Moral Fiction. Seriously.

I once considered titled my blog Snob Appeal, but in the end I worried the moniker didn't fit. Yes, I was a snob, but could I really claim to have an appeal? Probably not. But I'm particularly sensitive to snobbery. Not that I take umbrage; I'm more of a connoisseur. Mary Gordon's talk at the Calvin Festival was very fine in this regard, because she kept addressing her audience as "people who appreciate serious fiction," and contrasting our tastes with those of fundamentalists of every stripe.

The funny thing? This is the text of the article Gordon read, originally published in The Atlantic. I remember reading it -- and appreciating it. The second time around, I had my doubts -- not so much about the premise as the subtext.

The interesting thing about this distinction was that it arrived in a lecture that took John Gardner to task for stumping on behalf of "moral" fiction. Using the language of morality to describe something that is, after all, a matter of taste, is a project fraught with difficulty. Better to just admit, I like some things and not others, but it isn't a moral issue. Now I like Gardner's book On Moral Fiction, but I'm inclined to agree with Gordon. Aesthetic discussions, when freighted with the heady language of right and wrong, often seem to veer off the tracks. Statements are made that can hardly be supported by the facts, or at least by any quantifiable measure.

And yet, I can't help feeling there should be a kind of moral force behind taste, and it's an instinct many people seem to share. Gordon herself does, if I'm not mistaken, and that's where this distinction between the kind of serious fiction "we" like and the other stuff preferred by fundamentalists comes in. Isn't there a judgment in all that? During the talk, she evoked the late 1970s when Gardner wrote, a time of innocence apparently, since (as Gordon summarized) Jimmy Carter was president, no one had ever heard of a fatwa, and there was no such thing as Christian fiction. I can't speak to the era. I was looking forward to turning ten and bore a strong grudge against Carter for pre-empting Battlestar Galactica to give a speech of some sort (when I'd expressly pretended to be sick and thus get out of going to evening church). In school the following week, when the other kids were drawing unicorns and bikes, I did a mural featuring the future Habitat for Humanity ambassador restrained atop a mountain peak in something akin to Dante's Inferno, forced to watch re-runs of the shows he'd interrupted on a million little screens suspended overhead. Overkill? Perhaps, but even then I was confusing the aesthetic and moral, believing punishment in the afterlife was a fit reward for breaking in on science fiction programming.

But then, I was a fundamentalist.

What I wonder, though, is whether the judgment behind terms like moral and serious are really so different after all. In a post-moral age, perhaps seriousness is the only way we have of distinguishing ourselves. Like kids comparing favorite bands, the only way we can establish our betterness is to assert our tastes.

Comments

[Julana]

Did you hear Yann Martel's presentation about Life of Pi? I haven't yet read the book, but it apparently gives the reader a choice between two stories at the end. The more reasonable story contains cruelty. His aim is to tempt the reader to choose the less reasonable, but kinder, alternative.
Some kind of faith similicrum?

He's not dealing with the same issue you are, exactly, but I think the two play off each other in an interesting way.