On Moral Fiction
Book author: John Champlin Gardner
đź•‘ 6 minute read || Nov 24, 2024 || by Daniel Norther
9/10
Highly recommend this to anyone who wants to write good books, but be warned that the wording is very complex compared to what we see nowadays.
This is a book from 1978. The format is obsolete, but the messages have survived the test of time.
Here’s a quote. If you like it, then you’ll learn from this book:
“True art’s divine madness is shot through with love: love of the good, a love proved not by some airy and abstract high-mindedness but by active celebration of whatever good or trace of good can be found by a quick and compassionate eye in this always corrupt and corruptible but god-freighted world. To return one last time to the image of Thor’s hammer with which I launched all this, it strikes outward at the trolls, or inward when the trolls have made incursions, not blindly in all directions. It smashes to construct. Most artists will no doubt claim they do just that, and most critic’s will no doubt claim that they praise only artists who, in one way or another, fight for the good. Some artists and critics tell the truth; some lie. The business of civilization is to pay attention, remembering what is central, remembering that we live or die by the artist’s vision, sane or cracked.”
Let me summarize some of the book for you:
Art is “a way of thinking.” Art is the act of giving light. The Norse god Thor would ride around the earth and beat back the darkness with his storm hammer, Mjolnir. Art is Mjolnir and Mjolnir is art. Art is the storm hammer that pushes back the unknown and makes it known. In the space between light and dark, order and chaos, good and evil, we have art. Art is only art when it is illuminating something, or pushing back the darkness. The artist shines light into the unknown, and reveals what is there, and then everyone else can work in the space that has been revealed. Sometimes this means the artist must shine a light on evil, and then we have to fight the evil that has been found. Sometimes this means the artist shines a light on ignorance, and then society deals with the ignorance. Art is the tip of the spear. Art is the face (the hitting part) of the hammer.
Gardner says that the real artists are the ones who use art as “a way of thinking.” Not a way of preaching. Not a way of informing. Not a way of predicting, or making noise, or trying to be pretty. Art is a way of thinking. Real artists write about things that they do not understand, hoping that they will understand it. While the artist doesn’t understand exactly what they’re doing, they use their moral intuition to guide them through the unknown. Intuitions are real things, and a righteous intuition is a tool we can develop through art.
This isn’t about religion. This is not about living a good life so we can go to heaven. This is about living a good life, and doing what’s right, for its own sake. Gardner’s book is selfless.
Gardner calls false artists “trolls”. A “troll” is someone like Andy Warhol, who never contributed anything to art, even though some people called Warhol a genius artist. He wasn’t. He was a troll. Gardner says, “If art destroys good, mistaking it for evil, then that art is false, an error; it requires denunciation. This, I have claimed, is what true art is about—preservation of the world of gods and men. True criticism praises true art for what it does—praises as plainly and comprehensively as possible—and denounces false art for its failure to do art’s proper work. No easy task, the task of the critic, since the trolls are masters of disguise.”
And then Gardner says this: “Bad art is always basically creepy; that is its first and most obvious identifying sign.” Then he talks about what makes it creepy, how to identify it, etc. He knows the difference between something that is creepy for a purpose and something that is pointlessly creepy. Nazis are creepy, but they can be used as narrative tools to think about the nature of evil. Vampires are creepy, but they can serve a purpose as we use them to think about something. True art is “a way of thinking.” This is a part of knowing what our moral intuitions are telling us, what our consciences are saying.
I’m paraphrasing, but Gardner basically says this: The true artist starts their artistic journey by asking, “What is true?” The false artist starts their artistic journey by asking, “What is mine?”
Gardner talks about the then-current state of fiction publishing. 1978 was a year during the postmodernist surge, where postmodernist nihilists were spreading their nihilism far and wide. Nihilism is a disgusting illness. Gardner explains why nihilism is dumb. He discusses philosophers like Sartre, who had bad philosophies. There is a point where Gardner says that he will talk more about Sartre in a later section, but he never got around to it. We need to forgive Gardner for making small writing errors like that, given how much work Gardner was doing for his students. John Gardner worked for a living, and he earned every penny he ever made. We know this because his students loved him. Some even loved him too much.
Gardner talks about some authors from the 1970s. I’m not familiar with any of them. I didn’t know who he was talking about. He denounces some of those writers, saying that they are false artists who aren’t using art correctly. To some, this may sound high and mighty. To me, it sounds very mighty indeed. Gardner was a good man.
Gardner knew that a storyteller’s job is to serve the public. Storytellers are public servants, doing a public service, for the common good. If a storyteller isn’t serving goodness, then they’re not doing their job and they’re not making art.
Okay I’m done summarizing. I didn’t summarize all of it, but those are some things I learned.
Why doesn’t this book get a 10/10?
Firstly, it’s written too complexly. The sentences are long and difficult for most English-speakers to read. It’s written by a smart man for a smart audience, but Gardner assumes that the audience is better at reading than it actually is. You need a very high reading comprehension level to understand all of it. It’s as thick as honey, and very sweet, but it’s too damn thick. George Orwell should have helped Gardner write this, to make the language simpler but equally effective. The language is so thick that I can’t think of many people I would recommend this to. I would rather have an artificial intelligence summarize this for me. In the next few years, AI will be smart enough to effectively summarize books like this.
Another reason why this book doesn’t get 10 out of 10 is because it fails to say enough. Gardner failed to make a perfect commentary of contemporary art because he didn’t know what was coming. Even a guy as smart as John Gardner couldn’t have known that such a huge wave of ugly false art was heading our way. For generations, we will be fighting lazy fake art.
“On Moral Fiction” is preachy for a reason, and it should have preached more. This book isn’t art, and it knows it. True art isn’t preaching, but thinking. This book is an ode to good art and a critique of false art. False art was, and is still, infecting the world, now more than ever. False art is causing unnecessary suffering. Too many people have become hopeless nihilists, and any art that fails to help the world needs to be revealed for what it is: trash with a lower-case “t”. Critics are failing the public. As an example, there was a horrible movie that came out in 2017 called “Star Wars: The Last Jedi”. It was very bad. It was false art. It failed the audience. It wasn’t morally ugly, but it was morally lacking. Too many critics sucked its dick and said it was very good. That’s just one example. There are thousands more. Critics have lost their way. Politicians have lost their way. But the people will never lose their way. The sun will always rise.
This isn’t a doomsday book. This is a moral lesson.
John Gardner was born in 1933. He didn’t have the internet. That’s why his writing advice is locked away in a hopelessly outdated book format. No one gets their writing advice from books anymore. Videos, audiobooks, videos, and also videos, that’s the way to go in the modern world. Did I mention videos? Gardner WOULD have made Youtube videos if he hadn’t died in a motorcycle accident before he was even 50 years old. We have some documentaries and interview videos with him, and he’s clearly a genius.
Gardner was one of the smartest fiction teachers ever -- the smartest I’ve ever read -- and he cared more about his students than he cared about himself. That’s why he married one of his students -- wait what? Oh. Well. Probably shouldn’t have done that lmao.
