There is a paragraph toward the end of On Moral Fiction in which Mr. Gardner tells us about the kind of frustration which must have led him to publish his beliefs about art in this form.

… I've been in conversations where no one seemed to care about the truth, where people argued merely to win, refused to listen or try to understand, threw in irrelevancies—some anecdote without conceivable bearing, some mere ego flower. A thousand times I have heard some person—some casual acquaintance about whom I had no strong feeling—cruelly vilified, and have found that to rise in defense of mere fairness is to become, suddenly, the enemy. I have witnessed, repeatedly, university battles in which no one on any side would stoop to plain truth.

The strength of Gardner's argument comes from his conviction that this "plain truth" is before our eyes. It is the argument of the prophet, the one whose vision is not clouded by the ephemera of his particular time. And such righteous indignation is a strong rhetorical device. The mere force of Gardner's conviction carries a lot of weight. His model seems to be Tolstoy who also sought the "plain truth" and found it in what he called "Christian Art." Gardner has substituted the secular idea of the "moral" to salvage for art among other things, Tolstoy's novels….

He believes that there is some common understanding of how people ought to behave, an understanding that might as well be called "right reason" or "common sense" as any of the more elaborate philosophical terms. It is a feeling that is clear and "moral" and as "old as the hills." Thus Gardner is amazed that most contemporary art, especially fiction, strays so far from this "plain truth."

The particular enemies to the truth as Gardner sees it are the "merdistes," the nay-saying offspring of Sartre affecting nausea in the house of culture. After chastising the "existentialists" Gardner's anger moves to the "trivializers." In this category he seems to include most living fiction writers except John Fowles. (p. 462)

Because Gardner's anger is honest and wholesome the criticism of his contemporaries never descends to mere vindictiveness or gossip. He simply knows what he likes and why he likes it and is ready to share his beliefs. His straightforward sincerity mingled with his certitude make it difficult to detach oneself from his opinions. Here is a respected and popularly acknowledged novelist getting hold of you the way only a skillful essayist does, whispering the "truth" in your ear. It seems almost rude to reject truths offered with such enthusiasm and good intention, but when Gardner moves from the general to the specific it is sometimes as easy to say no to him as it is to the missionary on the street corner. When he tries to ground his argument in the framework of aesthetic theory he is solemnly tedious. When he uses the "touchstones" of Homer or Shakespeare to judge rightly a Ron Sukenick or a William Gass he is indulging in the sort of comic exaggeration he criticizes. Mr. Gardner has the big guns of antiquity in his hip pocket and is quick to use them. His essays on Homer and Dante are splendid interpretations quite apart from their argumentative use in the book. But it sometimes seems as if his admirable sense of the past has distorted his notion of time. The bulk of the argument on literary values concerns fiction written in the past fifteen years. Mr. Gardner is busy judging writers still in the midst of their careers as if they were the "mute inglorious Miltons" of Gray's Elegy.

Furthermore, we have the odd circumstance of a serious writer whose own fiction has received acclaim and wide popular acceptance finding threats to the nature of art in the mists of "experimental" fiction where the audience is small enough to fit under Mr. Gardner's fingernail. (pp. 462-63)

The main technique of the trivializers is what Mr. Gardner calls "texture," "fiction as pure language." They create what he calls "linguistic sculpture." They focus "their attention on language, gathering nouns and verbs the way a crow collects paper clips sending off their characters and action to take a long nap."…

The failure to see the reality within the exaggeration, the moral within the "trivial," may be Mr. Gardner's literary blind spot. No fiction writer ever has immunity from the charge of being a "trivializer."…

When Gardner is making the grandiose claims of art in simple language he is most eloquent. "Art asserts and reasserts those values which hold off dissolution … rediscovers, generation by generation what is necessary to humanness." He knows that often writers settle for the tricks of style, and that critics tend to fall into the bureaucracy of their diction. His indignation and the general truths he represents should shake us even when the specifics of his argument do not. (p. 463)