The Avenues of Mundane Salvation: Time and Change in the Fiction of John Gardner

Abstract

INCE the publication of John Gardner's treatise On Moral Fiction 3 (1978), it has become virtually impossible to offer criticism of his work without some recourse to both his general thesis that art seeks that which is good-i.e., that which nurtures and affirms life rather than that which debases and destroys-and his specific definition of a book as that, for its time, is wise, sane, and magical, one that clarifies life and tends to improve it.1 Indeed, the temptation is strong now to judge Gardner's fiction at least in part according to how it measures up to his standards. A case in point is Robert Harris' review of Gardner's last novel, Mickelsson's Ghosts (I982). In a startlingly wrongheaded misappraisal, Harris accuses Gardner of almost every sin a writer can commit, from padding and plain bad writing to philosophical dilletantism and wallowing in a moral morass of his own making, and suggests that the novel is a failure even when judged by the author's own criteria.2 While it would be a mistake to operate solely within the system of a writer's own critical principles, given Gardner's insistence that good fiction is morally instructive (through induction, not didacticism) it may reasonably be expected that his fiction inculcates some moral message. Such is certainly the case, as several recent studies have shown.! What has emerged from the criticism thus far is a