John Gardner: On Moral Fiction

John Champlin Gardner Jr. was an American novelist, essayist, literary critic, and university professor, who wrote the popular 1971 novel Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf myth from the monster's point of view. Perhaps more importantly, he wrote a collection of essays, On Moral Fiction, published in 1978 in which the author attacked what he saw as contemporary literature's lack of moral conscience.

When  I first read On Moral Fiction back in my college days, I was stunned by Gardner’s willingness to judge his literary peers, including such famous and well-established public figures as Saul Bellow, John Updike, John Barth, etc., to mention just a few. 

As far back as the early 1970’s I had begun to notice a disturbing trend among many contemporary writers, who published regularly in such prestigious literary journals as The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, as well as the university quarterlies. Creative fiction was becoming flagrantly raunchy, bordering on pornographic. The supercilious term, ‘intelligent erotica’, was frequently used to give credence to the bogus fad. And yet, this smarmy  terminology did nothing to mask the insipid quality of many of the stories, which were sadly lacking in meaningful plots as well as aesthetic value. Establishment magazines were publishing third-rate dreck and passing it off as stylish literature. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

    According to Gardner, morality is not an arbitrary  social 

construct, but an eternal truth, taking on different forms 

but not essentially changing through the ages. He says 

that moral fiction "attempts to test human values, not for 

the purpose of preaching or peddling a particular ideology, 

but in a truly honest and open-minded effort to find out 

which best promotes human fulfillment."

    Leo Tolstoy, among others, espouses similar views in his

essay What is Art?, and Gardner draws upon Tolstoy in his

 argument. (Wikipedia)

When Gardner published On Moral Fiction, the literary community went berserk, vilifying him as a narrow-minded prude. What took place amounted to character assasination, modern-day cancel culture. Many of the writers Gardner exposed had achieved celebrity status and considerable wealth. The general consensus was that nobody had the right to question intelligentsia’s artistic standards. So here we are in 2026 asking the troubling question: Does anyone have the right to call a writer to task for not taking a moral stand, imbuing his prose with ethical implication and, if not, has artistic ‘hedonism’ now become the new normal? 

I distinctly remember a particular scene that cropped up near the beginning of one of Saul Bellow’s later novels, where an elderly man was experiencing erotic fantasies about a young girl on a bus. When I first read the description, I didn’t know what to make of it, since the young girl did not figure prominently in the plot. Much later, after reading On Moral Fiction, I realized that the scene was in poor taste and thrown into the mix for no other plausible purpose other than to titillate the reader. More importantly, the author never bothered taking either a  philosophical or ethical stand on the issue.

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble

activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is

an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor

good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold

water.

                            J. Gardner

“We are rich in schools which speak of how art 'works' 

and avoid the whole subject of what work it ought to do.”

                                                                                   J. Gardner

“Structuralists, formalists, linguistic philosophers who tell us 

that works of art are like trees - simply objects for perception - 

all avoid on principle the humanistic questions: who will this 

work of art help? what baby is it squashing? The business of 

criticism has become definition, morality reduced to the 

positivist ideal of clarity. The trouble is that clarity on the 

wrong subject can be dangerously misleading, as when we 

define Count Fosco's crocodile as a smiling animal weighing 

four hundred pounds.”

                               J. Gardner

Anton Chekhov never needed to resort to salacious sex to write a decent short story. Neither did George Elliot, William Saroyan, Willa Cather, Jane Austin, Guy deMaupassant or Leo Tolstoy. With his collection of essays, On Moral Fiction, John Gardner told the literary community what he thought the purpose of literature ought to be. Judging by where things stand today, it would appear that very few writers, especially among academia, are listening.