Innovations of the republic of uzbekistan gulistan state university

CONCULISION
After being betrayed, they abandon their childlike ideals and embrace the existentialist position that Gardner deplores for its rationalist assumptions and pessimistic moral relativism. His antidote to the modern malaise in general and Jean-Paul Sartre’s “nausea” in particular is a twentieth century version of the heroic ideal: common heroes—fathers and husbands, farmers and professors, for example—who intuitively understand that whatever the odds against them, they must act as if they can protect those whom they love. Instead of pure and powerful knights dedicated to a holy quest, Gardner’s heroes are confused, sometimes ridiculous figures who learn to overcome their feelings of betrayal and find their strength in love, memory, and forgiveness. Choosing to act responsibly, they achieve a certain measure of human dignity. In effect, the choice these characters face is a simple one: either to affirm “the buzzing blooming confusion” of life, as Gardner, quotingWilliam James, calls it, or to deny it. Whereas the existentialist finds in that confusion meaningless abundance and historical discontinuity, Gardner posits meaningful variety and an interconnectedness that assumes value and makes the individual a part of, not apart from, the human and natural worlds in which he or she lives.To find, or imagine, these connections is the role Gardner assigns to the artist. This view, propounded at length in On Moral Fiction, clearly puts Gardner at odds with other contemporary writers of innovative fiction who, he claims, too readily and uncritically accept the views of Sartre, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other twentieth century pessimists. Art, Gardner maintains, ought not merely to reflect life as it is but also should portray life as it should be. This does not mean that Gardner approves of simple-minded affirmations, for he carefully distinguishes “true” artists from those who simplify complex moral issues, as well as from those who, like William H. Gass, sidestep such issues entirely by creating “linguistic sculpture” in which only the “surface texture” is important.
Believing that art does indeed affect life and accepting Percy Bysshe Shelley’s conception of the artist as legislator for all humankind, Gardner calls for a moral fiction that provides “valid models for imitation, eternal verities worth keeping in mind, and a benevolent vision of the possible” that will cause the reader to feel uneasy about his or her failings and limitations and stimulate him or her to act virtuously. Moral fiction, however, is not didactic; rather, it involves a search for truth. The author “gropes” for meaning in the act of writing and revising his story; then, by creating suspense, he devises for the reader a parallel experience. The meaning that author and reader discover in Gardner’s work emphasizes the importance of rejecting existential isolation and accepting one’s place in the human community, the “common herd” as Gardner calls it in one story. This meaning is not so much rational and intellectual as intuitive and emotional, less a specific message than a feeling—as is entirely appropriate in the case of a writer who defines fiction as “an enormously complex language.”Agathon reappears in Gardner’s next novel as the perversely likable narrator of Grendel, a retelling of Beowulf from the monster’s distinctly modern point of view. In his 1970 essay, “Fulgentius’s Expositio Vergiliana Continentia,” Gardner argues that the Beowulf poet used his three monsters as perversions of those virtues affirmed by Vergil in the Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.): valor, wisdom, and goodness (the proper use of things). Specifically, Grendel represents perverted wisdom; in Gardner’s novel, he is the one who mistakenly chooses to believe in what he rationally knows and to reject what he intuitively feels. In both the epic and the novel, Grendel is an isolate, a cosmic outlaw, but Gardner’s monster is less a hulking beast than a shaggy Holden Caulfield (The Catcher in the Rye), a disillusioned and therefore cynical adolescent. Not simply a creature cursed by God, he is a detached Sartrean observer, a relativist for whom “balance” can be both “everything” and “nothing,” and a comic ironist trapped within his own mocking point of view. For him the world is a meaningless accident, “wreckage.” Although he finds the indignity of the men he observes humorous, he is less tolerant of the factitious patterns they use to make sense of their existence.Grendel makes his chief mistake when, having become dissatisfied with what is, he goes to the Dragon for advice and guidance. The Dragon is a bored and weary existentialist who espouses the philosophy of Sartre’s L’ Étre et le néant, 1943 (Being and Nothingness, 1956). He tells the confused and terrified Grendel that values are merely things, all of which are worthless, and counsels fatalistic passivity in the face of a fragmented, purposeless world. Although Grendel becomes infected by the Dragon’s nihilism, he still feels attracted to King Hrothgar’s court poet, the Shaper, whose songs he believes are lies. Unlike the Dragon, who is the ultimate realist and materialist, the Shaper is a visionary who sings of the “projected possible” and an alchemist who transforms the base ore of barbarism into the gold of civilization. His songs bespeak hopefulness and, by means of what the Dragon scornfully terms the “gluey whine of connectedness,” a dream of order.