Where’s the moral in the story?
In his book, The Three, the One, and the Many (Cambridge University Press, 1993), Colin Gunton writes about the connection between art and its role toward portraying good and evil: “For aesthetics, the chief question concerns in what sense art may be conceived to embody being, meaning and truth. Defenders of the autonomy of art argue rightly that it should not be compelled to serve some extraneous moral, and certainly not political, end; its task is to serve reality as it distinctly perceives it. But that raises the question of reality … To suppose that meaninglessness, the evil and the discordant are the essentially real is to serve a Manichean vision, which holds that reality is irredeemable. To suppose otherwise, however, is to be involved in the question of whether art should incorporate some kind of redemptive vision, as for most of history it has done. It is therefore inextricably involved with the question of moral good, which does not mean that it must be didactically moral, bu
