Word: gardners
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...METAPHOR which Gardner places like a frame around his book acts in this way. On the first page he tells a story from Norse myth: Thor, Woden and the gods must fight off the trolls, the forces of chaos, but the only weapon remaining to them is Thor's hammer. For us, Gardner says, that hammer is art. Writers must take it up and strike, before the Gotterdammerung. The tale acts as a light, disarming way to begin a book with such a solemn title. But from the first pages forward Gardner relies on the logical force of this tale...
...Gardner poses the questions well enough. Though he uses the word sparingly, he diagones the contemporary sickness of the arts as decadence. Authors strive for texture, not content; they create characters to be tinkered with, not to be understood; their books foster self-hatred. Gardner's criticism of his colleagues is the most valuable part of On Moral Fiction. He deftly shows what authors like Vonnegut and Heller lack, entertaining as they are. We may be unable to swallow in the abstract the statement that the missing quality is "love," or "morality"; but leaving aside these culturally ambiguous, exhausted words...
...Moral Fiction is packed with observations, with judgements that make sense. Yet we leave it dissatisfied, because Gardner's whole ethical approach raises questions he knows about but shyly avoids. He assumes from the very start that artists must save civilization, and that they can save civilization. The tired old critical dilemma of whether society shapes the artist or vice versa is central to Gardner's argument, and though he may be trying to spare his readers the boredom of another rehashing, Gardner's failure to take a consistent stand on the question dooms his position from the start...
...ignore the equivocation at the end, Gardner has taken a definite position here. But it stands unsupported, vulnerable to attacks from every angle. Can "moral art" solve economic problems? Can it solve international problems? Can it counteract the sickness in society that derives not from sick art but from sick institutions? The answers are not necessarily "no," but Gardner never bothers to give us arguments otherwise...
THROUGH WHAT he says in these essays Gardner is identifying himself with a long tradition of critics like Matthew Arnold who tried to diagnose the ills of their societies. And Gardner's calls for "Beauty, Truth and Goodness" are not far removed from Arnold's famous celebration of "sweetness and light." But Gardner lacks the formal power, the rhetorical skill which Arnold employed to make the abstract palatable and comprehensible. Gardner's book is structureless. The divisions between chapters are arbitrary, and just about the only overall element of the book that seems planned is the appearance of Thor...