On Moral Fiction

I downloaded this as an audiobook for my long drive on my way to an equally long hike. I liked the Art of Fiction, so I was excited to dive in. So far so good!

The road cuts through the pine trees and I start to hear things that don't sound quite right. (Quotes are from memory and may not be exactly accurate for that reason.)

“like a fat woman holding a plate of hamburgers”

well, I think, that's just an unfortunate phrase. Surely he cares about other people, people who include fat women.

“like the disgusting XYY”

Oh, he appears to be talking about intersex people and using them as an example of things gone very wrong. That's pretty gross.

“(bad) stories about blacks and women”

I was beginning to suspect that Gardner would dislike a story just because he, presumably a white man, might be the villain. It didn't sound like he had any concept that he might not “get” these stories enough to appreciate them.

I kept listening for a bit but Gardner comes across as a hateful, unvirtuous person. I found I did not want to hear any of his ideas about morality, because he seemed to be awful. I felt sorry for his students (the ones who weren't white men), who must have been getting the same garbage in their ears day after day.

I had noticed him being judgmental in The Art of Fiction but thought of it then as a positive – how refreshing to be clear and direct and to know your own thoughts. But now I can see that was the tip of the iceberg, and the hateful thoughts were swirling underneath.

Lots to think about.

This book is a bit scattered, and seems incomplete, like no one really bothered to edit it. Much of it is the author's attempt to take down the fiction of his day, but only by making very broad generalizations about another author's entire oeuvre.

The crux of his argument is that art should be moral. And by this he means, “Moral art in its highest form holds up models of virtue, ... heroic models like Homer's Achilles.” Using Achilles as a model of morality or virtue seems to miss much of the point of the Iliad.

But, Gardner does make some good points. The most important thing I took from him is, “without real and deep love for his “subjects” (the people he writes about and, by extension, all human beings)—no artist can summon the will to make true art; he will be satisfied, instead, with clever language or with cynical jokes and too easy, dire solutions like those common in contemporary fiction.”