By Christopher Clausen
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Additional resources for The Moral Imagination: Essays on Literature and Ethics
Example text
I have tried to show that there is no good theoretical reason to avoid criticism of the moral content of a literary work, and that to do so often distorts our notion of what the work really is. Diamonds, after all, are not merely beautiful; they are hard enough to cut glass. The breadth and depth of moral analysis, as of any other kind of thought, are not to be measured only by our acceptance or rejection of its conclusions. On the contrary, by recognizing in poems a variety of cognitive and philosophical significance that has properly been theirs all along, it reaffirms the status of poetry as an art that illuminates our other acts of living.
When adults annex a book like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or Huckleberry Finn for themselves, it achieves a higher literary status even than that of being numbered among the ''classic" works for children, works such as Now We Are Six, Treasure Island, or—a more complicated case, as we shall see—The Wind in the Willows. That many adults understand more of these things than many children is hardly a basis for confident taxonomizing. The books we don't deeply admire may present fewer problems, but then the question of their status is correspondingly less interesting.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning glow, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may.... If there is an afterlife in which God will reward virginity and punish unchastity, then a playful attitude in the face of death is imprudent. The lover's conclusion is, given the circumstances as the poem conveys them, morally impeccable, intellectually enlightened, and fully consistent with the long tradition (older than carpe diem) in which play is seen as the appropriate response to mortality: Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife Thorough the iron gates of life: Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.