THE SECOND EYE OF WODEN:
An Approach to Ethics
through Fiction
by David Poyer
"It is no accident that every human society communicates its values by means of the STORY."
John Gardner began one of his books with a fable he took from Norse mythology. "It was said in the old days that every year Thor made a circle around Middle-earth, beating back the enemies of order. Thor got older every year, and the circle occupied by gods and men grew smaller. The wisdom god, Woden, went out to the king of the trolls, got him in an armlock, and demanded to know of him how order might triumph over chaos.
"'Give me your left eye,' said the king of the trolls, "And I'll tell you."
Without hesitation Woden gave up his left eye. "Now tell me."
The troll said, "The secret is, Watch with both eyes!"'
Beginning with this myth, today I want to discuss the relation of ethics to fiction. First, in building the ability to apply ethics under stress the world calls "character." Second, how human societies use stories to teach ethics. And finally, how we as writers can employ ethical choices and questions to improve the depth of our fiction, increase its quality, address a universal human need, and finally, maybe even, just a LITTLE bit, make the world a SLIGHTLY better place to live.
I should qualify these remarks by saying that I'm not a professor of English or of literature; nor am I a professional ethicist. But I am a working novelist with 20 years of experience. The speculations you'll hear tonight were reached over years of musing on my own choices, the right and wrong decisions I made; in trying to embody and clarify them in upwards of eighteen novels and sixty short stories; and in asking myself what I would have benefited by knowing when I started to write.
I. HOW DO WE ACHIEVE 1) AN ETHIC 2) A PERSONAL CHARACTER?
The story of life is a story of moral challenge. Challenges that, like the troll king, will destroy us if we can't keep both eyes open.
The study of ethics is the search for a way to strengthen that second eye, that deeper understanding that not only shows you what to do, but lends you the strength to do it in the face of tremendous costs. How do we prepare ourselves for the moral choices our lives will hold? How do we build our characters, and those of our children, so that we can make that right choice, just when it is most difficult? And -- just as important as knowing the right choice, and being able to make it -- how do we even recognize that a choice must be made, that we're at that cusp where we'll decide the course and outcome of our lives?
One tempting path is to try to write ethical codes, rules of conduct structured to fit certain situations. If A happens -- your response is B. If K -- your response is L. If we accept the Morality of The Book -- The Bible, The Talmud, The New Testament, The Book of Mormon, The Koran -- we have the advantage of rigid rules. And usually they come with the very best authority -- the awesome sanction of GOD himself.
But ultimately most tough decisions will NOT be covered by those rules. If they were, the Ten Commandments would have solved the problem for all time. They didn't; so the Laws of Moses were promulgated. They didn't, so the Talmud was written. Meanwhile the Romans were trying to cover the same bases with the Law. Yet today, at the end of centuries of elaboration and testing, can we even come close to seeing either religion or law as a completed guide to ethical decisionmaking?
The sad truth is that moral codes are better than nothing, but ultimately they're a pocket map to a world too vast even to imagine. As Gardner says: " . . . since the possible number of actions in the universe is unlimited -- as is the number of possible situations from which actions may proceed and take their tone -- morality is ... too complex to be knowable and far too complex to be reduced to any code . . ." (On Moral Fiction.)
The fact is that when we concentrate on learning ethical codes, we double-whammy ourselves. Not only are we internalizing a guide that doesn't cover all the bases, we aren't practicing those decision processes we'll need to make choices that are NOT laid down in the rulebook.
A more subtle danger in this approach is that when we guide our behavior by codes, it's easy to justify using different codes for different circumstances.
Machiavelli is a prime example, and nowhere near as dated as you may think. In The Discourses, the subtle master distinguishes between two systems of morality. The first is what we think of as Christian. The second is the morality of the Prince. From time to time, Machiavelli allows that the ruler must act in a way that offends personal ethics and indeed his own conscience.
It is this view that contradictory codes can both be valid that permits leaders to act as if their personal values have no relevance to their public acts. I don't mean Pope Julius or Goring; I mean acts such as Lincoln's approval of Sherman's destruction of farms and homes; Churchill's ordering the shootdown of air ambulances; Truman's use of the atomic bomb on largely civilian targets. The acts that as good men they would have recoiled from in person, they authorized in their roles as wartime leaders.
See, I think Machiavelli was wrong. Every attempt to operate on separate levels personally and professionally leads to ethical disaster. Or to treat various classes of people by different codes: Aryans and Jews, for example, or men and women, or blacks and whites.
At any rate, I'm convinced that we can't approach ethical decisionmaking by building codes. And even if we had a code that covered every conceivable situation, which is impossible, that's no guarantee that when the crunch comes, we'd have the guts to DO what the code told us was right. Especially if it meant our disgrace, obloquy, imprisonment, or death.
A second approach to ethics we might term the legal-philosophical. That is, to educate people from the ground up in Socratic logic, Aristotelian ethics, St. Thomas Aquinas, John Stuart Mill, Kant, right up to the present.
This is an attractive approach, but I think it too is doomed to failure. Why? For two reasons. First, abstract knowledge of this sort is just not the kind of thing most people will carry out with them into life. And second, this kind of learning just doesn't translate into actual behavior. It's like teaching an advanced course in aerodynamics, then trotting the student out to a F-18 and telling him to fly it. All you're gonna get is a column of smoke.
So, again, how DO we build character?
I think there are two ways. First, to SEE it in action. Second, to GROW it -- to grow the ability to see the crunch coming, then to find and carry out the ethical course of action -- like you grow muscles or coordination -- by PRACTICING it.
The first way, example, is something we don't do much. America tends to elevate as its exemplars people who demonstrate SUCCESS, not character. We admire guys who are good at games, or invent things, or make a lot of money -- HOW is secondary.
I'd like to see us honor people who gave up their careers , or went to jail, because they believed in something else more. Someone like the person Philip Dick calls "the authentic human being":
"The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves . . . their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way; not in their willingness to perform great deeds, but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not." -- (I Think I Shall Arrive Soon, p. 25)
Okay, that's enough about examples. How about the second way we achieve character -- to GROW it?
We do that by practicing it, we said. But we also said that the crunch only come a few times in every life. So how do we practice, when the opportunities come so seldom?
Thomas Jefferson gave us a clue. He wrote to his nephew in 1787, as he commenced his studies at William and Mary, about this very subject. Mr. J. 's recommendation was to read good books to encourage and direct one's feelings. Then, to exercise one's gift of character at every opportunity, to strengthen it and to increase one's worth.
What? Read Good Books to develop character? Can he be serious??
II. FICTION -- ITS PURPOSES IN HUMAN SOCIETY
I think he was -- because that's one of the main purposes of fiction, and especially, of the novel.
A novel is another world, one with so much detail we can imagine ourselves living in it. We can be a staff officer in the Russian army in August, 1914 with Solzhenitsyn, a sergeant in Schofield Barracks in 1940 with James Jones, a Navy flyer in 1967 with Stephen Coonts. We are not limited in our locales, nor in our persons. As Francois Mauriac says, "Every novel worthy of the name is like another planet, whether large or small, which has its own laws just as it has its own flora and fauna."
A novel is a lengthy narrative that depends for its power on the development of character as it is forged under the influence of a given environment. In other words -- the ETHICAL CHOICES its characters make, and what FOLLOWS FROM those choices.
Why do such narratives fascinate people? It's a little hard to say, but Arthur Krystal comes close when he calls literature "the artistic form in which an individual's awareness of life encounters its fullest expression." Or, as Alan Dean Foster says, all novels are morality plays. Will Durant puts it differently, that novels make sense out of the turbulent flow of events that seems to us, in our hurried existence, too often to be nonsense.
We read for many reasons: entertainment, information, escape. But the best fiction provides us with all these PLUS a view of the world that enables us to live our lives more fully. The great novel changes our consciousness, instead of merely reinforcing what we THOUGHT we knew before.
It is no accident that every human society communicates its values by means of the STORY. But this is NOT to say fiction is deliberate "propaganda" or "cultural programming." It is not, at least not much today, produced to the order of "society", "church", or "ruling class." The government's not subsidizing it -- the NEA's about done for. There is no Party censorship. There is no Index Expurgatorius. There are market barriers, and there are critics who hate certain kinds of work, but except in totalitarian societies, and they're getting scarce these days, no one is ramming fiction into our subconscious to program our behavior. Certainly you can ARGUE that's one of the traditional functions of fiction, just as it is of religion or patriotic legend. You can make a case that fairy tales exist to program children for heterosexuality, or exogamy, or paternalism. Children's literature especially conveys overt messages: share things, don't hit each other.
But I think the primary reason thoughtful people read adult fiction is because they're HUNGRY for guidance -- for connections -- for an explanation of our place and our responsibilities in the universe. We hunger for story because stories guide us; and above all, we are conscious, if we have any consciousness at all beyond daily food and our job, of our need for moral guidance in a bewildering world.
III. HOW DO WE AS WRITERS USE FICTION
The first way we as writers can make use of ethical fiction is to build our own system of ethics. Remember our discussion of rules, of codes? In the military, those are called ROEs -- rules of engagement. Traditionally, they were learned and tested in war games, carried out in the field. Today, there's a major shift on in moving them into cyberspace, where commanders can try out their own responses to contingencies and crises in a full virtual-reality environment.
Fiction is the virtual reality where we carry out our own personal ethical training. Reading Dostoevsky, Austen, Kafka, Thomas Pynchon, Colleen McCullough places us in alternate realities, where we can exercise our ability to make moral choices.
We are not looking for codes or rules. We are Wodan, remember . . . and we must watch with both eyes, to find understanding. We are striving for what Aristotle calls a "felt knowledge." As Gardner says: "Knowledge may or may not lead to belief; understanding always does, since to believe one understands a complex situation is to form at least a tentative theory of how one ought to behave in it . . . ." (OMF, 139)
To a large extent, the process is unconscious. In entering the world of the writer, we accept his or her ethical standards. They become ours, if they are convincing, by an osmotic process. This is the "humanizing" process of literature. And at the end, we have learned something; we are less vulnerable to error than we were before.
IV. HOW DO WE AS WRITERS INCORPORATE MORAL THEMES?
But now let's turn from what fiction "does" to how we, as WRITERS of fiction, are going to make OUR work do it. How can we use ethical themes, conflicts, and insights to improve the depth of our fiction, to increase its quality, to make it more interesting and salable? Is it really as easy as it is on TV -- distinguishing good from bad characters, then rewarding the good ones and punishing the bad? Or, put another way: when we've reached some understanding of the universe, the nature of right and wrong -- or even if we've reached the point of understanding that a problem exists -- then how do we incorporate that understanding or that question into the complex and daunting process of creating fiction?
Let me warn you up front that most beginning writers don't understand this process at all. What they produce is not ethical fiction but MORALISTIC fiction. The reason is that too many of them start their work with the idea -- maybe it comes from writing essays in high school English class -- of, "I have to convey a MESSAGE." One young writer recently brought me a first chapter that was so laden with Message it was impossible to read.
My advice to him was: forget about the Message. At least for the first five drafts, forget entirely about the Message. For one thing, you don't have the faintest idea yet, what that message is going to be.
See, we build meaning into a story gradually, in a progressive hierarchy of understanding. You don't START an effective novel by saying, "This will be a novel about what happens when a young man denies the existence of God." You start by looking at a newspaper clipping and thinking, "Huh, this might be a good story." And then you write and write. Slowly the theme emerges through the actions of the character, the description, the plot, the action proper. Slowly the writer understands what fascinated him about the original idea, and what connections it makes at the deepest levels . . . and eventually you get Crime and Punishment. A profoundly ethical novel, concerned with the deepest questions of right and wrong and behavior and guilt, but it all started with Fyodor reading a newspaper clipping about a student who robbed and killed an old woman. He didn't START with the message. The message GREW from the story.
Not to compare myself with Dostoevski, but this is the way things develop in my work, as well. The theme of THE MED -- is it right to support and cover for an incompetent commander? The theme of AS THE WOLF LOVES WINTER -- what is man's proper relationship to nature? The theme of THE ONLY THING TO FEAR -- what is our proper relationship to our fellow creatures, which is what we call politics? The theme of THE CIRCLE -- what is our responsibility for events which seem to be chance, or result from the errors of others? None of these books started with these ideas. They started with nothing more than the suspicion there was a story there. The discovery took place in the process of writing and rewriting, over and over, until I finally discovered the theme, and occasionally, even a hint of an answer.
For example, with THE PASSAGE, I began writing with nothing more than a vague dissatisfaction with Navy policy on gays in the military. I had always accepted that they shouldn't be there, without really thinking about it. When I was at the Academy and they told us so and so had been thrown out because he got caught in the shower with another guy, I didn't even wonder whether or not this was justified. But as I grew older, as I realized some of the people I had served with were gay, as I met more people with openly unconventional orientations and worked with them in the civilian world, I began to think -- WAS it just, was it right? Or would putting homosexuals at sea with other young people for long periods of time just asking for trouble, of one sort or another?
I finally realized I'd have to write a novel, just to find out. So that in the course of THE PASSAGE I tested the question in the kinds of situations I'd seen, at sea, in relationships, in port, not by speculating about them in the author's voice, but by EMBODYING them in characters and putting those characters to the test. In the process, from time to time they state their opinions. I tried hard to be fair to each character, letting them make the best arguments they could for their points of view.
Meanwhile, other subthemes and metaphors in the work started to interlock with my original question, making it a richer and deeper and far more resonant book. The extended metaphor of masks -- as in the masks gays wear, and the masks spies wear, and the masks men wear with women and vice versa. The metaphor of viruses, insinuating their way into computer systems, turning data and logic into meaningless chaos. And as I worked, gradually an answer emerged from the mist.
This is not to say that no preconceived opinion stands up, but only that a simulation of real experience can be useful in reaching deeper insights, if you maintain an open mind and are not unwilling to be proven wrong at times.
Even though I write three series of books, along with the occasional one-off, I understand now that all my books are about the same thing. Seen one way, it's the struggle between good and evil WITHIN THE HEARTS OF EACH INDIVIDUAL CHARACTER. Seen another way, it is THE SEARCH FOR A LEGITIMATE AUTHORITY. The Hemlock County books see this in terms of the struggle between the common people and the economic elite; the diving books, between an individual who first cooperates, then revolts against authorities he only gradually discovers are corrupt; the Navy books, the conflict between duty and conscience in the person of an idealistic and rather naive young officer. But I didn't see this overarching pattern until recently. It wasn't a conscious choice. It grew out of my history and my personality. But because it was organic, it worked in the books, and fascinated others, and sold. Because I embodied the my struggle and my search in story.
So when I talk about the hierarchy of discovery, I mean that the way to incorporate an ethical theme in your work is to GROW it from your own heart and your own understanding. First grow the characters; then, the plot; then, later, the symbolism, or extended metaphor. By "later" I mean in the fourth or fifth draft or thereabouts. Gradually, like an iceberg looming out of the fog, you will begin to hear echoes coming back from something big. THAT will be your theme, and by then you won't be able to avoid it. Because unless you come to grips with it then, it will tear your guts out under the waterline and sink your novel beyond any possibility of salvage.
But once again we face a dilemma. Before we get to that late point, we have to write the story. And to have a story, we have to have characters in conflict or at least in doubt. How do we embody our ethical conflicts in the form, not of summary, but of character and action?
The key to conscious use of ethics in developing a character is simple, but it takes some organization. When you're sketching out your character, before you even begin the book, ask the following questions: what's the primary moral dilemma he or she will face in the book? what are his choices? what were the advantages/disadvantages of each choice? why should we care what choice he makes? how does the choice reflect or contrast with those of the other characters? And later on: what did the character choose? was it the right choice? what is the downside of that choice?
Now a couple of caveats, warnings. When you present a character with an ethical choice, DON'T make it a choice between good and evil. That's what we call a no-brainer, okay? A lot of writers do it and will in the future, from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Tom Clancy. But it's FAR more interesting if you present it as the choice between two goods. For example, the choice Mark Twain gave Huck Finn. A choice between obeying the law, which is good, or loyalty to a friend, to the slave Jim, which is also a good.
It should also be not only conceivable, but CREDIBLE, that the character can make EITHER choice. If the character can't credibly select either alternative, it's not really a choice. If Huck had turned Jim in, we'd have a different message from the book; but to my reading, given Huck's suspicion of authority, it really wouldn't be believable in Huck's character. I think Twain should have balanced the scales a little more.
One thing Huck does right, though, is agonize. Make your characters THINK about what they're going to do. Make them CONTEMPLATE the costs. Make them DISCUSS their choice with others, and solicit opinions. All this heightens tension, and that's just what we want -- tension, uncertainty, and suspense. That's what keeps people reading, and suspense about what moral choice a character is going to make is a more subtle form of it than other common forms -- such as, suspense about how he's going to respond to a physical challenge, suspense about which suitor a young girl will choose, or suspense about "who done" a murder.
Okay, that's the basic setup. After this, you've got to go away and write the story.
Writing fiction isn't a set of procedures that can be taught; it's a skill, a craft, an art that must be practiced to be learned. But I do have some guidelines to suggest, as you jump into the alligator pit. DON'T start with a message in mind. DON'T think in terms of Good vs. Evil. DON'T start with "good guys" and "bad guys." FORGET heroes and villains. DO start with flawed protagonists and admirable antagonists. William Barrett calls this "The deepest and most vexing trait of the human condition itself: that our efforts are always ineradicably a mixture of good and evil." (The Illusion of Technique, 25)
SUSPEND JUDGMENT till the end of the story. STRIVE to understand and justify in their own terms EVEN those characters YOU think may be WRONG.
SHOW WHAT IS -- not what "should be." Medieval scholars said: Whatever IS equals what is true. It's a very superficial view of God that looks away from huge portions of His created world on the basis that it's "not pretty" or "shouldn't be written about."
DON'T tell the reader what to think.
DON'T tell the reader what YOU, as the author, think about your characters and their actions. Samuel Richardson could get away with it in 1740. Today it is of absolutely no interest to your reader, your agent, your publisher, or anyone except possibly your biographers, fifty years from now. At this stage in your career, which set of people should you really be writing for?
DO let the characters speak for themselves. Let them do more than speak; let them ACT. Let them test the temper of their convictions against the grinding wheel of the world. SHOW the reader the characters in action and reflection, and the outcome of their actions; and let the reader make HIS OWN conclusions.
Nota bene, the characters don't have to make the RIGHT choice. Or they can decline to choose, and run. Or, as in much current fiction, they can consciously choose evil -- the depraved but fascinating Hannibal Lectors and Chappies of recent bestsellers like Silence of the Lambs and The End of Alice.
And maybe this is the place to put in a word in favor of evil -- at least, as a fictional device. All of you already know that it's easier to create an appealing antihero than it is a hero. But that's not what I mean -- not entirely. Henry Miller said: "One reason why I have stressed so much the immoral, the wicked, the ugly, the cruel in my work is because I wanted others to know how valuable these are, how equally if not more important than the good things . . . Curiously enough, this poison had a tonic effect for others. It was as if I had given them some kind of immunity." (RS, 2/27/75)
I don't think the message here is actually that evil is more important than good. I think Miller's meaning is more along the lines of Rabelais' or Baudelaire's -- that just as we must know good to understand evil, we have to understand evil in order truly to know the good. We also have to reinvestigate evil from time to time in order to ask whether parts of it can add new meaning to life, whether our idea of "good" has in fact become too restrictive and too stultifying. If that is so, then what we once called "good" now becomes something to be battled against in turn -- as Miller did so successfully. Miller's work isn't pretty -- but make no mistake, it IS ethical fiction, folks.
Finally, YOU DON'T HAVE TO PROVIDE AN ANSWER, even at the very end of your story. You probably won't find an "ANSWER" that's good beyond the very limited confines of your characters and story. But at the very least, you've explored alternate approaches, and hopefully made the reader aware that there are DIFFERENT answers than his own.
Just that, folks, can be a real improvement, jacking open someone's head and lighting up the fact that there are different possibilities out there than they one they were programmed with. And, doggone it -- YOU may even change your mind in the course of the writing. That's not being weak-minded. That's what the whole process is about, DISCOVERING the truth.
THIS is what we call writing ethical fiction. Not MORALISTIC fiction, where the writer pontificates, gives the world the benefit of his total knowledge of right and wrong. But fiction that is concerned with how we act when our guidelines fade away and our rulebooks are silent.
Now I'm going to make a slight veer, and talk about philosophy. I'm going to talk, very briefly, about it because ethics is a subset of philosophy.
Philosophy is the search for truth, and how we can know it. Novels are basically philosophy told in the form of a story. Usually the philosophy is pretty shallow, but sometimes, as in the novels of Iris Murdoch or Thomas Pynchon, it gets heavy. We won't go very deep today, because we'd need four semesters to really get anywhere. But I do want to introduce the topic, because it's the key to building in some deeper choices for your characers than whether they should do the right thing or the wrong thing. Which, as we already pointed out, doesn't make for a very challenging read.
In the first place, philosophy is concerned with exactly the same things fiction is. Determinism, for example. Do we do what we do because we have to, or because we choose to? The naturalistic writer, such as Zola or Hardy, says we make a certain choice because we're programmed to by genes or environment. Most other writers presuppose varying degrees of free will. Wittgenstein began by believing not only that all human actions were predetermined, but that, as he says in the Tractatus: "Any one fact can either be the case, or not be the case, and everything else remains the same." (IOT, 36)
An astonishing statement, because it means not only that there's no free will, there's also no such thing as causality. But Sartre, another philosopher, came to the opposite conclusion. He said, "Man is condemned to be free." Well, which is it, free will or determinism? The answer for us writers is: sounds like there's a story here!
Another permanent question in philosophy is, how we know things. Is there an objective reality? Or is the only reality the one we assemble in our heads? You remember this from James's The Turn of the Screw, Poe's The Tell-tale Heart; and it's a question every one of us faces every time we consider which point of view our story will be told from.
You don't have to have a degree in philosophy to write. But I recommend you do at least a little light reading in it, because the concepts of determinism, positivism, phenomenology, nihilism, of Kantian, utilitarian, and naturalistic ethics, existentialism, Satrean freedom, behaviorism and so on, are useful for the working writer and essential to the liteary critic.
Are the techical terms intimidating? Well, you've already met the ideas in your reading of fiction. Sartrean freedom, for example, is simply the idea that at ANY MOMENT a character may do something so radical and gratuitious that the whole course of life or story is utterly changed from what it was up to then -- an idea that permeates modern literature from Camus's The Stranger up to current work by such leading lights of Generation X as Elizabeth Wurtzel, David Foster Wallace, and A. M. Homes. And whether you believe Sartean freedom is liberating, or irresponsible and unrealistic, once you understand it, it's another tool you can reach for when your plot seems too stale and predictable, or when a character suddenly takes a leap in the dark that astonishes you.
Even a nodding acquaintance with philosophy will help you clarify and order your thoughts about ethical problems. Not only will you be able to embody such concepts in your fiction, you'll gain insight into your own motivations and view of the world.
Each of us sees the world differently -- and maybe that's why we're all here. I spoke briefly about my own equivocal relationship with authority. We could list lots of examples. Faulkner's dogged insistence on the inheritability of tragedy. William Barrett speaks of ." . . . the world of Franz Kafka's fiction as one of "baffled transcendance." The characters are always haunted by some transcendant world beyond the banal one they inhabit, yet they are perpetually defeated in their attempt to make contact with this other sphere . . . " Hemingway's insistence on the existential virtues of courage and manliness. Elisabeth Graves's war between the need for love and the imperative of independence. And so forth.
Every writer has his or her own ethical view, derived from family, religion, culture, and personal experience. "Primitive" writers, like primitive artists, may be powerful within a limited frame of reference. But like a muscle, again, our ethical understanding only GROWs if we evaluate it consciously, search for worthy opponents, and continually test it against the toughest fictional challengers we can conceive.
WHAT KIND OF MORALITY SHOULD WE ESPOUSE?
Now let's look at a really tricky question. Given that writers should have an ethical sense; that this should be embodied in their work; then, what KIND of ethics should the writer espouse? And make no mistake: the artist has to begin with some sort of conviction. Manet said it best: "One has to have SOMETHING to say. Otherwise good night . . . It is not enough to know one's métier."
Remember that I said it was useless to try to set up ethical codes? Well, that applies to the writer as well. I hope you understand that all morality is existential. Meaning, that we, and each fictional character we create, are free to select what kind we're going to follow. It can be Christian or nonchristian, it can be secular humanist or mystical or rationalistic. Some of the most evil people I've ever met professed their piety in ringing tones; some of the best were unsure of anything at all. Which is what Jesus was trying to get across with a couple of his parables, I suspect.
I believe our moral vision enlarges as we age, reflecting, in a way, the progress of religion as it has evolved over the span of mankind's existence. As Haeckel said of biological development, "Ontogenesis, or the development of the individual, is a short and quick recapitulation of phylogenesis, or the development of the tribe to which it belongs."
Thus, the initial idea of morality is justice to oneself; then to one's family; then tribal morality; then that of the nation; then of all the human race; finally to all nature.
We are not yet fully conscious beings. Probably we never will be. But to me the beauty of the idea of God is that if there really were a being that understood everything, its circle of love and care would be congruent with the circle of the entire universe. Sometimes I suspect, like a dimly reasoning beast, that ultimately ethics will be seen as the outcome of a moral solution of simultaneous linear equations. It would reach the same answer whether we believed in God or not, whether we believed that Christ was divine or not, for it would embody as complete an understanding of the universe as God has.
But in the end I'm not going to prescribe for you what KIND of morality you can incorporate in your work. The essential thing is that you approach each question, not as a CONSERVATIVE, or a LIBERAL, a CHRISTIAN, or a JEW, but that you approach it with an OPEN HEART AS A SEEKER OF THE TRUTH.
That is the beauty of freedom: that no one is going to provide The Truth; that you must discover it for yourself.
This, in the end, is where the writer achieves the pinnacle of his art; when he or she succeeds in depicting the INDIVIDUAL's struggle with social, cultural, and personal values; where this struggle with seemingly insoluble dilemmas is spun into art; where we can hear thoughts that cannot be spoken, contemplate reasons that cannot be acknowledged, understand motivations that will never be admitted. Where characters like you and me, and people we know, wrestle to force the lives they have to live into some form of congruence with abstractions like duty, honor, ambition, career, and morality; and where in the end they reach an understanding far deeper, more lasting, and more useful than any dry memorizing of rules can ever achieve.
This is a high challenge. But I believe we can live up to it. I believe each of us, as a human being, has the capacity to develop a character that will stand through any challenge or trial. I believe each of us, as a reader, can use fiction to achieve that deeper understanding that will allow us to make an honorable decision and courageous enough to take the consequences. And I believe each of us, as a writer, has the capability to achieve what Tolstoy called the highest purpose of art: to make people be good, not by compulsion, but by their own free choice.
You have the capability. But you have to make a conscious choice to develop the skill. It will make you better people, no matter what you do for our livelihood. It will make you better writers, no matter how the market responds to your work. And you owe that effort not only to yourselves, but to those whose lives you will shape through YOUR writing -- now and in the years to come.
For some day they too will stand face to face with the evil and chaos the Troll King personified in the Norse tale with which I began this afternoon.
When that day comes, I hope what you will write will help them to open their second eye.
And give them the courage to strike -- with devastating force.
PERSONAL USE ONLY -- NOT FOR PUBLICATION
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David Poyer is possibly the best known writer of American sea fiction
alive today. His most recent book is THAT ANVIL OF OUR SOULS (Simon
& Schuster, July 2005). Check out his work and career advice at
the Home Page location below.
Return to Dave Poyer's "Writing Tips and Advice" Page.
Return to the David Poyer Home Page.