Chapter I—Introduction

Part I

In a recent discussion on NCTE Talk (an internet discussion list sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English) with English teachers from all over the country, I posted a question: does the simple act of reading moral fiction thereby “create” moral people? The responses to my question were more telling than I had anticipated. My mistake was in not defining “moral fiction.” Had I done so, I probably would not have stirred up as many emotions as I did. When one speaks of morality in a public forum, defenses arise both for and against some sort of prescription for living. The main comments initially in the discussion were along the lines of identifying fiction as either moral or immoral and who makes such a distinction. What was once thought immoral, such as Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, may now be considered classic, sometimes mandatory reading for literate Americans, even though the racial issues in the novel may cause heated debates. And the arena in which we judge constantly changes. Initially, Twain was rebuked for the way his main character used language and not for the ideas in Huck’s head. Scholars and proper people felt that young people who read “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of the Adventures of Tom Sawyer” would be intellectually harmed, that using such base vernacular would drive our society down. It seemed not to occur to critics that the portrayal of Jim as ignorant and helpless was an affront to Blacks. Of course not—at the time, consideration for African Americans as “real people” was not common. In later years, the 1960’s, literature would be looked at critically through the ethical and political lenses of race and gender and sexual roles.

Today, issues of morality in literature tend to focus on sex and to some degree violence. And what’s acceptable in one society is hardly acceptable in another. And this is one of the key problems of ethical criticism according to Wayne Booth in his book The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. The ethics of fiction is subjective, changing from society to society, from time to time, and even from person to person, though there are seemingly universal values (excessive greed is bad, etc.) (148).

The expression “moral fiction,” which I will use, comes from John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction. He attempts to clarify the idea that fiction is moral when it is true art, and true art, says Gardner is that which isn’t overly didactic in initial purpose, is that which doesn’t “know” where it will end up, and that which is life affirming (19). While On Moral Fiction was published in 1978, Gardner’s ideas continue to be scrutinized and debated. And even though the author is no longer living, his impact on the debate about what is quality fiction is still strong.

At the end of chapter two, I will clarify “moral fiction,” listing the qualities of great books. To me these are the books that fit Gardner’s ideas of artistic integrity, but to be sure, making it to his approved list would be nearly impossible for most authors today. So, in addition, but not to the exclusion of Gardner’s criteria, I will suggest my own criteria for judging quality literature. Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren took on the enormous task of qualifying books worth reading in How To Read a Book. They list over 150 titles.

Others have addressed this idea of the basic value of fiction as well, and while they may use words like ethics or value, the intention here is not to say that a book in itself is moral, that its subject is moral, but that the book is, as a whole work of art, a book in which, as Gardner says, “we will recognize ourselves as we struggle to find our place in the universe and [where we] look to find a light to guide us in our way.” This is art; this is moral fiction. Students who read this kind of literature on a regular basis will mature faster than those who don’t read this kind of literature.

The idea that reading great fiction helps foster maturity and  moral development is important for English teachers to consider. The implications of this relationship are important in education, especially these days when many teachers,  feeling frustrated or helpless at the apparent lack of morality in students, are encouraged jump on a “character education” bandwagon and directly “teach” morality. Many people-- politicians, school administrators, and teachers--advocate character education. However, character education programs are usually prescriptive, pre-made programs that are added to existing curriculum. They are meant to teach a set of values or principles. What’s wrong with such an approach? First, these programs assume we all agree on a set of values and principles. Second, these programs are generally one-size-fits-all. Third, and most important, these programs are applied on the outside by adults in some ways like a salve to a wound. The salve might help, but healing comes from the body’s antibodies and cell production. In the same way, a person develops principles and values from the inside. It seems to make more sense that a program intending to improve moral character would find a way to be a catalyst for those internal processes that lead to maturity and moral development. Reading great literature, discussing great ideas, confronting moral problems that have been at the root of human concern for centuries is an effective way to become a mature person. Reading moral fiction affects us and we must react to the effect. If the book is truly moral fiction, it will change us. The change will be one of growth and understanding about what it means to be human and part of the human race.

Along with reading great books or moral fiction, comes the act of discussing the ideas. This Socratic approach to education appears to be unpopular or perceived as extraneous in a time when what seems to matter in education is how well students score on standardized tests that measure competence in basic skills. Education has become a numbers game that politicians play rather than a serious process.

Through great or moral literature, students and teachers can actively participate in an intellectual process that raises consciousness and fosters moral development in students, creating members of a more just society.

Part II

It’s important to define some terms. Adler and Van Doren refer to their list of recommended books as “Great Books.” They mean “great” in a historical sense. They’ve collated what they feel are the books that most represent the struggles and achievements of all of human history. They concede that all books on their list are not a pleasure to read but believe that not having read them leaves us somewhat incomplete as educated people. When I use the term great, I mean something a bit more humble. I mean that the work is really good. I list the qualities of great books at the end of this introduction.

Gardner defines moral fiction as that which maintains artistic integrity. He also believes that moral fiction is literature that points the way for us, showing us the possibilities that exist within us individually and collectively as human beings.

And what is fiction? For Gardner and for Booth, it is more than a novel. Fiction for Booth represents a wide range including imaginative works as well as nonfiction. To him, the aspect of fiction that is important is that it tells a story. It doesn’t matter if the story is “real life” or a product of imagination. Poetry, drama, short fiction, the novel, personal essay, even a newspaper feature story can all be considered fiction.

When I say great books, I mean to include epic poetry, plays, novels, short fiction and poetry. I usually don’t think of nonfiction as great literature, but perhaps that’s because my experience with nonfiction narratives is limited. I do believe that the power of fiction lies in the fact that it is a narrative, that it tells a story, big or small, for it is through stories that we are best able to recognize ourselves and learn about who we are and might be.

What is a great book? It has to be at some level like Franz Kafka described. “The books we need are the kind that act upon us like misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves. . . a book should serve as an ax for the frozen sea within us.” If it hurts—makes us feel—then not only do you know the book, the story, its people, but you also know something far more important—you know something about you. You know you’re human. One thing great books do is to create a bridge for us to that mystical, ethereal realm of eternal humanness, where we need often to visit to understand our role in all of human history. This sounds like a tremendous, almost impossible thing, but it is actually very simple. Poetry, visual art, music, dance do it all the time; they take us to our souls.

 Consider the poem “Keeping Things Whole” by Mark Strand.

                 In a field

                 I am the absence

                 of field.

                 This is

                 always the case.

                 Wherever I am

                 I am what is missing.

                 When I walk

                 I part the air

                 and always

                 the air moves in

                 to fill the spaces

                 where my body’s been.

                 We all have reasons

                 for moving.

                 I move

                 to keep things whole.

In these 17 lines, I understand with that I am an essentially physical part of this universe I live in, and knowing that “I move to keep things whole,” allows me to be rescued from despair or the existential angst that I may feel if I believe that I am like the man in Stephen Crane’s poem to whom the universe replies that it cares not at all that he exists.

Similarly, a great book can connect us with people of all time, creating in us a sense of humanity that becomes more powerful upon reflection than the idea that we are nothing in a vast, meaningless space.

A great book filled with ideas may cause one to stop reading for a moment because a shiver creeps up the neck or the chest and the throat tightens like the need to cry. In a great book, one expects to find startling or true ideas. Paul Bourget said, “Ideas are to literature what light is to painting.” To paint light, it seems to me, is the most difficult and elusive art. Light is one of those real intangibles. It’s there and we can see it, but what we see changes without end, and without it we cannot see. It seems that weaving ideas into literature is no less difficult than attempting to capture the light at five am or as it breaks free from a storm cloud. Done clumsily, you have a sermon or worse, a predictably obvious novel in which characters and their struggles are secondary to the lessons we are supposed to learn. Done well, that is, when ideas come to us like light, they illuminate our sight. Maybe we knew, but didn’t understand. Maybe our knowing was undeveloped. Maybe we were like hard ice needing an ax to break us free. Ideas in literature connect us to the mind of humanity and  help us realize what we all should know, but sometimes, because we are so busy living, we forget.

A great book is a source of awe and amazement: an amazing idea, an emotion so true, a sentence so beautifully crafted as to be no less wonderful than Van Gogh’s Starry Night. If it lingers long—reconnecting at odd times, long after the cover is closed, it may be a great book. If those photographs and paintings it created in the mind live in the memory as do places in external life, then it may be a great book. Great writers use language like artists use oils, pastels, and watercolor to paint images that evoke emotion. These visual memories become part of who we are—part of our cognitive landscape and are as real for us, through reading, as images we know through seeing. Eternally with me are Cather’s priests making their way down the Grand Canyon on mules or her prairie grasses moving like waves in the late afternoon sun on a day so warm I can feel it warming me from deep inside. There are also Antonia’s deep eyes, the eyes she saw into me with when she was old and had lived hard, eyes that allowed me to see deeper, into the realness of her beauty, to better understand what true beauty is.

To read fictional images is not just the process of seeing, it is also the process of creating. As we read, we create images and landscapes in our minds. We become, along with the writer, the creator, the painter of the painting, and so, as reader, we too become the artist.

A great book changes one inescapably. Subtly or overtly—one will never be the same. If only for the ideas, the images or the richness of the language, we will never again think or feel or see in exactly the same way as we did before. But mostly, change comes from living the book, from the experience of being in a new, often strange place, of meeting and—usually—loving new people, new friends, new lovers. Who we know, what we know, and where we know all change when we read any book, but when we read a great book, the richness of the experience is more like real living. As readers, we become part of the landscape and part of its social structure. We are a part of its world. What happens there affects us in irreversible ways. We are changed.

In Mark Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War, Alessandro is a man I come to know through his recollection of his life. Though I knew in my head that he was old (this is how the book begins) and that he was going to die, by the end of the book I had come to love him so well that I was nonetheless totally unprepared to let him die. And once he was gone, I grieved for him. For weeks I grieved, remembering his life, his courage, his beauty, his strength, his frailty, his humor, his sorrow, his wisdom and his capacity for love. He was my friend, and something he said will stay with me always because I know how true it is and because I had never thought of it before and because it shows me, in a deeper, richer way, what love is. Alessandro, who had loved his wife with unrestrained, unequalled passion, came to his own death reluctantly—not because he was afraid to die, but because in dying he knew that there would be no one left to remember her (771). Even now, ten years or so after having read that book, the recollection of his words continues to help me understand love.

My students recently became so concerned over Winston Smith’s welfare that they crossed the line and forgot that his life was fictional and that they were reading 1984, Orwell’s creation. They debated and argued over what Winston should have done, what might have happened if he had made other choices, about why he suffered and whether or not he was better off dead than alive. All the while, they spoke of him as a real person whom they knew and respected and whom they nonetheless pitied as a wretched member of an inhuman system. They did not speak of the artist’s creation. They spoke of a person, as real to them as each other.

This is what comes to us in great books—moments of knowing, in an essential way, what love is, or who we are, or of what value life is, or answers to the questions we forever burn to answer but cannot. One of the most essential of all the big questions is "how ought we to live?" This question is essential to much of the worlds great literature. And this is the literature that is art. And art comes to us through the artist, a connection that on all accounts must be revered as holy, spiritual.

The act of reading a great book is a risk, in a way, for we are moving ourselves into being with art and the artist; the experience becomes one and it is timeless. No matter that the temporal artist has died or that dust has settled on the gilt edges of a forgotten novel on the topmost shelf, when we take all into our hands and words into our minds, we do indeed become part of this art, and thereby part of this artist and he or she becomes part of us. Can we believe such an event to be anything less than mystical?

Still, how does one know the difference between what’s merely ordinary or even good compared with what is great? If I think about what Gardner says about the process of art, that a writer who sets out knowing all the answers, who’s got it figured out in advance, who’s got a moral to teach, a theme to convey, a didactic agenda, I realize this writer is not an artist at all. I could say it’s the difference between sculpting from a block and pouring a mold. Though I may want the end result to look like Shakespeare’s head, the block does not start out knowing its shape. The mold does. The block comes into being slowly and unsurely, being born with each tap of the chisel. The other knows its shape before the first plop of cement or plaster is poured. One just like it, or at least, nearly indistinguishable, can be made again and again with no real effort. In the end, both may look like William Shakespeare, but only one is art.

How will readers know which is better if on the outside One Hundred Years of Solitude looks pretty much like The Horse Whisperer (the last worst book I read)? Who’s to say this is great, but this is not? I think it’s a thing experienced readers know that inexperienced readers won’t know. Mortimer Adler believes that the truly great books are those that are above us, those that continue to stretch our minds (343). John Gardner says a good book is “one that, for its time, is wise, sane, and magical, one that clarifies life and tends to improve it” (132).

I am embarrassed to admit what I’ve enjoyed reading in my past compared with what I need in a book now. And I can remember with great clarity the first time I understood that there is a difference between art and the ordinary. It was summer of 1978. I was pregnant for the first time, and I didn’t feel like doing much besides reading. I’d pick up the most recently raved about romance novel and devour it in days. And it was fine. I read a lot of them. And then the post office came out with a Willa Cather commemorative stamp. I wondered who she was. I’d never heard of her before (a thought that seems incredulous to me now). So I went to the library and checked out Death Comes for the Archbishop. I read the wonderfully rich, slow story of priests in the Southwest, and I was never the same again. In that one week, I knew I could never go back to anything less than its equal and that I would continue to seek out what is great in books. And it’s not that I just decided to do this. It’s that I crave what is great. I starve for what is great. The junk leaves me hungry and ornery, knowing I’ve been cheated or deceived.

Then, as a teacher, how do I get my students to come to that same discovery? I’m already doing it. They’re reading Sophocles, Dante, Chaucer, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Faulkner, O’Connor, Cather, and others. I’m feeding them on the fattening, rich diet of the greats. And I have to trust that they too will realize the difference, that when they read junk, they’ll still be hungry—they’ll get ornery, and in a very short time, they’ll be starving again. I have to hope that they will be disappointed or even angry at manipulative sentiment, contrived plot, unrealistic character in implausible action, sex for titillation, violence for shock, and that they will feel cheated because there was nothing really there that meant anything.

My theory, my hope, was proven to me once in a very small way in my novels class. The students had read The Grapes of Wrath, All Quiet on The Western Front, and Cat’s Eye (Atwood). For a change, I let them choose their next novel. Groups of three or four decided on a book to read together, any book. One group chose a futuristic fantasy novel. Another a romance novel. Another a kind of horror/thriller. In other words, they filled their plates with popular, easy-access pulp. Their reactions excited me. Within days of reading the new books, they were bored. I heard comments like, “Everyone’s the same in this book,”  “this is just stupid; no one would really do that,” and “there’s not really a point to this book; it’s just kind of fun.” It seemed that they knew that these books weren’t as good as the others they had read.

So, who says what’s good and what’s not? Ideally we would all come to realize the difference between what’s bad and good and between what’s good and great. And maybe it doesn’t take a whole lifetime of reading the classics for this understanding to set in. Maybe, like me, it just takes that one amazing book to make it all obvious. To know something is bad is to trust yourself, after all, though it is important to point out that inexperienced readers may not be ready for the intense experience of some books and will reject as bad that which is good simply because they do not have the broad realm of experience by which to measure this experience. Still, if it feels wrong, it is wrong, at the very least, for you at the time, and at most, for anyone at any time. 

Reading great books, taking the challenge, accepting the risk, means nothing less than gaining the power to transform ourselves through art. Initially teachers can guide students to find the path of great books. Eventually, students will find their own way towards art, and if they’ve read well, they will always search for the light.

Qualities of Great Literature

        The following list is mine, though what I think is influenced by Gardner, Adler, Booth and unnamed others as well as my experiences as a reader and as student and teacher of literature. If there were a checklist one could apply to literature to measure its greatness, the debate about what is good and great would end. Of course there is no such thing. The qualities I propose here seem to me to be complete, though no doubt, as I look upon them again in the future, I will want to add or change what I think are essential qualities of  great books.

• A great book shows us what it means to be human (and thereby connects us to each other).

• A great book shows us how to be better at being human. It shows us who we could be and how we could be better.

• A great book expresses great ideas, ideas that have engaged philosophers throughout history.

•  A great book helps readers know more fully what beauty is, or truth, justice, honor, compassion, courage or love.

• A great book recognizes the value of life and honors it.

• A great book recreates archetypal stories for new generations to understand and own, remaking ancient heroes into contemporary heroes.

• A great book is over our heads. It challenges our thinking, inviting us to reread. We continue to be enlightened by a great book.

• A great writer is an exceptional wordsmith. Language as metaphor, imagery, and sound reveals truth.

• A great book changes us intellectually. We emerge from the experience knowing something we did not know before. We experience a cognitive realignment. The best books will leave us desiring to know more.

• A great book changes us emotionally. To be compassionately engaged in the lives and the conflicts of characters enriches us.

This text was revised slightly from the original on 2/3/04.