A great OpEd from the NYTimes. Jen Silverman (the author of the OpEd and a playwright/novelist) identifies “a peculiar American illness: namely, that we have a profound and dangerous inclination to confuse art with moral instruction, and vice versa.” Silverman goes on to say:
When I work with younger writers, I am frequently amazed by how quickly peer feedback sessions turn into a process of identifying which characters did or said insensitive things. Sometimes the writers rush to defend the character, but often they apologize shamefacedly for their own blind spot, and the discussion swerves into how to fix the morals of the piece. The suggestion that the values of a character can be neither the values of the writer nor the entire point of the piece seems more and more surprising — and apt to trigger discomfort.
In my own teaching, I’ve run into this confusion of character voice with authorial voice. But the bigger point, that great writing/art is not just a morality tale. I’m reminded of Les liaisons dangereuses which suddenly had a heyday with three movie adaptations, Dangerous Liaisons(1988), Valmont (1989), and later the teen adaptation Cruel Intentions(1999). My impression is that Dangerous Liaisons made the bigger splash, but I preferred Valmont precisely because it wasn’t a neat, little morality play were the bad people got their comeuppance. It had a more complex, perhaps less comfortable ending.
I’ve never been a fan of the comfortable. The comfort zone is not a zone of growth. That’s not to say the comfort zone doesn’t have its very important place (give me a good book, good cup of tea, cat in the lap, and fire in the fireplace). But it’s not the place to spend one’s entire life.
Silverman sums it up beautifully:
But what art offers us is crucial precisely because it is not a bland backdrop or a platform for simple directives. Our books, plays, films and TV shows can do the most for us when they don’t serve as moral instruction manuals but allow us to glimpse our own hidden capacities, the slippery social contracts inside which we function, and the contradictions we all contain.
We need more narratives that tell us the truth about how complex our world is. We need stories that help us name and accept paradoxes, not ones that erase or ignore them.
…the more we cultivate audiences who believe that the job of art is to instruct instead of investigate, to judge instead of question, to seek easy clarity instead of holding multiple uncertainties, the more we will find ourselves inside a culture defined by rigidity, knee-jerk judgments and incuriosity.
Ramblings 
I don’t think it’s an American think to mistake art for moral instruction: the classical world regarded one of art’s functions as being to inspire and cultivate virtue in the reader, and I don’t think anyone would dismiss Sophocles’ plays as being simplistic. Of course, that can swing very easily into mere propaganda, regardless of viewpoint, and works that are “author tracts” generally tend to be tedious — unless one is reading them to mock them.
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Good point. There is certainly a debate in Ancient Athens the moralizing effects of literature and drama. But I’ve never found Sophocles or Homer to be writing what we would call morality tales. Rather than having messages about the critical moral issues of the day, they seem explorations of the complex social dynamics and issues. Every time I return to the Iliad, I find myself in a different reading of it.
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