The famous substacker and academic Erik Hoel recently penned a piece in which he suggests that Americans are fed a diet of what amounts to entertainment fast-food: Disney films with clear moral distinctions drawn between characters. It is this vision, Hoel submits, that warps Americans’ sense of ethical complexity. In place of Disney, we should look to Studio Ghibli and its depictions of more-or-less equal sides, one or both or which are misunderstood by the other, for a better cultural guide.
This kind of thinking is a common one in today’s pop-culture, redolent as it is with ‘grey’ characters - Walter White, Jaime Lannister, and even, perhaps, Kylo Ren. But characters like this aren’t new in literature. Achilles himself is hardly defined by his status as a ‘good’ or as a ‘bad’ character, although his violence is often lamented by Homer. Likewise, the tragedies of the classical Athenians showcase the lives of characters caught by webs woven by the Fates, or, if you prefer, characters whose sense of free-will is badly mistaken. Oedipus, like Túrin Turambar in Tolkien’s Silmarillion tale, is not really culpable for his actions in any definite moral sense, because they are (at least partly) brought about by forces external to his free-will. Other characters, like Antigone, are caught between competing cultural myths about the proper treatment of the dead on the one hand, and cultural myths about the status of human law on the other. In the novel, especially in its nineteenth century incarnation, characters like Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment), or Dmitri and Ivan (The Brothers Karamazov) although villainous in some respects, are treated with fully realised persons with complex inner psychologies. And yet, these remain works deeply concerned about moral questions - one cannot read Dostoyesvky without thinking deeply on the nature of moral and immoral action, the status of belief, etc.
So, I’m not really interested in defending the idea that literature should only depict ‘good’ or ‘bad’ characters - of course it shouldn’t, and outside of a few YA novels I can’t think of any major (literary/fantastic) fiction that does this. With that said, I think that recent media (like House of the Dragon) does suggest or imply something new: that moral categories per se are misleading or wrong. Like Ivan Karamozov, Daemon Targaryen is depicted as a kind of bad boy nihilist. He is no tragic hero: the show doesn’t really imply that he is a prisoner to forces beyond his control, like Túrin, but that we, the audience, have no real place to stand from which to cast judgement on his actions at all. We are merely to watch and obsorb his actions: he is a ‘grey’ character, and therefore in some sense beyond moral discernibility. But this is exaclty Dostoyevsky’s point, re. Ivan. Such people are in fact monsters, and yet to judge by the response Daemon has received online, these character types are often received as though they embody some sort of ‘post-moral’ Truth:
People like Daemon are, by any moral standard, mostrous. And yet, they display qualities that we might in isolation consider worthy. This, it seems to me, is what Hoel is getting at: there are no ‘blue’ or ‘red’ lightsabers in real life - people don’t go around advertising their evilness like Emperor Palpatine or (supposedly, although I don’t think he belongs in this category as Hoel seems to suggest) Sauron. Instead, they believe themselves to be doing ‘right’ by some ethic. Here, though, Hoel, like a lot of pop-cultural stuff these days, equivocates between morality as ‘the moral sense’ and morality as ethics. That our overdeveloped moral sense should imply that most evildoers are ‘moralists’ in some way should not imply that they are acting out some vision of the moral life that is as compatible with ‘actual’ moral Truth. I think I initially misread Hoel as advocating some kind of moral relativism, and tweeted to that effect, to which Hoel responded:
So, fair’s fair. Still, there is some confusion in Hoel’s piece, it seems to me. By ‘grey’ does he mean that it is desirable to find some sort of median point at which our greater and lesser angels are balanced and therefore contained, or, perhaps, that it is undesirable to look to ‘the Good’ at all, given that it is sometimes difficult to discern? Philosophers like Iris Murdoch might disagree: we readily see and acknowledge the Good in the world, we have only to ‘action’ it in our lives through application of the Virtues. To do otherwise is to hide behind a screen of relativism and pretend that our conflicted natures give justification to otherwise immoral actions (cheating, treating others with disdain,etc. - frequent abuses given often hilarious treatment in Murdoch’s novels).
The point, then, seems to be about the sometimes intractable nature of conflicting goods: as in the example of the Ghibli films. If I may indulge myself and again use Tolkien as an example, we might point to Frodo’s predicament as an exemplum of this in literary form: Frodo must destroy the Ring, and to do so requires sacrifice, maybe even murder. Ought Frodo kill Gollum? To do so would rid him of a fanatical enemy, and yet Frodo’s pity allows that Gollum should live. The one good (the prudential and moral requirement to destroy the Ring) is in potential conflict with another (the seemingly ironclad moral law proscribing murder). In the end, Frodo finds a way through, and the story suggests that such moral ‘conflicts’ are on some level illusory - perhaps this is one reason why Murdoch herself re-read the book and loved it so much. Gollum has “a part to play” in the final drama of the story, and it is only through his evil that the Ring is ultimately destroyed. It is a kind of Leibnizian ‘best of all possible worlds’ scenario - in the end, everything works out for The Good. And yet, something is lost - Gollum’s ‘true’ character,
So, both Frodo and Gollum misunderstand one another, at first, but come to some understanding, at least, before the tragic denouement. Hoel suggests that something similar takes place in the Ghibli universe; but does all this amount to ‘moral greyness’? When people talk about morally grey characters they seem to mean something more like Daemon - a character given over to a debauched sense of self-importance, a singularity of will, something ‘beyond’ the moral altogether. Jaime Lannister has also been called a ‘grey’ character, presumably because he seems to inhabit drives toward both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ actions, but again any sensible court would try him for war crimes, regardless of the complexities of his inner life.
My problem, then, is not that literature depicts complex characters - it has always done so - but that recent media has shown such persons as in some sense beyond moral judgement altogether. This is the world of grimdark. Even Homer asks his readers to both sympathise with and cast judgement on Achilles’ character. Indeed, much of the work of reading literature consists in makind value judgements of one kind or another all the time. In literature like Martin’s we are asked to suspend moral judgement and assume that it is either 1. a hypocritical gesture, 2. naive (see Eddard) or 3. willfuly stupid.
This is certainly one approach (and not, perhaps, an invalid one) but I think Martin’s overall 'moral aesthetic’ has confused the extent to which audiences believe, or are encouraged to believe, that questions of ethics are important in fiction (and maybe real life, too). This isn’t (it seems to me) Martin’s intention, necessarily, but many of his characters seem to be received in this way, as in the example of Daemon or even Jaime. This has further confused ideas about ‘grey’ morality (not a phrase used in metaethical literature, insofar as I can tell), as though there is some amourphous middle ground between ‘simple’ good and ‘simple’ evil (not simple concepts at all) which (for example) other writers like Tolkien have hitherto neglected. The question of Tolkien’s treatment of character awaits another newsletter, but it neither unadornedly simple nor nihlistic. It is, at times, Byronic (Túrin), and there are antiheroes (Fëanor; perhaps Aldarion), and there are ‘sympathetic villains’ (like Gollum), but it does not ask us to sympathise with cruelty.