finely aware, richly responsible

Here's Martha Nussbaum on literature and moral imagination/philosophy. If you don't have access to Jstor I can forward you a copy on request.

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written."
--Wilde.

Do you agree with that? [Celia, I need you in particular to respond to this]

Well, first things first: it's pretty difficult to say that a whole book is moral or immoral-either in intent or content. Secondly, one has to be on guard against the moralizing brigade that wants, on the one hand, to prescribe 'good' books in order to produce good citizens, moral upright beings, provide moral instruction and so on, and proscribe 'bad' ones in order to protect the innocent, prevent 'moral corruption' on the other hand. And there is, as Roxana rightly points out, the danger of totalitarianism here (Plato, the Taliban, the Communists etc) .

But even putting that to one side -which is not to ignore it, far from it- is Wilde still right? Would one say the same for art (i.e art has no relation to religion or the ethical whatsoever)? A painting is just painted with some style that is evaluated in a favourable light or has some formal features that one finds agreeable? When one talks about 'good' must one inevitably empty it of all moral connotations?

What does literature do, then? Have you ever walked away from a book thinking, you know what, I feel morally uplifted? I don't think that novels work in the way, nor do they aim to. But to say that is not to admit that they are written with no purpose except for a stylistic one. For what is the work of the imagination, the ability to sympathise with other points of view, pay attention to details, picture a life, enter other worlds, become finely aware of conflicts, tragedies, but a moral endeavour?

And shouldn't we also think of some novels (not "the novel") as attempting to show human acts of kindness, generosity and strength in the face of adversity-personal, political or moral collapse?And what of Bellow, with his supreme gift of inclusiveness, his fascination with matters of the soul (as Amis says), the swift flow of prose that picks up the details, leaves nothing out, lets the gaze move on, trained and effortless.

And now, after listening to Wood and Amis on Bellow (do watch the superb BBC documentary on him if you can) I am compelled to quote the following:

At the corner, he paused to watch the work of the wrecking crew. The great metal ball swung at the walls, passed easily through brick, and entered the rooms, the lazy weight browsing on kitchens and parlors. Everything it touched wavered and burst, spilled down. There rose a white tranquil cloud of plaster dust. The afternoon was ending, and in the widening area of demolition was a fire fed by the wreckage ... Paint and varnish smoked like incense. The old flooring burned gratefully - the funeral of exhausted objects. Scaffolds walled with pink, white, green doors, quivered as the six-wheeled trucks carried off fallen brick. The sun, now leaving for New Jersey and the west, was surrounded by a dazzling broth of atmospheric gases.

Bellow was a great pleasure-giver; and a very serious pleasure-giver, too. I mean that he treated the novel in the highest terms, considered it a metaphysical vessel, a form for the examination of the self and its strivings.

--James Wood.

Of course, one doesn't read books with the explicit desire for gaining moral insights, but tell me, who amongst you has read a book or loved a book just because it was well written, for aesthetic reasons alone?

I don't know. I think reading encourages you to take words seriously. And that means, also, not taking others too seriously.

As a character from my favourite Calvino book says: "We can know nothing about what is outside us if we overlook ourselves" To which one might add: we can know nothing of ourselves if we overlook what is outside us. Here "knowing" is not epistemology , but understanding and comprehension. It is not about "facts" but values that are deeply entangled with them.

From the same story:

He opens his eyes. What appears to his gaze is something he seems to have seen already, every day: streets full of people, hurrying, elbowing their way ahead, without looking one another in the face, among high walls, sharp and peeling. In the background, the starry sky scatters intermittent flashes like a stalled mechanism, which jerks and creaks in all its unoiled joints, outposts of an endangered universe, twisted, restless as he is.