Mark Pedretti:

"Gardner and Nietzsche: Towards a Post-Ethical
Aesthetic Morality of Fiction"
(A paper loosely based upon "The Tragic Monster: Towards a Nietzschean  
Grendel," from the Berkeley Undergraduate Journal, Fall 1996.)
Mark Pedretti

[This paper represents a heavily condensed version of an article I  
published at Berkeley last fall; I suspect that it may have another  
incarnation some time in the future, so I am definitely grateful for  
this opportunity to try out my argument with all of you today.  I know  
that it is late in the conference, but I hope that you all won't find  
this too boring, for I think that it offers a fresh viewpoint to an old  
debate.  In getting to speak so late in the day I also have a chance to  
contextualize my work in terms of some of the other papers we've heard  
over the last two days.  Like a couple of the talks yesterday, I am  
engaging in a highly speculative kind of reading which may upset or  
disappoint some expectations some of us have about John Gardner.  And  
like Robert Morace's brilliant address last night, I tackle the  
relationship between Gardner and the post-modern in the hopes of  
gesturing towards a post-ethical aesthetic morality of fiction.]
	Perhaps one of the most common critical approaches to John Gardner's  
Grendel has been to consider the text in terms of its philosophical  
stance on "existentialism," a word I hastily put into quotation marks  
because I believe that any such label will reduce a plurality of  
philosophies to a convenient bumper sticker.  Among these  
"existentialists" I would consider both Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin  
Heidegger on the German side, and Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus on  
the French side, though their influence undoubtedly extends into the  
work of the French phenomenologists of the nineteen sixties.  Later we  
shall see how the differences among these "existentialists" are indeed  
crucial when considering the substance of their philosophies.  In any  
regard, readers of Grendel have viewed the text in terms of the  
philosophy of Sartre, with many finding a profoundly post-modern  
"existentialist" anti-hero in the monster, and a bleak social commentary  
on the illusions of man; while others have taken Gardner's own  
admonitions to the contrary and proclaimed the text an  
anti-"existentialist", anti-Sartrean tract which upholds a more  
traditional vision of the perseverance of the human spirit.  In many of  
his interviews, Gardner heartily endorsed this latter view, and was  
greatly dismayed that his text should be so "misread" into an  
endorsement of what he considered to be nihilism.  In this light, the  
debate would seem to be resolved; Grendel is meant to be read  
ironically, and by no means endorses the bleak vision which Gardner  
found so troubling in his contemporaries.  These statements from the  
author have become the guiding principles in the history of the  
criticism of the novel, and most articles on the subject take one of  
Gardner's statements as their point of departure, reading his own  
intentions back into the text, almost retroactively.  But the strong  
pull towards reading the novel as distinctively "post-modern" cannot be  
denied, and the readings prompted by Gardner's interviews cannot  
reconcile themselves to the possibility of their monstrous other - they  
can only cast out any "existentialist" reading from the city walls, so  
to speak.  But the threat of such a "wrong reading" remains carefully  
buffered on the edge of the text by Gardner and his supporters'  
extratextual admonitions.
	It is my aim here to attempt to recuperate the possibility of this type  
of "existentialist" reading, while at the same time reconciling it with  
Gardner's anti-Sartrean stance towards his own work.  I would suggest  
that the application of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche offers  
such an opportunity for this type of reading.  There is but one small  
problem... John Gardner hated Friedrich Nietzsche.  As he said in one  
interview, "I don't like a single thing Nietzsche's ever said.  I don't  
like his politics.  I think he is a Nazi."  In On Moral Fiction, Gardner  
rejects "philosophies like Nietzsche's where intuition serves not  
compassion and understanding, but ferocious self-assertion."  And in  
another interview, he rejects out of hand the possibility of the reading  
we shall be attempting; he says, "You can't say Grendel is a peering  
into the abyss - nothing of the kind.  It has none of that dignity.  I  
am not Nietzsche, nor was I meant to be, nor would I want to be."  But  
to blindly accept the exclusive interpretations of the author would be  
to repeat again the myopia of the commentators on Grendel; more  
generally, it would reduce the interpretive endeavor to some kind of  
literary totalitarianism.  The text speaks volumes beyond it author,  
beyond all Author-ity, and beyond any interpretation for that matter.   
But then there is also Gardner's Mickelsson's Ghosts, which tells the  
tale of an aging professor haunted by the ghost of Nietzsche himself.  I  
would suggest that the spectre of Nietzsche haunts Gardner's world long  
before this late novel, but we must listen very closely to hear its  
whispers from the pages of the text before us.  What we will find in  
Grendel, in both symbol and metaphor, is the violent dance of opposites  
- and the voices of nietzsche's gardner and gardner's nietzsche.
	We can trace this movement, hear these voices, by roughly dividing  
Grendel's philosophical odyssey into the three ages of man which  
Nietzsche's Zarathustra proclaims: the age of the camel, the lion, and  
the child.  (Incidentally, we should note that Thus Spoke Zarathustra,  
as Nietzsche's most fictional work, will be our guiding philosophical  
text, allowing us to compare more easily the journeys of the two  
protagonists.)  Craig Stromme's article about the twelve chapters of  
Grendel discusses the text as a philosophical progression through the  
history of philosophy; we can take this idea as our guide as well, but  
refigure that history not as a movement from Plato's cave to American  
pragmatism but rather as Nietzsche interprets that genealogy of morals.   
For the text reveals a philosophical growth indeed, but a distinctively  
Nietzschean one.  As Grendel opens, we behold the monster standing atop  
a nightmare cliff, gazing down at the vast emptiness below.  Grendel is  
"terrified at the sound of my own huge voice in the darkness," terrified  
at the lack of a reply, or perhaps more appropriately the lack of a  
single Answer for the darkness to explain itself.  He finds in the abyss  
only a scornful negative value: the absence of a fixed Meaning.  But one  
must be clear that the expectation for such a singular Meaning remains.   
While the critical reading I am questioning would view this scene  
ironically, at this point in a first reading we have very little reason  
to do so.  The abyss is also Nietzsche's point of departure - that is,  
the a priori assumption for both Zarathustra and for Nietzsche's career  
in general.  The revelation of his first work, The Birth of Tragedy, is  
the exposure of "the abysses of the Dionysiac," the darkness of the  
Titanic destroyer-god, and the giver of life.  The abyss of Dionysus is  
"the core of the world," in which "eternal life flows indestructibly  
onwards;" it is the "well of eternity, [the] serene and terrible  
noontide abyss," as Zarathustra calls it.  Eternal, indiscernible flux,  
encompassing both good and evil, the possibilities of both life and  
death.  It is the incommensurability of this abyss upon which man casts  
his Apolline ordering light, over which he builds his bridges, his  
meadhalls, and his gods.  And so he gives his world meaning, brick by  
brick; but it is the tragic vision which remembers the Dionysiac flux  
and flow beneath the Apolline order.  The affirmation of that abysmal  
chaos, of destruction and pain along with life and joy, saves; but it is  
an affirmation of which few are capable.  Those who cannot do so, flee,  
and invest their illusions with a permanence called Truth or Being or  
God.  It is these illusions of permanence which have tempted the bulk of  
the history of philosophy, and which tempt Grendel.
	The first age of man of which Zarathustra speaks is the age of the  
camel.  The camel is a beast of burden, one who takes the burdens of  
others, and for others, upon itself.  It lives for them, neglecting and  
denying itself.  Nietzsche finds the spirit of the camel in  
Judeo-Christian morality, about which we shall say more later.  Grendel  
tries on three illusions of this kind.  The first is the song of the  
Shaper.  While many interpreters of Gardner's text - including Gardner  
himself - have pointed to the Shaper as the counterpoint to Grendel's  
destruction because his song, as an act of art, affirms life.  But more  
important than that he sings, is what he sings.  He revalues all values  
with his art, turning the brutish Danes into heroes and saints.  But he  
can only do this by constructing a morality of good and evil, defining  
the goodness of Hrothgar's kingdom in relation to the evil Other; as  
Grendel says, "Balance is everything."  This Other is our monster,  
progeny of "the terrible race God cursed."  Without this evil, the good  
loses its value. "The credit is wholly mine," the monster laughs.  It is  
this sort of relational valuation which Nietzsche attributes to the  
morality of the slave - and later the Judaic belief structure - in The  
Genealogy of Morals: "Slave morality from the outset says No to what is  
'outside,' what is 'different,' what is not itself; and this No is its  
creative deed."  But for the Thanes in the meadhall, the Shaper's song  
is their salvation, the proof of their absolute worth.  Such salvation  
is the spirit of ressentiment itself, which Nietzsche aligns with a  
turning against life itself in favor of a metaphysical otherworld called  
Heaven, the Good, Nirvana.  Turning away from this life is a turning  
towards asceticism and denial, which produces for Nietzsche only  
"d E9cadence - a symptom of declining life."  Grendel calls man's  
ascetic drive away from the world of becoming a "mor(t)ality," both a  
morality and a mortality, or a moral code which inevitably tends towards  
death and suffering.  As man builds these planks across the abyss, with  
all their illusion of permanence and meaning, he turns against the abyss  
with all of its life-force, and retreats into atrophy and decay.
	But nonetheless Grendel is drawn to the Shaper's song, and drawn to  
join this slavish race of men.  And so he goes in peace to Hart,  
carrying a corpse - "something fleshy" - to become one of them.  Of  
course, the Other must remain safely beyond the walls of difference in  
order to maintain the moral code, and so Grendel is beat back, crying  
"Pity, O pity! Pity!"  Pity.  Zarathustra tries to share his message of  
the Overman with the masses, but instead gains only the body of a dead  
tight-rope walker: "[Zarathustra] caught no man, but he did catch a  
corpse," he proclaims.  He cannot be "the mouth for these ears" in the  
common marketplace because the ascetic morality of good and evil levels  
off the difference in mankind so that all are the same.  He calls this  
desire the will to pity.  One is tempted to say that Gardner is here  
clearly drawing on Nietzsche's body of work.  Pity removes fear and  
difference - and produces only d E9cadence and decline.  The  
accomplishment of this leveling-off of mankind produces Nietzsche's  
famous herd.  For Grendel, the Thanes are such a herd, mindlessly  
rebuilding the door to Hart "industrious and witless as worker ants."   
Elsewhere they are "yipping like dogs" or "a herd of cows".  
Zarathustra's herd is full of fleas, or occasionally blinking cows -  
pacified, impotent.  This leveling tranquilizes the chaos of the  
Dionysiac, destroying the life-drive along with the death-drive.  For  
Zarathustra, equality - a profound equality beyond any notion of civil  
rights which we may harbor- can bring only decline.  Grendel laughs at  
the thought: "By deed worth praise a man can, in any kingdom, prosper.  
So."
	After his retreat, our monster again becomes enraptured with this human  
world of Apolline visions taken for truths, and next seeks solace in the  
woman Wealtheow.  She is the "holy servant of the common good,"  
surrendering herself to her husband "with the dignity of a sacrificial  
virgin."  Children cling to her skirt, and she will wash the feet of  
even the most lowly Thanes.  Grendel asks, "Who could miss the grim  
parallel?"  Wealtheow is an image of Christ, and Christian morality.   
For Nietzsche in the Genealogy, Christianity is the progressive  
culmination of the slavish morality, changing the direction of  
ressentiment from the demonized Other towards the self in guilt.  The  
spirit of guilt, the irredeemable burden of salvation, is the turning  
against life in its most profound form, as the impossibility of  
self-valuation produces an unbearable asceticism - the essence of  
d E9cadence.  Our monster is lured in by all of these figures in the  
human world, and each is directed away from the self and towards  
something else.  The camel is fundamentally a beast of pity, which in so  
doing gives up any claim to fulfillment in this world, the world of  
becoming.
	And so we turn to the second age of man, the age of the lion; but first  
we turn towards the stars.  Much has been said and written about the  
structuration of Gardner's text according to the signs of the Zodiac,  
and those symbols need no belaboring here.  In every chapter, the  
corresponding animal symbol appears somewhere, with one notable  
exception: there is not a lion - Leo, the fifth sign of the Zodiac, and  
the chapter of the Dragon - to be found anywhere in the text.  Sure,  
there is a "beast," and even a "roar," but these references do not come  
close to the level of specificity found in the other chapters'  
structural markers.  Listen for a moment to Zarathustra, who provides us  
with a lion, and a solution:
But in the loneliest desert the second metamorphosis occurs: the spirit  
here becomes a lion; it wants to capture freedom and be lord in its own  
desert.
	It seeks here its ultimate lord: it will be an enemy to him and to its  
ultimate God, it will struggle for victory with the great dragon.  What  
is the dragon which the spirit no longer wants to call lord and God?   
The great dragon is called "Thou Shalt."  But the spirit of the lion  
says "I will!"
	"Thou shalt" lies in its path, sparkling with gold, a scale-covered  
beast, and on every scale glitters golden "Thou shalt."
	Values of a thousand years glitter on the scales, and thus speaks the  
mightiest of all dragons: "All the values of things - glitter on me.
	"All values have already been created, and all created values - are in  
me.  Truly, there shall be no more 'I will!'"  Thus speaks the dragon.

  Again, the imagery of this passage suggests the voice of Zarathustra  
haunting the pages of Gardner's text.  The lion of Chapter Five is not  
the Dragon but the ferocious, furry, man-eating monster Grendel.  For  
Zarathustra - and for Nietzsche - the age of the lion is the age of  
no-saying, of destruction, which necessarily clears a space for the  
imaginative affirmation of the child in the third age.  It is at this  
point in Gardner's text that Grendel stops being tempted by the illusory  
systems of order man gives to his chaos, and becomes the nihilistic  
destroyer which he is often considered to be in the critical literature.  
 The dragon of which Zarathustra speaks is the voice of the "Thou  
shalt," the voice of the will to truth and the decadent denial of life  
which it entails.  But Grendel's Dragon is a nihilist, offering nothing  
more than the defeatist maxim to "seek out gold and sit on it."  In the  
Judeo-Christian schema of morality, however, the ascetic urge of the  
will to truth turns upon itself, overcomes itself, and too becomes a  
nihilistic urge, as Nietzsche explains in his autobiography: "God is a  
crude answer, a piece of indelicacy against us thinkers - fundamentally  
even a crude prohibition to us: you shall not think!"  Just as Truth  
must eventually call itself into question, willing turns upon itself and  
wills nothingness.  A new law-table hangs now in the marketplace and  
over the meadhall: "Wisdom makes weary, nothing is worth while; you  
shall not desire!"  This is the prohibition of Gardner's dragon.
	The lion, then, fights the nihilism of the will to Truth with his own  
form of rejection, smashing the winter-idols of priests, the songs of  
poets, and the beauty of women.  In seeking to destroy all ideals, the  
lion must take a healthy dose of nihilism of the dragon who says that  
"all is vanity!" to use against them; he must reject the whole world in  
order to create it again.  He swings to the other portion of the  
Dionysiac undercurrent, embracing the destruction which is necessarily a  
part of life.  In this no-saying, the lion levels a path for the coming  
of the child, who provides "innocence and forgetfulness, a new  
beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred  
Yes," as Zarathustra puts it.  The lion can free himself from the  
expectation of meaning, the crude negative valuation of the abyss.   
Nietzsche speaks of this lion again in The Twilight of the Idols:
There they savor the freedom from all social constraints, they  
compensate themselves in the wilderness for the tension engendered by  
protracted confinement and enclosure within the peace of society, they  
go back to the innocent conscience of the beast of prey, as triumphant  
monsters who perhaps emerge from a disgusting procession of murder,  
arson, rape, torture, exhilarated and undisturbed of soul, as if it were  
no more than a students' prank, convinced they have provided the poets  
with a lot more material for song and praise.

   Here, too, do we not recognize traces of our monster, Grendel?  To seize  
upon this destructive impulse as an end in itself is both a trap and a  
mistake, as some like Jean-Paul Sartre will invariably fall short and  
remain within this sort of nihilism.  Nihilism turned upon itself  
becomes solipsism, as the only remaining thing is the self as the center  
of its self-made universe.  Such a solipsism is, I might add, the  
logical outcome of any philosophy which starts with a Cartesian split;  
skepticism and solipsism become inevitable in the face of the  
impossibility of healing this divide.  In this sense, the criticisms  
which Gardner has leveled against Sartre in various fora are indeed  
justified; but they would be equally justified coming from Nietzsche,  
who would find the unbridgeable gap between Sartre's being-in-itself and  
being-for-itself equally problematic.  How, then, can our monster  
Grendel escape from this trap of nihilism?  We move quickly now to the  
end, as the Geats come to Hart.  The conclusion of the text is foregone  
from the legend: Grendel must die.  But must this death necessarily  
signify a defeat?
	This is certainly the way in which many critics have chosen to read the  
text, and perhaps the way Gardner "intended" for it to be read.  But I  
find the equation of Beowulf's victory of brute force with a victory of  
morality and order highly troublesome and problematic.  This belief in a  
morality of the strong would, I believe, be very troubling to John  
Gardner as well, at least in terms of the moral world he imagines in On  
Moral Fiction.  Grendel redeems himself twice at the end of the text,  
with his song and with his joy, turning his defeat into a very  
Nietzschean victory.  We shall consider the latter first, Grendel's  
penultimate thought, "Is it joy I feel?"  What are we to make of this  
joy?  Is it the joy of release?  Or is it the joy of religion?  Listen  
again to Zarathustra:
Did you ever say Yes to one joy?  O my friends, then you said Yes to all  
woe as well.  All things are chained and entwined together, all things  
are in love;
	if ever you wanted one moment twice, if ever you said: "You please me,  
happiness, instant, moment!" then you wanted everything to return!
	you wanted everything anew, everything eternal, everything chained,  
entwined together, everything in love, O that is how you loved the  
world,
	you everlasting men, loved it eternally and for all time: and you say  
even to woe: "Go, but return!"  For all joy wants - eternity!

  The joy of which Zarathustra speaks is the joy of the eternal recurrence  
of the same, Nietzsche's quasi-cosmological doctrine proclaiming the  
possibility that the past is yet to come, that time runs in a circle  
joined at the gateway Moment.  The thought of eternal return is "the  
greatest burden," the demon who visits you in the middle of the night  
and greets you with the prospect of living your same life - detail upon  
horrifying detail - over and over for all eternity.  But to say Yes to  
one moment of joy is to redeem one's whole contingent history, to redeem  
the accident of one's happening at all.  And in his final thought, "Poor  
Grendel's had an accident, so may you all," Grendel affirms his  
accident, and all of the contingent happenings which have brought him to  
his moment of joy.  Like narrative itself, the eternal return affirms  
the absolute necessity of every moment to produce the next, for "every  
power draws its ultimate consequences every moment."  Nietzsche tells  
his own story in his autobiography by affirming a moment of joy in the  
face of a lifetime of pain and setting down to "tell myself my life."   
The narrative text, or the autobiographical text, brings forth this  
pattern of eternal return, endlessly repeating the same events every  
time the text is opened, affirming the necessity of each word, saying  
Yes to the world it creates.  Alexander Nehamas, in his study Nietzsche:  
Life as Literature, has advanced this very view.  What the eternal  
return tells us, he argues, is to live as if we were a character in a  
narrative, but to construct simultaneously one's own story consciously  
like a first-person narrator.  For Nehamas the paradigmatic example of  
this is Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, a title perhaps  
better translated as On the Recovery of Lost Time.
In this fictional autobiography the narrator relates in enormous,  
painstaking detail all the silly, insignificant, pointless, accidental,  
sometimes horrible things he did in his rambling efforts to become an  
author.  He writes about the time he wasted, the acquaintances he made,  
the views and values he accepted at different times, his changes of  
heart and mind, his friendships, the ways in which he treated his  
family, his lovers, and his servants, his attempts to enter society, the  
disjointed and often base motives out of which he acted, and much else  
besides.  Yet it is just these unconnected, chance events that somehow  
finally enable him to become an author, to see them after all as parts  
of a unified pattern, the result of which is his determination to begin  
at last his first book.  This book, he tells us, will relate in detail  
all the silly, insignificant, pointless, accidental, sometimes horrible  
things he did....  - a book he has not yet begun to write but which his  
readers have just finished reading.

Could we not say the same about Grendel, narrating to the reader the  
story of his life which has given him the ability to narrate the story  
of his life?  The power of the eternal return as narration allows one to  
reconcile with the past, heal the wounds of time, and proclaim a mighty  
Yes.  Joy proclaims its Yes to the chaos, contingency, and accident of  
existence, to the disorder of the Dionysiac undercurrent.  Joy pays  
homage to this god of the dark.
	Which is the mark of the child in the third age of man; the  
imaginative, forgetful, innocent child who affirms the world he creates  
with every breath.  As we have been suggesting, the question of eternal  
recurrence is inseparable from the question of art.  Grendel's song of  
walls is his textual production of art, affirming the world he makes in  
his whispers.  While many have viewed this moment as his defeat, the  
song is his own act of affirmation.  From out of that affirmation comes  
his joy.  Which returns us to the tragic stage of the Greeks, watched  
over by both Apollo and Dionysus, the light and the darkness which makes  
it possible.  Grendel's song proclaims both the Apolline order of man's  
creations, and the tragic awareness of its eventual demise as they  
return to the fold of the cauldron below.  Like the Attic tragedian, he  
exalts the Dionysiac life-force of creation and destruction through the  
beauty of an Apolline image.  Art constructs an  interpretation of  
reality, a perspective upon being.  In this regard, then, the roles of  
the artist and the philosopher are not entirely distinct for Nietzsche.   
The philosopher is also a creator of interpretations, no longer a seeker  
of truth; in the face of the impossibility of truth, his or her task  
moves into the realm of the aesthetic: philosophers "create values...   
they reach for the future with a creative hand, and everything that has  
been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer."  The world is  
the canvas and materials of the philosopher; from it he creates a system  
of valuation which holds sway over the lives of men  - but it is  
fundamentally an artistic vision beyond true and false.  Zarathustra  
speaks about the two in tandem like this: these creators "generate a  
goal for mankind and give the earth its meaning and its future."
	This last maxim sounds very familiar, a lot like John Gardner's own  
proclamations about the role of art in the world.  As much as he may  
wish to deny it, we hear Nietzsche's voice in the vision of art  
presented in On Moral Fiction.  Gardner judges true art to be that which  
is an affirmation of life, "of what ought to be and what, in the  
artist's devout opinion, is."  Art, then, discloses the possibility of  
being for Gardner as well; it sets forth a world with its proclamation,  
"It's like this."  In this sense, then, it is the setting-forth of  
truth, despite the fact that, in Gardner's words, "one can only arrive  
at angles of vision, ways of trying to know."  Compare for a moment with  
Nietzsche's proclamations, that art is the "great stimulus to life."   
Reality ceases to be a grounding and becomes the refractory prism of  
perspective, the real-as-truth giving way to "only a perspective seeing,  
only a perspective knowing."  The poet Wallace Stevens would take up  
Nietzsche's position and summarize it succinctly, in terms which I  
venture Gardner would endorse: "the final belief must be in a fiction."   
Indeed, we have only our stories to keep us company in the darkness, to  
bring us home in our homelessness among the chaos.  The hammer of Thor  
protects and instructs us, affirms that we are, and how we are.  We find  
the tragic vision of the Greeks, of Nietzsche's Greeks, as well, when  
Gardner writes that "the sublime... celebrates mankind's defiance... of  
the awesome powers which will one of these days destroy him."  The  
Apolline image stands firmly and proudly before its Dionysiac other,  
proclaiming its inevitably pyrrhic victory.  In Gardner's celebration of  
the poet-priest we hear the voice of Zarathustra's philosopher-artist;  
both figures set forth the art of life to give man his interpretation of  
himself.  Great art is, Gardner says, like great philosophy,  
metaphysical; it erects a world, frames an image within the multiple and  
the chaotic.  Listen again for a moment to Nietzsche's journals  
regarding the place of art in the soul: "Here we discover art as an  
organic function: we discover it in the most angelic instinct, 'love';  
we discover it as the greatest stimulus to life - art thus sublimely  
expedient even when it lies."  Are these not also the words of John  
Gardner, inhabiting a text from long before his own birth?  With art a  
thrust enters history, recasts the past, reconciles the future, and  
gives forth itself, proclaiming its own unique vision and the world  
which is created in that vision.
	Now, none of this is to undercut the important differences between the  
two thinkers.  I think it would be fair to say that Gardner is much more  
conservative and canonical in considering the question of what counts as  
"true art."  Nietzsche, in fact, has nothing to say on the subject, but  
we can certainly extrapolate an opinion contrary to Gardner's based upon  
his feelings about morality in general.  What both thinkers agree upon  
is the fundamental role of art in constructing the nebulae of reality.   
Because of art's very real implications for the actual lives of actual  
people, Gardner - in an almost utilitarian move - prefers one kind of  
art over another; yet he leaves room for the power of "bad art", as it  
too inevitably asserts man's intuition of the beautiful.  So Where do we  
go from here?  Drawing again from Robert Morace's lecture, I would  
venture that Gardner's stubborn belief in a metaphysically grounded  
morality is untenable both for the reasons which he discussed last night  
and in the face of the critiques which thinkers such as Nietzsche,  
Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida have provided.  To reduce the question to  
a matter of choice or preference would be the ultimate act of nihilism -  
saying that the question of moral grounding is one of indifference or  
irrelevance.  What we can do is take the site of convergence in  
Nietzsche and Gardner - the fact that art affirms existence in revealing  
a perspective upon in it - and work from there.  Add to that Nietzsche's  
idea of the impossibility of grounding a morality, that every morality  
offers only a perspective on the world.  
	But then we are confronted with an ethical dilemma: Frank Kermode, in  
his 1965 lectures at Bryn Mawr explains that if we operate on the simple  
criteria of "affirming life," we could just as easily justify the  
killing of six million Jews in the name of this affirmation.  Indeed,  
the possibility of Nazism has always been the limiting-case for a  
post-modern ethics, and many important thinkers in this tradition have  
shied away from the question.  But as Nietzsche tells us, the key is not  
to flee from the abyss but to own up to it and confront it.  What is  
necessary is the realization that there can be no bright line to  
separate us from the Nazis, but through our strength and our will we  
choose otherwise.  Perhaps we need what Sren Kierkegaard calls a leap  
of faith, a choice we make without the word of God to guide us, like  
Abraham's hesitance with Isaac on the mountain.  Or, as Kermode  
suggests, we must prevent our fictions from deteriorating into myths.   
The myth seeks to be proven or disproven, while the fictional "as if"  
holds such a question permanently in suspense.  Fictions hold power over  
us from their position of powerlessness, that they will never be taken  
for true.  Whereas the myth seeks to make sense of eternity, the fiction  
helps us to cope with the here and now; as Gardner argues, the best  
fictions are those which are appropriate, but appropriate on a local  
level, we might add.  As the poet Marianne Moore writes, "These things  
are important not because a / high-sounding interpretation can be put  
upon them but because they are / useful."  So our stories can stave off  
the darkness only for a little while, forcing us to create new ones for  
the next night.  Again, in this dual realization of the power and  
powerlessness of our art-as-image, we find the vision of the Greek  
tragedian, and the possibility of a tragic age.
	But what I have tried to show here is that these two thinkers have a  
great deal more to say to one another than Gardner's scornful remarks  
would seem to indicate.  By putting them into dialogue with one another,  
letting their voices speak through each other, I hope to have at least  
made some overtures towards salvaging an "existentialist" reading which  
can avoid the pitfalls of nihilism which Sartre falls into.  As far as  
Nietzsche is concerned, Gardner is right to criticize Sartre for his  
life-denying vision, and for the rubble to which he reduces the very  
possibility of meaning.  In their art and in their discourses on art,  
John Gardner and Friedrich Nietzsche both show us a way of lighting up  
the darkness, making peace the haunting spectres, and bridging the gaps  
of being.  Thank you.

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updated on 21 May 1998

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