RE: Morality in Literature
November 27, 2020 at 6:01 am
(This post was last modified: November 27, 2020 at 6:04 am by Belacqua.)
(November 27, 2020 at 2:28 am)Apollo Wrote: it also allows to explore those possible scenarios without actually having the opportunity to to have experience them in real life as there is quite a likelihood not every individual may face them.
Yes, this makes sense to me. And I think it puts you, on this aspect, in agreement with Flaubert's argument. Literature allows us to experience things in imagination which we don't in life. And even if that imaginative experience is something immoral, it may (at best) improve our sensibility rather than influencing us to be evil. This means that the work which describes something immoral is not itself immoral.
I'm guessing that most of us agree with this, these days. The headlong increase in what it's OK to depict, after Flaubert's time, means that what we see in prime time is far more immoral than anything in Madame Bovary. And I don't think anyone here would argue that it's immoral for TV to show these things.
(I'm still not sure, myself. But I think this is the general consensus.)
This of course is only half of what Flaubert argues. He wants license to depict whatever he wants, but he also insists that the art must be of high quality. While most of us agree that any subject matter is moral to depict, I doubt that many of us would be in favor of censoring trashy depictions. Again, prime time TV is about as trashy as it gets, and popular literature isn't any better.
It may even be that our contemporaries question the ability to differentiate high quality from trashy quality.
(I don't necessarily agree with you that the benefit of reading about experiences we haven't had is so that we can prepare for them when we confront them. I mean, I doubt very much that I will be in the position of Humbert Humbert, and don't think that reading Lolita helped prepare me for being in that position.)
