Archive

READING

JOHN GARDNER’S GREAT STUFF ABOUT LITERATURE AND ART

August 31, 2015
ARTISTIC VENTURES, EDUCATION AND LEARNING, READING, WRITING PHILOSOPHY
1 Comment

From

 On Moral Fiction (1978)

Notes put together from the book; each passage could be a starting point for discussion.

***

Criticism, like art, is partly a game [but the game has a point].

My basic message . . . drawn from Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, and the rest, and a standard in Western civilization down through the eighteenth century . . . : TRUE ART IS MORAL: it seeks to improve life, not debase it.

Trivial art has no meaning or value except in the shadow of more serious art.

Art is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy.

Art re-discovers, generation by generation, what is necessary to humanness.

The critic’s proper business is explanation and evaluation, . . .

To understand a critic, one needs a clear head and a sensitive heart, but not great powers of the imagination.

Criticism and art, like theology and religion, are basically companions but not always friends. At times, they may be enemies.

True art is a conduit between body and soul, between feeling unabstracted and abstraction unfelt.

Dullness is the chief enemy of art.

True art is too complex to reflect the party line.

True art is by its nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values.

**Morality is nothing more than doing what is unselfish, helpful, kind, and noble-hearted, and doing it with at least a reasonable expectation that . . . we won’t be sorry for what we’ve done. Moral action is action which affirms life.

True morality [is] life-affirming, just, and compassionate behavior.

Great art celebrates life’s potential, offering a vision unmistakably and unsentimentally rooted in love.

In art, morality and love are inextricably bound: we affirm what is good . . . because we care.

Critics would be useful people to have around if they would simply do their work, carefully and thoughtfully assessing works of art, calling attention to those worth noticing, and explaining clearly, sensibly, and justly why others need not take up our time.

A good book is one that, for its time, is wise, sane, and magical, one that clarifies life and tends to improve it.

The chief quality that distinguishes great art . . . is its sanity, the good sense and efficient energy with which it goes after what is really there and feels significant.

The true artist’s purpose, and the purpose of the true critic after him, is to show what is healthy, in other words sane, in human seeing, thinking, and feeling, and to point out what is not.

The theoretical border between art and madness seems to be, then, that the artist can wake up and the psychotic cannot. When Hamlet plays mad, he takes a step toward real madness. Sanity is remembering the purpose of the game.

**The business of civilization is to pay attention, remembering what is central, remembering that we live or die by the artist’s vision, sane or cracked.

Question_mark_(black_on_white) 

GREAT STUFF ABOUT LITERATURE/ART/READING–(3)

August 17, 2015
EDUCATION AND LEARNING, READING
2 Comments

from Art and Reality by Joyce Cary (1958; 1961)

Sympathy is essential to the reader and writer. By sympathy the reader can obtain from the created world of art a knowledge of truth, of the real world, with exactly the same sense of illumination as if he had discovered it by force of intuition. So the reader’s process of creative discovery follows the same course as the writer’s.

The reader is often aware of learning more about the world from a book than he gets from actual experience,

not only because in the book he is prepared to find significance in events that mean nothing in life, but because those events in the book are related to each other in a coherent valuation which sets them in ordered relation of importance, and this can reveal to him in what had seemed the mere confusion of his daily affairs new orders of meaning … created by the author … with truth in context … showing motive and morality.

In summary:

PRIMITIVE RESPONSE [innate feelings] + EDUCATION [conceptual/symbolic]

AND

INTUITION [the recognition of the objective real: seeing what’s there]

PLUS REFLECTION, then EXPRESSION: ART

Once more: Art is the MEANS by which we can express ourselves in forms of meaning and communicate these meanings to others. It is the only means by which we can convey both FACTS and FEELINGS about the fact.

Question_mark_(black_on_white)

GREAT STUFF ABOUT LITERATURE/ART/READING–(2)

August 10, 2015
AUTHORS, EDUCATION AND LEARNING, READING
2 Comments

from Art and Reality by Joyce Cary (1958; 1961)

What happens in reading?

The reader is receptive only in a special sense. What a reader has in front of him is simply a collection of marks on paper, inert and meaningless in themselves. They are incapable on their own account of giving him anything. Reading is a creative art…. The meaning received is created by the imagination from the symbols, and that imagination must first be educated . . . in the use and meaning of a symbolic system….

Without education, it is not possible for a man even to appreciate any art. For education does not give only knowledge but taste; it qualifies the feelings as well as the judgment. It creates the sensibility, which is a compound of feeling and judgment.

We judge the value of the work finally by its revelation of a moral real. The power and quality of the artist’s craft is in the force and authority of his revelation. His subconscious is creating or reconstructing from the symbols before him the whole emotional content of the work; his reflective judgment is all the time recording flaws of expression, failures of emphasis, loose joints and weak transitions . . . some part . . . ready to notice an error of fact, even when the error does not destroy the continuity of the emotional experience.

The mind, in short, by education, has acquired a complex formal character which has all the spontaneity of primitive emotional make-up. The feelings are charged with ideas and the ideas with feeling, and reflection can proceed without conscious thought.

Question_mark_(black_on_white)

GREAT STUFF ABOUT LITERATURE/ART/READING–(1)

August 4, 2015
AUTHORS, READING, WRITING PHILOSOPHY
1 Comment

from Art and Reality by Joyce Cary (1958; 1961)

ART is the MEANS

by which we can express ourselves in forms of meaning and communicate these meanings to others.  It is the only means by which we can convey both FACTS and FEELINGS about the fact.

Truth in art can be checked with an objective reality, by correspondence with the real. All the scenes, all the events, and all the characters must contribute to the total effect, the total meaning of the work. The reader must not be confused by side issues.

Men live so entirely by feeling that reason has extremely small power over even our most intelligent geniuses.

The most important part of man’s existence, that part where he most truly lives and is aware of living, lies entirely within the domain of personal feeling.

Reason has very little power in conflict with any strong emotion, any powerful symbol [like a flag, the mere name of a country . . . or words like “freedom”].

 

Question_mark_(black_on_white)