Kirk (and Eliot) on good and evil in literature
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Dante and Virgil encounter Ugolino and Ruggieri in Gustave Doré’s illustration of Inferno XXXII
I’m currently reading Russell Kirk’s Enemies of the Permanent Things, a study of the “abnormity” in culture and politics that results from an abandonment of tradition and norms, the “permanent things” of the title, a phrase borrowed from TS ELiot, and the embrace of nihilism. Kirk examines this trend—already pronounced when he published the book in 1969—through literature rather than politics or policy, those things being downstream of culture.
Here, in an early chapter on the purpose of literature, he discusses “the normative end of letters”:
The great popular novelists of the nineteenth century—Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope—all assumed that the writer is under a moral obligation to normality: that is, explicitly or implicitly, bound to certain enduring standards of private and public conduct.
Now I do not mean that the great writer incessantly utters homilies. . . . Rather, the man of letters teaches the norms of our existence through parable, allegory, analogy, and holding up the mirror to nature. Like William Faulkner, the writer may write much more about what is evil than about what is good; and yet, exhibiting the depravity of human nature, he establishes in his reader’s mind the awareness that there exist enduring standards from which we fall away; and that fallen nature is an ugly sight.
Whether and how to describe or depict evil in literature is a question I’ve discussed with friends many, many times over the years. As an adolescent resentful of the bowdlerized literature I’d read in high school I’d often make a pretty simpleminded argument in favor of “realism”—a term I’m less and less fond of now.
Fortunately, early in my college career I came across this, in TS Eliot’s essay “Dante,” in which he considers the savage, gruesome punishments meted out by obscene demons in a hell populated by grotesque, unrepentant, blasphemous sinners:
“The contemplation of the horrid or sordid or disgusting, by an artist, is the necessary and negative aspect of the impulse toward the pursuit of beauty. ”
This is, of course, tricky, and Eliot continues with a subtle warning: “not all succeed as did Dante in expressing the complete scale from negative to positive.” And he notes earlier in the same essay that “[y]ou cannot . . . understand the Inferno without the Purgatorio and the Paradiso.” Evil will be incomprehensible without contemplation of the good as well.
I’ve never worked out any precise solution to these problems, but adapted book by book, using whatever style or method I saw as appropriate to a given story. It’s art, after all. But whether in depicting good or evil, subtlety must be a key consideration. Kirk again:
Often, in his appeal of a conscience to a conscience, [the writer] may row with muffled oars; sometimes he is aware only dimly of his normative function. The better the artist, one almost may say, the more subtle the preacher. Imaginative persuasion, not blunt exhortation, commonly is the method of the literary champion of norms.
Kirk’s book is excellent so far, and I’m grateful to have received it from my in-laws for Christmas. Some of Kirk’s concerns, observations, and admonitions remind me of a strikingly different writer, John Gardner, who explored similar territory in his book On Moral Fiction. It’s been a few years since I read that—here are my brief thoughts from back then—but it’s worth seeking out if you care at all about the cultural and moral implications of fiction and art.
