Word: lovelies
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...takes guts today to write about the old virtues; Gardner obviously knows this himself. Every time he introduces one of the hallowed concepts he cherishes, he selfconsciously mentions how embarassed he is to be talking about "love," or "morality." Yet talk about them he does, and usually without giving us concrete definitions of what he means by them...
Gardner tries hard; he struggles every now and then to pin down exactly what he means by one of these terms--"love," for example...
...Love" is of course another of those embarrassing words, perhaps a word more embarrassing even than "morality"... It has, nonetheless, a firm, hard-headed sense that names the single quality without which true art cannot exist... We read or listen to or look at works of art in the hope of experiencing our highest, most selfless emotion, either to reach a sublime communication with the maker of the work, sharing his affirmations as common lovers do, or to find, in works of literature, characters we love as we do real people...
Admirable, but not convincing. Here Gardner side-steps the logical problem, defining love in terms of art and then repeating the same thing backwards. More often he resorts to metaphor. His metaphors are quirky, personal, often drawn from the Northeastern countryside of his youth or the Greek and Anglo-Saxon myths of his beloved Homer and Beowulf. They're catchy, too; but usually in On Moral Fiction Gardner presents us with a serious question, flings a captivating metaphor at us, and hurries away to some other problem before we have time to ask for answers...
...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 floating like smoke-screens between us and Gardner's criticisms, he makes sense...