On Moral Fiction
Gardner, John
BOOK REVIEW On Mortal Fiction John Gardner/Basic Books/$8.95 Brian Thomas With the air of an ignored righteous one imparting devastating truths, John Gardner says that Art "builds...
...Instead of giving Barth some credit for confronting the modernist problem of what to do with myths once we no longer believe them, Gardner refuses to take the problem seriously...
...Policy them from dealing too patly with uncertainties, all things which Gardner's notion of moral fiction has little room for...
...When Gardner tries to say something about the mediations between what is good in life and what is good in art he only manages to come up with bromides that are incoherent with his thesis...
...M ost of what Gardner has to say about his fellow novelists is downright unfair, and the direct result of his neglect of the complexity of the shoves and tugs between art and morality...
...Diplomacy and Defense Interests 'FORTHCOMING THE CLOUDED LENS Persian Gulf Security and U.S...
...On Moral Fiction is vitiated by John Gardner's presupposition that aesthetic value rests immediately upon morality...
...It is more soothing to have one's prejudices massaged so that thought will be unnecessary...
...He takes Saul Bellow to task for pontificating and for writing "sprawling works of advice": If the reader knows in his bones that the opinion is Bellow's own, that Bellow cares more about his political opinion than he does about maintaining a coherent, self-sustained fictional world, then the reader has good reason for throwing out the book...
...Burgess says: "I don't think that the job of literature is to teach us how to behave, but I think it can make clearer the whole business of moral choice by showing what the nature of life's problems is...
...A.J...
...He doesn't seem to realize that this is precisely Pynchon's concern too-his most heroic characters are those who resist behaving according to laws, who fight entropy (a term which Pynchon uses with far more accuracy and dash than -Gardner), and who struggle to retain as much conscious human will as they can...
...Positions like Gardner's are especially prone to be tiresomely didactic, a weakness which Gardner does his rhetorical best to obscure...
...Of this story he says: Everything is obscene, everything mocks the values and hopes of Christianity, everything is cruel, and nothing is funny or meant to be...
...Irving remains our most provocative revisionist...
...Some of the best fiction is narrated by one who must be scrutinized closely, either because the voice is too tactful to tell all (as in The Golden Bowl), or because the character is unreliable and reveals the truth unintentionally-e.g., Serenus Zeitblom in Mann's Doctor Faustus and Dr...
...Subtly restrained or untrustworthy voices talk circles around explicit, reified morality...
...Perhaps because practice is always faulty and Coover is an idealist, Coover angrily mocks the whole Christian way of thinking...
...He would smite the majority of contemporary writers because they menace these walls with inundation-from without and dry-rot from within...
...Though Bellow does not obelize everything his heroes say (for example, Charlie Citrine's musings on anthroposophy in Humboldt's Gift were meant to be taken seriously, without irony), much of what they say has invisible shudder quotes bracketing it...
...Burgess also gives his character taste in music akin to Gardner's because it was his avowed intention to upset people who subscribe to a Gardnerian view of art and morality...
...It is jejune of Gardner thus to take Bellow's narrators as unproblematic mouthpieces...
...P TAYLOR "Prelude to the brilliant, wilful and ingenious Hitler's War...
...Taking the narrator too literally because of his monolithic view of moral fiction is the occasion for more of Gardner's slips...
...As a reviewer in Commentary has shown, the narrator Daniel is unreliable in his superficial appraisals of Gyorgi Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci, making them sound like rather Whiggish DAVID IRVING THE HUAR PTH HITLER'S GERMANY 1933-1939 "The story of Hitler's path to war, reconstructed by 'a.researcher of unrivaled industry and success...
...to the pulsing, throbbing 6lan vital...
...Compare that with the befuddlements into which Henry James lures careless readers who are inattentive to the endlessly crafty narrator of The Golden Bowl and find Charlotte Stant and the Prince such good, engaging people...
...I suspect Gardner battens onto "authoritative" narrators because this reliability makes shoring up those walls much easier...
...But this begs many important questions about morality, not to mention morality and art considered together...
...The novels of P.G...
...He praises John Fowles' Daniel Martin for its "totally authentic, reliable narrator," and he lauds the "entirely trustworthy, authoritative voice that leads us through The Golden Bowl...
...Gardner wants to be able to accommodate this kind of subtlety, but his notion of that moral sense is so coarse that the narrator of The Golden Bowl is taken to be leading the reader by the hand...
...Gardner objects to aleatory music and "immoral" fiction because they both celebrate the determined, the entropic, and the unfree at the expense of what is truly human...
...Some of them carry on this fight in a very old-fashioned way ("oldfashioned" is another of Gardner's buzzwords...
...The Times (London) 16 pages of photographs " $14.95 dons instead of Marxists-a thinness which seems to be Fowles' own...
...But the pleasure lies in the audacity and brilliance of the reach, in the disparity of the elements brought into concord...
...BOOK REVIEW On Moral Fiction John Gardner / Basic Books / $8.95 Brian Thomas and wicked can be aesthetically right...
...Robert Coover's short story "A Pedestrian Accident" is one of the few instances in which Gardner bothers to discuss a work in detail, and therefore his argument is more specific and strong here than in most places in the book...
...It just isn't the case that morality is the ultimate criterion in fiction, a fact which Gardner acknowledges, but which makes hash of his theory...
...to life refreshingly plain...
...Art should be moral...
...It may be that on the day of judgment (or some comparable stage of existence), all the various values-beauty, truth, kindness, gentility, rectitude-will be brought into harmony at last...
...This is especially peevish coming from Gardner, who elsewhere in On Moral Fiction takes electronic music and "hip composers" to task for being faithless to "the immutable laws of musical gravity"--a musical aesthetic which Pynchon plays upon in Gravity 's Rainbow...
...Surely mocking Christianity has been a noble pastime in certain hands...
...for him a reliable narrator makes sanity straightforward and saying yea...
...but part of what Gardner says here is astute...
...Morality may not be the criterion for art so much as an enabling condition, something without which art would not exist...
...The cost of embodying values is indeed high, and "beautiful souls" like Coover who would leave values untainted by contact with life deserve a raspberry-a point which can be made without espousing Christianity...
...This comforting pose, which Gardner assumes with curmudgeonly relish, requires two shaky assumptions: that there are morally neutral, universally applicable standards of sanity, and that "life affirmation" is not a medley of vacuous buzz-words...
...it is a rookie of a reader who thinks that they are unproblematic yardsticks...
...It is in elucidating that relation where Gardner fails...
...It's after truth, which is not goodness...
...Gardner cannot make sense of this last sentence since he holds that truth and goodness overlap without parallax...
...It is the highbrowed cousin of the rube who thinks that "schlock" is a term of aesthetic dismissal, as if schlock could never be fuel for a great book's furnace...
...great art often uses the former but never the latter...
...In A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess shows us an evil, intelligent punk who loves rhetoric, and who is therefore able to read the Old Testament for its considerable pornographic value, for the sex and violence...
...All of their characters live trivial, footling lives and are obsessed with inane things...
...In short, the standard is aesthetic, not moral...
...Legend has it that Firbank died of a heart attack in his Rome hotel room because he refused to call for help...the wallpaper was too dreadful to permit receiving visitors...
...most artists today are immoral...
...This demands more from readers, forces them to be alert for traps, and keeps THE PANAMA CANAL CONTROVERSY U.S...
...And since when are Rilke, Wagner, and polymer chemistry "schlock...
...He has lost none of his skill in delivering the cautionary punch where he knows it will hurt most...
...I would hate to lose their books because they are "immoral...
...Consider the following list of cases which Gardner's theory cannot handle: Yvor Winters on Henry James: "There is a moral sense, a sense of decency which is precarious, which may become confused and hysterical in a crisis, which may be enriched and cultivated through association with certain environments-and such association can be carried so far as to extinguish the moral sense...
...Charles Kinbote in Nabokov's Pale Fire...
...With even less justice Pynchon is captiously branded a nihilist who "carelessly praises the schlock of the past...
...When an artwork is great enough to encompass aesthetic value and morality broadly construed, we are braced...
...Gardner is too intelligent and too widely read to fall into such a crude error...
...BOOK REVIEW On Mortal Fiction John Gardner/Basic Books/$8.95 Brian Thomas With the air of an ignored righteous one imparting devastating truths, John Gardner says that Art "builds walls against life's levelling forces," and is "in sworn opposition to chaos...
...Wodehouse and Ronald Firbank have next to nothing to do with the fallen world in which we live...
...Yet isn't there something deeply satisfying in the passionate ingenuity and hilarity of their language...
...However, these are not immediately applicable as standards to judge fiction...
...But that is an altogether different cauldron of octopus...
...According to Gardner, great art is "fundamentally sane" and life-affirming, not lifedenying, whereas today's scribblers court unreason and say nay...
...Most of those who fizz with indignation about "immorality" in art do not want to acknowledge that what is dirty and crazy Brian Thomas is a writer living in Cincinnati...
...He appeals to the sense one has that, however silly they are, lazy smug readers who dismiss books because they are depressing or because virtue is not rewarded with a house in the suburbs come closer to the truth than aesthetes who deny any relation between art and morality at all...
...And who would deny that impoverishment, brutalization, and the flattening of value that accompanies depression are bad...
...In Bellow such slips of mask are common...
...But short of that day conflicts will abound, and to ignore them is to miss out on our best writers...
...Abundance, wealth spiritual and material, and expansive well-being-who would spurn these...
...They do not take their pact against dissolution and decay seriously enough...
...Gardner is even more wrong-headed in his swipes at John Barth and Thomas Pynchon...
...This is false...
...but in the ensuing blur he does not notice the dialectical sport that Bellow has with politics in his fictional world...
Vol. 12 • January 1979 • No. 1
