John Gardner on art and democracy
/Yesterday during my commute I revisited a short radio interview with John Gardner, one of the writers and writing teachers I most admire. The entire interview is worth listening to for Gardner’s trenchant comments on, well, everything, but I found the following exchange most striking.
Considering the way “the rise of middle class literature”—a “bad thing” in Gardner’s view—was satirized by Henry Fielding and Daniel Defoe, interviewer Stephen Banker goes back to Gardner’s preference for premodern work like Beowulf or Dante or Chaucer and his belief that literature has decreased in quality since then:
Banker: There’s so much in what you said. First of all, are you seriously suggesting that the literature of the aristocracy is the right kind of literature?
Gardner: Yeah, sure, sure. And I think that, as a matter of fact, I don’t think that’s snobbism, I think that every kid in a democracy would like that literature better if he knew it. But of course the thing that happens in a democracy is that the teachers lose touch with what’s good—they don’t know, you know? How many art teachers, you know, in ordinary public schools, have been to an art museum? Just that. How many teachers of creative writing in high schools and colleges for that matter really know what the Iliad is about? I’ve talked with an awful lot of professors. I think there are a handful of people in America who understand the poem Beowulf. And I don’t think there’s even a handful in England. It’s just lost knowledge.
Banker: Well, what—
Gardner: I don’t know anybody who knows about Dante! I don’t know a single person who understands what Dante is doing. I don’t mean that as arrogance, it’s just a fact. They read little sections of it, they talk about the dolce stil nuovo, that’s all.
The reading of great literature in context-free excerpt with a primary focus on formal or—increasingly—political qualities still rings true, as does the well-expressed observation that kids even in democracies will prefer to the adventure of aristocratic literature to middle-class realism. The problem comes in the line “if he knew it.” Many kids today are deprived, often for ideological rather than artistic reasons, and I can see their thirst for this kind of storytelling anytime I describe, in detail and for its own sake, a work of ancient or medieval literature to a class of students. They respond.
I do think there is more cause for hope than Gardner suggests—consider the wave of relative popularity greeting Emily Wilson’s recent translations of Homer—but the situation is dire.
Banker next moves the discussion on to whether old literature is still relevant in a more technologically sophisticated world and Gardner comes out swinging, while also rounding out some of his statements above:
“I don’t think that’s snobbism, I think that every kid in a democracy would like that literature better if he knew it.”
Banker: I think one could make a case—
Gardner: Mm-hm.
Banker: —that things that happened five, six, seven hundred years ago are not really relevant to the way we live now, that those people didn’t live with machinery, they didn’t live in the age of anxiety, they didn’t live with the kind of tensions, the kind of communications we have today.
Gardner: I think that’s probably not true. I think, in fact, that—pick your age, pick the age, for instance, of Alexandrian Greece, with Apollonius Rhodius writing in an overpopulated, effete, decadent society, he writes a book which is a bitter, ironic, very Donald Barthelme-like book in imitation of the epic form but actually making fun of the epic form and expressing, you know, his ultra-modern kind of disgust and despair and all this kind of business.
Banker: And what period are you talking about now?
Gardner: Oh, I don’t know about dates. Third century BC. One can find at the end of every great period decadent literature very much like ours. The difference is that we have for the first time—and it’s a great thing—real democracy, in which everybody can be educated. And as everybody begins to be educated and as everybody begins to say what education ought to be, then education changes, and so that the kind of values which make first-rate philosophy or art or anything else disappear—or become rare, at least. There are obviously lots of writers in America who are still concerned about great art and are trying to create it but, mostly, that’s not true.
Food for thought.
The interview ranges widely and it’s hard not to transcribe large parts of the rest, particularly, in considering the value of fiction, Gardner’s comparison of the way Nietzsche and Dostoevsky attacked the same philosophical problems, the first in abstract aphorism and the second in concretely realized fiction, and why Dostoevsky’s fictional interrogation of the Übermensch was more successful—and truthful.
Listen to the whole thing.
For more from Gardner on what’s great about Beowulf and what’s wrong with modern “realism,” check out this Paris Review interview from 1979, a year after the radio interview above. It’s paywalled but a generous, tantalizing chunk is available to read before it cuts off. I’ve written about Gardner here several times before, most importantly on his concept of fiction as the painstaking creation of a “vivid and continuous fictive dream.” This is a crucial idea to me, one I often reflect on. I also considered the role of sensory detail in Gardner’s “fictive dream” using the example of the novel Butcher’s Crossing here.
