Writers and Morality

 

Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky was a compulsive gambler. He also consumed alcohol rather liberally. But he remains one of my favourite novelists of all time. Very few writers have produced novels that surpass the greatness of The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. This raises a fundamental question: Should we keep a writer’s personal life totally aside while assessing the literary merit of their works?

Going a little further with Dostoevsky, his personal vices gave him firsthand experience of despair, guilt, and redemption, which shaped the deep psychological and moral explorations in his novels. Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov were all parts of Dostoevksy’s complex personality. In other words, if Dostoevsky was an ideal human being, he wasn’t likely to have produced such great novels. It may also be recalled that most of his greatest works were written under extreme pressure from creditors who kept knocking at his door. If he were not the compulsive gambler that he was, the creditors wouldn’t have egged him on to write so prolifically. 

Neruda

It's easier for me to accept Dostoevsky’s gambling than, say, Pablo Neruda’s sexual violence upon many women. Gambling is self-destructive, very unlike sexual violence. Neruda had an immense store of what Freud called libido, particularly the sexual side of it.

One of the many sexual encounters Neruda had was with a Tamil cleaning maid whom he met in Sri Lanka. He was the Chilean ambassador in Colombo. Something in the woman, the flame in her eyes maybe, enchanted Neruda. Of course, Neruda didn’t need much to be enchanted by women. Sexual libido is as compulsive as gambling or alcoholism. I believe they are all there in one’s very genetic make-up and are quite irresistible.

In his Memoirs, published posthumously, Neruda describes the slender waist and the full hip of the helpless maid whom he took to his bed by force. She became an antique classical South Indian sculpture for him. Neruda describes their lovemaking as an encounter with a statue. She had no emotions except contempt for the man who was outraging her modesty. But Neruda thought of his act as a conquest. Conquest of what? A race?

Neruda’s Memoirs speaks of the many women who came and went in his bedroom. Women of many hues, he says. Dark Dravidians and Africans and golden Anglos. Most of them came voluntarily. But that Tamil “sculpture” was forcefully subdued. We don’t know how many such women were victimised by the ‘great’ poet who wrote hundreds of lines about tender love.

Do you judge Neruda’s poetry based on his personal life? I taught a poem of his for many years in grade 12, but never mentioned the personal side of his life in class. 

Alice Munro

Nobel laureate Alice Munro was accused by her own daughter of certain sexual perversions as well as immorality. When Andrea was only 9 years old, her step-father molested her. Alice didn’t pay attention at all to her daughter’s anguish. Later on, Andrea filed a legal case against her step-father. Even then Alice continued to defend her man, the man who described the mother’s sexual appetites to her daughter in order to arouse the latter sexually. How do we judge Alice Munro’s writings on the interior worlds of women, sexuality, motherhood…? 

Althusser

I first heard of Louis Althusser in my postgraduate literature classes. Let me confess that I understood almost nothing of what he taught or what my teachers taught about him. But I wouldn’t have ever expected him – neither then as a young student nor later as a more amenable adult – to murder his own wife. He escaped punishment staking a claim that the murder was perpetrated in a depressive and confused state of mind. In his memoir, The Future Lasts Forever, written during his confinement in a mental hospital after the murder of his wife, he presented himself as weak, dependent, neurotic, and incapable of controlling his won life. What did the philosophy of such a man mean?

I presented four famous writers and raised a few questions. I have no answers to the questions. I’m interested in answers, however, and you’re welcome to give me yours.

My concern is more than about writers being role models. I don’t expect anyone to be a role model for anyone. Once when a student described me from the stage as a role model for students, I was upset. That was some twenty years ago when I was in Delhi. I told the student personally later that I wasn’t worthy of being a role model for anyone, let alone students. I had too many personal flaws.

My concern is about the relationship between a writer and their moral vision as seen in their works. Jean-Paul Sartre wanted writers to take responsibility for the moral and political implications of their words. I do agree. But what about certain inescapable human limitations? Do those limitations actually become the seedbed of good literature?