The Moral of the Story: Literature as a Divine Force

One of the problems repeatedly explored in this course is that of how literature can be used as a guiding force in one's life. An interesting way of looking at this is by considering a literary paradigm established by Augustine's Confessions: his famous sortes Biblicae. This is occurs during his climactic conversion scene when he pulls out his Bible and opens it to a random page. He reads the first sentence that he opens to and his life is instantly transformed. He writes that "with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart" (153). This represents an entirely different conception of "The Moral of the Story" - while Augustine does use literature as a guiding force in his life, he relies on it as almost a divine force shaping his life. A similar event takes place in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, where, when looking for a reason for the shift in society after the war, she relates: "A book lay beside me and, opening it, I turned casually enough to Tennyson" (14). Once more, Woolf is using literature as a sort of divine force to guide her. Thus, in this context, literature is a guiding force for life not because of the message contained in the work, but by some inherent power of literature.

This notion, however, is problematized when one considers Petrarch's The Ascent of Mt. Ventoux. This work specifically subverts the Augstinian paradigm, as Petrarch opens his copy of Augustine's Confessions and finds a passage which he interprets to be exhorting him to adopt a humanistic approach to life. This becomes extremely problematic because both Augustine and Petrarch relied on a conception of literature as a divine force, but received precisely opposite messages. The problem of conflicting messages isn't restricted solely to these uses of literature, however; the problem of conflicting messages is extremely difficult to surmount. How can we use literature to guide our actions when so many different works present so many different conceptions of how we should act? Literature concerns itself with seeking truth, but whose truth do we accept? The only way of discerning which is the right truth seems to be through personal critical reflection. But this seems to contradict the idea of relying on literature for truth if we only end up accepting truths that we already hold to be true. What, then, is the point of moralizing literature?

One solution to this problem comes ot us from the philosophy of hermeneutics. This approach to reading texts focuses on the interplay between the individual and the text. The process of seeking truth is "assimilating what is said to the point that it becomes one's own". When a reader approaches a text, they bring their own perspective to the text and puts it at risk in order to fully understand the text. If the reader truly understands the text, they will shift their perspective to be in line with that of the text. This dialectical method of obtaining truth helps avoid the aforementioned problems because the final product is "reducible to neither the interpreter, nor the text, nor their conjunction". Thus, the moral imperatives we find in literature are never applied fully to our lives; they are filtered through our own pre-existing understanding and synthesized into something entirely new.