"When I first read your story "Diana" and its critique, my initial response to the critic was dismissive. His analysis seemed too heavily serious for such a light story: as though someone objected to "Peter Rabbit" on the grounds that it condoned exploitation of landless agricultural proletarians like Farmer MacGregor. Anyway, it seemed overly literal: literature needs an allusive, emotional, and ultimately metaphoric reading if fiction is to have import in the real world. I remembered a poem of Robinson, one stanza of which appeared to me to clarify your point without possibility of moral objection:
Meanwhile we do no harm; for they
That with a god have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say,
Take what the god has given;
Though like waves breaking it may be,
Or like a changed, familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea
Where down the blind are driven.
"Unfortunately, I was not able to cease thinking about why the critique seemed to me so disturbingly off-base. It was seriously intentioned and rational in its methods without obvious flaws of logic or sense. It began to haunt my thoughts. This is, therefore, more an exorcism than an essay.
"Obviously, the reasons why I did and do not find the critique persuasive may relate to premises. If there is disagreement about premises, any dialogue will be futile. But I did not see obvious disagreements over premises between me and your critic, perhaps because the critique is not very explicit about his or her premises. My exorcism thus consists of thinking through some premises, some plausible and others less so.
"One possible premise that would completely exculpate your story from the specific criticism given is that literature is to be judged solely according to artistic criteria, not moral ones. This is certainly not the premise of the critic nor of any of the responses that you gave or quoted, nor is it mine. That literature like any other human activity may have consequences that demand a moral judgment seems to be a shared premise that does not need to be argued here. But a premise about the kind of moral calculus that is appropriate may be the wedge that separates me from your critic. My premise is that the primary purpose of literature, like all the arts, is to entertain, to give people comfort, joy, rest, and excitement. Seco ndarily, the purpose of literature, unlike any other of the arts, is to provide the only ethical laboratory for experimenting with the entire domain of human potential. Thus, my premise implies a moral calculus such that, if a piece of literature achieves at least its primary purpose, let alone both its primary and secondary purposes, it already has enough positive moral value that it warrants an adverse moral judgment only in essentially unambiguous cases where the piece is likely to do harm. Here may be the source of my antipathy to the critique because I not only can, I spontaneously did, read the story in a sense that seems highly unlikely to have any harmful consequences to real people.
"A different premise on which we might disagree is the morality of suicide (assuming for the moment that that is even relevant to the story). If suicide is an absolute moral wrong, then that might be a basis for a moral criticism of your story. Based, however, on what the critic said about the incident of the German soldier, we appear again to share a common premise: suicide is not an absolute wrong; it is a wrong merely if committed for reasons that do not demand such an extreme remedy.
"A third premise on which we might disagree relates to free will. This may well be a side issue, but, if the critic's argument against your tale is based solely on the story's purported denial of the existence of free will, he will not persuade me until he persuades me to abandon determinism, an extremely unlikely event. Of course, there is a more involved argument about free will, starting from this position: whether or not free will exists, acting as though it does is a fundamental part of the social contract. That I could agree with. The critic, however, to convince me that your story were pernicious, would have to assert more; namely, that it is also part of the social contract to do nothing that would ever require acknowledgment of the mythic nature of free will. That is not in my copy of the social contract, which is a contract of informed consent and full disclosure: I need only abide by, without ever having to attest to, the myth of free will.
"The following might be a defence for your fable. First, what is divinely ordained is moral by definition. Second, your protagonist violated those divine ordinances and paid the divinely ordained, and therefore morally proper, forfeit. "Ours not to question why:" verily, the judgments of the gods are righteous, and there is "nothing promised that is not performed." This defence seemingly implies that every tale is to be judged by the morality inherent in the imaginary world portrayed. I am extremely dubious about such a premise: for example, a movie in which Jews are less than human and so deserve extermination as vermin could not, in my view, be accepted as morally good or even neutral just because the movie gave many bigots pleasure or was technically skilled. Nevertheless, many of the comments seem to have implicitly adopted a premise that the morality of a story is to be assessed solely in light of the story's own moral universe. Such a premise, however, is obviously unimpeachable if the story's imagined universe is meant to represent the real universe, and, as an agnostic, I have to admit the possibility that the religion of classical Greece and Rome is absolutely true. In that case, when a mortal espies, intentionally or not, Diana and her nymphs, that is a violation of taboo, of universal law, for which the inevitable punishment is death; there is no more moral issue involved than if a person fell off a cliff and some crank asked us to decry the immorality of gravity: "So each new victim treads unfalteringly/ The never altered circuit of his fate." Moreover, "though all the saints revile her," still the White Godess with "rowan berry lips" does give us Her precious gift: when with her right hand "she crooks a finger, smiling,/ How may the King hold back?/ Royally then he barters life for love." Nor is this barter a bad trade since we are mortal anyway, and it is just those reviling saints who would deny us what is good in the only life that we shall ever have. Under such a reading, "Diana" is a perfectly moral story, and my selection from Robinson was, just like the above lootings from Graves, a shorthand way of articulating such a reading. Unhappily, that rationale is persuasive only emotionally even for me, though I think the result correct, because if taken as a logical argument, it is so obviously incomplete.
"Indeed, as an agnostic, I must also consider the case from a different angle; namely, that the gods of Olympus are myth. From this angle, it seems somewhat unlikely that most hikers in the woods of New England suffer grievous harm there from encountering beauty bare surrounded by her nymphs, or that many readers are going to interpret the story in any very literal sense: the story is fantasy. The more obviously a story is depicting an imaginary reality, the more it is reasonable to interpret it primarily, or even exclusively, in a metaphoric or figurative sense (again, a premise). I can easily read your story as metaphor for man alienated from nature by a civilization dominated by the machine (e.g., the computer), the city (e.g., New Haven, a truly unlovely spot), and reductionism (e.g., the psychology of Yale's Skinner who tormented rats in boxes) and liberated by erotic experience intense enough to induce him to abandon a forseeably unsatisfactory life for a new one that is fundamentally unpredictable and dangerous, but also human and satisfying. One life ends, metaphorically, as another begins, but that is both death and birth, and the death of the old is accepted willingly because the new life is the better one.
"I am not trying to argue that that is the only way to read the story, but fantasy invites an open reading: it is not inconsistent with Greek myth for a mortal encountering the divine to be translated to a different plane of existence. Not only do I think this is a reasonable way to read the story, I also believe that it is more consistent with the story's tone, which seems life affirming rather than life negating. Given my first premise--- that literature is to be judged immoral only in unambiguous case --- and given the possibility of at least two readings totally at variance with the one that raises moral issues in your critic's mind, I find his position perplexing at best.
"This argument depends critically on the nature of the tale: it applies to "Diana" because clearly that story is not directly of the quotidian world; it would hardly be valid if applied to the morally more questionable "Chantelle," a dispassionately told tale of violence, quasi-rape, and psychological manipulation that undercuts any sensible notion of consensual sex and is firmly set in what appears to be the actual world in which we live. Your critic picked the wrong story.
"Anyway, my haunting has been exorcised. As you can see, I react very differently to different stories that you have written. I liked, and approve of , "Diana."
G.
As G. called this an exorcism rather than an essay, I have decided not to respond to it point-by-point. Interesting, though. So much commentary from one little story...and even I don't know what was really in my head when I wrote it. Certainly very little of the above was consciously in mind. Unconsciously...who knows? - Mary Anne