Every Story is a Teacher
by Joshua Fagan
There is a quote I particularly like from H.W. Garrod, an early twentieth-century literary critic: “What we resent in didactic poetry is not that it teaches, but that it does not teach, its incompetency.”
Garrod perhaps came to this conclusion while studying Keats, whose writings he examined quite closely. Keats, in a letter to a friend, declared that “we hate poetry that has a palpable design on us.” In any case, Garrod’s quote is correct on two counts. One is that poetry, like all art, does have the effect of teaching. It reveals the secret essences of emotions and experiences that the chaos of life tends to obscure. The other is that overtly didactic poetry, which exists to promote a specific lesson or worldview, is almost always a bad teacher. There is something unshakeably childish about it, like the book of Aesop fables given to children to impress on them the necessity of certain basic moral lessons. Even children, however, do not tend to adore stories only designed to teach them morals. There are strong moral messages in everything from Peter Rabbit stories to old Disney movies, but they do not feel preachy to children or jarring to adults because the morals arise organically from the adventures the characters undertake. To use the phrase most associated with the American educational reformer John Dewey, they are “learning by doing.”
The simple messages provided to children can still provide comfort to adults, if they are presented in a charming and imaginative way, but an adult would still find them tedious or at least naïve if a story openly asserted that these lessons are all that is necessary. Yes, it is important to be kind and make friends and protect the natural environment and stand for righteousness against deceit, but the world is not always that simple. What makes certain works feel “adult” has nothing to do with sex or violence, and indeed the over-presence of those things can often make a work seem sneeringly infantile, like the schoolkid who writes dirty graffiti on the underside of desks. It has much more to do with a frank acknowledgement that the world is complicated, that individuals are frail and often fail to embody the ideals they value, and that transcendent clarity arrives rarely, if at all. When Virginia Woolf wrote that George Eliot’s Middlemarch was “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” she was referring to this rejection of simplistic answers and the facile platitudes of childhood.
Didactic art does the exact opposite. It pretends that the world is simpler than it is. “Political” art has a bad reputation not because art that deals directly with political issues is wrong, but because much of it attempts to push a particular perspective on the audience in a way that is rather embarrassing and absolutist, even for people who agree with the perspective asserted. This embarrassment comes firstly from how it reduces art to a blunt, utilitarian tool: people who disagree with the message will resist it, while people who agree will nod approvingly and perhaps yawn a bit. Yet this embarrassment also results from how overly partisan art tends to pretend the world is simpler than it is, dividing the world into good people who follow the beliefs being propagated and bad, selfish people who do not. Anyone who actually lives in the world knows such a division is false.
For the sake of argument, assume that a certain set of beliefs is in fact, perfectly right and moral, and there is no respect in which they are less than ideal. Even in that scenario, no beliefs can ameliorate the suffering and bewilderment that is innate to life. Even if one believes that, say, environmentalism is wholly correct, one has to accept that a lot of environmentalists are still in fact insular and petty and confused; they do not have these faults to a greater degree than the average person, but they also do not have them to a lesser degree. Having the “correct” beliefs is not a cure for the anxiety of being a human being in an innately fluctuating, uncertain world. Tolstoy writes brilliantly about this regarding Christianity at the conclusion of Anna Karenina. Levin, Tolstoy’s analogue in the book, embraces his faith again in a deeply moving last reflection, wherein he thinks: “This new feeling has not changed me, has not made me happy and enlightened all of a sudden, as I had dreamed,” but it has “taken firm root in my soul.” Even if Tolstoy and his proxy Levin believe that Christianity is correct and true, they understand that Christianity is not going to solve the ordinary difficulties of navigating life. Tolstoy advocates for a particular belief system, but he does not dogmatically demand that the audience agree with him, nor does he present a false version of reality in which having those beliefs automatically makes people righteous and all-knowing.
The same is true of any belief system, not simply a religious one. Works like Pocahontas or James Cameron’s Avatar are not fully satisfying because their lessons are rather shallow and reductive. They have nothing to teach except partisan platitudes, even if they are platitudes most people would agree with. Conversely, a work like Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke is much stronger because it does not present a simplified or cheapened vision of the world: it does not pretend that conservation is always the right impulse, or that the movement toward industrial society only exists because of callous selfishness. The difference is not that Mononoke is more or less environmentalist than those other works, or that it is trying harder or less hard to teach. The difference is that Miyazaki’s film deals with life as it actually exists, not a flattened caricature of it, and so its depictions of desperate people scrambling for control and coherence amidst a crumbling world resonate. Great art teaches, but not in the way of cheap platitudes and partisan propaganda. It does not exist to regurgitate pre-existing morals but to demonstrate the ways in which experience is more complicated than those morals convey.
Storytelling is not religion or ethics or even philosophy. There is nothing wrong with any of those things, and storytelling can overlap with them, but it teaches in a different way. It provides an amplified form of experience that demonstrates the emotions and ideas and psychological conflicts of people: such is as important a part of education as any moral dictates. If the moral teacher tells people not to steal or cheat, to be humble and selfless, art at its best demonstrates why people turn away from these dictates: whether through apathy or bitterness or often simply confusion.
On a personal note, very few of the actual moral lessons my mother gave me stuck: they were simple, repetitive lessons about staying warm and being honest. What I always think about instead are the stories she told me: about her relationship with her parents, about difficult experiences in her childhood, about her travels to different countries. None of these stories were told with a moral intent, and that is why they taught me so much. Many people, I think, have similar experiences: there is a reason one model of the bad parent is the one who says “do as I say, not as I do.” Individuals tend to learn most vividly through action and through experience, and art is a crisper and sharper version of experience.
Dewey discussed better than anyone the relation between art and morality and criticized how, when the two conflict, society tends to blame art. In reality, Dewey argues, great art never fully conforms to the values of its age, as a society’s expression of morals inevitably bears the stamp of its own caprices and limitations, while art deals more directly and completely with the fullness of experience. As he writes, art “has been the means of keeping alive the sense of purposes that outrun evidence and of meanings that transcend indurated habit.” Art for Dewey should not blindly follow the morals of the world, but comprehensively understanding how to behave in the world requires an understanding of art. When art succeeds, it casts light on the world as it is, in all its shades and complexities, socially and psychologically. Understanding these intricacies of how people live and think, instead of relying on platitudes, is necessary for moral action in the world.
Joshua Fagan is an award-winning writer and critic currently residing in Seattle. His creative work has previously been published in venues including Daily Science Fiction, The Fantastic Other, and Star*Line. He is the author of The Philosophy of Avatar, an extended study of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the context of the Western philosophical tradition. As an academic, his work mainly focuses on the intersection of British and American literature and science in the aftermath of Darwin, and he has published a variety of articles on writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as William Morris, H.G. Wells, and Robert Frost. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary speculative-fiction publication Orion’s Belt.