Paksworld

A listserv I’m on mentioned that a member had published a review of Game of Thrones in a major market,  so I wandered over to look.    Here’s the link: http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=1543&fulltext=1&media=#article-text-cutpoint

I was impressed with the review on several counts, but the one I want to bring up here is the way other reviewers, critics, and readers talk about characterization, especially in the area of morality/ethics and spirituality.  This isn’t about GRRM’s books, per se, but about a way of looking at all books, and considering how a writer’s view of reality affects how that writer constructs characters.   Right now–in the review cited and in other writing about Game of Thrones–Martin epitomizes one particular view of reality, history, and human nature.    Tolkein is often cited as his opposite. Thus it’s important to use language appropriate to those fundamental views–which Teitelbaum does in her review,  and many others do not.

I’m going a bit further: she deals with the  books, as a reviewer should, but I’m dealing with the field of “book discussion” in general.    Complex characterization–including moral complexity–is usually considered a desirable component of serious fiction and has been throughout literary history in the West (I’m not competent to speak of other branches of the tree of literature, though the folktales I’ve read suggest appreciation of complex characterization worldwide in more sophisticated readerships.)   Characters faced with difficult choices–characters whose choices arose from internal conflicts as well as external challenges, from Aristotle’s “fatal flaw” to subtler multiple ones–characters who had to cope with the results of their choices (good and bad)–were praised for that complexity.

But over the past century, increasingly, moral ambiguity become conflated with moral complexity…as if a character’s feeling of ambiguity in some situations–being uncertain what was the right choice, or feeling tempted to a wrong one–made the character morally ambiguous.   From there,  “morally ambiguous” expanded to mean that readers could not discern whether the character was “good” or “bad” or whether the character had any conception of right and wrong…and from there, fairly predictably,  the morally ambiguous character became the one who ignored any such considerations and simply acted on personal preference.    Characters who would once have been recognized as evil were retitled morally ambiguous and granted the description of moral complexity as well.

Writers whose characters had a clear understanding of right and wrong within the fictional culture (the character’s culture)  were criticized for writing characters without moral complexity–simplistic, idealistic, romantic being some of the common terms applied.   Hence the shallow criticism of Tolkein that his characters were simply good or simply bad, without the desired complexity.  (How any thinking adult reading Tolkein with attention could miss the moral complexity baffles me, but then I’m easily baffled.)

We all act, in part, from beliefs about the nature of the moral universe–beliefs, because there isn’t enough data for us to use logic every time we come to a choice.  Either we think there’s a general good and bad, right and wrong…or we think there isn’t.    In both camps there are disagreements on detail–serious ones–but the chasm between the two is larger than the internal fissures.

Moral complexity requires a general good and bad–an ordered moral universe.   For there to be conflicts of values, the essence of moral complexity, there must be values held firmly enough to spark off one another.  Character motivations will then include internal conflicts arising from the recognition that choices are made in that framework–but are not simple, because values do conflict.   Which good is the greater good?   Which bad is worse in this situation, right now?

Moral ambiguity requires that there be no general good and bad–a chaotic, or amoral, universe–a universe in which the concepts of good and evil are absent, immaterial, and have no effect on characters’  motivation.   Characters can still be complex, but they cannot be complex in the moral dimension.  They have preferences, desires, fears, which motivate actions, but they do not relate these to any moral order.    Moral order, if any,  is supplied by the reader (and some readers, happy in an amoral view of things, have none to supply.)

Thus moral complexity and moral ambiguity are not the same,  and do not exist in the same fictional moral universes…except where a writer introduces characters who themselves believe these two different viewpoints.   What happens then is interesting…because writers reveal themselves in their writing.    When those two views appear in the same story, the writer will inevitably (in all my years of reading experience) reveal what the writer’s own foundation belief is, and most of the wrinkles of the subsidiary choices as well.

One of the scariest things about writing is that the better you get at writing fiction, the more you’re revealing yourself…the less you can hide.  The novice storyteller’s self is hidden in layers of “influence”–what shows is what he or she read most–but later on, that fabled “voice” comes through and there you are, revealed, warts and pimples and flab and all.    It’s not that all your characters are “you”, or that you did everything your characters did or approved of it.   It’s that  foundational beliefs that you may not even mention–probably don’t mention–bleed through.  They are what I call the “deep logic” of your stories.     Two writers may write a similar story–may write a hero and an anti-hero–but under that will be their deep beliefs about what “hero” and “anti-hero” mean, and the discerning reader will know that one of them thinks good & evil, right & wrong, just & unjust are real concepts, an important component of human thought and action,  and the other thinks those are just romantic twaddle and what matters is strength, will, desire, etc.

So I toss out these ideas: moral complexity is not moral ambiguity, and moral ambiguity is not moral complexity.    Labeling moral ambiguity “realistic” and moral complexity “idealistic” or “romantic” is…in a world in which fervent believers in one or another branch of morality kill or  die (or both) to spread it…an exercise in denial.    I wish reviewers, critics, and those who comment on books had the background to recognize and distinguish between them.

And now, back to the current chapter in which someone who “needed killing” had an unusual but fitting end.   Last night’s session went long into the wee hours of the morning, so my day has been off-kilter from that as well as daylight savings time.    Working on the chapter today…well.  I write better before 1 am than after, but “what happened” still feels right.