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A WORLD OF ORDER AND LIGHT: A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION TO THE FICTION OF JOHN GARDNER
Abstract
The fiction of John Gardner has come to represent a return to certain classical and traditional aesthetic principles. As he has explained in his principal critical work, On Moral Fiction, the artist has a responsibility to discover--as all of the artists of "the great tradition" have discovered--the inherent morality and orderliness of the world and the possibility of a humane existence for mankind. Art is moral to the extent that it affirms these enduring human values. As this study attempts to show, in his own work Gardner has displayed an astounding fidelity to this belief, creating a universe that ultimately declares its order and its reason and its good faith in the workings of the human community. In essence, Gardner works, thinks, and creates from an "emotional metaphysic" that takes its impulses more from the heart than from the head. While he does not scorn the ability of reason to bring man to the eventual truths, Gardner does maintain a stringent confidence in intuition, in hunch, in a "felt" logic that traditionally has kept mankind moral and sane and life-affirming. His characters very often "feel" something to be right or just, though they cannot explain why it is right or just. The "hero" is the individual who acts upon this feeling, this hunch, despite his doubts or anxieties or the existential attraction of the abyss. The hero--and the artist--brings light and order to man and his world. This aesthetic and intellectual moralism has brought Gardner to the fore of a neo-humanistic movement now afoot in the contemporary arts. It is a movement that seeks, through a return to realism and form and human expression, to relocate man at the center of his universe. The trend toward art as parody and the intense concentration upon "art about art"--all of the varieties of "meta-art"--is being supplanted by an art that is less self-conscious and more belief-conscious. And the dominant belief is one that stresses man's ability to survive amidst the occasional grief and chaos and blackness that rack his universe. What John Gardner so consistently does is enforce that belief with a fiction that, by process and development, allows the artist, character, and reader to discover their private capacity for grandness: he makes of each a hero, a bringer of hope and enlightenment and of reliable good sense.
Subject Area
American literature
Recommended Citation
MORRIS, GREGORY LYNN, "A WORLD OF ORDER AND LIGHT: A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION TO THE FICTION OF JOHN GARDNER" (1981). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8118175.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8118175