December 13, 2024

[Note: This newsletter contains a discussion of incest and sexual abuse].

In 1978, John Gardner published On Moral Fiction, in which he claimed that fiction is more than just entertainment. It is in fact a moral instrument, analyzing good and evil in actual human situations rather than arguing abstractly as philosophy does, clarifying, judging, and thereby acting not just as a means of insight but as a moral force. It is hardly a new claim. Reviewers noted that Gardner was influenced by Tolstoy’s What Is Art? (1898), but the genre of the novel, which began with a bad reputation as, at best, a waste of time, and, at worst, a bad influence on proper young ladies, has always been justified by its practitioners as having a serious purpose in providing social and psychological criticism. In English criticism, the famous statement of this position was F.R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition (1948), which caused a minor furor by excluding Dickens for being a mere entertainer.

The novel inherited this moral purpose from the neo-Classical criticism of drama, which was supposed to, in Aristotle’s words, produce an effect of catharsis on its audience in the contemplation of tragic events; in Hamlet’s words, to hold the mirror up to nature; in Matthew Arnold’s words to provide (like literature in general) a “criticism of life.” Despite this lineage, Gardner’s argument was regarded by some reviewers as quaint and irrelevant. Postmodernism was at the height of its popularity, and it was fashionable to say that no text reflects reality or truth. Signifiers do not point to some external experience, only to other signifiers, and the purpose of narrative can only be the jouissance, as Roland Barthes put it, of the play of signifiers, creating verbal patterns for their own sake. This is what Gardner condemned as “jazzing around,” rather pointedly accusing some big-name writers of wasting their talents in a kind of elite, self-conscious game-playing.

The moral tradition in literature rests upon the founation of a society’s mythology, which embodies a sense of order codified ideologically as “law.” Discussions of the evolution of law in the Old Testament slow a development from judging based on external actions towards judging based on the interior state of the actors. The prophets relentlessly promulgated the idea that God judges based not on the external act but what is in someone’s heart. In the good old days, you could be stoned for working on the Sabbath, with no excuses or regard for extenuating circumstances. When the Pharisees asked Jesus, however, whether it is lawful to work on the Sabbath, he said, which of you, whose ox, on which you depend for the surival of your family, has fallen into a hole, would not retrieve that ox even if it were the Sabbath? The kind of legalism that defines evil as, essentially, the violating of a taboo has given religion a bad reputation in many quarters. When I was growing up Catholic, if you missed Mass willfully on Sunday and were hit by a truck before you got to confession, you were going to hell. From the Middle Ages to modern times, no person unlucky enough not to have been baptized could go to heaven. It was, incidentally, no different in the Classical tradition. In Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Orestes is caught in a legalistic double bind. He has a duty to avenge his father Agamemnon, but that means killing his own mother. Hence he is guilty of matricide and pursued by the Furies, who care only for the letter of the law and not its spirit.

The vision of moral judgment in Dante’s Divine Comedy is constrained by this kind of legalism. Much as it pains him, Dante has to accept that his beloved Virgil, a truly good man, will have to return to Limbo because he had the bad judgment to die in 19 BCE before Christian baptism existed. It is in fact the moments of collision between legalism and a deeper sense of right and wrong that generate some of the profounder moments of moral searching in Dante, including his “pity,” as the text calls it, of Paolo and Francesca, doomed for their illicit romantic love, and his poignant love of his teacher, Brunetto Latini, condemned to hell for his homosexuality. The rest of the Infero, however, for the most part reverts to traditional judgment based on acts rather than states of mind. The intricate system of categories of sin at times seems rather simplistic, even if the reader doesn’t mind because what really drives Dante is not a searching analysis of conscience but a burning rage for justice, and we share his satisfaction at seeing all the bad guys who got away with it in life finally getting theirs for all eternity. For the most part, their sins are straightforward and not arguable, nor are they characters on whom we’d waste our sympathy. We are told we should not feel this way—I devoted an early newsletter to the complexities of revenge and the demand for forgiveness. But the fact that people cheered when someone just assassinated the CEO of a healthcare agency notorious for denying care to people in order to maximize profits shows that there is a demand for justice that takes precedence over abstract principle.

The more we judge according to what is in people’s hearts rather than simply by their external acts, however, the more we are entangled in ambiguities and ambivalence. Seen from the perspective of the heart, life is not black and white but shades of grey. “Heart” is of course a metaphor: what we are really talking about is the human mind, which, as has been increasingly obvious since at least the 19^th century, extends downward into reaches that are unconscious and irrational. The allegorical tradition that includes not only Dante but Spenser and Bunyan may label characters with the names of abstract virtues and vices, but it is extinct in our time because new techniques were needed to explore how human actions are driven by desires and fears that lie hidden in the unconscious and are anything but rational. The old moral tradition was based on the premise that God had established a moral system and gave human beings reason in order to choose between good and bad. Even in Milton, morality is still essentially rational: “reason is but choosing,” in an often-quoted phrase from Paradise Lost. In the Enlightenment, reason was partly uncoupled from God and religious doctrine: what reason discerned was instead a morality said to be evident in the order of nature, giving rise to “natural religion.” Such truths were held to be “self-evident,” in the words of the Declaration of Independence—they are just “naturally” true.

But the problem of democracy is that, Enlightenment rationalism notwithstanding, people are not rational. Economists are baffled by the way that people constantly make choices that are against their own “enlightened self-interest.” Dostoyevsky wrote The Underground Man (1864) in part as a satire against utilitarianism of this sort. The Underground Man says that he refuses to be bound by any kind of rational order—that is an infringement on his freedom. He will insist that 2 + 2 = 5 in order to assert the autonomy of his own will over any mere facts, and he will choose such idiocy in the name of freedom. In other words, he is the epitome of a Trump voter. Dostoyevsky went on, in Crime and Punishment, to explore what happens when such wilfulness sets itself up as being “beyond good and evil.” The Underground Man is well named: writers in the moral tradition of the 19^th and early 20^th century, including George Eliot, Henry James, Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and, in Europe, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky himself, are following a realistic displacement of the Romantic myth of descent into a dark and mysterious realm in which dwell, like dragons, the powerful energies of the pleasure principle and the will to power. The descent is very different from that of Dante in the Inferno.

But there is one transgression that stands out and is treated as exceptional in traditional mythology and literature, both Classical and Christian, that of incest. People have been skeptical of Freud’s claim that incestuous fantasy is at the heart of human identity, some claiming that the “Oedipus complex” is a recent Western invention. But the Oedipus story seems to me unique because it inescapably demands psychological explanation. If someone is a glutton or a murderer or a traitor, they have committed an act because they felt they would gain something, an act that is to that extent rational. But incest cannot be explained in terms of utilitarian gain and loss. The gain of incest is not sexual pleasure, which could be had elsewhere. Incest wants something beyond the possible, something that belongs only to the gods. Trying to explain the Oedipus story drew traditional storytellers into the depths of the unconscious more than any other I can think of. Freud was right in regarding it as something uniquely haunting, some kind of key to the unconscious.

Working from Freudian clues, critical theory began with the observation that the bond between mother and child is the ground of our distinction between self and other—in other words, it is where the reality principle develops. Initially, the infant makes no distinction between self and other: it dwells in a solipsistic condition in which it is the whole universe. The mother becomes the first other, sometimes expressed in the visual pun m(other). When the mother sometimes goes away, the child is traumatized, filled with anxiety, and fantasies of reunion with the maternal ground begin. It is a dream of a nostos or return to a condition of original paradise. However, there is a taboo, established by society, but also by the natural process of individuation. The child must become an autonomous individual, so desire for the mother becomes ambivalent, a yearning combined with a fear of being engulfed or swallowed by what Jung called the Terrible Mother. This ambivalence can play itself out in the actual mother-child relationship, as between Paul Morel and his mother in D.H. Lawrence’s quasi-autobiographical Sons and Lovers (1912). In Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, the title character is gripped by “masculine protest,” exaggerating his masculinity and independence, because he secretly has a fixation on his enveloping mother, appropriately named Volumnia. And the English Freudian Ernest Jones wrote a book called Hamlet and Oedipus (1949), pointing out Hamlet’s obsession with his mother’s sexual relationship with his uncle Claudius, who has done what the Oedipus complex postulates that all boys secretly wish to do, kill their father-rivals and marry their mothers.

Perhaps because it avoids such ambivalence, brother-sister incest actually seems more common in mythology and literature than the mother-son version, the ideal union between brother and sister becoming an image of the return to an original hermaphroditic condition, before the “fall” into gender. Some of the unions of the gods reflect this ideal: Zeus and Hera are both husband and wife and brother and sister. The Romantic tradition was quite fond of the ideal brother-sister incest motif. Although not biologically related, Heathcliff and Catherine in Wuthering Heights are psychologically incestuous, a condition summed up by Catherine in her triumphant remark that “Heathcliff and I are one!” The incest theme floats through the work of Shelley and Byron, and appears in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury in Quentin Compson’s attachment to his sister Caddy, originating in a voyeuristic moment in childhood when he saw her dirty drawers when she was up in a tree.

But although Freud made the mother-son pattern of the Oedipus complex his paradigm, and rejected Jung’s idea of an Elektra complex of father-daughter incest, it is the latter that dominates both literature and society in modern times, and it looks possible that Freud tried to repress the evidence for it, at least according to the bombshell book In the Freud Archives by Jeffery Masson (1984). Freud’s notorious theory was that most of his female patients who claimed to have been abused by their fathers were in fact only fantasizing about it: what they presented as an accusation was in fact a disguised wish. This sets up the standard male defense that the woman who complains of abuse, harrassment, or rape is in fact the initiator—“She really wanted it.” But Masson claimed, on the basis of documents in the Freud Archives that only he had access to, that Freud lied to protect the abusive fathers. Ovid presents a cunning girl named Myrrha who cunningly seduces her father in the Metamorphoses. But most father-daughter abuse is simply that, abuse.

To use Blake’s terms, the child is a symbol of Innocence in a world of Experience whose first impulse is to murder it. This is not mere exaggeration. It would definitely spoil the holiday mood if we tried to imagine what an unspeakable horror the Slaughter of the Innocents must have been in experience, so we allow it to be muted by the gentle pastoralism of the Christmas narrative. Mary and Joseph flee with the Christ child to Egypt, where the Egyptian first-born were killed by the ever-lovable Yahweh. The Israelites looked down self-righteously on the devotees of Moloch, who sacrificed their children in a furnace, but their own God is a child-killer, and that’s okay if it’s the child of an enemy. Recent newsletters have noted Dylan Thomas’s two poems on the death of children by fire during the London blitz of World War II, war being a collective form of human sacrifice.

Children who are not killed may be exploited. Blake wrote poems protesting the use of boys as chimney sweeps, for the same reason that they were used in the coal mines: because they were small, they could go where an adult would not fit. Children worked in the factories: young Charles Dickens’ experience in the blacking factory was fictionalized in David Copperfield. But child labor is one of those external evils, easier for that very reason to attack and eliminate. The more insidious assault on innocence is secret and psychological. The primary motive of child abuse is not just sex but sexualized power. The thrill for the adult male is having the female totally, helplessly in his power, as a way of denying or reversing the male emotional dependence on the mother with which we all began. The allure of violating the child’s innocence derives from the fact that the innocence is a taboo. The child should be untouchable, but that inaccessibility is maddening to an insecure and yearning male. So the imagination generates the cover story that the child is seductive and has tempted the male, then acted coy. Thus, the child is “bad” and needs to be punished—spanking is a common fantasy. The scenario can be extended to older ages: JD Vance has talked about spanking wayward teenage daughters. It used to be a common enough occurrence in older movies and comics that an obnoxiously bratty woman got taken over a man’s knee and spanked. “What she needs is a good spanking” was a familiar phrase. These things are not comfortable to talk about, and in fact they were not talked about. So much has gone on that is “secret,” even though people really knew about it. That is the real theme of this newsletter, that the moral tradition in modern literature has to delve into the “secret” areas of forbidden fantasies, especially of sex and power. To which we may add the even more uncomfortable truth that the imagination has the duty to do so because it is the imagination that has generated the evil fantasies in the first place. For the imagination can certainly be perverted, go over to the dark side. The contest of good against evil is therefore a contest between two forms of the imagination, one redemptive and one corrupted. The imagination should not be sentimentalized.

The daddy-little girl scenario is one of several abusive scripts. Priests who abuse boys are not just sex-deprived: they too are engaging in power fantasies of dominance and submission. So too are sadistic teachers, as noted in a previous newsletter. The regularity of “corporal punishment” both in the real school system and in literature points to a sadistic impulse with a sexual undertone, often again with the motif of spanking. In porn, there is the “naughty schoolgirl,” and, a hangover from the days of domestic servants, the “French maid.” We are reluctant to allow these matters into any discussion of evil. The very word “evil” has a melodramatic ring to it, suggesting either titanic rebels or at least glamorous gangsters. But the depths to which people will sink are so undignified that we are reluctant to speak of them because of what it implies about human nature and human identity. For, after all, those who transgress dramatize what is latent in all of us, and no one wants to admit they could possibly find such sick fantasies understandable, maybe even a touch attractive. Better to keep our distance and keep to the story that such fantasies and behavior are so pathological that they are alien and incomprehensible, and so extreme that we can be sure that they are rare exceptions in real life. That was an easy position to maintain in earlier times, when “respectability” was the first and last duty of every family. You simply didn’t talk about such things, and, if you did, you were a traitor. But the idea that all but a few weirdos are nice and normal is getting harder to maintain as our social fabric disintegrates. Trump has nominated so many alleged sex criminals to key political positions that people are inferring, correctly I think, that he is trying to normalize by asssociation his status as a convicted rapist and acquaintance of Jeffrey Epstein, the ultimate abuser of innocence. People like Matt Gaetz, who boasts of coke-and-Viagra-fueled orgies with allegedly underage girls, do not represent some new level of degeneracy. Their open shamelessness is just the only defensive stance possible in an age of social media, where secrecy is no longer possible. Nor is this abusive behavior confined to repressed right-wingers. We know what went on in the Kennedy White House years ago, and just in recent weeks have witnessed the probable end of the career of fantasist Neil Gaiman after 5 women accused him of sexual harassment.

We may trace the abusive pattern back even further, to, for example, Charles Dodgson’s nude pictures of Alice Liddell, along with other prepubescent girls, at the same time that he, as Lewis Carroll, was immortalizing her as Alice in Wonderland. The poet Richard Howard has a dramatic monologue by Alice in which the first words are “Don’t move,” a memory of instructions by Dodgson during photography sessions but of course with a sexual implication as well. There is an interesting Wikipedia article on “Childhood Nudity,” which documents the claim that in fact the Victorians, despite their notorious prudery, saw nothing wrong with naked pictures of young children, on the grounds that part of children’s innocence is that they are asexual. Sure enough, the article includes a number of paintings from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries in which children are naked. All of them, however, are scenes of group public swimming. What went on in private was another matter. When Freud provided proof of childhood sexuality, people were outraged, or at least pretended to be. And Freud has had his influence, over the longer term, at least in the United States, which became much more strict about images of children. Back in the time when photos were taken to the drug store to be developed, there were warnings about parents who had got in trouble with the law for sending in nude photos of their children. Child models no longer appear in underwear ads, and I suspect the famous image of the little Coppertone girl in the suntan lotion ad, her bare bottom exposed by a dog pulling down her swimsuit, would not be regarded as appropriate these days. Is this American puritanism? Or is it heightened sensitivity to the possibility of sexual abuse excused as good clean fun?

Which brings us, finally, to the inspiration for this newsletter, an article in The New York Times Magazine on December 8, 2024, called "What Alice Munro Knew" by

Giles Harvey. Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 for 15 volumes of short stories that constitute one of the most profoundly searching bodies of moral fiction in our time. Over the course of a long career, Munro’s stories kept getting more and more complex, not in incident but in repeated overlays of interconnections and intricate patterns. Yet this is the opposite of the kind of self-conscious virtuosity that irked John Gardner. I have twice taught an entire course in Munro’s fiction, and I told students at the outset each time that the typical experience of reading a Munro story was to get to the end of a story having gathered a lot of what are clearly clues and thematic puzzle pieces but not understanding how they all fit together to disclose a total insight. In this they are like life itself. No simplistic moral schemes are going to suffice for these stories. You have to go back through the story slowly and let a pattern emerge, often by a kind of emotional intuition, like letting your eyes adjust until you can see the outlines in a dark room. That is because people are more complicated than they appear—and the “you” the story implicitly addresses is on one level the artist herself. The protagonist of one of Munro’s central stories, “Family Furnishings,” is one of her many surrogates, a clever young woman from a dysfunctional family who is clearly on her way to becoming a writer. Without permission, she incorporates into a short story a private anecdote told to her about a relative named Alfrida, alienating Alfrida permanently. Alfrida sends the message that the narrator isn’t as smart as she thinks she is, and that turns out to be correct. A writer is not an omniscient, godlike creator who lays out all the answers for the reader: rather, she too struggles for clarity, and, even more importantly, she is implicated in the moral judgments the story makes. Throughout the stories, many of which contain clearly autobiographical elements, Munro is judging herself, and not always favorably. For her, art was a form of self-confrontation.

That made it all the more shocking that, when Andrea Skinner, the youngest of Munro’s three daughters, announced last July after her mother’s death that she had been sexually molested by Munro’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin, and that her mother, when told of it, told Skinner that she would have to work it out with her step-father, whom she needed and couldn’t live without. Munro had no sympathy for the ordeal Skinner had undergone as far back as 1976, when she was only 9, only a complaint about how hard this all was on her. Skinner did not reveal to her mother what had happened to her until 1992, when she was 25, because such dirty secrets are not talked about. But Giles Harvey’s article, which is admirably free of the kind of self-satisfied cleverness and simplistic pop-psych that so often makes this kind of article irritating, explains that Munro was not suddenly blindsided in 1992. She had been informed by friends as far back as 1981 that Fremlin had exposed himself to their daughter. She knew his tendencies, and even feared his capacity for violence. Another central story, the significantly titled “Open Secrets,” is constructed as a kind of true-crime mystery story about a child murderer. It was published in 1993, the year after her daughter had confirmed that her husband’s problem was no longer theoretical. The identity of the murderer lies in plain sight in the small community in which it takes place, but in fact there are open secrets about almost every character in the story, things everybody knows that everybody knows but will never admit to knowing. And the darkest secret of them all is that, in writing the story, Munro had her own husband in mind. Fremlin was not a murderer, but with his aggressive, abrasive personality he very much could have been. He did threaten to kill Skinner if she went to the police. Harvey’s article contains an incisive and illuminating quotation:

The Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, who was one of Munro’s friends, told me she thought it “very, very likely” that Munro was sexually abused as a girl, if only because sexual abuse is so common. “Peeping Toms” and “gropers on trains,” Atwood wrote to me, were a “dime a dozen” in what she called “the Dark Ages.” In small towns like Wingham, there was a social imperative to keep such things private. “Everybody knew stuff about other people,” Atwood said. “What you most feared was being shamed and ridiculed.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in Munro’s stories themselves: Her abused young women invariably keep quiet.

Eventually, her worry about the danger Fremlin posed to her own daughters led to a permanent estrangement from Munro. When Munro said in an interview that she was lucky to know Fremlin and had a close relationship with her daughters, Skinner, outraged at the hypocrisy, gave to the police the letters that Fremlin had written to her years before. Fremlin was arrested but got off with 2 years’ probation, no doubt because he was 80 by that time. A detective claimed that, during the arrest, Munro was screaming that her daughter was a liar.

The story in which Munro attempts to confront her own complicity in her daughter’s abuse is “Vandals,” published in 1993, the same year as “Open Secrets.” When I taught it, I thought it the darkest and most disturbing Munro story I had ever read, and that is saying something. In it, an eccentric Munro-surrogate named Bea falls under the spell of a strange, difficult recluse named Ladner. He ends up abusing two next-door children who do not belong to Bea but who trust her as a sort of substitute mother, since they have lost their own. It becomes clear that Bea knows what is going on, but she cannot or will not summon the will to intervene. Years later, the abused daughter, Liza, breaks into the vacant house where Bea and Ladner used to live, along with her boyfriend, and they become the vandals of the title. The scenes describing the trashing of the house go on and on with excruciating vividness, all the more disturbing because at that point the reader does not know what Liza’s motive is. But Munro knew: when she was writing those scenes, she was putting herself inside her daughter’s absolutely justified rage against her abuser and, even more, against the mother figure who could have protected her but valued her emotional security over a child’s physical safety. Bea, meanwhile, hides out in the disguise of being just a silly old lady, no doubt going senile, who just doesn’t understand anything. The story is a brutal self-condemnation. Yet what good did it do? Writing it did not give Munro the will either to break with Fremlin or to admit her guilt to her daughter. A fierce but fair judgment might be that writing the story was not self-confronting but self-serving. Munro could secretly congratulate herself for having the courage to face what she was and condemn herself, even if only privately. Ah, but when I grew up Roman Catholic I was taught that if you confessed a sin without attempting to make amends, the sin was not forgiven. If you stole, you had to return what you stole. Admitting guilt to yourself while not addressing the damage caused by your actions is just wallowing.

When I first learned last summer of Andrea Skinner’s allegations, I was shocked but not surprised. But I too have come to think I was not as smart as I thought I was. In the period of time after Munro left her first marriage through her early years with Fremlin, she published a number of stories about strong-willed, independent-minded middle-aged women who are strong enough to walk away from failing marriages and relationships, who go out into the world determined to find what they wanted and get it, no matter whether the world approved of it or not, no matter if it meant affairs with other people’s husbands. Better murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires, said Blake, and there is a clear parallel with the strong will of the artist, who sees things clearly, coldly, and honestly, and who will speak the truth despite all disapproval. But I missed the clues hiding in plain sight that this self-dramatization was a sham, an attempt by a newly-independent woman in a feminist period to put on a bold front. The attempt eventually crumbled, and, when the mask dropped, behind it was a woman who was empty, needy, emotionally dependent, and borderline unstable. She does not really need multiple lovers, melodrama, an emotional roller coaster, the euphoria of “freedom.” What she needs is a man to cling to who is a pillar of strength, by which she means strong-willed and domineering, not “nice.” What she wants is what we now call a toxic male. It is not surprising that Munro hid this desire. She was well aware that she fit the stereotype of the educated, liberated women as misogynist men see them: “What they want is a real man, though they won’t admit it.” In “Vandals,” Bea is quite aware that by feminist standards she is a disgrace.

[…she] would hate to think she had gone after Ladner because he was rude and testy and slightly savage … because wasn’t that the way in all the dreary romances — some brute gets the woman tingling and then it’s goodbye to Mr. Fine and Decent?” A few days later, she is driving back to see Ladner on her own. “She had to feel sorry for herself, in her silk underwear. Her teeth chattered. She pitied herself for being a victim of such wants.”

And yet there is something in Ladner’s personality that Bea is drawn to, and it is exactly his defiance of social norms. It is the old attraction of the “bad boy.” What draws Bea to Ladner is what drew Munro to Fremlin: “It was this stick-it-up your-ass, let’s-cut-through-the-bullshit kind of attitude,” as her daughter put it. Ladner enjoys being cruel and makes fun of Bea behind her back. Fremlin would make fun of Munro to her face. Harvey cites other examples of the sadistic type from a few stories I have not read, including one called “Labor Day Dinner”:

The girls, meanwhile, are wary of George, who is trigger-happy with belittling jokes. They are also grieved by his effect on their mother. “I have seen her change,” Angela confides to her diary (which Roberta has read), “from a person I deeply respected into a person on the verge of being a nervous wreck. If this is love I want no part of it. He wants to enslave her and us all and she walks a tightrope trying to keep him from getting mad.”

The sadism extends beyond verbal abuse to abusive actions:

In “Material,” from 1974, the middle-aged narrator discovers a short story by her ex-husband, Hugo, a well-known writer. It describes an episode from the early years of their marriage when Hugo vindictively flooded the apartment of their downstairs neighbor, a low-rent prostitute named Dotty. The narrator has every reason to dislike the story, and yet she can’t help acknowledging its brilliance. “There is Dotty, lifted out of life and held in light, suspended in the marvelous clear jelly that Hugo has spent all his life learning how to make. It is an act of magic, there is no getting around it; it is an act, you might say, of a special, unsparing, unsentimental love.”

In the world of normal adult responsibility, there is no excusing the violence of destroying someone’s property by drowning it out of revenge. That is not defensible behavior and indicates mental issues. “Unsentimental love” is outrageous hogwash. Yet her ex-husband has not only perpetrated the violence but seems to have done so deliberately in order to provide a subject for his art—his writing is described as a way of preserving things in some sort of gel, like flies in amber. This is what I mean about how Munro keeps adding layers of psychological texture to her stories, far beyond what most writers do. Here, simultaneously with being in the place of the woman admiring the abusive male, she identifies with the male himself, who is an artist figure, with the artist’s ruthlessness. To the artist, life is just “material” for art, and some artists clearly have cultivated chaos and dysfunction in their lives and the lives of others in order to have “material.” Moreover, in preserving the material, the artist kills it in a different way, by turning it into unliving artifice. Hugo’s work embeds Dotty in “jelly”; Ladner in “Vandals” is a taxidermist: Liza takes fierce pleasure in destroying his exquisite works of “art,” once-living birds who have been killed and their insides removed so that they may be turned into true-to-life artifice.

What attracts a woman to someone like Ladner or Fremlin? Margaret Atwood’s theory that Munro might have been sexually molested when young makes sense, but that reduces her to the role of the passive, violated innocent. In an extraordinary moment, Munro, through Bea, suggests something more like the opposite: “Certain women, she muses, thinking of herself, ‘might be always on the lookout for an insanity that could contain them.’” Such a woman is insane herself, uncontrollable by normal men, and can only be subdued to a stronger will that is even more insane. At the moment, I am regretting that for once I listened to the critics and skipped seeing The Joker: Folie á Deux. The story of Harley Quinn, a psychologist who ends up being contained by her patient’s insanity, might be an analogue here, and I wonder whether the link with the figure of the destructive artist might have been what drew Lady Gaga to the project.

Some people are asking whether we should bother to read Munro any longer, knowing what we now know. Of course we should. This is the old argument about Nazis weeping at symphonies. Art does not automatically transform and redeem people, including the artist herself. The moral task of art is to hold the mirror up to human nature. It shows us the good and the evil in ourselves, and then says, “Choose.” In this, art is almost in the place of God, and the arguments about art’s influence parallel those about predestination. God does not predestine us. He gives us the freedom to choose what path we will take, the mystery being why we choose evil when we know better. It is not because the moral labyrinth is impenetrable. Milton knew that reason’s choice cannot be simple. We ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and that means, he said, of knowing good by evil. But in the end, we are saved from hopeless skepticism or nihilism by keeping hold of the principle that we are judged by our actions. It is simply wrong to sexually abuse children, to be cruel and misogynistic, to be ruled by our selfish will. Google had it right in the first place when it said, “Don’t be evil.” Unfortunately, it was no more able to live up to its own wisdom than Munro. The purpose of analyzing the tangle of reasons why someone might choose evil over good has nothing to do with excusing or forgiving them, only in learning from their example why such wrong choices happen, hoping that insight might sway our own and others’ choices.

In the recent newsletter about writing, I predicted that much of the important writing in the years to come is going to be about self-confrontation, and about this subject Munro has much to teach us, through her failures as much as her successes. Half of American just chose an abuser for president, a convicted sexual abuser who is appointing other abusers to positions of power, someone who was emotionally abused himself by a monster of a father. Trump voters should not be allowed to hide behind Bea’s excuse of being a naïve innocent misled by bad influences and just really confused about it all. To say, “Fox News made me do it” is mostly a self-serving lie. Munro shows us how people lie to themselves in the most complicated ways. Trump’s cruelty and abrasiveness are exactly like Ladner’s and Fremlin’s, and he manipulates even the media to find his repeated and deliberate violation of social norms to be interesting and full of energy. When Munro won the Nobel Prize, a few dissenters said she did not deserve it because her material was not the stuff of great literature, by which they meant it was about women and poor people. One of the dissenters was, not surprisingly, Bret Easton Ellis, who wrote a flashy novel, American Psycho, about an investment banker whose hobby is killing affluent, elite young women. But Munro knows as much about evil as many of the big names. Most of all, she shows us our attraction to the irrational, the nihilistic. The people in her small country towns, were they not Canadian, would have voted for Trump. Munro can teach us why. The Trump electorate was looking for an insanity that could contain them, and they found it.