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1.2 Lifetime creativity, activity and famous works of the writer


The ResurrectionThe Resurrection is a fairly straightforward, realistic novel about the ways in which its main character, James Chandler, confronts the fact of death. His disease, leukemia, involves the mindless proliferation of lymph cells and so reflects the universe itself, which may be, as Chandler speculates, similarly chaotic and purposeless. Philosophy does not at first provide Chandler with a Boethian consolation because he, as a distinctly modern man, suspects that philosophy may be nothing more than a meaningless technique, a self-enclosed game. The novel thus raises the question of the purpose of philosophy, art, literature, and even medicine. Chandler’s mother knows that the job of philosophers is to help people like her understand what their experiences and their world mean. Meaning, however, is precisely what contemporary philosophy generally denies and what Chandler wisely struggles to find. His breakthrough occurs when he realizes Immanuel Kant’s fundamental error, the failure to see that moral and aesthetic affirmations are interconnected and need not—or should not—necessitate that the individual who makes the affirmation be entirely disinterested; that is, the affirmation may have—or should have—some practical application, some usefulness.⁴Sharing this knowledge becomes rather difficult for Chandler. His sympathetic and loving wife, Marie, is too practical-minded to understand him. Nineteen-year-old Viola Stacey, who, torn between cynicism and her childlike “hunger for absolute goodness,” falls in love with Chandler, misinterprets his writing as an escape from reality precipitated by his intense physical suffering. More interesting is John Horne, who, like Chandler, is a terminal patient. According to Horne, a believer in legal technique, love is illusion and humanity is composed of clowns who act with no reason for their behavior. Like Viola, he assumes that art is an escape from life, or an “atonement” for one’s failures and mistakes. Although he is interested in philosophy and acquainted with Chandler’s published works, his endless prattling precludes Chandler’s sharing the discovery with him. However, Chandler does finally, if indirectly, communicate his vision. By putting it to some practical use (he dies trying to help Viola), Chandler finds what Horne never does: something or someone worth dying for, some vision worth affirming. “It was not the beauty of the world one must affirm,” he suddenly understands, “but the world, the buzzing blooming confusion itself.” Understanding that life is what drives humanity to art and philosophy, to fashion a life for oneself and others that is ennobling and useful (realistically idealistic, Gardner seems to suggest), Chandler fights down his physical and philosophical nausea. His vision worth perpetuating, he lives on—is resurrected—in the memories of those whom he loved, and thus for whom he died
The Wreckage of Agathon
Early in The Resurrection, Gardner quotes the British philosopher R. G. Collingwood: “History is a process . . . in which the things that are destroyed are brought into existence. Only it is easier to see their destruction than to see their construction, because it does not take long.” Like Gardner, James Chandler in The Resurrection affirms Collingwood’s optimistic position, a position which the title character of The Wreckage of Agathon unwisely rejects. Insofar as he stands in opposition to the law-and-order society established in Sparta by the tyrant Lykourgus, the seer Agathon is an appealing figure. No system built solely upon reason, least of all one as inflexible as Sparta’s, is adequate to the variety and complexity of life, Gardner implies, but this does not mean that the only alternative is the nihilism espoused by Agathon, who had “spent so much time seeing through men’s lies he’d forgotten what plain truth looked like.” Having once been a lover of truth and beauty, Agathon (“the good”) now mocks them; choosing to embody “the absolute idea of No,” he is the one who sees the wreckage that was, is, and will be, the one who dismisses all art and ideals as mere illusions.Whereas Chandler learns to put his philosophy to some use, Agathon comes to value his ideas more highly than people. Unlike Chandler, who eventually accepts death, mutability, and human limitations and in this way transcends them, Agathon refuses to see wreckage as being part of life; for him it is the ultimate fact. The cause of Agathon’s pessimism is not cosmic but personal; it is the result of his repeated betrayals of his friends, his wife, and his lover. This is the knowledge that haunts Agathon, however much he tries to hide it behind his leering clown’s mask, leading him to believe that to be alive is necessarily to be a threat to others. Although he dies of the plague, Agathon’s real sickness is of the soul: the inability to believe in love and human dignity as actual possibilities. The fact that they are real is clearly shown in the characters of his friend Dorkis, leader of the Helot revolt, and his young disciple Demodokos, whose prison journal alternates with Agathon’s (together they make up Gardner’s novel). Demodokos, the “Peeker” to Agathon’s “Seer,” represents that childlike faith and goodness of heart that the disillusioned Seer has renounced. Patient, understanding (if not completely comprehending), and above all committed to others, the Peeker is the one who, for all his naïveté, or perhaps because of it, serves as Gardner’s hero.⁵
The Sunlight Dialogues
Like Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues (which was written earlier) depends in part on Gardner’s skillful interlacing of his literary sources: Gilgamesh, Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485), Dante, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), William Faulkner, and A. Leo Oppenheim’s Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization (1977). It appears to be, at first glance, part family chronicle, part mystery story, but beneath the surface realism, the reader finds elements of fantasy and myth. By an elaborate system of plots and subplots, each echoing the others, Gardner weaves together his eighty-odd characters into a densely textured whole that contrasts with his characters’ sense of social and spiritual fragmentation. The main characters appear as isolates—the marked children of Cain—and as prisoners trapped in cells of their own making. Some blindly strike out for absolute personal freedom (Millie Hodge, for example), while others passively accept the small measure of freedom to be had in the cage of their limitations (Millie’s ex-husband, Will Hodge, Sr.). As adults living in a world “decayed to ambiguity,” they are like one character’s young daughter whose toys frustrate her “to tears of wrath.” Their frustration leads not to tantrums but to cynical denial of all hope, all ideals, and all connections between self and other.The modern condition is illustrated in the fate of the Hodge clan. Just as their farm, Stony Hill, is said to symbolize “virtues no longer found,” the late congressman represents the unity and sense of idealistic purpose missing in the Batavia of 1966. His qualities now appear in fragmented and diluted form in his five children: Will, Sr., a lawyer and toggler who can repair but not build; Ben, the weak-willed visionary; Art, Jr., the tinkerer; Ruth, the organizer; and Taggert, who inherits his father’s genius, purity of heart, and pride, but not his luck. The failure of the congressman’s harmonious vision leads to the moral relativism of the Sunlight Man on one hand and the reductive law-and-order morality of Batavia’s chief of police, Fred Clumly, on the other.The Sunlight Man is the congressman’s youngest child, the angelic Tag, transmogrified by misfortune into a forty-year-old devil. Badly disfigured by the fire that kills his two sons, he returns to his hometown in the shape of a Melvillean monomaniac. Having searched for love and truth but having found only betrayal and illusion, he claims that love and truth do not exist; having failed to heal his psychotic wife or protect his sons, he proclaims all actions absurd. His magic tricks are cynical jokes intended to expose all meanings as self-delusions. His four dialogues with the police chief serve the same purpose: to disillusion Clumly, representative of the Judeo- Christian culture. Taking the Babylonian position, the Sunlight Man propounds the complete separation of spirit and matter, the feebleness and inconsequentiality of the individual human life, and the futility of the desire for fame and immortality. Personal responsibility, he says, means nothing more than remaining free to act out one’s fated part. Although his dialogues are in fact monologues, it is significant that the Sunlight Man feels it necessary to make any gesture at all toward Clumly and that he finds some relief once he has made it. Similarly, his magic not only evidences his nihilism but also serves to mask the fact that despite his monstrous appearance and philosophy, he is still human enough—vulnerable enough—to feel the need for fellowship and love.It is this need that Clumly eventually comes to understand. Powerless to stop either the local or the national epidemic of senseless crimes and bewildered by a world that appears to be changing for the worse, the sixty-four-year-old police chief at first seizes upon the Sunlight Man as the embodiment of evil in the modern world. Slowly the molelike, ever-hungry Clumly abandons this Manichaean notion and begins to search for the complicated truth. Clumly strikes through the pasteboard mask and, unlike Melville’s Ahab, or the Sunlight Man who is made in his image, finds not the abyss but Taggert Hodge.Throughout the novel, Clumly feels a strong sense of personal responsibility for his town and all its citizens, but, at the same time, he finds no clear answer to his repeated question, “What’s a man to do?” He understands that there is something wrong with the Sunlight Man’s philosophy but is not able to articulate what it is; he realizes that in separating the world into actual and ideal, the Sunlight Man has limited the choices too narrowly, but he has no idea what the other choices might be. The conflict between head and heart affects Clumly profoundly and eventually costs him his job. Only at this point can he meet Taggert Hodge as “Fred Clumly, merely mortal.” In the novel’s final chapter, Clumly, speaking before a local audience, abandons the text of his hackneyed speech on “Law and Order” and delivers instead an impromptu and inspired sermon, or eulogy (Taggert having been killed by a policeman) that transforms the Sunlight Man into “one of our number.”⁶ Ascending to a healing vision of pure sunlight, Clumly, “shocked to wisdom,” spreads the gospel according to Gardner: Man must try to do the best he possibly can; “that’s the whole thing.”Nickel Mountain Although not published until 1973, Nickel Mountain was begun nearly twenty years earlier while Gardner was an undergraduate at Washington University. The fact that parts of the novel originally appeared as self-contained short stories is evident in the work’s episodic structure and unnecessary repetition of background material. Nevertheless, Nickel Mountain is one of Gardner’s finest achievements, especially in the handling of characters and setting.The novel’s chief figure is the enormously fat, middle-aged bachelor Henry Soames, owner of a diner somewhere in the Catskill Mountains. Alternately sentimental and violent, Henry is a kind of inarticulate poet or priest whose hunger is not for the food he eats but for the love he has never experienced. Similarly, his Stop Off is less a run-down diner than a communal meeting place, a church where the light (“altar lamp”) is always on and misfits are always welcome. Willard Freund and Callie Wells, for example, see in Henry the loving father neither has had. Longing to escape their loveless families and fulfill their adolescent dreams, they find shelter at the diner.Willard, however, chooses to follow his father’s advice rather than act responsibly toward Callie, whom he has impregnated—a choice that, perversely, confirms Willard in his cynicism and colors his view of human nature. Betrayal comes early to sixteen-year-old Callie (Calliope: the muse of epic poetry) and, as with Willard, leaves its mark. When Henry fumblingly proposes marriage, she interprets her acceptance as an entirely selfish choice. Gardner’s description of the wedding, however, shows that, whatever Callie’s motivation, the ceremony serves as a communal celebration of those values she and Henry unconsciously affirm and Willard mistakenly denies.Henry’s charity looms as large in the novel as his bulk and seems to extend to everyone but himself. When Simon Bale, a belligerently self-righteous Jehovah’s Witness, loses his wife and his home, Henry naturally takes him in, but when Henry accidentally causes Bale to fall to his death, he turns suicidal. Henry’s suicide attempt takes a rather comical form—overeating—but his predicament is nevertheless serious. To accept Simon Bale’s death as an accident, Henry believes, would be to admit that chance governs the universe and to forfeit all possibility of human dignity. This either/or approach precludes Henry’s understanding of one fundamental point: that man is neither hero nor clown, savior nor devil, but a mixture of both; the best he can do is to hope and to act on the strength of that hope.