I immediately recognized myself in this passage, as someone who tends not to care what most people read, who thinks poorly of the common reader, and who doesn’t think literature can or should be justified morally—who prizes aesthetic over moral concerns any day of the week. The third habit is the one I struggle with especially. I tend to believe that literature exists solely for the pleasure of those who read and write it, and that claims that literature does moral good in society invariably rely on dubious logic.
--snip--
I balked and continue to balk at the implication that literature must be justified morally. Unlike Trilling, I believe that there are irreconcilable conflicts between ethics and aesthetics. What about great art that is amoral or perversely immoral? (For example, art that valorizes the anti-social impulses Freud considered in constant conflict with the positive, social ones, and which Camille Paglia explores magnificently in Sexual Personae.) Is that art (if you believe art has a significant impact upon society) a detriment to society? Should we eschew such art? Should artists ever privilege moral concerns over aesthetic ones when they create art? My answers to these questions tend to fall on the side of the aesthetic, not least because I don’t think we can determine the moral content of all impulses (sexual and violent impulses are particularly ambiguous).
The best literature contains multitudes. There are political dimensions, social dimensions, psychological dimensions, and, yes, narrative dimensions that exist purely for their own sake. I am not one to impugn anyone's reading habits; even the most dreadful works of writing offer to their readers something, a moment's escape, a way to investigate the lives of others. Those works, The Life of Pi, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, and A Suitable Boy that present whole worlds, characters that are more than mere sketches on paper, and even (as in the dense Pi) ideas and thoughts that linger long after the final paragraph is finished reward repeated visits.
The idea that there is some kind of inherent "conflict" between the "moral" and the "aesthetic" is a product, it seems to me, of a vision of art in general as existing in some pristine netherworld, divorced from life. While I have no issue with anyone who chooses to read purely for the aesthetic pleasure reading can bring, I find it a highly dubious notion that there can even be such a thing as "immoral art" (or even "moral art" for that matter). Do the stories and plays of the Marquis de Sade make up the former? In what way? Is "Billy Budd", Melville's "lost story" that many high school students read with relish, something of this sort as well?
Is "Piss Christ" immoral? What about The Last Temptation of Christ, in either book or film? I fail to see how such a verdict - it's immoral! - works in any of these cases, even the extreme one of the pornographic stories of the Marquis. Morality is the tale we tell ourselves of how wonderful our ideas are; we tend to read those stories, observe that art, and such not, that reinforce our own sense of ourselves as "moral" agents, and judge that which we do not take in as not satisfying whatever criteria we have set up to meet the standard of "morality".
So, the author of this piece eschews the moral dimension for some kind of pure aesthetics. Good for him. Sometimes, reading something for the pure joy of encountering those beautiful bits of prose or poetry for their own sake can indeed be a joy. To claim, however, that literature enjoys some kind of Platonic sphere, removed from the conditions that drove authors to create it, makes of it something artificial, even inhuman.
