For a writer who, since the publication of On Moral Fiction in 1978, has been under almost continual attack and whose literary reputation reached its lowest point in the time between the appearance of his ninth novel, Mickelsson’s Ghosts, in June, 1982, and his death three months later, John Gardner has received a surprising amount of attention from academic critics, who have made him the subject of no fewer than seven books in the past four years: John Gardner: A Bibliographical Profile (1980), by John Howell; Moral Fiction: An Anthology (1980), edited by Joe David Bellamy; John Gardner: Critical Perspectives (1982), edited by Robert A. Morace and Kathryn VanSpanckeren; John Gardner: True Art, Moral Art (1983), edited by Beatrice Mendez-Egle; A World of Order and Light: The Fiction of John Gardner (1984), by Gregory Morris; John Gardner: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography (1984), by Robert A. Morace; and the book under review here, Arches & Light: The Fiction of John Gardner (1983), by David Cowart.
On the strength of his earlier critical study, Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion (1980), Cowart’s view of Gardner demands the serious attention of anyone interested in Gardner and his work. Briefly stated, that view is as follows. Gardner believed that
the artist must, in his work, make the world over from scratch. This creation is by no means irresponsible or escapist, because the world becomes what art says it is. To put it another way, the artist must shoulder responsibility for what he creates at first hand—his art—and for what he creates at second hand—the world shaped by that art. Gardner thus modifies the traditional dictum that art uncovers changeless, preexistent truths; he makes of the proposition “life imitates art” something more than a parlor witticism.
As an artist, Gardner acknowledged the horror of the world but refused to succumb to despair. Against the darkness of the abyss, Gardner posited what he called the “arches and light” of aesthetic creation, in particular the effect of such art on the reader for whom it would act as “an antidote to despair.” Gardner’s characters, many of them artists or surrogate artists, face the same choice; they must choose between negation and affirmation, between the acceptance of a “narrowly defined existential truth” and “some finer, more complex, less accessible truth that is no less real for being created, at least in part, by the artist in the process of uncovering it.”
No one familiar with Gardner’s work will find Cowart’s position especially startling or even new, for it derives in large measure from On Moral Fiction. At his best, however, Cowart does add significantly to the reader’s understanding of and appreciation for Gardner’s artistry. In writing his three “early pastoral novels,” The Resurrection (1966), The Wreckage of Agathon (1970), and Nickel Mountain (1973), Cowart explains, Gardner “sets himself the task of making positive stories out of the grimmest possible material,” realizing “that his creed as a novelist—affirmation—was nugatory unless it could be practiced in the face of the ugliest truths about the human condition.” By manipulating narrative points of view and combining the conventions of distinct literary forms, the novel and the pastoral, Gardner was able to transform morbid subjects, such as the death of The Resurrection’s protagonist, James Chandler, into affirmations of certain basic human values such as responsibility and community. Cowart’s chapter on Gardner’s most frequently discussed work, Grendel (1971), is nearly as good. Cowart’s lucid treatment makes clear exactly how much previous commentators have missed, even in the by now overworked relationship between the novel and the Anglo-Saxon epic from which it derives. Beowulf (c. 1000), Cowart points out,
at once endorses and questions the values of the society it describes; it glorifies the ancient, heroic ideals espoused by the pagan ancestors of its Christian audience at the same time that it reveals how little those ideals mean without the rationale provided by Christian faith. With Grendel the situation is exactly reversed. Where the earlier audience could look back on the pagan past and congratulate itself on its spiritual enlightenment, the modern audience looks back on a Christian past and laments its disillusionment. The desperate spiritual situation of the Scyldings mirrors our own.
Cowart’s success in these chapters, and in his Jungian analysis of The Sunlight Dialogues (1972), in which Taggert Hodge is discussed as the trickster figure who becomes Fred Clumly’s shadow and eventually his savior, derives from his critical method. A reviewer once complained that Gardner’s mind was too well stocked with literary matter, matter which the professor-as-novelist turned into grist for the mill of academic fiction. Cowart’s mind appears to be just as well furnished. Works by William Blake, Richard Wagner, Sir Philip Sidney, André Gide, Sir Thomas Malory, Dante, Geoffrey Chaucer, Henry James, William Butler Yeats, John Gay, Sir James Frazer, Carl Jung, and filmmakers Jean Cocteau, Akira Kurosawa, and Michael Cimino are among the many sources of and analogues to Gardner’s fiction identified by Cowart. Many of these deserve and require fuller treatment than Cowart provides, but all of them shed new light on Gardner’s accessible yet highly allusive and richly textured novels and stories. Had Cowart concentrated on these matters, as he did in his Pynchon study, Arches & Light would have been a far better book than it is. As it stands, however, Arches & Light (like Morris’ more recent A World of Order and Light) functions chiefly as a general introduction. Cowart may be interested in illuminating Gardner’s allusive style, but he is apparently intent on explaining the fiction for an interested but largely uninformed audience of undergraduates who, for example, might still not know that Gardner modeled the dragon in Grendel on the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. What is needed here is not a mere restatement of this obvious connection but an examination of the precise nature of Gardner’s self-confessed love-hate relationship with Sartre (and with Existentialism as well).
Because this is essentially an introductory study, Cowart discusses the fiction comprehensively, novel by novel, story by story, down to the very least of the tales written for children. (Unwisely, Cowart does not include the epic poem Jason and Medeia, 1973, among Gardner’s fictions despite the author’s fondness for Chaucerian “genre-jumping” and the general breakdown of literary categories which characterizes literary postmodernism, with which Gardner had another of his love-hate relationships.) Because he is an astute critic, Cowart does raise significant points, but because he has committed himself to slogging his way through all the fiction, he often fails to pursue these points (often presenting them as if they are self-evident facts) or to treat them consistently. Does Gardner’s “willingness to raise the question of whether the phenomenal world is fundamentally orderly or chaotic” really evidence his “integrity,” as Cowart claims? Should the critic simply agree with Gardner’s belief that the test of art is the effect it has on its audience? Did Gardner maintain throughout his career (or only during his “new fiction” phase) that “the proper task of the artist... is at once to create illusion and to penetrate it”? Can the artist be said to create ex nihilo the truths he affirms in his work and to uncover them as if they were preexistent eternal verities? Cowart makes both claims but makes no effort to resolve the inconsistency (his as well as Gardner’s); in fact, he seems to be unaware that the inconsistency even exists and is certainly unconcerned about what it implies about Gardner’s art, as distinct from his well-intentioned posturings in On Moral Fiction. A deconstructionist would have made too much of the discrepancy; Cowart makes too little.
The most serious limitation of Arches & Light derives from Cowart’s unwillingness to consider the issue of Gardner’s aesthetic development. That Gardner’s general subjects, major themes, character types, and dramatic conflicts have remained constant throughout his career is an established fact and as such hardly requires or deserves the lengthy and generally predictable attention Cowart gives it. Serious questions have been raised, however, concerning the appropriateness of “moral fiction” in the postmodern age of uncertainty; some critics have suggested that Gardner’s fiction written after On Moral Fiction suffers from the author’s commitment to his literary theory. Committed to proving that Gardner’s fiction forms a seamless whole, Cowart can only offer generalizations concerning the progress of the author’s literary career. Cowart writes that Gardner involved himself in “a career-long quest for fictive strategies to gainsay this horror,” but he fails to situate this “quest” in the larger literary context of innovative versus traditional fiction, of the novel as play versus Gardner’s odd claim that the novel has its own “built-in metaphysic” (The Art of Fiction, 1984). Further, Cowart contends that those writers and critics who have dismissed Gardner as being “ridiculously quixotic” will “in time” come to realize that he was “more admirable than absurd,” but surely the time to convert these skeptics and infidels who have worshiped at the altar of immoral fiction is the now of Arches & Light, not some happy future of literary faith, hope, charity, and built-in metaphysics.
Unfortunately, Cowart does not make a convincing case for either the cultural importance or the literary merit of Gardner’s fiction. Instead of assessing the fiction with some degree of critical detachment, Cowart praises every scrap of it indiscriminately. The King’s Indian (1974), for example, cannot in good conscience be favorably compared with James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914); nor is the title story of the collection Grendel’ s equal in wit and invention; nor is In the Suicide Mountains (1977) “a perfect hybrid” of adult and children’s fiction; nor do Gardner’s four books for young readers prove that children’s literature can be “major” (presumably on a par with Fyodor Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment, 1866, and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, 1857); nor, finally, do works such as “Gudgekin the Thistle Girl” evidence “the awesome power of art to deliver us from dragons, from darkness, from despair itself.” Even Gardner’s most sympathetic readers will find this kind of praise overblown and unconvincing. Instead of establishing and clarifying Gardner’s place in contemporary American literature, Arches & Light only makes clear that these tasks remain to be done.