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In Thor's Defense:

The On Moral Fiction Debate Reclarified

Part One: The Controversy

by Sandy Hiortdahl

  

    Since John  Gardner's publication of On Moral Fiction, there has been a controversy over whether fiction should be accountable for having a function in society; indeed whether it has a "function" at all, properly speaking. The secondary argument (though in the case of the On Moral Fiction controversy this has very much become the primary argument) is whether or not anyone should be allowed to suggest this accountability, let alone defend its purposes in society, or  criticize those who disavow it.

    The very word 'moral' has become charged with connotations of political control and religious right wing affiliation. Gardner anticipated this, of course. He spends the first part of the work discussing his use of the word 'moral.' Few seem to have read that section--or if they have, prefer to ignore it. This seeming indifference to the thesis of On Moral Fiction has resulted in a plethora of misinterpretation,. misrepresentation, and, plainly  speaking--fear--of the text.

    My own experience, in seeking to discuss On Moral Fiction with published writers and literary scholars, is that many think of John Gardner as a "bad man" who wrote a "bad book." They haven't, of course, actually read the book. I've been  warned away" from defending the treatise on the grounds that these days it's a very politically incorrect choice of cause to champion. More recently, even Gardner scholars themselves have expressed the desire to let On Moral Fiction die a quiet death so that the tensions it aroused might also drift into obscurity.

    I firmly believe that this attitude stems from the same basic fears of political incorrectness that Gardner was fighting against twenty years ago. I happen to believe his fight. was worthwhile-- even necessary-- to the evolution of American fiction as it approaches the next century. It is one thing to suggest that  Gardner's treatise has been battled on logical grounds, that it should be relegated to obscurity because it has been found unimportant or unsound. This is not so.

    Because of political issues, few have read the book well enough to talk of its thesis, let alone the implications of that thesis. The main focus to the attacks (when in fact there is a focus to them) is the caustic quality of  Gardner's evaluations of his fellow writers. Let there be no mistake about this: many of them were caustic evaluations, some of them without solid grounding, some (as admitted by Gardner later) wrong.. to one degree or another. Having established that, let me suggest that any treatise that seeks to comment on art currently being produced will, to some extent, miss the importance or immediacy of (some of) that art to the society  existent. Further, none of this has much of anything to do with the relevancy of the aesthetic proposals of On Moral Fiction.

    I believe that the intention of On Moral Fiction was to realign fiction with the basic tenants of storytelling throughout history-- i.e., evaluations of human nature in a form that is effective because it becomes part of the reader/ listener's emotional experience. Gardner thesis can hardly be missed, so those who claim not to see one have clearly not been paying attention. From page four, "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 awhile, the twilight of the gods and us." (4,  OMF) Again, later:

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        True art, by specific technical means now commonly forgotten, clarifies life, establishes           models of human action,, casts nets toward the future, carefully judges our right and wrong          directions, celebrates and mourns. It does not rant. It does not sneer or giggle in the face of          death,, it invents prayers and weapons. It designs visions worth trying to make fact. It does          not whimper or cower or throw up its hands and bat its lashes. It does not make hope             contingent on acceptance of some religious theory. >It strikes like lightning or is lightning;           whichever. (100)

    Gardner's "traditional" view was primarily an  argument directed against   postmodernism,' a term that has acquired standard usage in the twenty years since On Moral Fiction was published. According to the Merriam-Webster's  Encyclopedia of Literature,  postmodernism is a "...reaction against the modern concept of an ordered view of the world, and therefore against the form and meaning of texts" (899). Although this tells us "what it isn't" more than "what it is," it is still a significant contrast to  Gardner's beliefs. The scholar Jeff Henderson, in his preface to John Gardner: A Study of the Short Fiction puts it especially well:

In  Gardner's case it is also true that he was dead serious about the writing of fiction; he believed, and frequently said, that it is the purpose and function of art (fiction) to clarify and improve life. His fiction therefore seeks to discover and inculcate values and beliefs that serve those ends, not didactically (he abhorred didactic fiction) but inductively, by dramatizing in plot and character the processes that lead to discovery.  (x)

The  postmodernist is fundamentally opposed to this concept. If no underpinning of morals exists, one can't discover it.

    This is basically a debate on the existence of a priori values-- one might call it a debate on the existence of "God"--whether or not exists beyond ourselves to be discovered. Yet for the most part,  postmodernists refuse to enter that discussion, presumably because it has its own set of ordered precepts. Rather than the bold, existentialist statement that would be "anti moral fiction": "this is it, what you see around you is all there is, God is dead," their attitude seems to be that it probably doesn't  matter whether an underpinning exists. Taking this view that "it doesn't matter.," they remove themselves from the philosophical debate.

    Gardner was saying in On Moral Fiction that it does matter, quite a bit, what the current writers being touted as the best of their generation say; that it matters because their attitude changes the current views on fiction but, more importantly., changes how people view their lives, and, possibly, how they live their lives. If moral fiction provides aesthetic sustenance in defense of the  world's chaos, then  postmodernism, by its definition, is on the side of chaos. The apathetic view that it doesn't matter enough to discuss is in itself a choice.

    Since the above argument is not especially new-- order versus chaos in respect to the function of art in society-- one might ask what is different about the argument now, and what specifically is different about On Moral Fiction that has caused such exclusion of the book, such a rabid reaction. The literary community clearly feels threatened by the concepts of On Moral Fiction, but why? Again, Gardner presupposes the arguments. Foremost is the idea that morality, being a judgment on action, hurts free expression and is therefore anti-democratic. I think that the distinction to be made here is that "being moral" or simply "believing in morality" does no harm to democracy: that democracy is in and of itself a moral system (or at least strives to be) and that this is very different from legislating moral codes.

    New to this debate is that within the last century the idea of suggesting "order" has seemed dangerous. Therefore in ways subtle and not so subtle, social systems such as education and publishing have begun to advocate chaos: not simply an acceptance of the exist ence of chaos, but an  advocation of chaos as the basis for intellectual and emotional perspectives on the world, and / or God figures, and / or ourselves. The idea that  Gardner's book should be shunned (or that any book should be shunned), that is, dismissed not on the basis of its logical  profluence or the integrity of its arguments-- but because it is critical of the current trends--is antidemocracy at its height, and is itself the most dangerous form of didacticism.

    As I said, Gardner has been most harshly criticized because of his proclamations against other writers, for a too-harsh stance, for name-calling. I'm told that he "took back" much of that, and felt sorry about it insofar as feelings were hurt, or insofar as he wasn't fair to some writers. It seems to me, however, that in some ways this has been exaggerated to the extent that (excuse the cliché d) it isn't   putting the cart before the horse" so much as it is screaming that the cart is really a tank and that no horse ever existed. I wish to point to the horse, dead as he may be, having had the cart driven over him by those who didn't want to see him there.

    Perhaps I exaggerate and they really don't see the horse there, and it isn't a matter of wishing him away. Yet given the fact that the amount of time spent on criticism of peers is a fraction of the totality of On Moral Fiction, far less than a fourth, one wonders what they felt the rest of the book was meant to do. Again., they will claim that they don't know,, that it doesn't make any sense: yet Gardner is anything but obscure. His  plainspoken account of his peers is mirrored by his  plainspoken projection of the argument that he bases those accounts on.

    He doesn't simply call John Barth "ambitious and fake," but spends pages giving a detailed argument. He praises  Barth's early novels, "... rare vividness of imagery and dramatization and a strong sense of place... wonderful comic moments carefully drawn from life" but states that they are "weakened to the point of collapse" by the notion that "life is absurd." (94,  OMF) One can agree with Gardner or not,, but can't,, so far as I can see, claim that he is not arguing a carefully drawn thesis.

    Granted, these criticisms may seem bigger because due to their focus on specifics, rather than being based solely on literary principles without tangible example. I believe that this was  Gardner's attempt to begin the grand debate on fiction,. that had he simply published a treatise on the failure of contemporary literature, without pointing to specific failures as he saw them, no one would've paid much attention. Since most of the  book's detractors claim the nonexist ence of the horse,, one can only speculate on how little attention it would've received without any cart at all.

Near the end of On Moral Fiction,, Gardner posits the following metaphor:

Since bad art has a harmful effect on society, it should never go unchallenged; but since the bad artist (like the good one) is an artist at all only because he claims he is, and has gotten at least one other person to believe him, how is he to be challenged? The only available rules are those of the gunfighter.

...In any case, a little loud shouting between artists about art can bring the community back into the debate and thus, besides improving business,, protect the world from arrogant pretenders who claim to be above mere mortal explanation--the   Nietzsches of the arts., who think it the business if ordinary clods to blink, shut their mouths, and try to follow.

The  gunfighting of artists is already common,, of course. The fiercest and most interesting book reviews in the New York Times are by writers. My object here is therefore not to startup such  gunfighting, but to make it a little more orderly, a little more deadly. (148 -149,  OMF)

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   The fact that few of them have ever seriously answered the call to debate suggests to me that Gardner was right about their apathy concerning the issue of the purposes and function of fiction. By viewing On Moral Fiction in relation to themselves alone,, focusing on the individual criticisms,, they restate in action his premises for writing the book.

 

Part Two: The Debate Itself

Morality & Linguistics in the Writing of Fiction

 

    In On Moral  Fiction Gardner suggests that temporal labels give the sense that   postmodern writers are the "new and improved" modern writers, and that this leaves the impression that "merely modern" writers have been outmoded and are, therefore, no longer necessary or viable. This seems to leave the so-called "modern" writer in the dust. (54,  OMF) Whether or not one agrees with the value judgment, it is true that temporal delineations can only continue for so long until they become absurd. One might ask what comes after "postmodernism ": post-post modernism,,  pre-postmodernism,,  neo-postmodernism? In addition, the writers under each label vary so considerably from one another that the labels serve only as a very loose guide to time period,, with little concrete delineations of aesthetic form or intent.

   Therefore, for this comparison,, I'd like to set up classifications based on literary intent rather than temporality. On Moral Fiction asserts that fiction ought to search for truths and be life affirming. There should be no argument with calling Gardner a  "moral writer," if one understands that what he means by "moral fiction" has nothing to do with didacticism or the strong-armed bullying of the "moral majority" or any other such group.

   William Gass, who was a friend of  Gardner's, is one of the few writers who argues against the points of On Moral Fiction as Gardner outlines them.  Gass's arguments open up a grand debate on the possible, probable, and potential functions of fiction in American society. Just as "modernism"  stultifies writers to whom it is applied, so  "postmodernism" as a term is insufficient when applied to William Gass. The phrase "reaction against meaning" does not give us the slightest indication of what new processes will accompany that idea; does not allow for the possibility of establishing a new type of meaning, particularly as it applies to fiction and literary theory.

   For Gass, literary endeavor is grounded in language, not in a quest for truth. The limits of language are explored because language is at the base of what it means to be human. That is to say, one explores language because one "is" human, not to achieve any sort of end to do with being better humans or leading better lives (as in moral writing.)

   In Fiction and the Figures of Life, Gass argues against the traditional view that  of order" is achieved only in the realm of intellect, and thus gives a pointed definition of his literary aims:

It is a sadly limited view of the power of the  n-mind in man to assume that only truth employs or pleasures it... creative thought and creative imagination are not so much stirred on by truth in any synthetic sense as by sublimity-- a vision of absolute organization. It is really a moral insistence, this insistence that truth be first, whether it is the Platonist, who requires that Ideas do the work of things, or the Pragmatist, who demands that things perform the functions of ideas. (12,  F&F)

At base of this, it seems to be, is a treatment of fiction as language: not language that is representative of a system or a "way of being," but language for its own sake; that is, the expression of concepts through language in the form of fiction is meant to provide aesthetic pleasure (or reaction) at that expression, not lead to moral or philosophical  enlightenments. Such writers, as opposed to, say, "Moral" writers, would seem to me to best be labeled "Lingual" writers.

   By separating them with these classifications, I don't mean to imply that moral writers aren't at all interested in linguistics, or that lingual writers aren't concerned with morality. Instead, I mean to delineate the starting points from which they proceed, and to define what they would consider "success" or "failure" in an end result of a work of fiction. These distinctions are substantiated by the criticism (as well as the praise) that Gass and Gardner have for one  another's literary endeavors. Indicative of their friendship-rivalry, there is often praise mixed in with criticism, and, in addition, an acknowledgment of influence.

       The very distinction between "moral" exploration and "lingual" exploration is a philosophical rather than stylistic difference, not surprising given the fact that Gass is a respected professional  philosopher, and that  Gardner's fictional subjects often stem from a philosophical base. The problem with this is that much of the controversy surrounding their differences must be approached with the caution with which one would approach a philosophical debate. Simply put, the two writers often have very different meanings for the same word.

      Let us first consider the simple proposition, "Character is the central element of fiction." This would seem to hold true for fiction throughout the ages, and Gardner and Gass seem to agree on it, so it would appear that we've found a starting point. Yet the agreement is superficial. As with almost everything else, Gardner and Gass mean significantly different things by the word "character."

   In a debate on fiction at a Fiction Festival in 1978, Thomas LeClair asked each man to talk about his notion of character. With  Gass's answer we see a clear indication of his belief that language is  supereminent in fiction:

A character for me is any linguistic location in a book toward which a great part of the rest of the text stands as a modifier.Just as the subject of a sentence, say, is modified by the predicate, so frequently some character, Emma Bovary for instance, is regarded as a central character in the book because a lot of the language basically and ultimately goes back to modify, be about, Emma Bovary... What we... have are subordinate locales of linguistic energy--other characters-which the words in a book flow toward and come out of. A white whale is a character; mountains in Under the Volcano are characters. Ideas can become characters. Some of the most famous characters in the history of fiction are in that great novel called philosophy. There's free will and determinism. There's substance and accident. (47)

This is a somewhat radical view, on several counts. The first (and most easily dispatched) is the confusion that such a proposition would cause in terms of 'character analysis.' Given Gass's theory, there are a varying number of characters in any given work, this number dependent not on any sort of accepted theory of counting heads but on a reader's perception, which could vary from reader to reader or even from reading to reading.

   For instance, if we take a simple tale like "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" and try to determine how many characters there are, Gass may very well scorn the socalled standard academic answer, Goldilocks (one) plus Bears (three) equals four. As a philosopher, he might include Human Curiosity or Property or any number of other concepts toward which, in his estimation, linguistic energy is applied. Someone with an interest in studying the traditional role of the woman in homemaking might see "Porridge" as a more central character than Mama Bear, since more of the language in the tale is devoted to it. The lists could go on and on.

    On first reading, it seems that Gass has aligned the traditional concept of character with the traditional concept of symbol. Yet symbol presupposes a meaning beyond that which is given, and this is not in Gass's definition. Therefore, this realignment is actually between character and concept. Any concept can be a character, according to Gass. On the one hand, this seems to greatly expand the limits that might otherwise be placed on character analysis--on, in fact, the whole way one might view a piece of fiction. On the other hand, one might ask what was removed from the traditional definition of character in order to make it synonymous with concept.

    It is not, for Gass, that in fiction language "leads" to a clearer definition of humanity, any more than it leads to a clearer definition of morality (Gardner's claim.) In fact, what we have in Gass's theory is not what is traditionally thought of as "character" in fiction--human types with human type responses to conflict--but the complete removal of "humanity" from the issue. This is not accidental, nor is it mere hyperbole, but is instead the foundation on which Gass's fiction rests.

    For the lingual writer, fiction is language; therefore, the core of fiction, "character," is the focus of that language, whether that focus is human, inanimate, or philosophical in nature. To be effective, there must be organization, but this can be achieved through the language itself,, not on the existence of any sort of a moral underpinning, not even on a reliance upon the personal, "human" identification of a reader with a character.

     In the same LeClair interview, Gardner's response to the question "What is character?" shows a much more narrow scope: "It seems to me that character is an apparition in the writer's mind, a very clear apparition based on an imaginative reconstruction or melting of many people the writer has known." (48) Let me turn again to our "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" example. Since elsewhere (and in his own fiction--Grendel comes to n-mind) Gardner does not limit his notion of characters to human beings per se, we can safely assume that this "imaginative reconstruction" allows the three bears to be counted as characters. Further, we could speculate that, unlike Gass, he would not consider concepts to be characters, and so would give the expected answer: Goldilocks (one) plus bears (three) equals four.

    As applied to our tale, Gardner's answer would not, perhaps, cause any sort of objections--yet consider the possible inherent limitations when more complex subject matter is used. For instance, do we count creatures as characters only insofar as they're personified? In other words, if these bears were real bears (as in, say, Gentle Ben ) would they then be central to the story only insofar as readers could relate to them as "humanlike"? Must a thing be imbued with human qualities, or is it not enough for a rock's "rockness," if it is clearly delineated and a focus of the story, to give it the rank of "character"?

    I believe that Gardner would argue the point of "centrality," would say (and would perhaps be right) that no one would value a story that was solely centered on a non-human base, with absolutely no connections or relation to "human" existence, concerns, etc. So far as I know, none has ever been accepted as literature. On the other hand, Gass might well bring up the Bertrand Russell philosophical point on perspective: that immediately upon perceiving anything we make it human because it becomes part of our personal human perception and experience. Therefore, everything "is" human, in some sense, and it is a matter of where one draws the line.

   Thus we see that whereas both writers would call "character a central element of fiction," that centrality is defined by their conception of the whole, with Gass judging it according to its language mass and Gardner according to its human elements. The differences themselves illuminate the question of where we, as readers and as scholars, draw the line between the terms characters and concepts, and why, perhaps, we do so.

   Gardner has accused Gass of not caring about "characters," as he defines them and therefore of advocating fiction which lacks "truth." To get a clearer idea of Gardner's perspective on this, it is helpful to study his view on how fiction moves the reader, as he gives it throughout On Moral Fiction (as well as in The Art of Fiction, On Becoming a Novelist and On Writers and Writing): that fiction should be written so that it becomes a "vivid and continuous dream" in the reader's mind.

   This vivid and continuous dream, containing as it does the kernel of truth that comes with the writer's immersing himself in the process of writing, contains truth which is more vital and therefore more real than the truth contained in abstract philosophy. Marshall L. Harvey, in "Where Philosophy and Fiction Meet: An Interview with John Gardner," quotes Gardner on the subject:

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Basically, writing is a kind of philosophy. Good writers see their work as a way of testing abstract ideas in the real world.  What happens--though not all good writers are conscious of what they do--is that you take an abstract idea, your own or somebody else's, and then you imagine real characters in a real city in a real world and you put your characters through a kind of laboratory experiment testing the idea... As long as you work with pure philosophy, you work with abstract, logical suppositions and logical necessities coming out of those suppositions. The result, as Aquinas found, is that you prove something but you only prove it abstractly, as in mathematics. What Aquinas discovered... the horrifying thing that the Nazis discovered--that absolutely rigorous argument can lead to mutually exclusive positions. (80)

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This idea that fiction and philosophy are fairly closely linked in terms of their pursuit of truth., but that fiction is a better vehicle for finding it, is at the core of Gardner's argument in On Moral Fiction.

      Gass varies greatly in this view of how fiction moves, as well as on truth, fiction, and philosophy. When LeClair asks him about the vivid and continuous dream he calls it "rather imaginary," and goes on to say:

... in fiction, the motion that moves the text comes from the reader... He's going to, in fact, stop, brush a fly off his nose, go back to the first page, read it over, skip, look around for the juicy parts. (177)

For Gass, insofar as fiction might contain some ideas about "truth,," that is not its aim, nor what it is especially good for. just as Gardner claims that philosophy perverts the truth through hard argument, Gass claims that fiction perverts the truth through subjectivity: the very same subjectivity that comes during the process of creating fiction. In the LeClair interview, he states:

John's saying that a number of contemporary writers are really not interested in solving problems is a little misleading. I think the difference lies in whether they believe one can understand important human issues by writing novels; they might be so concerned with these problems that they would rather not trust the solution of them to novelists. My own feelings are, of course, that moral issues surround us everywhere, that they are deeply important, and that the survival of the human race is necessary so that parasites like myself can diddle away in corners. The question that lies between John and me here is whether or not writing fiction, rather than, for instance, doing philosophy, is a good method for such an exploration.Philosophy has its own disciplines, its own methods of coming to clarity about these issues, so the way one talks about them won't twist the conclusions. Because fiction is a method which, by its very nature and demands, deforms, I am suspicious of it... I don't know most of the time what I believe. Indeed, as a fiction writer, I find it convenient not to believe things. (33)

Herein lies the major reasons for the divergent paths of Gardner and Gass.  Each apparently seeks truth (Gardner through fiction and Gass through philosophy), and believes the the other's choice for vehicle is wrong.

      This removal of "truth seeking" from fiction illuminates Gass's statement (as quoted earlier) that the imagination is more stirred by sublimity than by truth. We come closer to seeing that for Gass, the primary aim of fiction is the stirring of the imagination. In Habitations of the Word, Gass states:

... on the other hand [as opposed to the chief aims of science, philosophy, and history], the object of the art of fiction is... pleasure, for fiction creates worlds for us to live in that are designed to satisfy our deepest feelings, not our intelligence. (94)

For Gass, the reader engages with the language of the fiction casually, seeking creative stimulation; the form of the stimulation, different from Gardner's vivid and continuous dream,, need not contain profluence. Gass goes on to give a description of his novel, The Tunnel, that is consistent with this outlook:

My present novel, The Tunnel, is dominated by the trope of its title. The text is at once the hollow absence of life, words, and earth... which incontinently caves in occasionally, filling the reader's nose with noise, and ears with sand and misunderstanding; while finally it is the shapelessness of dirt, word-dung, and desire,which has to be taken out and disposed of. (HW, 158)

Clearly, the comparison of Gass and Gardner is not so much a difference in aesthetics about fiction, but a difference in the very definition of the word "fiction." They both agree that it concerns things not actually existing in the world we encounter with the hands that hold their books; and that's where the agreement seems to end.

      My opinion is that the underlying reason for their differences resides in a contrasting view on what lies outside of the realm that we perceive as reality. For Gass,, the fact that spirituality is a myth seems to be a given:

The idea of the death of the author does not match the idea of the death of god as perfectly as the current members of this faith may suppose, because we know--as they know--there are authors; and we know--as they know--there are no gods... The death of god represents not only the realization that gods have never existed, but the contention that such a belief is no longer even irrationally possible: that neither reason nor the taste and temper of the times can condone it. The belief lingers on, of course,, but it does so like astrology or a faith in a flat earth--in worse case than a neurotic symptom, no longer even a la mode.

(HW, 265)

Whether or not Gass believes in a spiritual world (the above quotation may be mere rhetoric, or a passing mood), it is clear that he intends for his fiction to serve other purposes than the suggestion of its existence.

For Gardner, the opposite is true. Without espousing any particular religious view, he nonetheless maintains that fiction ought to be strive toward life affirmation, to "hold off the twilight of the gods and of us" (5, OMF). The governing metaphor of the book is given in the first paragraph:

It was said in the old days that every year Thor made a circle around Middle-earth, beating back the enemies of order. Thor got older every year, and the circle occupied by gods and men grew smaller. The wisdom god, Woden,, went out to the king of the trolls, got him in an armlock, and demanded to know of him how order might triumph over chaos. "Give me your left eye," said the kind of the trolls, "and I'll tell you."

Without hesitation, Woden gave up his left eye. "Now tell me." The troll said, "The secret is, Watch with both eyes!"

Woden's left eye was the last sure hope of the gods and men in their kingdom of light surrounded on all sides by darkness. All we have left is Thor's hammer, which represents not brute force but art, or, counting both hammerheads, art and criticism." (3)

 

It is past time for the On Moral Fiction debate to begin again, this time as a discussion on the contrasting precepts of Moral versus Lingual writing, along with new evaluations of the relationship between fiction and society.

 

 

Works Consulted

Butts, Leonard. The Novels of lohn Gardner. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State

    University Press, 1988.

Chavkin, Allan, ed. Conversations with fohn Gardner. London: University

    Press of Mississippi, 1990.

Diehl, Digby. "Medievalist in Illinois Ozarks." Los Angeles Times Calendar 5

September 1971: 43.

Dyck, Reginald. "William Gass: A 'Purified Modernist' in a Postmodern

    World." Review of Conteml2orary Fiction II #3, 150 (Fall 91): 124-125.

Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.

The Art of Living and Other Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.

Grendel.

Mickelsson's Ghosts.

On Becoming a Novelist.

On Moral Fiction. New York: Basic Books, 1978.

The Sunlight Dialogues.

Gass, William H. Fiction and the Figures of Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

1970.

Habitations of the Word. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.

The Tunnel.

The World Within the Word.

Harvey, Marshall L. "Where Philosophy and Fiction Meet: An Interview with

        John Gardner." Chicago Review 29 (Spring 1978), 73-87.

Henderson, Jeff. Tohn Gardner: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne

        Publishers, G.K. Hall & Co., 1990.

LeClair, Thomas. "William Gass and John Gardner: A Debate on Fiction."

The New Rel2ublic 180 (10 March 1979): 25, 28-33.

Morris, Gregory L. A World of Order and Light. Athens: The University of

        Georgia Press, 1984.

Plimpton, George, ed. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Sixth

        Series. 1984: 377-410.

"Postmodernism." Merriam-Webster's Engyclopedia of Literature, 1995 ed.

Saltzman, Arhur M. "Language and Conscience: An Interview with William

        Gass." Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. II #3, 150 (Fall 91)

Singular, Stephen. 'The Sound and the Fury over Fiction." The New York

        Times Magazine 8 July 1979: 13-15, 34f 36-39.