Word: gardners
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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...
...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...