The moral act of writing

“Writing,” Patrick Kurp remarks this morning, “is a moral act (a tautology if we assume every human act possesses a moral component).”

This statement needs to be fleshed out to be exact, I am afraid. I worry about the sentence quoted by Jake Seliger a few days ago from Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound (1981): “He’s not merely a monster, he’s a great moralist too.” The moralist is a monster—of morality. He does not engage in moral reflection, but in moral legislation. He knows right and wrong clearly and in advance, because he has reduced human experience to a universal code, which admits of no exceptions. If he cooked as badly as he moralizes, his dishes would be tasteless reproductions of laboratory-tested recipes. He is under the delusion that morality, like good cooking, can be set down in black and white, and he is just the man to do so.

But this is not possibly what Kurp means. He doesn’t mean that writing is a moralizing act. A great writer is not a monster and a great moralist too. Nor does Kurp mean, I think, that writing is the labor to produce what the novelist John Gardner called, to the consternation of those who might otherwise have agreed with him, “moral fiction.” For Gardner, writing in 1978, this was a species of fiction distinguished from (and opposed to) experimental fiction or metafiction or self-conscious fiction. It is a paradox universally acknowledged that fiction can be amoral or even immoral in intention while holding itself to a chaste and persistent morality in realizing its intentions.

Writing is a moral act, because it demands complete autonomy (to be in thrall, whether to an employer or an ideology, is not to write but merely to recirculate stock phrases and received ideas), freedom from coercion of any kind, including moral fashion, and the refusal to quit until an adequate reaction to the literary situation at hand is carried off. What Michael Oakeshott said about religion applies equally well to writing. “In religion,” Oakeshott said, “we achieve goodness, not by becoming better, but by losing ourselves in God.” In writing a man achieves goodness—that is, morality—not by becoming a better man through the habit of composition, nor even less by laying down the moral law, but by losing himself in the text he is now writing.