With A Conscious Moral Purpose
A Closer Look at "What Belongs to You"
👋 This is another in a series of monthly posts investigating books that I’ve found particularly influential. In case you missed them, you can read the previous two here:
Garth Greenwell’s debut, What Belongs to You, is a triumphant and inventive work, a triptych concerned with desire and intimacy. Its unnamed protagonist, an English language teacher in Sofia, solicits sex from a hustler named Mitko in its opening pages. The courtship that follows takes them from bathroom stalls to apartments to computer screens, the real and virtual, culminating at a seaside trip during which the transactional nature of their relationship becomes aggressively clear, an altercation in which Mitko becomes violent. In the second section, the teacher receives troubling news about his father that leads him to revisit a painful childhood spent grappling with his sexuality, the familial rejection of which is correlated in memory to rejection of closeness and intimacy more generally. Mitko returns in the third and final section with the news he has contracted a sexually transmitted disease, that the teacher should be tested.
In the hands of some writers, this arc might easily devolve into a Hays Code moral story: an American gets involved in a homosexual tryst with a sex worker abroad and is then punished with disease1; his “moral lapse” contextualized by the comparatively greater moral failure of his abusive father. But Greenwell is (thankfully) not among these writers. He is uninterested in moral statements as much as human experience.
Greenwell’s resistance to moral posturing in favor of emotional realism is in the tradition of—or rebellion against—a history of attempts to answer these questions dating back as far as 1884.
On April 25, the English novelist Sir Walter Besant rose the steps of the Royal Institution and held a lecture, so declaring:
…the modern English novel, whatever form it takes, almost always starts with a conscious moral purpose. When it does not, so much are we accustomed to expect it, that one feels as if there has been a debasement of the Art.2
It’s quite a bold thing to declare that any literature not intending to teach a moral lesson is not only a failure but a debasement of literature itself. But the novel of 1884 was an entirely distinct technology from its modern counterpart: when the drunken villain fell (as all villains were obliged to do), all of drunkenness fell with him. This type of writing necessitates the flattening of characters into archetypes so the attributes (and therefore the lessons) become evident. In this type of novel, Mitko would surely suffer some terrible fate, if not outright death.
Besant’s declaration garnered its fair share of critics, none among them more passionate than Henry James, who took particular offense to Besant’s distinction between novels of character (inner change) and “incident” (external change).
What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?…
It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way… When a young man makes up his mind that he has not faith enough, after all, to enter the church as he intended, that is an incident… The only classification of the novel that I can understand is into the interesting and the uninteresting.
This is what would become a foundational stance, the formation of a school of theory: that the “goal” of fiction (so much as one can exist) is not explicitly moral; that actions serve to reveal character. This, he seems to say, is literature’s true pursuit: not the action; not the character; but the revelation itself, how one informs the other. The novel as an exploration of human interiority.
Related to the moral novel is the social or protest novel, a more specialized technology which uses fiction to power a more pointed polemic. These are timely devices responding blatantly to popular issues of their times, defined by that same mechanism of flattening a multifaceted reality into something binary and easily reproachable. It is exemplified in Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Miss Ophelia’s Yankee reaction to her southern cousin’s defense of slavery in the sanctimonious, “This is perfectly horrible! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!”
A spate of protest novels written against slavery and systemic racism informed James Baldwin’s essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel” in response. Some seventy-odd years later, we can see Baldwin make a defense not dissimilar to Henry James’s:
The “protest” novel, so far from being disturbing, is an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene, ramifying that framework we believe to be so necessary. Whatever unsettling questions are raised are evanescent, titillating; remote, for this has nothing to do with us, it is safely ensconced in the social arena, where, indeed, it has nothing to do with anyone, so that finally we receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that we are reading such a book at all… “As long as such books are being published,” an American liberal once said to me, “everything will be all right.”3
Baldwin’s qualm with the protest novel is its tendency to simplify the complicated nature of life into something that can be easily rejected. Where these works may seek to interrogate a social problem to raise support, they become aesthetic signifiers of self-congratulation, becoming substitutes—instead of incitations—for the hard protest work they hope to inspire. Or else, their writers simply know that performative resistance (as if reading a book about an issue and doing something about it are the same) is lucrative. Like, wildly so. But it is the simplifying itself Baldwin views as its most damning anti-literary act:
The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.
Or, in Henry James’s words, that “No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.”
That Greenwell avoids the trappings of moralizing his protagonist’s journey is no small feat, particularly considering the nature of his protagonist’s affair and its physiological ramifications. In this way, the novel becomes a sort of anti-novel, diametrically opposed to the posturing that has preceded its patterns for generations. Mitko is neither the spurious urchin nor the virtuous prostitute. We see his calculating transactional nature alongside his flares of anger alongside his genuine joys and affection. He is, in other words, a human being. This is in itself a political statement: that the most flattened dynamics by time are ineffective, they do not hold against a more nuanced and representative view of life. There are no villains, not really.
One of the more notable ways Greenwell eschews these frameworks is his rich prose. Every physical touch is rendered with intensity and steeped in desire, contextualised by a history of starvation. We do not witness the teacher’s affairs with Mitko so much as inhabit them, they overflow with sensory information in a way many contemporary novels avoid entirely by “fading to black.” It was this explicitness that garnered the novel much of its well-deserved critical attention—and admittedly some confusion on the part of Greenwell himself:
The biggest surprise to me about the reception of my first book—other than the fact of there being any reception at all—was how much discussion there was about the sex in it. There isn’t very much sex in it! It said something about the culture of mainstream publishing in America in 2016 that a novel with maybe three or four pages of explicit sex between men could seem surprising.4
The roles of the novel’s characters are not ornamental; the sex is not salacious. Every aspect is designed to render something true and real and personal. It is a novel concerned with human experience that refuses facile alignments.
It’s not that I think explicitness is necessarily all that interesting in and of itself. Our culture is drowning in explicitness - thanks to the internet. And yet we suffer from a dearth of representations of embodiedness, by which I mean bodies imbued with consciousness…
Literature is the most powerful means we have for communicating consciousness… To write something, to make art of it, is to make a claim about its value.5
And so Greenwell’s literary pursuits inevitably lead us back to the question of literature’s purpose.
The whole point of art, for me, is to give us tools to explore feelings or situations or dilemmas that defeat our other ways of making meaning… I think art is the realm in which we can give full rein to the ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt that we often feel we have to suppress in other kinds of expression—in our political speech, say.
This humanist realist view of literature does not, I think, preclude the ability of the novel (this one and, more generally, as a technology) to be a political vehicle, but I do believe James/Baldwin/Greenwell well articulate why it cannot serve as solely a political vehicle. Fiction requires something honest of its author in surveying the world around them. If the author has political preoccupations and is also bringing all of themselves to their work, those views will enrich the text. Their absence, by contrast, is evidence either of the author’s apolitics or else their artistic dishonesty.
The thing about surveying the world is that it is an uneven inconsistent place from any angle you examine it. To flatten those inconvenient complexities that make up life for the purpose of moralizing or politicizing reduces fiction to polemic and, in doing so, strips away all of the magic emotional accessibility that makes it literature in the first place.
Or, as Henry James puts it, the novelist’s “first duty is to be as complete as possible—to make as perfect a work. Be generous and delicate, and then, in the vulgar phrase, go in!”
Writing intimacy is one of the more challenging parts of writing, but taking a critical look at What Belongs to You reminded me how powerful it can be when done well. It was a pleasure to learn-by-reading from someone who has so clearly mastered its possibilities.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading this even half as much as I enjoyed writing it. After a week spent attending and traveling between Cúirt Festival in Galway and then Granard Booktown Festival in Longford, it was the exact kind of hard thinking I needed to reset.
- JSR
P.S. For those wondering, these photographs come courtesy of my Olympus XA and a recent trip to Lisbon last March, where the excited discovery of ginhija was trumped only by the discovery of its price.
This literary tradition of using disease—particularly sexually transmitted disease—as retribution for “moral” offense (depending on what the particular era deems “moral,” of course, which goes out of style fairly quickly) is interrogated particularly well by Susan Sontag in her 1978 essay for The New York Review of Books, “Disease as a Political Metaphor”:
Epidemic diseases were a common figure for social disorder. From pestilence (bubonic plague) came “pestilent,” whose figurative meaning, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “injurious to religion, morals, or public peace—1513”; and “pestilential,” meaning “morally baneful or pernicious—1531.” Feelings about evil are projected onto a disease. And the disease (so enriched with meanings) is projected onto the world.
It is, in other words, no coincidence so many gay tragi-romance stories from 10+ years ago ended with the contraction of AIDS and the death of one, if not both, partners.
Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning—that meaning being invariably a moralistic one. Any important disease, whose physical etiology is not understood, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
Sontag, Susan. “Disease as Political Metaphor | Susan Sontag.” The New York Review of Books, 23 Feb. 1978.
Besant, Walter, and Henry James. The Art of Fiction. Boston, Cupples and Hurd, 1884.
Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. London, Penguin Books, 1955.