Moral Codes in Literature

In committed literature of the first half of the twentieth century the individual is guided by a moral code that is made rather than one that is received. Characters in novels by AndrT Malraux and in plays by Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre are inevitably placed in extreme situations where recourse to received notions of morality is at least impractical, and often impossible. It is impossible, of course, if the characters are to achieve freedom, as the men and women in these works attempt to do. For some characters the circumstances produce a retreat to the received codes, but these instances function as demonstrations of the futility of received notions of morality. The Grand Duchess in Camus' The Just Assassins (1949), for example, is overwhelmed by the world and retreats into faith. But her faith is shown to be a form of complicity with the order the terrorists have identified as the source of the oppression against which they have staked their lives. In his confrontation with the Duchess, Kaliayev recognizes this complicity for what it is and is strengthened in his commitment to the code he had worked out in the course of the play. But this code, like those of the other characters in the literature, is not presented as an absolute set of principles. Rather the moral responses are a kind of ethical pragmatism--but one that makes great demands of them. Just as the terrorists Dora Dulebov and Ivan Kaliayev, for example, know that death is the only possible end fo

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e historical moment in which the work of art is set. The exigencies of the moment may, therefore, place extreme demands upon the individual--as is the case in all the works considered here. Sartre has shown how the individual who tries to fulfill a duty to those close to her/him will eventually be implicated in the evils of the world if s/he does nothing to change that world. The received moral codes do not work, therefore, because they are imbricated with the order that oppresses the rest of the individual's neighbors. The individual must, then, work out some manner of defying that evil order to ensure that the 'limited' goods that s/he practices remain goods. In the case of those who resist in extreme cases, however, the pointlessness of the received moral code is even more apparent. Such individuals may even be called upon to act in a manner that goes beyond what can ordinarily be called a moral code. There is no room for example, for the murders of the terrorists in The Just Assassins or Orestes' matricide in The Flies, in any version of a moral code worthy of the name. Neither Sartre nor Camus, however, argues that their characters can act in some manner other than what they choose if they choose to be free. But ther

Category: Literature - M