I made the mistake of trying to read New York Echoes, a short story collection by Warren Adler coming out in February. I say trying because I couldn’t make it through. Aside from the pressing desire to cut the character’s dialogue in half and compress the narration, I was most put off by the morality of the stories, more specifically the lack of it. In the first story, the moral appears to be that you shouldn’t act altruistically towards your neighbors because they will most likely take advantage of you. In the second, the reader is expected to feel satisfied by the act of petty revenge that wraps up the story. And the third advocates divorce as a simple and painless option when haunted by the smell of 9/11.
These stories, and the others I made it through, reminded me of how much I value the moral in fiction, how essential it is that fiction should somehow be profoundly moral. Because of this collection, I revisited John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction, a seminal work that attempts an overarching vision of what literature should be. Of course, his view of what “moral” entails is far broader than the initial connotations associated with the word. It involves a fiction eschewing trivialism and well-crafted fluff, and promoting life-giving actions. I’ll leave you with two quotes from John Gardner’s book that help illustrate, however briefly, the essence of moral fiction:
The traditional view is that true art is moral: it seeks to improve life, not debase it. It seeks to hold off, at least for a while, the twilight of the gods and us. I do not deny that art, like criticism, may legitimately celebrate the trifling. It may joke, or mock, or while away the time. But trivial art has no meaning or value except in the shadow of more serious art, the kind of art that beats back the monsters.
[Fiction] 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 or indifference.
2 comments
Do you think you could expand a little on what makes Adler’s fiction “lack morality”?Your very brief accounts of the three stories don’t really indicate why you reached the conclusion you did. Is it possible other readers might read the same stories and interpret them differently?
My summary/judgment was incredibly brief, yes, in the three sentences at the end of the first paragraph. You ask whether it might be possible that other readers might read the same stories and interpret them differently – well, of course. I expect that they might, and they usually do. So here are my qualifications on the three stories.
While it might be possible to wrangle a moral lesson out of the first story–that overly good intentions are taken advantage of, therefore guard yourself while performing good deeds–the characters that share the protagonists apartment building are too uniformly nasty and the lesson at the end too neatly wrapped up (she’s going to resist extending herself towards others now–the exact opposite, rather than any measured position) to make the “lesson” work. Perhaps it’s too didactic, pointing at a moral of excess, rather than the Aristotelian principle of the moral being between two extremes, and that is what repulses me.
The second story involves a park bench and a woman forced to listen to a terrible 2nd woman’s phone call. At the end, the 1st woman calls and cancels the party reserved by the 2nd. And that’s that. Revenge–petty, sniveling revenge, at that–is supposed to make the reader feel good, to catalyze catharsis. There is no sense of disapproval of this act of revenge, only a muted sense of celebration at the little trick, the surprise turn. But for me, I resisted the feeling the story imposed because I was offended someone would lift that up as an act to be emulated. Unless you’re advocating a Nietzschean concept of morality as equivalent or reducible to strength, I don’t see how you could call the story moral.
I’m well aware of the enormous space allowed by the criteria set forth under the umbrella of “moral” in “On Moral Fiction,” and also know that Gardner’s primary target was not fiction of this type but rather many types of postmodern fiction, yet I still think that the stories that I read in New York Echoes failed to offer redeemable storylines.
Hope that’s more specific. And now I’ve written all this, I wish I’d written it the first time. Although really, it’s still too brief. You got me on length, Dan, I admit. But thanks for making me get a tiny bit more specific.