Part 1 — Consider the Moralist (I)
Part 2 — Consider the Moralist (II)
Part 3 — Consider the Moralist (III)
VIII
It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writing than to put one principle into practice.
Leo Tolstoy* (*unconfirmed)
While primarily a writer of verse, one can not fail to be taken by the pure necessity of the work - it is not something he is choosing to write in a pure sense, and by all accounts wishes nothing along the lines was every written, but at the same time fulfils an obligation as an artist, and relater of present conditions, one who is best suited for it, owing to the importance of the task.
Ezra Pound on Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind
Fabian comes to the realization that the moralism he continues to contend with does not—and perhaps can not—resign itself to permanence. For, rather than being in a state of indefinite psychological docility or moral suspension, Fabian finds himself in conflict more akin to a tug-of-war, pulling alone against what feels like the weight of an entire society. But society does not merely pull. Rather, it is falling over a distant but rapidly approaching cliff. But now both Fabian’s arms and his resolve are tiring. The contest cannot go on much longer. Who has ever defeated gravity?
Yes, like a true moralist, Fabian has stood his ground on ground that he has stood on alone. He has pulled valiantly, no matter the uncertainty of the contest (is this all virtue demands of us in this life?). How easy it would have been to either disregard, ignore, or, easiest, be completely consumed by the chaos around him; how seamless it would be to go with the proverbial ‘going of the dogs,’ to stop pulling, to surrender, to be for a moment at rest before being pulled over the cliff by the gentlest lapse of effort. No, Fabian has grabbed the rope dangling in front of him and asks fate to first to hold on, then demands it reveals which way it is heading, then humbly requests it pause once more as he tries to determine what could be done to counter the direction it revealed him it was going. But as the novel proceeds, the rope thins and wears away at a greater rate than he can sort out answers to his questions. Fate, as is all too well known, leads the willing and drags the unwilling; it exhausts those that pull at it and weans away that which it can be temporarily countered by. But not all who are dragged are dragged in the same way.
Going to the Dogs tracks the arc and increasing intensity of this fateful tug-of-war. As his society further descends into chaos and close friends are added to its lists of victims, Fabian begins to tread further away from his proverbial fence; away from his ambivalence, objectivity, and inaction. His interventions grow both by magnitude and in degree of involvement. First, Fabian protects a young girl at a department store who has been (accurately) accused of theft. Soon after he breaks up a fight between some communist and fascist sympathizers. These actions amount to no great result in themselves; the communists and fascists will fight again and the girl will resume her thievery. But at least for a moment, Fabian has suspended the sinking of the sinking ship.
But then Fabian really gets involved. Until now, he had been merely dipping his toe in the water of the world if he had stepped into it at all. Fabian’s best friend, Labude, is dead as a result of the poor execution of a lowly joke, having taken his own life after falsely being led to believe by a scheming classmate that his thesis and life’s work had been ridiculed and rejected. It is later revealed that his thesis was not rejected but instead lauded with the highest possible terms. Fabian’s dividing wall between thought and action is definitively breached by the particularly cruel and unnecessary circumstance of Stephan Labude’s death, which functions as a sort of moral casting of the die: it is through it Fabian morphs into an active moral agent.
Fabian and Labude once bonded over their passivity borne out of a shared sense of disillusionment. So it is significant when Fabian looks over Labude’s body and addresses him in an accusing manner. Labude, perhaps without permission, has ‘done something’. In taking his own life he has transformed from a man of theory into a man of action. And there no going back. The fact that Fabian addresses him in the present tense, reproaching him for what ‘he’s done’ (he is speaking to a lifeless body) suggests that Fabian considers Labude just as much ‘alive’ as he does himself, if not more so—Labude has now done more than he or Fabian had ever done before. “But Stephan,” [Fabian] said, ‘you can’t do this.’”
But he could—he has! Of course Fabian is not speaking literally—he doesn't mean so much that Labude could not have taken his own life as much as he means that Labude had no right to act in such a decisive manner. Fabian’s accusatory tone continues to the next chapter, in which he visits Labude again, “Are you still content to be dead, now you have died? Or have you repented of it?” It is only now, perhaps as he takes notice of the ‘shadowed sockets’ that were once Labude’s eyes, that Fabian addresses him in the past tense. “Do you wish to make undone what is done for all eternity?” It is crucial that Labude is both ‘dead’, and also ‘has died,’ for the duality underpins Fabian’s realization that actions, no matter how futile, mistaken, or wasteful, have consequences. Yes, Fabian is wary of eternity, yes, Fabian thinks it vulgar to “worm oneself thus into the confidences of fate!” But as Thoreau reminds us, eternity exists, and we are involved with fate all the same. Eternity exists anyway.
So when the man responsible for this tragedy, Weckherlin, comes by the dean’s office to explain himself, and defends himself by claiming that ‘it was only a joke!’ Fabian takes revenge, crying out and throwing himself at the hoodwinked. “It was an inarticulate sound like the sound of an animal. The next moment he sprang forward and struck at Weckherlin with both fists, repeatedly, careless of where the blows fell. Insensate, like an automatic hammer, he struck and struck again. ‘You scoundrel!’ he screamed, and struck the other in the face with both fists.”
But Fabian's first moment of true moral reckoning, of true action, neither comes easily nor satisfies him. He feels himself dehumanize, feeling more more animal, more inanimate object, more ‘automatic hammer,’ even, than human. Fabian questions the dubious righteousness of his revenge and reflects on the implications of his own participation in the illogical tragedy. ”Why did I thrash that fellow? As though I had to destroy him! Why did my rage against him exceed my sorrow for Labude’s futile death? Surely a man who is the unintentional cause of such a tragedy deserves pity rather than hate? Will he ever be able to sleep peacefully at night?”
Was his attack on Weckherlin not warranted, however? It is a not a scratch for an eye, a cavity for a tooth? But what is truly right is not always what is merely warranted. Indeed, the moralist often chooses a lack of action rather than having to choose between two imperfect choices. There is a third solution to the trolley problem; to let fate run its course. To not kill, to not save, but to observe. To this end, Fabian admits to regretting the unfurling of the truth, whereby an absurdity is introduced to what was simply tragic. “Would it not have been better, now that Labude was dead, if Weckherlin’s lie had survived? Yesterday his friend’s death had filled Fabian with sorrow, today it filled him with a turbulent restlessness. The truth had been revealed, and who was the better for it? Labude’s parents now knew their son had been the victim of an infamous lie—were they the better? Before they knew the truth there had been no untruth. Now justice had triumphed and his death became a tragic absurdity.” Vengeance will not be his—Labude is still dead, and there will be more futile deaths. And not only is Labude dead, but his death, worse than being tragic, is a tragic absurdity. Is it not the same tragically absurd quality not also the case for Berlin and for Germany?
The end of Going to the Dogs finds Fabian in certain defeat, already having been defeated, in a position to determine the nature of such a defeat, whereby he can lose a game that has already been lost by either dropping the rope or through one more great but certainly futile effort. Is the purpose of life not, as Rilke said, to be defeated by greater and greater things? What will be the nature of his defeat?
VIII
The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one.
Marguerite Duras, ‘The Lover’
Queen Elizabeth: It doesn’t feel right, as Head of State, to do nothing.
Queen Mary: It is exactly right.
Queen Elizabeth: Is it? But surely doing nothing is no job at all?
Queen Mary: To do nothing is the hardest job of all. And it will take every ounce of energy that you have. To be impartial is not natural, not human. People will always want you to smile or agree or frown. And the minute you do, you will have declared a position. A point of view. And that is the one thing as sovereign that you are not entitled to do. The less you do, the less you say or agree or smile—
Queen Elizabeth: Or think? Or feel? Or breathe? Or exist?
Queen Mary: The better.
Queen Elizabeth: Well, that’s fine for the sovereign. But where does that leave me?
The Crown, Season 1
Wilde is correct when he says, “to become the spectator of one’s own life is to escape the suffering of life.” But that is not necessarily the truth. In my view, the spectator merely changes the terms of his suffering. He stands to escape only one form of suffering but in the end suffers all the same. To spectate is seemingly desirable until the one moment the moralist wishes to become involved, to truly live, to act, to engage with the life and world he has is apart from. Besides, it is more a temporary evasion than a permanent escape, for how can he who spectates suffering not eventually suffer himself, at least while maintaining his sense of humanity?
Is being a spectator any less tragic? Yes, perhaps it is a “sin to love life and never have a serious affair with it.” Perhaps it is a mistake, like Frau Moll says, to take the world as a shop-window, to see it as being distinct from where you situate yourself. Does it not get lonely on the other side of the glass from everyone else? Does the moralist not get the sense that he has, while watching everyone else live, not truly lived himself? And if he truly loved that which was within the aquarium tank—life—does he not want to swim in it also?
The repeated symbology of windows most closely represents Fabian’s relationship with the activity of the world. There is a marked and well-defended boundary between his internal make-up and his external presence. Fabian would much rather be ‘in’ than ‘out’, while preferring to look ‘out’ rather than ‘in’. There is a revealing scene where Fabian escapes the company of a lover, preferring instead to look out the window. “‘Won’t you tell me anything about yourself, sweetheart?’ ’No,’ he said, and went into the living-room. She ran after him. He was standing by the window.” In another instance, he describes the uncomfortable effect of feeling as though his ‘window’ had been shattered. It is as though a protective layer is pierced. “When he awoke the next morning and found the light still burning, the events of the previous day had vanished from his mind. He felt wretched and depressed, but he did not know why. He shut his eyes, and then, very gradually, his misery took shape. All that had happened came back to him, as though someone outside had thrown it through his window-pane.” Fabian’s misery consists of both the pain of the piercing as well as the ensuing exposure as a result of the breakdown of his defences.
But Fabian starts to sense the windowpane his moralist stance brings about is more of a ‘false azure’ than productive construct. His manufactured separation from society gnaws at him, taunts him to fill its gap, teases its closure, haunts him of his own non-existence, and invites him to jump into the pool of water on the other side of the pane of glass that he has installed to keep himself dry and allow him to see. “Love life and despise your fellow men—that seldom turns out well,” foretells Fabian.
And what is the origin of Fabian’s moralism in the first place? Is Fabian passive because he is a moralist, or a moralist because he is passive? Is his passivity a necessity and constituent element of his chosen duty or merely an excuse, a better story about the passivity that afflicts both their characters, a way to conceal his cowardice under a screen of virtue? Was the position of a moralist an invented stance, a way to better arrange a base of timidity, lack of courage, his failure to become anything? It is described that Fabian “hated the practice of lifting the veil of the future as though it were the coverlet of a bed,” regarding it as “presumptuous for a person to attempt this misplaced intimacy with what was still hidden.” In other words, Fabian believes in a sort of right-of-way, whereby the future is a sort of prime mover that is to be yielded to, never interfered with, never commanded. But no bed makes itself. And even if Fabian is unwilling to pull off the covers, others are more than eager to take the sheets into their hands and make the world their world—and Fabian’s world too.
Fabian eventually comes to this realization. “But was this plan of his not a mere escape? Was there not always, everywhere, a stage for those who wished to act? For what had he been waiting for all these years? Perhaps for the realization that he had been born and ordained a spectator, and not, as he still believed, an actor in the world’s theatre.” The book ends with Fabian’s short scene on the world’s stage.
X
The problem with the modern world is that a man can live his entire life without ever really knowing whether or not he is a coward.
Dr. George Sheehan
We are given Jude’s collision with Arabella as a weakness, but one of those weaknesses most persons believe make men human, real.
Elizabeth Hardwick, on Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
Now Fabian looks up to the stage he will step up to. “Perhaps, up there, he would find himself again. Perhaps, up there, he would grow into the semblance of a man. Perhaps, on those lonely forest paths, he might find an object for which he could stake his life.” And Fabian does now stake his life. The object is a young boy who has fallen into the river. In the last scene of the novel, jumps in after the boy. But Fabian does not reach him, for the boy, at the same time that Fabian enters the water, walks out under his own power. Truthfully, Fabian wouldn’t have reached him anyway. For, Fabian has drowned. He did not even know how to swim.
Fabian has now acted decisively, no matter how stupidly or pointlessly. And it is only because of this that he is redeemed. Morality is not a predetermined condition. And it is not an automatically assigned one either; just like how a train is not moral for running on time. In fact, most moral men are really just men. Not all ‘moral men’ have the opportunity to actually be moral. Neither moral wishfulness nor projected ‘goodness’ can ascent one to any sort of moral identity. But who among us is so fortunate, so cursed, to be thrust by fate into the moral arena, placed in the Colosseum, the moral stage, staring into the eyes of a starved, raging lion, so that he might be called strong and brave? And who merely lives? How many of us are merely men, devoid of moral opportunity? Do we not go through our lives without ever taking such action? I posit that most of us are not moral men, but that we are not immoral men either. We are merely men, and we don’t know whether we are moral or not until chance places us on the stage of morality.
At the end of all Fabian’s moralism, he dives to his death himself in effort to save someone who didn’t need saving. (And does he thus save himself?) The self-contradiction of Kästner’s own life hovers mercilessly in the background. Does Kästner wish he jumped in the so-called river? He certainly looked into it; he watched his books burn. He was interviewed twice by the Gestapo. When the Nazis came to power, he denied himself the opportunity to begin a new life in safer pastures, taking the first train from Switzerland back to Berlin so that he could best be positioned to observe the horrors to come. But he watched from the railing of the bridge as his society drowned and did not climb out. When arrived back in his childhood home of Dresden in 1945 he found it a pile of ruin, saying of it, “I was born in the most beautiful city in the world. Even if your father, child, was the richest man in the world, he could not take you to see it, because it does not exist any more...In a thousand years was her beauty built, in one night was it utterly destroyed.”
One reading of the back and forth of Going to the Dogs, then, is as a routine of Kästner’s internal conflict, wherein the ‘thought experiment’ of action is eventually tried and tested, whereby the circumstance of being ‘an actor in the world’s theatre’ is taken to its logical conclusion through an entirety of a moral journey of a man of a similar character and temperament. But Kästner is Fabian until he isn’t: Fabian jumps in the proverbial river and Kästner does not. Still, the outcome of Fabian’s life is far from a settled conclusion. Fabian will not see the ascension of the Nazi party, the outbreak of war. He will not be able to help further. But when Fabian struggles to walk across the bridge he doesn’t feel he deserves to walk over, is it any surprise that Fabian jumps into the water he cannot swim in? And does that ambiguously useful act of honour—futile in a way, benevolent in another—not comprise the ultimate story of a moralist? But while this story of the moralist ends, the story of the moralist doesn't. Fabian’s story is but one iteration. Kästner’s is another.
Kästner seems to have stayed largely on the fence throughout his life. Do we fault him for this? His forthcoming and oft-repeated words, “he maintains that he is a moralist,” ring out. If there is no fence no moralist. It seems that the greatness or evil of humanity must be recognized by someone removed from it. Without the glass that allows both division and observation, humanity is no longer an aquarium but an unending tank of water. To have that glass is what makes the bowl of water meaningful. To define is to limit, but also explain. But one parable of Going to the Dogs is that eventually we must come off the fence, though it is not so much from choice as much as from compulsion, and that we might as well, sometime before, choose what side of it we fall on and hope that as many of our words as possible have been heard. And hope also that someone else is ready to climb the fence and hold up that distorted mirror that has fallen to the consecrated, fractured ground, for others to see for themselves and reflect it to others still.
Was it a futile action? A man who can’t swim jumping into a river in order to save a boy who didn’t require saving? Futile to the greatest extreme, yes. But perhaps the engine of humanity is driven by the willingness of the individual to commit futile acts for the supposed benefit of the greater good. Perhaps our existence is oiled by the fleeting existence of the man who cares so much about the world that he purposefully removes himself from it, in order to be in a position to defend it. And so with one last desperate and sure-to-fail pull of the rope, Fabian is pulled back into eternity.
Epilogue
Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
We end the same way Kästner did originally, with an epilogue original to the 1931 edition.
Original Epilogue to the 1931 Edition
This book is not meant for innocents of whatever age. The author repeatedly draws attention to the anatomical differences between the sexes…He omits nothing which might lead the guardians of morality to express the view that the author is a purveyor of filth. To this the author replies: I am a moralist.
Personal experience and other observations have led him to the conclusion that events of an erotic nature should loom large in his novel…he wanted very much to depict life in its proper proportions. His respect for this task may have taken precedence over his delicacy of feeling. He finds this justifiable. The guardians of morality, whether masculine, feminine or neuter, have once again leapt into action. Inspired by their psychoanalytical training, they are running amok through the countryside in droves, just like bailiffs, sticking fig-leaves over every keyhole and on every walking stick. But it is not just secondary sexual characteristics that they find objectionable. It is not enough for them to accuse the author of pornography; they also condemn him as a pessimist, and in the eyes of moral guardians of every persuasion, that is the very worst that can be said of someone.
They want each citizen to put all his hopes into one great pot. And the less these hopes weigh, the more they try to make him offer up. And because nothing which occurs to them can be made to yield nourishment when people cook away at it, and because what has occurred to them in the past has long since been consigned to the rubbish heap of history, our moral guardians ask themselves: what need have we then of writers, those clerks of the imagination, if not for this purpose? To all of this the author replies: I am a moralist. He discerns but one ray of hope, and he names it. He sees that his contemporaries, like stubborn mules, are running backwards towards a yawning abyss in which there is enough room for all the nations of Europe. And so, like a number of others before and alongside him, he cries out: Watch out! Grip the handrail on your left with your left hand!
If people do not gather their wits (and each individual must gather his own, and not just leave it to others), and if they do not at long last take the decision to move forwards, away from the abyss and towards reason, where in all the world will be able to discover any genuine grounds for hope? Hopes which a decent person can swear by, as he would swear by his mother. The author loves candour and reveres the truth. He has candidly depicted a certain state of affairs and truthfully expressed his opinion of it. Before the horrified guardians of morality destroy his book in a fit of rage, they should pay heed to what he has repeatedly asserted here.
He maintains that he is a moralist.
And to it we add the second part to the Auden line that opened Part II.
But where to serve and when and how?
None escape these questions now.
W.H. Auden, New Year Letter