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13Karen Hewitt Oxford University
Fiction and Morality: the Case of Master Georgie
When we interpret novels, we rely on different kinds of help. We are guided by the choice of words and organization of scenes, but when in difficulties, we find ourselves trying to make sense of what we are reading by measuring what happens in the novel against our own personal beliefs and values. Yet we read fiction in order to encounter a world which is different from ours.
The dilemma can be expressed thus: ‘I want to extend my imagination by reading about other lives and unfamiliar attitudes; I want to feel sympathy for people who are strange to me. On the other hand, I disapprove of the beliefs and actions of these fictional characters who think and behave so differently from me. So how can I read any fiction except fiction which echoes my point of view?’
Readers of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment have to confront this dilemma from the first pages. Dostoevsky creates the anguish and tension of Raskolnikov so powerfully that readers live inside his mind, and suffer with him. But how can they feel any sympathy for a murderer who kills two defenceless female victims with an axe? Are we supposed to condone murder?
At a much simpler and essentially comic level, readers sometimes get absolutely exasperated with Will Freeman in About A Boy because he does not work hard and because he chases women who already have difficult lives. And yet we are shown - we are made to feel - that at bottom he is a likeable youngish man.
These objections to Crime and Punishment and to About A Boy are moral objections: ‘Murder is wrong’; ‘idleness is wrong’; ‘sexual indulgence without commitment is wrong’. The simple solution is to tell oneself, ‘These characters are immoral; but the plot of the novel will show us that immorality and wrong-doing are punished, and that thereby the characters will learn to live a better life!’ Anxious readers quite often try to squeeze the actual story into a shape which will fit their own moral convictions.
Unfortunately, in doing so they distort or even destroy the novel. Will Freeman at the end of About a Boy is in love and feeling very vulnerable, but work is not even considered! Some readers of Crime and Punishment point out that Raskolnikov feels new love for Sonya on the last page of the novel; but he is still insisting that he does not feel remorse for the murder of the old woman. So are all those preceding 600 pages a waste of our time?
I suggest that we can solve the dilemma by asking ‘What is the novelist trying to do?’ rather than ‘Have the characters failed to live up to my high standards?’ For example, Hornby in About a Boy is telling a story about our need for friends and how finding them is confusing and makes us vulnerable to loss. So ‘hard work’ is not relevant in this novel; ‘depression’ is a terrible illness that cuts you off from friendship; ‘loneliness’ cannot always be alleviated by sexual love, and Marcus will lose his special charm as he learns to be happy.
In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky is writing about a young man who struggles with questions of freedom, social transgression and personal integrity. He murders and then has to confront the challenges of religious belief, helpless suffering, and social alienation. The murder, however shocking in itself, does not resolve these questions as he had hoped. So discussing whether murder is right or wrong is irrelevant. We know the answer, but we endure torment with Raskolnikov, not with his victim.
Beryl Bainbridge’s strange and powerful novel, Master Georgie, bewilders most readers at first. ‘Who are these people? What is the connection between one scene and the next? How are we supposed to react to each odd action?’ In the previous two essays in this section, the authors have selected ‘Responsibility’, ‘Love’ and ‘War’ as themes which should be explored in the novel. These are two vigorous and lively essays but, as a reader I ask myself, ‘Is the author actually examining our notions of Responsibility or Love or War? Or is she doing something quite different?
Many English novelists construct plots in which responsible choice and the burdens of responsibility are explored. However, if we ask ‘Is Master Georgie about responsibility?’ the answer comes clearly out of the first essay. ‘In fact every serious decision is taken
sporadically, in a most controversial, irresponsible manner.’ Is Bainbridge criticizing her characters for their irresponsible actions? No: as the authors of this article point out, the three narrators have their own preoccupations, biases and delusions; there is no ruling authorial voice.
The authors write very perceptively about the novel, so why did they focus on ‘responsibility’ in the first place? They indicate that they were shocked by the notion of anyone taking a family with women and children off to watch a war. No sensible person could do that! These people are crazy and irresponsible! George took charge over the death of his father, so he must be responsible for this plan too! Thus our own moral convictions are imposed on fiction.
But if we look at the way Bainbridge juxtaposes one scene with the next, and one set of reflections with the next, a different meaning comes out of the novel. Here are one or two examples. In ‘Tug-of-War beside the Sweet Waters of Europe’ we learn that many fashionable families had come out to view the war. George’s family are enjoying the mild discomfort, and choose to have their photograph taken as soldiers play games in the background. So the title of the Plate is comic in this chapter, bitterly ironic for the future. Bainbridge is showing, succinctly, how intelligent people drift into unspeakable horrors because they are preoccupied with their own concerns and because they cannot (as we can) see the future.
Another intriguing juxtaposition is in the scene where George and Rimmer operate on the cataracts which are blinding an ape. Pompey Jones feels sympathy for the terrified animal - yet it is the two doctors who restore its sight. ‘Good!’ we might say. ‘How noble!’ Pompey corrects any sentimental enthusiasm on our part.
I didn’t doubt their cleverness but what use was a
world only glimpsed from a cage?
If someone asks this important question early in the novel, we can be sure that Bainbridge will want us to bear it in mind when we look at the horrors in the later chapters. (We know already that the falsity of photographs - for good and bad purposes - is a constant
theme; medical operations and their purpose are another.) George who was excited about the ape exhausts himself trying to save soldiers from cholera, wounds and infection with inadequate equipment. Every glimpse shows them all living in the prison of war, bewildered and trapped like the ape.
The more we look at such details, the more we can say with some certainty that this novel is not about responsibility, but about the fact that all acts are contradictory in both motives and consequences. Generosity is also selfishness, liberation is also imprisonment, Myrtle standing by her dead benefactor is an emblem of kindness to Mrs Hardy, emotional self-preservation to George, unblinking devotion to George for herself and deceit to all of them.
In discussing ‘Love’ the authors of the second article write: ‘One of the points of the novel is to show that human libido is frequently realized in a quaint way - in this we see a clear link between Bainbridge’s concept of love and Sigmund Freud’s theory.’ I think this means that many kinds of sexual activity are mentioned in the novel (which is true) and that these activities all come under the heading of ‘Love’. Therefore, the authors conclude, Bainbridge has an immoral and perverted idea of love (sharing her errors with Freud).
But Bainbridge as a novelist doesn’t have a ‘concept of love’. The three narrators have their own views of the world. Through them we read about Myrtle’s obsessive devotion to George, Pompey’s helpless longing for Myrtle while he resigns himself to accepting George’s advances and Potter’s sexually satisfying but intellectually exasperating relationship with his wife (which is described in comic scenes where Beatrice often comes off best). There is no suggestion that Bainbridge has given any thought to Freud - why should she if she is trying to enter the world of characters living in the 1850s? What she seems to be doing is throwing the reader off-balance by introducing one surprising scene after another and thereby shifting our point of view.
For example, the authors of the article tell us that there is nothing sublime or romantic in the characters’ feelings for each other. On the one hand we could ask: ‘Why should their feelings be romantic or sublime?’ On the other hand, we could reflect on the photographic
copper plate of Myrtle which Pompey keeps with him for years. Myrtle mourns, ‘I wished it was Georgie who held my picture against his heart, however darkened by time.’ These are expressions of romantic yearning by two people who have to live with the fact that they love someone who does not love them. Is that so unusual? Is it perverted? It seems that the authors have imposed their own moral assumptions on a novel which is open-minded and sympathetic to its characters.
Bainbridge is certainly writing about war. The authors of the second article tell us that ‘Bainbridge’s characters are not heroes, and there is no one to sympathize with’. As a reader I am horrified at the random and precise scenes of sickness, violence, dirt, chaotic cruelty -but I also notice that these scenes are very carefully shown through the eyes not of ‘heroic’ stereotypes, but of ordinary confused people trying to make the best of an appalling mess which they never expected. Surely Bainbridge’s point is that imposed moral ideas about heroism do not apply in war; the heroic photographs tell lies. (This was the first war which was photographed. Things have not got better.) As for sympathy, the last two pages show all four characters in moments of loving recognition. Pompey’s last sentence is as poignant and beautiful as any last sentence I know.
