W: Reading about Writing

Here we have from John Gardner’s book, “The Art of Fiction”, an interesting point about fiction in the English language. He is explaining deconstruction, but he unwittingly makes a profound observation.

…At any rate, behind the deconstructionists’ dazzling cloud of language lie certain more or less indisputable facts: that language carries values with it, sometimes values we do not recognize as we speak and would not subscribe to if we noticed their presence in what we say; and that art (music, painting, literature, etc.) is language. That language carries values is obvious. Again and again this book speaks of the writer as “he,” though many of the best writers I have read or have taught in writing classes are female. English, like most languages, is covertly male chauvinist. It is also, as the novelist Harold Brodkey points out, covertly Christian. Nearly all our most resonant words and images carry a trace of Neoplatonic Christianity. Even so innocent a word as “friend” has overtones. In feudal times it meant one’s lord and protector; in Anglo-Saxon times it meant the opposite of “fiend.” We can of course read a book about friends without ever consciously invoking the undercurrents of the word; but where the friendship grows intense, in this story we’re reading, we are almost sure to encounter images of light or warmth, flower or garden imagery, hunger, sacrifice, blood, and so on. The very form of the story, its orderly beginning, middle, and end, is likely to hint at a Christian metaphysic.