The Moral of the Story is…

The perception of literature is culture-specific. Depending on where you are in the world and which educational system you find yourself in, literature is served up in a certain way – sometimes a little unpalatably. One of the common misconceptions about literature is that it must have a “moral message” – an idea stemming from, and I am generalising, conservative, retrograde, over-religious cultures.

The tendency to moralise literature may seem innocuous, but if you turn the matter over a few times in your head, you will see that the damage it does to an individual’s interpretive faculties is considerable. This is because when one is constantly told to search for moral messages in works of art, one ends up assuming that all art is moral, which, as most of us know, is a gross generalisation. The person told to do so constantly will go through life thinking every word, act, and decision comes with a clear moral code. More often than not, the morals we are force-fed fail us in later life due to their generalised nature. “Do not judge a book by its cover,” my least favourite of all the morals, is largely untrue, because in the world of appearance, first impressions weigh a lot more than we give them credit for. “Good will be rewarded (and evil punished).” History has shown us this is rarely the case. There are no higher powers “judging” our actions, benign or malevolent, regardless of what organised religion attempts to tell us. The universe is indifferent to what we do; good and evil are non-notions and therefore meaningless.

While it can be argued that all human beings are moral creatures, it does not necessarily mean that everything must be interpreted through a moral lens. When this is done to literature, the ultimate forum for self-expression, it curbs and mangles it, twisting it out of shape. This happens to the detriment of young minds.

One quick glance at (Western) literary history will tell us that we were – and still are – intolerant of works of art that do not conform to our moral codes: Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Nabokov’s Lolita, Mann’s Death in Venice, Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, all of D. H. Lawrence’s works, Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Mann’s Death in Venice, Chopin’s The Awakening, Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus, Forster’s Maurice, Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Huxley’s Brave New World, Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Burrough’s Naked Lunch, Ginsberg’s poetry – all works of art that have at one point or another been subjected to censorship and labelled “scandalous” or “scatological.”  

When we force our moral judgement on works of art, we rob them of their dignity and deny ourselves the privilege of enlightenment. Literature is not to be approached the same way as the Bible, the Qur’an or the Torah, which all are – ironically – in themselves “literary works” open to interpretation. Organised religion may function as a trusting guide to some 80% of the world’s population, but its primary role, one should be aware, is to instruct and dictate, prescribe and proselytise. Literature, however, is an amoral mirror; it reflects the psyche of the individual approaching it. If it is a narrow mind that comes upon it, that is EXACTLY what it will reflect. 

The next time someone asks you, “What is the moral of the story?”, your reply should ideally be: “What is the moral you wish me to seek?”

A note to the reader: After I finished this entry, a certain controversial pop artist named Lady Gaga was discouraged from performing in the ultra-religious Indonesia. One of the Islamic representatives, elated at the banishment of the “Mother Monster,” had this to say: “Indonesians need entertainment and art which have moral values.” With this sort of viewpoint, it is no surprise the country is sinking deeper into the quagmire of religious orthodoxy, making an ideal hotbed for Islamist terrorist groups.

Read the article here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-18224783