living shadows: aesthetics of moral worldbuilding

omg lionel trilling went here!!!!

Photo by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash

Hello friends—

Last night, I gave a craft talk at Columbia, home of Lionel Trilling (!!!!).

I decided to write a sequel of sorts to a craft talk I gave in Paris last month on what I’ve been calling moral worldbuilding, which to me just means being more conscientious about the kinds of value systems we include in our work, and facing up to the fear of being called didactic or melodramatic. That talk was pretty diagnostic and focused mostly on theorizing causes of how we got there. This one focuses more on the aesthetic qualities of bad moral worldbuilding and their immediate causes.

It’s pretty vibey.

---

Last month in Paris, I wrote and gave a craft talk on what I called moral worldbuilding. The talk concerned itself with the extent to which evil is permitted into contemporary fiction, my thesis being that evil is often kept at bay through psychologizing and explanation by way of backstory or by calling evil those petty everyday slights that make life such a humiliating ordeal.

When I was putting together my talk for Paris, I read a lot of reviews of the novels I wanted to discuss. Among them were two contemporary novels that I found a little boring. Kind of anti-reading, really. Anyway, I bring them up because in a review of one of the novels, Ron Charles, reviewer for the Washington Post, celebrated the author for “not judging her characters.” Indeed, just yesterday, I came across a similar line in a review of an ideologically and aesthetically similar novel by a different author in which she was always praised for “not judging her characters.” This line will be familiar to anyone who has been reading reviews over the last five or more years. There is a renewed interest in “not judging” one’s characters and “loving one’s characters” meaning of course, those characters whom a reader might find unlikeable. I have myself been asked about writing characters who are difficult or, more accurately, who are racist and say things that are racist. People want to know how one can imagine such characters. Why would a black man write a character who believes differently from him? Why would a good liberal write characters who say and do things that contravene their progressive hopes for the world? Etc.

I feel somehow that I was trained in a tradition of fiction with deeply Humanist leanings. A tradition that finds full expression in D.H. Lawrence, when he tells us that moral fiction is a fiction that preserves the true relation between things. That is, a moral fiction is a fiction that does not bend in favor of external value systems and does not waver in order to curry favor with existing orthodoxies. A moral fiction is an ambiguous fiction. This tradition also finds itself summarized in Trilling’s moral realism and his conception of the liberal imagination. In his essay, “Manners, Morals, and the Novel,” he attributes, as does Lawrence, false, flattening writing to an overweaning love for one’s characters. If we truly love them, then we must let them be flawed and get into trouble, etc. This idea is not confined to literature, of course. The great value of contemporary society seems to be a kind of flattened moral ambiguity, which itself is just a badly restated and reconstituted moral relativism.

We fear didacticism in art. We fear preaching in art. What we want, like good bourgeois drones, is a lesson in disguise, one that quietly but forcefully confirms the moral schema that govern and drive our lives, while allowing us a little frisson of mischief. I think the fear of didacticism but the fear also of true moral realism has lead to reviewers and critics praising an art that “doesn’t judge its characters” even as the characters do not commit any crimes worth judging. We need moral worldbuilding.

I would like to revisit that topic, but first I should explain a little of what I mean.

Worldbuilding is a term that is familiar to us from science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction. This was not always the case. It used to pertain to any kind of building out of the story world in which a given narrative unfolded. The term, lately, has regained some of this capacious meaning, and so you have people applying it once again to more straightforwardly realist narratives as though this were importing a whole set of aesthetic and analyticals tools from genre fiction that were themselves not native to realist fiction in the first place. Think only of Dickens, Hugo, Thackery, Zola, Wharton, Tolstoy, Verne, and Swift. These authors represent the more familiar genre of worldbuilding, I suppose. That focused on the edifices of civilization and the exterior trappings of its manners and habits of mind—styles of dress, varieties of food, modes of transport, structures of government, methods of trade, and the laws that govern the heavenly spheres and the crude rock beneath our feet.

Perhaps that word, moral makes you squeamish. It is a complicated term with complicated slippages and no one is ever quite sure what they mean.

Let’s use a word from E. M. Forster.

In Aspects of a Novel, Forster describes life as having two dimensions. A life lived in time—meaning in events, meaning chronology. And a life lived in value, meaning something like intensity or evening meaning itself. He gives the example of looking back at your life as a timeline. Chronology orders the events, but our sense of what was important is different than what happened in what order, right? The intensity or emotional investment of the account changes based on our relationship to those events. And so in telling the story of our lives, we might tell it chronologically. Or in terms of the events that mattered most. So when we say morality or moral, we might also say “value” or “intensity.”

I suppose what I mean when I say moral worldbuilding is the region of the story that contains much of what we call meaning or theme, the part of the story we often leave to develop in the underdark of our writing, something we must look away from in order to articulate. When I say moral worldbuilding, what I am trying to address is the part of the story that speaks out of every shadow and silence—subtext, you might say, or context. It is a part of the story that is often cluttered when we attempt to get at it in the first pass. We fill it with nonsense explanations. Oh, he had a bad childhood. Oh, she got attacked in college. Oh, their dad abandoned them to take up breakdancing. These explanations are not part of the moral worldbuilding of the story. They belong only to the realm of event. They do not add meaning. Only information.

Moral worldbuilding comes at the layer below event. The layer that speaks to what these events mean in the life of the character and the life of the world unfolding. The layer that situates events in an order traced out by lines of causation that might run invisibly through the circumstances of characters but which link up solidly and tightly, creating a weave of story.

This is what Stanislavski calls the super-objective. And it is the heart of what I mean today.

By moral worldbuilding, I mean the worldbuilding that comes to mind when one thinks of Austen, Turgenev, Chekhov, Moliere, Mauriac, Greene, and James. This variety of worldbuilding is quieter, more subtle, harder to separate from the first, yes, but it is equally important because it accounts for the meaning that runs through and beneath all of the events of the story. I am speaking here of the values that organize the story world and give rise to all of the material externality referenced above. It is perhaps easier to grasp what I mean by looking at fiction from a time or place that diverges sharply from our own contemporary moment.

Let us go back to Austen. In Sense and Sensibility, a series of unfortunate inheritances give the novel its inciting incident: Mr. Dashwood’s first wife, a wealthy heiress, left her only son an inheritance that could not be diverted to any other cause, which fine, great. Mr. Dashwood was the heir to his wealthy uncle, and he was counting on this inheritance to set up his second wife and their three daughters in comfort. However, the uncle died and left all of his money to the first son, yet again, diverting inheritance in such a way as to limit its utility profoundly. Again, fine, okay. Mr. Dashwood then plans to work and build up a savings for his wife and daughters, yet he is struck ill very shortly after his uncle dies, and he must leave his wife and children in the care of his oldest son, from whom he extracts a promise to look after them. This would be fine except, yet again, there is an intervention in the person of Fanny Dashwood, wife of the aforementioned son, who, yes, you guessed it, diverts the money and estate away from Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters.

What does this have to do with moral worldbuilding? Well, you see, in our time, we’d just sue for the inheritance, right? There would be laws about this sort of thing. But in Austen’s time and in the setting of Sense and Sensibility, a daughter has very little expectation of such an inheritance. This becomes more pressing when we realize that without a substantial dowry, these well-bred but now impoverished young women have very few marriage prospects. And if they have very few marriage prospects, then, what is society going to do with them? The social world then becomes a great pressure upon these women and upon the events of the narrative. Also, how are they going to feed themselves? In the opening chapters of Sense and Sensibility, we watch a family get robbed of their house and home, and we feel, if we are canny, a growing sense of dread because we know how precarious it is out there for unattached women without fortune.

Because it is Austen, we are treated to that dread with a sense of wry irony. Fanny Dashwood is a total heel, but Mrs. Dashwood sees through her. Everyone sees through her actions, including Fanny herself, and so when Mrs. Dashwood, in a fit of pique, uproots the family from their estate and moves to a small cottage rented from a relation, she is giving Fanny Dashwood exactly what many of us would like to have given her. Yet, the result of that action—Elinor, the oldest daughter, chastises her mother gently—is that now they have even more greatly reduced circumstances.

Austen makes the values of her world legible to the reader through the consequences of her characters’ actions. We feel very acutely the narrow band of possibilities for her characters growing even narrower with each successive incident. The events of the novel come out of the moral understructure of the world. Only in this place with these laws made up from these values could give rise to this particular matrix of circumstances. If it seems arbitrary, it is only because the viewer or the reader is out of phase with moral structure of the world and must be brought down to the level of the world itself in order understand it.

I think this accounts for a lot of frustration with novels from the past or set in the past. But not just novels of course—films, plays, and tv shows, as well. The contemporary reader suffers from narcissism of the present, which impedes access to what Lionel Trilling called the “hum and buzz of implication” that comprises manners themselves. It is hard for a narcissistic reader to appreciate why Anna didn’t just divorce her husband because to us divorce is just a drop in the bucket. Divorce means nothing now. Yet, it did then. And I would argue that in some contexts, it still means something today.

There is a tendency sometimes—more readily visible in the speculative and fantasy genres—to erect free-standing social and civilizational edifices without any real thought or care as to the chain of events or values that brought them about. I see this most often in the treatment of religion in contemporary fiction where no one prays, no one has any sort of deference for the spiritual life except as practiced by artists (usually writers), and where no one believes anything. It seems somewhat silly to say, but how can I as a reader care about people who do not have any beliefs? Who have no inner life except that which flashes temporarily upon the surface of whatever stray object has wandered into the direct path of the character?

I should say here that I am speaking of a particular (yet pervasive) mode of contemporary fiction called the cinematic mode, which I came to understand through the work of the critic Marco Bellardi. He tells us that the cinematic mode involves retrograde intermediation of cinema forms and technique into prose fiction. Less technically, he theorizes that this involves fiction that mimics the time signature of cinema, meaning a constant present-ness that itself results in a flattened narrative relief. To try to make it even less technical, let us say for the duration of this talk that a cinematic fiction is a fiction whose background (exposition, interiority, and discursive material) and narrative foreground (the “present action”) are compressed into a single narrative unit, largely resulting in an intensely “present” forward action. The critic Fredric Jameson, working independently of Bellardi, came to a similar conclusion about realism and its rise, and he located one of the crests of realism as coalescing around constant presentism. To me, Jameson and Bellardi are describing the same phenomenon, the constant profusion of the present, which mimics the ever-present-ness and flat narrative relief of cinema itself.

I believe that this flattened narrative relief has consequences for the moral worldbuilding of a story. After all, if one does away with exposition (which is often where the story world can think most directly about itself) and shows only the character falling endlessly through the void of the present, with past and future rising and dissolving instantaneously, one is also doing away with the ready-made instrument of moral worldbuilding itself. A world composed only of present action has no history, and if one has no history, one has no culture, and without the overarching and determining structures of culture, there is only the free-standing edifice of so-called free-will. I suppose this is what Jameson means when he describes this kind of fiction as existential fiction. But for me, it manifests in a different way, which is to say that when I read contemporary fiction now, I sometimes wonder what any of it means. Our fiction is dominated by Event and Situation, but without any orienting or organizing schemas to give it all any meaning. Or else, even the non-event is elevated to the status of Event and given meaning. All of which seems to be a commentary on how…non-meaningful life is out in the great concourse of mass subjectivity in which everyone is a protagonist and no one is a protagonist.

We are taught that this is how one writes well. You must love your villains. You must treat even your most unlikable characters as though they were the protagonist, meaning, giving them some sense of moral agency, moral ambiguity. The result of this very nice humanist belief in fiction is a moral indeterminacy, a gray sludge stretched across the field of view in which every act, every harm, every minor inconvenience, is given equal weight and sway. We celebrate people for “not judging” their characters when the most extreme thing they’ve done is, what, like, tell a lie? Do a microaggression? Be a little racist? The moral worldbuilding is so thin on the ground and so centered on elevating the petty humiliations of everyday life into the highest levels of human experience that commending someone for not judging these characters is like congratulating someone for not punching a toddler when they burp.

It is sometimes viewed as bad writing or old-fashioned to portray people behaving in ways that contemporary readers find irredeemable. “They’re so flat. They’re so one-note.” It’s okay for us to find pleasure in Fanny Dashwood’s villainy, but the contemporary writer is told to avoid such melodrama. That every character should be as complex—which is to say, vaguely ambiguous morally speaking—as the protagonist. This results in something that Fredric Jameson describes in Antimonies of Realism as waning protagonicity. This idea can be understood best in the context of the series The White Lotus. Who, among those characters is the protagonist? Exactly. I would argue that while narrative in realist fiction has again found its way back to the protagonist as a central load-bearing structure by way of first-person fiction, the moral dimension of our fiction has not followed suit.

The expectation of “complexity” meaning of course “moral ambiguity” was extended to the protagonist or main character of a story and perhaps at most, it might extend to one or two secondary characters. In the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, there was not an expectation that every character in the world of the story had some set of morally ambiguous motivations. But then, the rise of subjectivity.

In our lives, we are aware of own mix of motivations. Our own actions feel if not good to us then at least justified in some way. Even when we act badly or misbehave or bring about misfortune for others, we interpolate this recognition of bad acts with knowledge that we aren’t evil. This dynamic of self-justification (or delusion) also comes out of Jameson’s reading of George Eliot, borrowing Sartre’s idea of mauvaise foi, bad faith. This itself comes from another Sartrean concept, that evil is a construction of the other. That is, one is never able to declare oneself evil because evil can only be observed externally. And so when it comes to our judgement of ourselves, we can only begin to understand our actions as bad when we interpolate the judgement from the outside, but in doing so, we also subject those external judgements to the mitigating factors of our lives. And so there is, internally, always a tension between the self viewed via the internalized view of ourselves from some external viewer and our deep experience of ourselves. This also pertains to those we know best or come into contact with most often. It is for this reason that we find it difficult to accept that the ones we love have done some horrible act to someone else. We can’t interpolate the badness because we have some sense of them and through empathy, we substitute their sense of themselves for our sense of them, and in doing so, we reconstitute the drama of the mauvaise foi within ourselves, though at one remove. I would argue that this empathy is an extension of Jameson’s idea of waning protagonicity. We share the primacy of our narrative with those closest to us.

So we have arrived at moment when good liberal storytelling is predicated on the idea that every person is at the exact center of their own story, and that a narrative is made of the suffusion and profusion of these narratives. That yes might be shaped by emphasis placed here or there, around this or that character, but that in the sum total of the narrative, everyone’s stories are equally important, or at least, they have the benefit of the moral primacy of their own values in their own little sector of the story. The result then is the aforementioned moral indeterminacy. Fictional worlds made without any deep thought or care to the underpinning value systems that ought to organize and structure the lives of the people living within them.

In some sense, this is to do with democracy and its flattening, totalizing effects. It has also to do with capitalism, which has provided one of the few hierarchies and operating logics still available to us in daily life. At the moment, we are witnessing a change in the governing currency of the world, but not its underlying logic. Capitalism with its acquisitiveness and strange Protestant formulations of the elect and the notions of virtue still describes much of how we live and operate in the world. But I would say that money is on the wane. I used to think that people wanted to be celebrities because then they could acquire great fortune and that this fortune would permit them to live a certain lifestyle that would then affirm something about their belief in the notion of their moral and spiritual superiority. That is, that the material life would come to speak for the interior or spiritual life, but only abstractly and at a great remove.

I feel now that people want to be rich so that they can acquire fame, and that they will spend any amount of money to do so. Attention then is the true currency of the world. Attention which then points the way to money and then this points the way to some set of vague statements about the quality of one’s soul.

I believe our fiction tries to capture this strange, distorted mirror. These curious amorphous values. Yet, our novels have thus far only managed, I believe, to restate the initial condition of what it is to be alive today. The initial condition is this: in a world where nothing matters, where everything is a signifier or a sign pointing to another set of empty notions, how is anyone supposed to make a life filled with meaning? It is this that makes our fiction feel so arid. It’s all semiotics and symbolic logic, a set of sly and often stylish permutations meant to winkingly acknowledge that one knows the right people in the right place at the right time. The ascendent genre among writers aged twenty-five to thirty-four is the novel of manners whose primary subject is the feeling of alienation and frustration one feels at trying to decode the invisible and seemingly arbitrary symbols that will permit one into the social sphere of one’s choosing. The contemporary novel of manners has taken on the social paranoia and intense snobbery that so characterizes our time. Someone is always imagining that there is another, smaller room to which they have not been invited, and so they begin to project outward onto the vast social space a whole conspiracy of exclusion that they can solve if only, if only, if only, they are just clever enough and smart enough—the revelation is sometimes that there was never any such room, but it is mostly that there was such a room but that within that room, there were people also imagining that there was an even smaller, more selective room that they had not been invited to. And so the social dimension of the contemporary novel comes to be a reification or validation of one’s social paranoia.

Everything is about a set of people grappling with a desperation for meaning in a world that deprives them of it, except in the contemporary world, the authors deprive their characters even of God or country or creed. The contemporary fictional every person is a millennial hunched over a computer doing extractive labor and having the products of that labor alienated from them, and thus alienated, they move through a series of dim, but beautifully described tableaux. And toward what end? It feels unstylish to even ask that question, but I ask it just the same. Toward what end? What is the point of this genre of novel? If we’re all just asking, in a world where God is dead and the Money God is dying and there only other God is the Attention God, why does anything I do matter? The endless recursive scroll of the contemporary novel has turned concerns about racism, patriarchy, the evils of consumption, and more, into a set of scripts and modes and faddish gestures all meant to signal rather than to address directly. We cannot address things directly because we are taught that directness is didacticism and didacticism is bad. Shoddy. Preachy. Moral in the bad way.

And so we have a fiction of thin moral worldbuilding. Fiction so ambiguous as to become muddled. Fiction that refuses to speak any sort of judgement. Or to pass any sort of judgement.

This would seem to place me on the side of all of those people online who want more legible villains. People who want art that can come down hard on its characters for behaving badly. People who want fiction that can “show that the author does not approve.” That is not what I mean. That is not what I want. I don’t care what the author approves of. I just want to read fiction that occurs in a world that has a moral vector. That doesn’t take as its operating scheme a kind of rote moral relativism. I don’t want a morally democratic fiction, where everyone is a little bad and a little good and it’s really just about the tragedy of the irresolvable conflicts that characterize human life. That to me is certainly one goal of a mimetic fiction. A fiction that seeks to capture in raw data the way life is.

But another goal, a more discursive goal perhaps, might be a fiction that is capable of going beyond capturing the raw data of life’s many irresolvable tragedies. A fiction that can unfold in a world that is shaped and held by certain values, indeed, a world that is characterized by them. I don’t need to read another 320 page novel about a twenty-eight-year-old woman living in a major urban center working for a magazine, thinking quietly suicidal thoughts to know that everyday life is filled with things that are kinda boring and kinda bad and kinda make me want to die. I know that already. The thrill of seeing it reflected in fiction is gone for me. What I need is more than data.

To then reformulate what we have been saying here: I would like to read fiction set in a world that has values and patterns of emphasis and de-emphasis. What matters in this world. It is not enough to undertake pure mimesis. Pure recreation of life in your art. I suppose that this de-emphasis of value comes out of the cinematic mode as well. The pseudo-objectivity of the camera lens when transposed into fiction really is just the author deciding not to partake in interiority. The result is a coolness. A remove. A world that seems harsh but fair like watching animals go at it in the wild.

In fact, this is just the abdication of authorly responsibility. It is a variety of cowardice. There is no objectivity, even in cinema. No image is objective. Every image is a creation, a curation, of objects and light and theme. Every image has an author and therefore an implied audience. And so we must begin to ask ourselves, even in the face of pseudo-objectivity, why has this image been presented to us? Why has it been composed in this way? To put it another way, when an author presents a world that is simply filled with events that themselves do not seem to matter beyond spawning more events, when the inner values of the world remain opaque and distant, they are not in fact partaking in moral ambiguity. They are in fact writing poorly. And toward what end?

So-called balanced characters are, to me, a result of modern insecurity and the prevalence of subjectivity. Even our pseudo-objectivity is a manifestation of the predominance of the subjective. Balanced characters are tedious ciphers. And a sign of a writer in distress. A villain is always a collaborative effort between author and audience. A balanced character is only ever one question: who?

I do have a suggestion. I do think that there is a way out. It has to do with two things. The first is to begin to ask better, deeper questions about the moral logic of the world you create and its value systems. Do not merely copy and paste the value systems of our world into your story. Ask yourself, is this particular milieu I am describing governed by the hazy rules I feel in my own life or by some set of more concrete if arbitrary norms. Think vividly and deeply about the governing logic of the values you give your characters. Indeed, give your characters values.

The second has to do with minor characters. I think it is important to return to an attitude of hierarchy with respect to our minor characters. Not narratively. But morally. We have to be willing to let some shadow of inarticulacy fall upon regions of our cast of characters. I do not mean, give them moral ambiguity. I mean, to let them act and operate in a way that is outside the capacity for judgement of your protagonist. To truly reintroduce an element of the unknown and unknowable into the populace of your story world. To ask if it is possible that somewhere out there, lurking in all the shadows of the land, there is a person capable of tremendous evil without explanation.

The very potential for the existence of such a being will improve almost any story. Because it means that there are real consequences and real stakes. Ask yourself, what is the worst possible thing I can imagine taking place in this world. Ask yourself if it is truly grave. If there are people who are capable of vast, inexplicable harm. And if not, ask yourself why. I think it is time to let our minor characters step away from us and the illuminating glow of our humanism. And to permit them to be villains or heroes or whatever. To behave in ways that would seem to run counter to our storytelling instincts. Because I think too much complexity can actually be a bad thing.

Because the goal of moral worldbuilding is not to create a terrain of moral ambiguity. But to establish a living world in which events and circumstances have corresponding meanings and consequences. Where it matters that a character woke up on a given day and went out into the world and met with so and so on such and such path. That it was that day and that path and that moment and those two meeting. That is why we care about the fates of the Dashwoods. That is why we care about Levin and his scything. That is why we care about the detective’s son in The End of the Affair. Because all of these people live in a world that is itself alive. And we read its living breath in differences and shades of primacy and emphasis placed upon events and people and things.

It all comes down to this, I suppose. When you write a story or read a story or watch a movie or a play or hear an anecdote, ask yourself what are the values of this world? To whom are these people accountable? To what? And what is the cost? Who must pay it? And what if they can’t?