Thinking About On Moral Fiction

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Saturday, April 16, 2005
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Next week, we're hosting a conversation about John Gardner's On Moral Fiction at Strange Land Books. In preparation, I've been copying some notes from the book. Gardner argues that true art is moral. He traces the history of his viewpoint through two threads: the religious (as represented by Tolstoy, Homer and Dante) and the Romantic. Gardner's idea of morality is not Christian, though the two share some common ground:

Let us say for the moment that morality means nothing more than doing what is unselfish, helpful, kind, and noble-hearted, and doing it with at least a reasonable expectation that in the long run as well as the short we won't be sorry for what we've done, whether or not it was against some petty human law. Moral action is action which affirms life.

We could argue over the basis of this morality -- Why is it moral to affirm life? To be unselfish? But let's assume, as Gardner does, that there is a basis for morality apart from the assumption of God's existence. Because "morality" is a term freighted with negative connotations today -- as if there were a silent false or so-called prefixed to the word -- Gardner attempts to distinguish between good and bad concepts of what is moral:

The true artist is the one who -- directly assisted by the techniques of his art, his art's mechanisms for helping him see clearly -- can distinguish between conventional morality and that morality which tends to work for all people throughout the ages.

I'm not at all comfortable with the idea that morality is determined by observing what "works" for most people at most times. As a Christian, I would be more comfortable with the orientation of Dante, which Gardner summarizes earlier in the book. I'm intrigued, though, by the reference to "art's mechanism" for seeing things clearly. Throughout the book, Gardner emphasizes the utility of process as a way of finding truth in fiction:

Fiction goes after understanding by capturing, through imitation, "the ineluctable modality of the world" -- that is, characters who subtly embody values and who test them, with clear but inexpressible results, in action.

So the act of creating characters, aligning them with values, and then testing those values by placing characters in conflict serves to clarify the artist's vision. This is how he "discovers" what is right and wrong -- or at least, how he earns his argument in favor of his vision of the world, so that it is not merely an assertion.

To me, this rings true, and it has wider implications: if we think of history primarily as a story -- in the case of Christians, a redemptive one -- then it is easy to see how "going through the motions" of existence earns the story argument in a way that mere assertion would not, in spite of the fact that the Author has the power to make things so by assertion alone. I'm slipping into theology here -- it's hard not to -- but when people object to the idea of God's foreordination of all things, objecting that if God is really that much in control, then there is no point in our being here, I think of the difference between logical argument and story. The story isn't told through summary or through a concise description of its themes. It isn't real -- hasn't happened -- until it plays itself out. Gardner makes a crack at one point about "the God of Calvinists, who loves only his ideas." But of course, in Ephesians 1, we read "...in love he predestined us...," which suggests an Author who, like Gardner's moral artist, loves his characters and cares deeply about what happens to them.

The connection between God and the artist becomes particularly clear to me in Gardner's passage about the importance of love to art:

In art, morality and love are inextricably bound: we affirm what is good -- for the characters in particular and for humanity in general -- because we care. The artist who has no strong feelings about his characters--the artist who can feel passionate only about his words or ideas -- has no urgent reason to think hard about the characters' problems, the "themes" in his fiction. He imitates human gesture in the movements of his puppets, but he does not worry as a father worries about the behavior of his son; and the result is a fictional universe one would not want one's loved ones forced to inhabit.

The first part of the description sounds like the God of Scripture to me. The second part sounds a lot like the straw man Gardner labels "the God of the Calvinists." What I find interesting is that Gardner speaks in terms of love and morality about characters the artist has made up, whose actions are entirely controlled by their creator. This control only becomes puppetry to him when the creator does not love his characters. The God of the Calvinists -- the Triune, loving God of Scripture -- loves his creatures more profoundly than we can imagine.

On Moral Fiction is worth reading. My copy is dog-earred, underlined and annotated. I find a lot to agree with and a lot to take exception to as well. Books like this help to shape an artist's aesthetic -- in my case, by challenging it. I'm looking forward to the upcoming discussion.