Moral Ambiguity

Kafka, Woolf and Joyce and the question, Why make art?

Image by enzo-tomassi on Unsplash

Dear friends,

As we begin our collaboration with others here, I examine this question as an introduction to my thinking (This essay, considerably changed here, appeared early and briefly on my personal Substack).

A shoutout to John Pistelli who writes

Grand Hotel Abyss

and will post soon as our guest under his byline.

We’re thrilled to collaborate with those doing such fine work on the arts—in the broadest sense.

Why make art? and a glimpse into Kafka, Woolf and Joyce

Why attempt to create art, to make something “other” when faced with the dilemmas of existence, with, as I’ve said in one of my short stories, “all the ways that life betrays the living”?

Here are some thoughts on the struggle for meaning, for a narrative in our lives, and the question, Why make art? I ask this from the perspective of my own search for a moral framework—for a narrative of hope.

Each of the novels I’ve re-read for this essay explores the struggle for meaning in the midst of moral ambiguity and a longing for a return of some sort—what I name here, as hope—while I recognize the path may never be clear.

In my own writing, I’ve turned again and again to Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche questioned the foundation of moral thought that preceded him. Consider his most quoted assertion, given to the madman: “‘Whither is God,’ he cried. ‘I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. … God is dead.’” ¹

Nietzsche again: “‘[W]ill to truth’ does not mean ‘I will not let myself be deceived’ but—there is no choice—‘I will not deceive, not even myself’: and with this we are on the ground of morality.”²

Nietzsche’s questioning resonates for me because his work asks the primal question, Is a coherent narrative for our lives possible? And if we have no clear answer, what then?

The so-called ‘royalty’ of modernism—Kafka (who arguably was prescient), Woolf, Joyce—all reflect on the philosophical struggle that comprises the ambiguity, the loss of coherence that plagues us.

To clarify the ground I’m on, I turn to formidable critics who argue the modernist writer moved inward and away from society.

The critic Peter Faulkner says the “modernist writers fail to see man socially and historically, and so make his alienation, which is a social process, into an absolute.”³

The critic Randall Stevenson says, “Once narrative places ‘everything in the mind’, a sense of significance can be restored to individuals: it becomes once again possible to consider ‘what a terrific thing a person is’—regardless of how diminished … their actual lives in the modern industrial world may be.”⁴

The critic Stephen Spender starkly expressed the move away from society: “In the works of the most characteristically modern writers contemporary civilization was represented as chaotic, decadent, on the point of collapse, anarchic, absurd, the desert of non-values.”⁵

I don’t agree with Spender’s view as it relates to Woolf and Joyce, but I think he’s right about where Kafka leads us. And Kafka, most certainly of the three novelists, was an adherent of Nietzsche.

The critic Gerhard Kurz notes the importance of Nietzsche to Kafka: “The study of Kafka’s relation to Nietzsche was long obstructed by Max Brod’s [friend, biographer and literary executor of Kafka’s body of work] denial of such an influence. The relation first came to light in 1954, when Erich Heller named Nietzsche as Kafka’s ‘intellectual predecessor.’ [Kurz explains that Kafka met Nietzsche through his friend Oskar Pollak.].” Kurz asserts, “Kafka remained faithful to Nietzsche’s thinking until death.”⁶

Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathrustra is referenced three times by Joyce in Ulysses. As an aside, I note that Walter Kaufmann, in his introduction to his translation of Nietzsche, links the two for their affinity for play on words.⁷

I couldn’t find in my research an indication that Virginia Woolf had studied Nietzsche, but considering how well-read she was, I find it hard to believe she was unaware of his work.

The critic Ihab Hassan characterizes the nihilism in Nietzsche’s work that illuminates the dilemma I explore. Hassan notes: “Existentialism, we know, plumbs the solitude of man. It follows through the nihilism of Nietzsche, denies all essences, all a priories in the human condition ... .”⁸

Woolf, Joyce—and Kafka address how to decide what one ought to do when one is alone, separated from society and believes society may not offer a set of shared values that work.

Virginia Woolf in her essay “On Being Ill,” said, “Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. … Here we go alone, and like it better so.”⁹

In To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay looks out on the constant stroke of the lighthouse and says inside her head, “It will end, it will end.” She addresses the question of existence and asks herself, “What did it all mean? To this day she had no notion.” The novel’s middle section, “Time Passes,” separates the action of the novel and all the characters from society. The inexorable power of time and nature rule in “this silence, this indifference, this integrity, the thud of something falling”, and, in this context, three deaths occur in brackets: Mrs. Ramsay, rather suddenly; her daughter Prue Ramsay in childbirth; her son Andrew in the war.

In Ulysses, both Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus are exiles. Bloom is an outsider, a Jew, cuckolded by his wife, shunned by others, the object of derision and anti-Semitism. Stephen, recently returned from Paris, is the loner, struggling with refusal to take the sacraments, with his art, with his dissatisfaction with the politics of Ireland. It’s Stephen who says, “That is God. ... A shout in the street.”

K. in The Trial is the most cut off from the world. The novel opens with K. excluded from society by the accusation of guilt. We find no actual events in the novel. The Trial takes place devoid of time or place.

The movement to the self was perhaps inevitable and technique followed.

The interior monologue, what came to be known in Joyce’s work as stream of consciousness, arose from a philosophic need to move narrative inside the domain of the self.

Ulysses intimidates readers because of its lack of clear narrative thread—though I argue we always know what day it is and what time it is. Those who dismiss the novel argue fairly, I think, that Joyce purposely impedes a clear linear narrative thread. I argue that Joyce is questioning how one finds the narrative of one’s own life.

This question is bleakly explored in Kafka’s The Trial, where the move to the interior in terms of technique is also evident. Kafka does not allow the reader to know for sure we’re inside someone’s consciousness—as both Woolf and Joyce do. K.’s seemingly impossible world could be the real world.

The critic Hassan comments, “If his [Kafka’s] art stands for anything, it may be this: the dark and clarity of consciousness, the impossible quest for self-apprehension. It is a quest that men neither abandon nor fully attain. Increasing their consciousness of existence, they manage only to intensify the predicament of consciousness.”¹⁰

Kafka, Woolf and Joyce in their fiction articulated the moral ambiguity that the “self,” Nietzsche’s subjective will “undeceived,” must face, and each then asserts by implication what Nietzsche did directly with these words: “… and with this we are on the ground of morality.”¹¹

Woolf expresses faith in art as one of the best paths. She implies morality could arise out of the artistic endeavor. In her essay “Art and Life,” she said, “If aesthetic beauty is to affect other qualities in the human being, the emotion which we get from beauty must in some way induce us (for example) to do right.”¹²

To the Lighthouse ends with Lily’s completion of her painting and the words “I have had my vision,” as she lays down her brush. Woolf may very well believe art is not the only way to understand “subject, object and the nature of reality”, but it is one path clearly offered in the novel. It’s a credit to the novel’s complexity that art is not presented as an answer.

My point here is that Woolf continues the search, that she longs for a return—the indefinable lighthouse, perhaps?

Joyce by choosing the Homeric myth of Ulysses, a story of returning, places Bloomsday in that context from the start. He concludes less forcefully in favor of art. Stephen Dedalus is more aesthete than humanist or spiritualist. It’s Bloom who’s defined as having “the touch of the artist,” Joyce’s recognition of the artist’s sensitive nature, the  inability to avoid seeing, to avoid hearing, to avoid the bombardment that is life in a city, in this case Dublin, Ireland. And I add here, that it is Bloom who is most humane, who searches and finds and connects with Stephen.

Joyce in Ulysses moved beyond his position in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where he describes the artist who “like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

Perhaps author and critic Anthony Burgess said it best:

“The greatest of man’s achievements, after language, is the community, and Joyce’s Dublin stands for every city-state that ever was. … To Joyce, a community is men meeting, drinking, arguing, recognizing each other in the streets, and one of his peculiar miracles is to make a real historical Dublin (the Dublin that flourished in summer 1904) an eternal pattern of human society. All men gain strength and even a certain nobility from belonging to it, and Bloom and Stephen are equally citizens of a blessed imperfect city, despite their intermittent sense of inner exile.”¹³

The key words here for me are “community” and “inner exile,” for these are two of the opposing forces that Joyce confronts: In other words, how to find a narrative for a life when one is exiled from his community.

Kafka, in contrast, creates no such community. K. is the ultimate outsider, and he remains so to the very last line of the novel before he is about to die, “‘Like a dog!’ he said; it was as if the shame of it must outlive him.”

But if there is shame, then there must also be guilt. And though we as readers may be unable to identify the nature of K.’s guilt, or, for that matter, our own, a belief in guilt is also, by its very inference, an assertion that a search is in place and that a longing for return to something, to some form of meaning lies at the base of this novel. I offer for consideration Kafka’s short parable “Couriers”:

They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other—since there are no kings—messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.

What is one to make of the “oath of service”? Kafka provides no answer, but don’t we hear echoes of Nietzsche’s words here: “… the meaning of all this, should we dare to comprehend it, is a will to nothingness, a will running counter to life … . ”?¹⁴

Could not Kafka’s oath of service be a service to life? In K.’s shame and in the couriers’ oath to service, I find a longing to return to meaning in the face of nihilism.

Kafka put pen to paper. He wrote.

Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka wrote works that articulate moral ambiguity, but there’s also no question they affirmed—indeed with the force of art—that the struggle to find meaning continued.

That struggle continues when we choose to read them, where we may be transformed by that experience.

I’m saying that the search for meaning makes a difference in the world. It defies nihilism by the very act of making something, something “other,” that is of the self but not the self.

A writer’s work, the novel in a trunk in the attic, the poems unpublished and in a drawer, the painting stored against the wall may very well be a call with no hope of an answer. But each is still a call.

We know that art gets made even under the most dire of circumstances, that it gets made, most often, with no hope even of compensation, let alone fame.

If the human spirit can’t help but make art, then hope, not despair, resides in that effort.

Mary Tabor writes Only connect ...

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, The Gay Science, “The Madman,” ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Penguin Group, paperbound edition, 1976).

2. Ibid.

3. Peter Faulkner, Modernism (London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1977).

4. Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction: An Introduction (Hertfordshire, England: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992).

5. Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (California: University of California Press, 1963).

6. Gerhard Kurz, “Nietzsche, Freud, and Kafka,” trans. Neil Donahue, Reading Kafka, ed. Mark Anderson (New York: Schocken Books, Inc., 1989).

7. Kaufmann, Nietzsche.

8. Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1982).

9. Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, Volume IV (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1967).

10. Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus.

11. Kaufmann, Nietzsche, The Gay Science.

12. Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. I, 1904-1912, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: The Hogarth Press, 1986).

13. Anthony Burgess, Re Joyce (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966).

14. Kaufman, Toward a Genealogy of Morals.