Can Literature Make Us Better People?

In 2012, the novelist Toni Morrison gave a lecture titled “Goodness: Altruism and the Literary Imagination” at Harvard Divinity School. Prompted, she says, by the response of the Amish community to the 2006 school shooting (in which a young man lined up 10 girls along the blackboard in a small, one-room schoolhouse, and shot them), Morrison set out to understand the nature of goodness, particularly the role goodness plays in literature. For Morrison, the community’s “silence following that slaughter, along with their very deep and sincere concern for the killer’s family, seemed to me at the time characteristic of genuine goodness, and so I became fascinated […] with the term, and its definition.”

What follows in Morrison’s lecture is a familiar discussion of theories of altruism and goodness: goodness as taught and learned; goodness as a form of narcissism and ego-enhancement; goodness as genetics, as instinctual love of one’s group. Her innovation is to refract and reimagine these definitions through the prism of literature and its uses. For Morrison, the great failing of contemporary literature—and this seems especially convincing to me—is the way in which its opposite, evil (in all its legion disguises), is the object of far more sustained attention:

Evil has a blockbuster audience. Goodness lurks backstage. Evil has vivid speech, and goodness bites its tongue […].

Evil grabs the intellectual platform and all of its energy. It demands careful examinations of its consequences, its techniques, its motives, its successes, however short-lived or challenged. Grief, melancholy, missed chances for personal happiness, often seem to be contemporary literature’s concept of evil. It hogs the stage; goodness sits in the audience and watches, assuming it even has a ticket to the show.

I begin with Morrison’s discussion of goodness because her claims describe and clarify a problem I have felt keenly as a reader and critic. Afraid, at times, to balk at a text simply on account of its manifold perversities and essentializing narratives about humankind’s inevitable ugliness (afraid, that is, of being caught doing something like moralizing or finger-wagging),