Literature, Morality, and Terror

Nothing so coarsely indecent as the whole history of Jude in his relations with his wife Arabella has ever been put in English print − that is to say, from the hands of a Master. There may be books more disgusting, more impious as regards human nature, more foul in detail, in those dark corners where the amateurs of filth find garbage to their taste; but not, we repeat, from any Master’s hand.
M.W.W. Elephant in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (Jan.1896)

Story-telling is an exercise in morality. To tell a story even about one’s day to one’s partner requires decisions about what was most important, what proved irrelevant, who deserves mention, and who gets ignored. Most of us make those decisions so unconsciously that, if asked, we’d simply assume we were telling the truth. And probably we were. Just not the whole truth. Who, for example, relates how many times they urinated while at the office? Unless the recent bug going around said office sent us toiletward an unusual number of times? If so, our imaginary story teller has revised the traditional standards of importance if only for a day.

But those standards of importance are based on a kind of morality, by which I mean we accept a set of expectations that give meaning to our activity. Morality offers meaning because morality establishes expectations and standards that a community will not lightly skirt, nor an individual comfortably ignore. I have not stated where these moral expectations and standards come from because I am not sure it matters where they come from. That willingness to forego (perhaps better: “suspend”) the thorny question of the origins of morality is where I think we can start to distinguish what I would like to term “transliterate” and “aliterate”, by trying to add to our current definitions of these terms in the hopes of defining a contemporary moral crisis.

Sue and Little Jude try to endure.

Jude The Obscure (Thomas Hardy, 1895) makes for some tough reading even in our day of Charlie Sheen’s HIV announcement and Miley  Cyrus’s latest PR stunt. Jude Fawley is a frail everyman who has big dreams and works hard to get a shot at having them − if you can call an academic life ‘big dreams.’ He is politely rebuffed at every turn and in ways that draw us in to sympathize with him. He manages to teach himself a bit of Latin and Greek, and he learns the vocabularies of Anglican and Dissenter theology.  He does not have much for bootstraps, but he’s willing to pull on them awfully hard and without too much complaint. Nevertheless, by his early twenties he is hoodwinked by a pig’s foreskin and a stout farm girl named Arabella Donn. Their walks a’ courtin’ turn into intimacies that in novels don’t happen before marriage, except to intimate the impositions of men. Arabella wonders if Jude’s dreams of Christminster (aka Oxford and its colleges) will steal from her a chance at socially mandated marriage, so she is convinced by her cousins to use her womanly wiles to snare him into matrimony. Jude can’t face his ambivalences, and Arabella’s assertions overwhelm him. Then she runs off to Australia with her parents, in no small part because she finds Jude too ethereal and yet too staid.

Enter Jude’s cousin, Sue Bridehead, who vaguely falls for Jude’s (incestuous?) advances, and spends a good deal of time wrestling with their relationship given his station and situation. She is the free spirit, the classicist, the flaunter of Victorian norms, who stands in high relief to Jude’s theocentrism and moralist pleas. Yet she retains her near namesake with such drama that this reader was torn between thinking her a harpy hypocrite or a virtuous epicurean. Which, of course, makes her all the more fascinating, even as I wondered why Jude was even bothering. Other fish in the sea, and all that.

Jude and Sue embark on a stormy voyage across an emotional sea that will bring a panicked marriage to a milquetoast preacher for Sue, that will carry Arabella and their child back into Jude’s life, and will stir up adulterous tempests that settle into de facto bigamy. I give nothing away by stating that perhaps a hundred pages could be cut from the middle without much loss of character development and confusion – a compliment to Hardy’s skill at holding our eyes on this calamity of sinking lives. Then the endings pile on tragedies on top of the sadnesses endured by all parties since at least Arabella’s off-handed confession that she turned out not to be pregnant back at her father’s haystack. Jude’s ship is sinking, and both Sue and Arabella stir the waters ever more, offering none of the traditional moral clarity that most nineteenth-century stories put on their female protagonists.

But “coarsely indecent”? “Disgusting”? In its particulars, perhaps, but a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Where are we to decide where the indecency lies? Debate about that question can be the lifeblood of story telling and moral living. And, of course, if story telling is indeed a moral exercise, the inverse must hold as well. Story telling can be immoral. Many stories were told at Stalin’s show trials and McCarthy’s HUAC meetings that were immoral and led to immoral actions (in varying degrees in the two cases, of course).

But here is the crux of the matter I hoped to intimate in the title. Is the moral of Jude the Obscure in the marital entrapment? In Arabella’s selfishness to get married? To flee the marriage? To demand it back? The egoism of the young Sue? The growing disillusionment and atheism of Jude? The religious backsliding of the older Sue? Or maybe in the fact that tragic things happen to those who flaunt honesty to themselves and to others? Or who flaunt social convention?

Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) is one of my favorite novels. It too was condemned by some critics for its immorality and Flaubert was put on trial for it (though acquitted). Women as sexual actors?! Intemperate outbursts at provincial clerics?! Bankruptcy!?!

From the Tumblr, “3-Panel Book Review”

But why is not Madame Bovary the most moral of tales? Indulge your romantic whims, live beyond your means, and watch your world crash around you and the ones you claim to love! Why do some see such stories as the source of modern abortion mills and divorce-on-demand, whereas others see such stories as worthy of deep reading and reflection, in part to gain insight into the human condition and the perils we face?

That difference lies at the heart of what I propose to be necessary shades of terms “transliterate” and “aliterate.” The contemporary west – post-industrial, technical, bureaucratic, safe (more on this below) – encourages clear and functional distinctions, so I must defend my additions as best I can if they are going to hold up the argument I hope to make. The term “transliterate” is usually used as a verb, and a fairly technical one at that: “Write or print (a letter or word) using the closest corresponding letters of a different alphabet or language” (OED online). One transliterates the Greek ‘Θ’ into the Latin/English ‘Th.’

I propose we also use it as an adjective describing “persons who read across different cultures and mindsets in an effort to find corresponding values of interests, aesthetics, tastes, morals, or ideals.” One might read The New York Times, The [Manchester] Guardian, and Spain’s El País to develop a multivalent perspective on political matters, for example. By my definition, a truly transliterate person would be able to read in at least two languages, so I barely make my own standard. But transliteracy could surely be granted to those of us who read from other cultures and traditions, albeit in translation (and often transliteration) into our own tongues.

The transliterate are unlikely to pin the morality of storytelling to any one place or time or culture. The transliterate are not likely to read about child sacrifice or adultery and scream “Unclean!” because the transliterate will (at least) read through the story to see what changes or what is learned, and the transliterate will embed the story in a broader experience of other stories, other accounts, that allow them to appreciate the moral without pinning any one story with the responsibility of establishing the entire moral edifice. The transliterate would not read Jude The Obscure and treat the bigamy as the moral of the story, nor would the transliterate stop as Sue slid toward religion and proclaim the story a stirring account of a wayward girl’s salvation.

The aliterate could do either, or both, or (most likely) neither. To be aliterate is being “unwilling to read, although able to do so” (OED online). The aliterate are not IL-literate, whose plight all humanity should strive to alleviate (I am talking about poor farmers in the third world and wealthy middle schoolers texting on the latest iPhone in Social Studies class.). But the aliterate choose not to read or, to broaden the concept a bit, choose not to read beyond what reinforces their established creed, aesthetic, or morality.

Abdelhamid Abaaoud, another dead terrorist

Which leads us to the person to the right, one of the ‘masterminds’ (ironic title, that) of the killings in Paris this past weekend. That he is holding a Quran does not mean readers of the Quran are fundamentalists, much less terrorists. But that fundamentalists hold a single book and claim to have the authority to act based on that book can not be ignored.

The attacks came to Paris the night after I started what was to be a commentary on Jude and the “moral outrage” it stirred in some. But while glued to my tv for three days (and getting on with the mundanities of my own safe life), I began to reflect upon the power of being literate, yet being unwilling to read. For those whose lives have been forever damaged by fundamentalism (if they were to read my blog), I make no claims to have any answer you could accept. And I have no whimsical faith that books will beat bullets.

Nevertheless, what I think the world fails to grasp in the aftermath of such horrors is the fundamental nihilism of this fundamentalist/jihadist ideology. The perpetrators of the attack in Paris (and in Beirut) (and in Nigeria) this weekend wanted to die. They were not thwarted by the fear of death so much as inspired by the drama of death. They were content to be shot by police on Friday night, to blow themselves up inside or outside a stadium or marketplace, or to escape one night to do it all again the next night. They perceive their deaths as the pivotal moral of their stories. Their deaths prove to them that their stories are moral ones – and they hope their deaths will inspire others to write similar autobiographies.

Abdelhamid Abaaoud believed “Allah chose me [and two others] to travel to Europe in order to terrorize the crusaders waging war against the Muslims.” (from The Atlantic) Such beliefs are unverifiable, unflappable, unstoppable. And often such beliefs inspire some of the greatest of human achievements. Imagine if he said “Allah chose me to travel to Europe to learn how to bring clean water to a community in Syria…”

If we are going to argue over the origin of the morality of Abaaoud’s statement, we might find ourselves on the wrong side of eternity. If indeed Allah were the origin of the statement, who are we to question Abaaoud’s narrative? The French authorities have somehow managed to thwart the will of Allah, and Abaaoud is enjoying his thousand virgins somewhere.

But if we are going to argue over the narrative of the morality – where I’m trying to argue the discussion will be more fruitful – then we have to strive for transliteracy. We have to read the Quran in the context of our moral struggles outside Arabia in the eighth century or the banlieu of Paris in the twenty-first. We have to wrestle with where we think the story has ended or will end. We have to allow our experiences with other moral struggles (like those in the Book of Genesis or in the last chapters of the Gospel of Luke or in the battles among the brothers Karamazov) to inform the particular struggles we are faced with. We must be taught and we must continually teach to think beyond what we have as our one point of reference.

I wonder if it is too late for the teens and older who have nothing but the Quran (or the Jewish Testament or the Christian Testament or the Rigveda) as their only moral story. But I want to think not, unless they are surrounded by those who refuse them access to  other stories − unless they are surrounded by the aliterate. And yes, I’ll say it: much of the Islamic Middle East struggles not so much from illiteracy as from aliteracy. If such a thing could be turned into statistics, I’d bet the region has the highest levels of aliteracy of any region or culture in history.

Such aliteracy simplifies things quite a bit, of course. The first story you read or are told gives you all you want or need to know. Any subsequent stories can be ignored if they do not fit with what the aliterate demand. Tragically, once one passes from illiteracy to aliteracy, one is unlikely to be drawn back toward humanity, short of being brought back in a body bag or scraped into a DNA-testing tube.

But if my idea is correct, we also should appreciate the fact that the dangerous people are terribly few. Aliteracy is beyond most people for any number of reasons: literate family members, friends, religious or political teachers; the impact of social media (maybe it does serve a purpose); the fear of getting caught; the fear of dying alone. Even after the events of November 13th, ‘the west’ is a phenomenally safe place to live, and those Parisians who have commemorated that fact with their vigils and prayers and calls to overcome their own fears stand as testament to that safety.

But of course the terror comes from the asymmetry: one aliterate fundamentalist can destroy hundreds or thousands of lives in moments. Perhaps that is the moral of the story they want to tell. Mine is a weak answer, but let me point this out to any aliterate who might be reading: Thomas Hardy and his stories continue to be discussed and debated and remembered a century after his death because his transliteracy lives on. No one will remember Abaaoud in a couple of weeks, nor will he have left anything but a French society resolved to retain its liberté, égalité, fraternité – and a smudge on an apartment wall. If only he had read Hardy’s Jude The Obscure he could have learned an important lesson on the first page: “The letter killeth…”