Writer of Moral Fiction & Essays student of human Nature
See below for insights on Moral Fiction
Thoughts on Moral Fiction
Quotes from John Gardner, On Moral Fiction
Art discovers, generation by generation, what is necessary to humanness.
..art is essentially and primary moral - that is, life-giving - moral in its process of creation and moral in what it says.
… art … is good only when it has a clear positive moral effect, presenting valid models for imitation, eternal verities worth keeping in mind, and a benevolent vision of the possible which can inspire and incite human beings toward virtue, toward life affirmation as opposed to destruction and indifference.
… morality means nothing more than doing what is unselfish, helpful, kind, and noble-hearted, and doing it with a reasonable expectation that in the long run as well as the short we won’t be sorry for what we have done, whether or not it was against some petty human law.
Insofar as literature is a telling of new stories, literature has been “exhausted” for centuries; but insofar as literature tells archetypal stories in an attempt to understand once more their truth—transfer their wisdom for another generation…
