Meanjin - on Ethics and Fiction
Poems of poise and measure. “The painter was an understated man” – begins Vivian Smith’s ‘Understanding’:
At last the story starts to get around:
the problem was the parents, not the child.
He grew a silent rebel, hidden, mild,
his only friend for years a small white dog.
Plus poetry for Chitre, for Blake, for Robert Adamson and, after Vasko Popa, Philip Hammial’s “Ancestors”:
My grandfather Karl Heinrich Graun
returned from the Great War with a hole in his stomach
from which he extracted a fully operational three-ring
circus. Missing, sad to say, was the man shot from a cannon.
and:
My mother Mary Margaret Church
married a man from the milk horse tribe. As meek
as teeth, he was a man of one word – no – which he kept.
Patrick Allington’s novel Figurehead explored dynamics of despotism, tyranny and fanaticism. His story “Facades” walks the reader through a different kind of instrumentalised and obsessive existence. More familiar, more like home. Allington presents a voyeur, researcher, artist so solipsistically inclined that the end of the world, or at least the end of everyone else who used to populate the world, makes no dent on his daily routines. The sites of his inner-city rituals of consumption and self-gratification sustain his sense of normality. He’s got a book to write, and with his former friends surviving as the subjects of his the text, there’s world enough to carry on with. More snapshots from the lettered classes - N.K. Mara’s “Tableau” sets out a barren nativity in Rome. Rough trade, family breakdown through the hoar-glass of memory, Clinton Caward wraps a tale of fraught influence and the competitive scrutiny of artistic friendships in a heavily embroidered cloak; nineteenth century supernaturalism, Blackwoods via Borges and Calvino, filtered through the jaded eye of an ex-devotee, a man who had fallen out of love with such conjuring (under the domesticating sway of the quotidian) but feels the old romance re-kindling – ‘A Shape in the Night’.
Enough preamble though, lets plumb some depths in the ethics of fiction.
Charlotte Wood has a dilemma: “One writer’s squeamishness is another’s sensitivity, just as one’s fearless commitment to art is another’s ruthless exploitation of innocents.” But to make great art one must be ruthless, that myth is a strong one, it has encouraged many aspirational bouts of imitation, among the talented and talentless alike.
Do I in fact have an obligation, as some artists believe, to hover in the lives of others, picking and choosing elements of them to use in my fiction as I wish? Or is this some treacherous moral trespass – on their privacy, against our bonds?
I still cannot answer these questions with any certainty.
Well who can - even handedness, an endeavour to properly try the issue, will produce an impression ultimately of having baulked at the amoral solution to this dilemma. Amoral in the sense that it has nothing to do with ethics or morality, and everything to do with individuals’ conscience and methods, and above all, with the results. No amount of ethical thinking and precaution taking will guarantee the good feelings of real life models for characters and events in fiction.
Patrick White had a habit of appropriating friends’ stories and confidences that frequently tipped over into betrayal. It just as frequently heralded the end of an acquaintance he no longer had any use for. So be it.
“The writers I spoke to,” (Helen Garner, Robert Drewe, Malcolm Knox, Ashley Hay and Tegan Bennet Daylight), “were sometimes surprisingly candid about their motives and the self-serving ways in which they went about the business of selecting from life.”
The ethics and the aesthetics of this kind of thing are entirely separate. Artists are real people and they live in the real world, it is populated by autonomous people not the characters that were based on them. Many great works of fiction and art are about ethics and about morality, and many have served moral and ethical uses, but more fundamentally they are subject solely to the criteria of good aesthetics. No success in one of those spheres can justify failure in the other. It’s always interesting, though, to follow an attempt to reconcile the two. It’s a familiar enough concern, something more than just the squeamishness Wood worries about – a desire to end the feedback or friction which the separate demands of life and art seem to make on an author (particularly if they’re committed to communicating contemporary social realities). It is probably certain types of people that will feel this kind of discomfort most keenly, social people, empathetic and engaged people – there are many great authors and artists who are none of those things. But for those who do, this turn to ethics suggests a desire to remove a discomfort which is surely (once it manifests) inextricably wound up in their attitudes to people and the purpose of art. The anxieties Charlotte Wood explores in the first part of her essay will be shared by some, anathema to others – though the writers she’s consulted with in the essay’s second half are, at their most strident, politely tolerant of Wood’s uneasiness (admitting to the callous approach of the artist-Titan is certainly out of fashion) – but whichever camp a particular writer falls into, or closest to, will have no bearing whatsoever on the quality or value of their work. Attitudes to this practical reality of writing from life are as personal as fingerprints – the resolution of these ethical problems will most likely be, as they have been for Wood, a personal step towards the right approach to a particular story. A ritual of conscientiousness, rather than steps towards a general ethical position. Which is not to say the ritual is meaningless, for Wood at least it is part of finding the best aesthetic solution for representing a particular character or telling a particular story. Here again, though, the successful outcome of this seemingly ethical dilemma looks to be the discovery of the right artistic approach. The ethical doubts about using the material aren’t solved, they are counterbalanced by discovering a way to use the material that seems artistically right. The important thing for Wood, as for any writer, is that a distorting and inhibiting distraction has been alleviated.
“Theft from the lives of others … is at the heart of the novelist’s practice. It is a deeply uncomfortable, complex moral problem that has always been with us, and will never disappear.”
The philosopher Bernard Williams came up with an idea he called moral luck. He used it to describe situations where a decision is made or a path is taken which can only be evaluated for its moral value in relation to some future goal. One of Williams’ best examples is Gauguin’s well known decision to abandon his bourgeois existence, and his family along with it, in order to perfect himself as an artist in the South Pacific. The morality of this choice, Williams says, can only be evaluated against the outcome of Gauguin’s decision. Was it the right thing to do? Weigh the desertion against the art works and the good things Gauguin bequeathed to the history of painting, and make up your own mind. Why moral ‘luck’ then? The implication is that this kind of choice is something like a gamble, Gauguin could not know that he would succeed as a painter, but fate (talent and hard work) rewarded his gamble and proved him morally lucky. Or so the argument goes for those of us untouched by anything but the works Gauguin left behind. For the people who came in second to his artistic aspirations, I don’t imagine the idea of moral luck would be either comforting or even convincing. And yes I imagine that for these people, and for anyone who admits they would have had a right to disagree with the idea of Gauguin’s moral luck, ill-feelings might even cloud their appreciation of the vivid and joyous canvasses Gauguin created in his exotic second-life. They might be inclined to doubt the man’s sincerity, to see in his work something a little contrived, a little touristy, a little indulgent. Not because they resent the desertion but because they have a good reason question the character of the man and the integrity underlying his all-consuming commitment to Art. Because they might ultimately see him as a sham.
Wood, and many other novelists like her who make use of details from the lives of acquaintances, families and friends, need ways to nullify the sense of staking their artistic achievements on material they have no clear right to use (even when permission has been given, how can anyone really know the extent of what they might be giving permission for). The moral angst Wood talks of is surely more like a personal ethic, a show of intent, which motivates her to find an aesthetic solution capable of allaying, but not solving, her ethical doubts. Williams’ concept of moral luck is a way to explain away our capacity to exonerate unusual individuals, particularly creative types, of fairly severe moral failings. It’s a problem that makes more sense in reverse: how could we say that it is wrong for someone like Gauguin to desert his family when as a direct result something life-enriching has been brought into existence. Leaving aside the contentiousness of the value systems that rank this kind of life-enhancement so highly, Williams has observed that a system of moral judgements that can’t provide a satisfactory account of the dynamics in the Gauguin anecdote is inadequate. The concept of moral luck was his solution for this inadequacy.
Success won’t justify the decision to use the lives of others, but it will make it much easier for the author to live with their choice. At heart, though, Wood’s concern is how to get past that inhibiting sense of being morally compromised. Crudely put, her problem is how to make exploitation seemly enough that she can get on with it. Hyperbole of course - it’s not really exploitation is it, although plainly it must feel like that sometimes, judging by Wood’s dilemma.
However, the author who is wrangling with their own conscience over the ethics of using other people’s stories, can not look into the future in order to gauge the particular level of betrayal that will eventually be justified by a work’s success. In Williams’ concept of moral luck (particularly as it applies to creative decisions with repercussions that can span a lifetime) the risk-taker must live through a purgatorial interim, uncertain if choices made in the name of artistic integrity will ultimately prove justified or not. While the prospect of future vindication is undoubtedly a source of encouragement for those betting on moral luck, the kind of rituals of ethical best practice which Wood discusses are more potent.
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