The Problem of the Abyss in John Gardner's Fiction

George Gaudette

I'd like to begin by sharing a passage from Jean-Paul Sartre's On Being and Nothingness, partly because it has been identified so often with the cliff scenes in Grendel, and partly because it offers an evocative definition of vertigo, one which I find appropriate to many of the crisis situations in Gardner's fiction. After claiming "Vertigo is anguish to the extent that I am afraid not of falling over the precipice, but of throwing myself over" (29), Sartre writes:

I approach the precipice, and my scrutiny is searching for myself in my very depths. In terms of this moment, I play with my possibilities. My eyes, running over the abyss from top to bottom, imitate the possible fall and realize it symbolically; at the same time suicide, from the fact that it becomes a possibility possible for me, now causes to appear possible motives for adopting it (suicide would cause anguish to cease). (32)

Among Gardner fans, perhaps the best-known analogue is found in the final pages of Grendel, in which Sartre's "vertigo,"--the fear of throwing oneself over the edge--appears in what Gardner calls "a dizzying reversal of up and down." In On Becoming a NovelistGardner writes that he imagined Grendel "as fallen on his back, looking up past the tree but imagining that he was looking down . . ." (58), and when Grendel's perspective shifts to the cliff, his struggle against his own desire to fall recreates the Sartrean example:

I look down past stars to a terrifying darkness. I seem to recognize the place, but it's impossible. "Accident," I whisper. I will fall. I seem to desire the fall, and though I fight it with all my will I know in advance that I can't win. Standing baffled, quaking with fear, three feet from the edge of a nightmare cliff, I find myself, incredibly moving towards it. I look down, down, into bottomless blackness, feeling the dark power moving in me like an ocean current, some monster inside me, deep sea wonder, dread night monarch astir in his cave, moving me slowly to my voluntary tumble into death. (173)

Criticism and interviews exploring Gardner's use Sartre is extensive, and I won't summarize them here, other than to note they recognize the potential for Sartre's metaphor of the precipice to symbolize the condition of the existentialist--that is, in addition to focusing on the ground at the bottom of the precipice and its potential to turn consciousness, through death, into nothingness, Gardner would have us look at the empty space between the ground and the narrator and to see this void as a metaphor for a universe without a god. I think the body of Gardner's fiction would be much different had Sartre chosen a different metaphor to illustrate what he calls "anguish in the face of the future"--one that didn't call to mind a void or an abyss, for many of Gardner's novels and stories confront existentialism by utilizing some sort of abyss or void as part of the fictional scene.

One goal of this paper, then, is simply to point out just such examples, and to note how the abyss in Gardner's fiction comes to represent not only the nothingness of non-existence or the emptiness of a godless world--things uniform in their nothingness, so to speak--but to represent disorder, chaos, or anarchy as well. This conflation is present in On Moral Fiction, for instance, in which Gardner reserves his sharpest criticism for literature he feels is guilty of "staring" into "the black abyss"--that is, literature that posits an absurd universe, thereby undermining values which both order and affirm life. Accordingly, in his poem "Nicholas Vergette 1923 -1974," praising the sculptor and teacher whose work Gardner saw as essentially affirmative, Gardner describes the moral artist's task as that of "flooring the ancient abyss with art" (22).

The main task of this paper, however, is to persuade against reading all such scenes homogeneously--that is, as reading every abyss solely as a Sartrean one, one that must be rejected so as to reaffirm order according to the moral plan of On Moral Fiction. On that note I'd like to return to the passage from Grendel in order to call attention to a few of its curious qualities: Immediately after Grendel describes the abyss as infinitely empty--in his words, "bottomless blackness," the abyss takes on properties that suggest it is something other than a complete vacuum; it has "dark power" that moves inside Grendel. Perhaps what Grendel perceives in the abyss is not "bottomless blackness" after all but, as Gardner writes of Grendel's ending in On Becoming a Novelist, "that terrifying Superfather whose otherness cannot be more frighteningly expressed than by the fact that he lives beyond the stars." If his analysis of his own work can be trusted, Gardner thus redefines the source of attraction present in the abyss; in Gardner's words, "for all his conscious belief it's all accident, Grendel choosesdeath, morally aligning himself with God" (59). As it does here, the abyss appears throughout Gardner's fiction as paradoxical space--one alternately empty, chaotic, or metaphysically charged, or all of these qualities at once. Its unfixed nature is important, I believe, because it makes problematic some of the central assertions of Gardner's most controversial and most well-known work of literary criticism, On Moral Fiction, regarding the moral artist's proper relationship to order and disorder. As I will discuss later, Gardner's praise of order is not unqualified; Gardner shows that excessive order, like excessive disorder, is detrimental to the human spirit, and several of his characters arguably are improved by loosening their moral codes. And, because Gardner's use of the abyss is not consistent, that is, because the abyss is not always a Sartrean one, and may, I believe, be positively valued, its appearance in any of Gardner's novels provides an opportunity to consider the question, "Can the Gardnerean artist morally affirm disorder?"

With that question in mind, I'd like to take up the case of John Napper. I know very little about John Napper the person, the John Napper who illustrated The Sunlight Dialogues. As the painter in the short story "John Napper Sailing Through the Universe," he is certainly one of Gardner's foremost moral artists--and also a picture of disarray; He wears "clothes that transcended shabbiness, became a kind of magnificent mess, a flight of wild chickens and Chinese kites that filled the whole room, filled continents" (121-22). His disordered, bohemian lifestyle, however, is no impediment to creating order as a moral artist, and the narrator claims "his pleasure in life was ridiculous, like a bear reeling home with honey" and reports that Napper wears "an absurdly beatific grin, even when the songs he sang were sad" (122). Yet Napper is also wise--"A tricky old man," as the narrator writes in his notebook. By the story's end, the narrator believes he has figured John Napper out: "He'd gone to the pit in those Paris paintings," he says,

fighting for his life, squeezing the blood from this turnip of a world to hunt out the secret life in it, and there was none there. He'd hounded light--not just visual light--straining every muscle of body and mind to get down to what was real, what was absolute; beauty not as someone else had seen it but beauty he could honestly find himself, and what he'd gotten was a picture of the coal pocket. His wife had seen it too. Her mosaics went dark, as morose as anything of his, and maybe more so. And then, at the edge of self-destruction, John Napper had, I saw, jumped back. He would make up the world from scratch: Let there be light, a splendid garden. He would fabricate treasure maps. And he'd come to believe them. How could he not, seeing how it lighted his sad wife's eyes? It was majestic! Also nonsense. (Napper 133)

This passage is interesting, in my opinion, because the abyss Gardner creates is not found in the geography of the setting but rather in the landscape of the interior; John Napper jumps back not from a physical threat, but from the spiritual threat of finding a figurative coal pocket where he expected to find beauty. At least, this is how the narrator sees John Napper after studying Napper's portrait of his wife, in which she gazes "toward a valley, a sudden openness, a kind of gasp in space, dark and in some unliteral way mysterious" (130).

Gardner went so far as to characterize this story as the fictive counterpart to his most controversial literary treatise, declaring in an interview with Marshall L. Harvey "'John Napper Sailing Through the Universe' is my fundamental theory of art, which I'm now spelling out in a different, more discursive way in a book . . . called On Moral Fiction" (92), and so the story is very useful as a template for reading how the affirmations made by other artist-characters in Gardner's fiction are grounded in a confrontation with disorder or nihilistic despair of the type often symbolized by a variation of a void. For instance, despite the fact that the short story "The Temptation of St. Ivo," like "John Napper Sailing Through the Universe," lacks a geographical abyss, its title character finds himself amidst a visual void, surrounded on all sides by darkness as he stumbles blindly through the night woods beyond the walls of the monastery that has been his home. Several critics have argued that Brother Ivo's confrontation with the what Ivo calls the "darkness at the heart of things" revitalizes him as an artist and thus constitutes a personal and artistic rebirth (Ivo 89). Jeff Henderson, describing the illustrator of sacred manuscripts prior to his conflict with Nicholas, claims:

As a Gardnerian artist . . . he is incomplete. He has not stood at the rim of the existential pit and stared into the "darkness at the heart of things." Until he does this, comes face to face with the threat of meaninglessness in an "abandoned universe," and overcomes the temptation of despair and the lure of nihilistic "freedom," he will not be able to affirm life truly and authoritatively. (24)

Similarly, echoing Gardner's claim in the Harvey interview that each of the first five stories in the collection "presents a kind of miraculous or 'absurd' resurrection" (92), David Cowart writes that Ivo returns from his experience in the woods "like the Phoenix, reborn from his own ashes . . ." (84).

Inasmuch as we think of Gardner as writer who sees affirming order as an essential task of the moral artist, this improvement of Ivo's character is somewhat curious at first glance; as a monk in a monastery, Ivo has reaffirmed order day after day through adherence to the strict codes of the brotherhood. When tempted by Brother Nicholas to break the rules, to leave the monastery under the cover of darkness to save the mysterious Phoenix from harm at Nicholas's hands, Ivo declares "rules are my only hope against his nihilism" (82). But according to John Howell, for all his skill, Ivo's obedience is detrimental--he doesn't have "the mind of an artist," and doesn't achieve the sainthood hinted at in the title--until he breaks the monastary's rules and searches the woods beyond its walls. Indeed, the restrictive nature of the monastary, accented as it is by its surrounding walls--recalls other "bad places" in the Gardner canon--the jails and locked-up cellars, for instance, of The Sunlight Dialogues, in which Clumly, the jailer, begins the novel figuratively imprisoned by his own compulsion to impose law and order in a world increasingly characterized by entropy. In like fashion, Lykourgos's Spartan policies find their symbolic counterpart in the jail that holds the moral anarchist Agathon. Accordingly, John Howell argues that Ivo's affirmation is accomplished by moving "toward a spiritual freedom beyond the rules of his religious order and, implicitly, the restrictive conventions which limit his own art" (98). Much as Grendel is the "brute existent" that moves Hrothgar's thanes to acts of heroism, the void, as it appears in these two short stories, has a regenerative effect on Gardner's moral artists that situates them midway between excessive order and anarchy.

In contrast to the rather abstract notion of a void found in these two stories, the abyss in the short novel "The King's Indian" is a life-threatening physical reality. Even so, Gardner's narrator, Jonathan Upchurch, finds himself attracted to it. Gardner lifts the passage that follows, making few changes, from Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket; in that short novel, which predates Sartre, of course, the scene occurs at the top of a cliff--but Gardner, in a move that invites comparison to the "mast-head dreaming" of Moby Dick, has moved it to the rigging of the whaling ship Jerusalem. Nonetheless, Gardner's--and Poe's--dramatization of vertigo more closely resembles Sartre's metaphor of the precipice than does Grendel. "The more earnestly I labored not to think," says Jonathan,

the more busily my mind went spinning toward disaster. In no time, the crisis was solidly upon me--the anticipation of the feeling of falling: the giddiness, the struggle, the headlong descent--and then the mysterious longing to fall, the hunger to sink into the absolute freedom of suicide. I could not, would not confine my gaze to the rope before me. With a wild, indefinite emotion, half-horror, half-relief, I cast my gaze into the abyss. (237, emphasis Gardner's)

Per Winther shows in The Art of John Gardner: Instruction and Explorationthe great degree to which Gardner intertwines his own tale with the themes of Pym and Moby Dick; I wish only to point out, as Winther does, the metaphysical qualities that the abyss attains: "I glimpsed" continues Jonathan Upchurch a few lines later,

as if out of the corner of my wall-eyed glance, the faintest conceivable shadow of some ultimate idea. I found myself suddenly not afraid. It was as if I had lost identity, become one with the mystic ocean at my feet, image of the deep-blue bottomless soul that pervades all mankind and nature like Cranmer's ashes. (257)

For all the similarities with Sartre's metaphor of the precipice in its first few lines, this abyss of this passage does not represent the emptiness of a universe without a god, but seems instead a response to it. In fact, speaking of the short novel, Gardner said in an interview with Heide Ziegler that " . . . as soon as you know that there is this one spirit in everything, that's enough; that's all you have to know. You don't go beyond that, you don't kill yourself to get to heaven, which is what would happen if Upchurch and his ship continue toward that maelstrom at the end of that book" (130).

The last example I wish to discuss in detail is found in the short story "Stillness" and in the corresponding chapter in the novel of the same name. If one my goal is to show that voids in Gardner's fiction are multivalent, than the description of tap dancer Pete Duggers provides the best opportunity for me, for he creates a void that seems to me to be, ultimately, unreadable.

Like the shaper in Grendel, Duggers seems to be one part artist, one part magician. Gardner writes in the short story "Stillness":

The speed and lightness with which Pete Duggers danced were amazing to behold, but what was really miraculous, so that it made you catch your breath, was the way he could stop, completely relaxed, leaning his elbow on empty air and grinning as if he'd been standing there for hours, all that movement and sound you'd been hearing all phantom and illusion. That was unfailingly the climax when he danced: a slow build, with elegant shuffles and turns, then more speed, and more, and more and still more until it seemed that the room spun drunkenly, crazily, all leading--direct as the path of an arrow--to nothing, or everything, a sudden stillness like an escape from reality, a sudden floating, whether terrible or wonderful she could never tell: an abrupt hush as when a large crowd looks up, all at the same moment, and sees an eagle in the sky, almost motionless, or then again, perhaps, the frightening silence one reads about in novels when a buzzbomb shut off over London. He stood perfectly still, the piano was still, his young students gapes, and then abruptly reality came back as the piano tinkled lightly and he listlessly danced and, as he did so, leaned toward his students and winked. "You see? Stillness! That's the magic!" (55)

The passage is essentially the same in the novel: the suggestion of vertigo in the room's spinning "drunkenly, crazily" remains untouched in the short story, but the phrasing and punctuation of what it leads to--the description of the void--are somewhat different. That is, instead of reading "to nothing, or everything," it reads "to nothing--everything" (62). The first suggests that the effect is leads to either nothing or everything, where in the novel it seems to be deliberately both. In each case it seems impossible for the narrator to distinguish between nothing and everything, so I don't believe that these revisions themselves, are significant ones. I do, however, think that the fact that revision does take place here is important--that the small changes concerning "nothing" and "everything" indicate a continuing desire to explore the complicated metaphor of the abyss. Gardner (who, admittedly, revised extensively and habitually), editing for the short story collection in the early eighties, still seems to be probing an idea that inspires James Chandler at the end of Book One of The Resurrection:

B: A great disorder is an order. These things are one. (Resurrection 167)

In closing, despite the fact that he counsels against "staring into the abyss," Gardner keeps bringing us to its edge: Many other instances of an abyss or a void exist in the Gardner canon, many of which are used with more subtlety than I can do justice to in a short presentation, but which I'd like to mention briefly in closing: In The Resurrection, Gardner seems to make deliberate use of Sartre's repeated invocation of "possibilities" when the narrator describes Letchworth falls as "a chaos of motion crying out to the chaos within: One knew that one could fall, that one had a choice" (138). Viola's reaction to revisiting the falls with Maria is one that I wish I had the time to thoroughly study and discuss today. Indeed, ledges, precipices, cliffs and gorges abound in Gardner's novels: for instance, the ledges of Nickel Mountainthat Henry Soames risks driving over in his bouts of recklessness--a risk that is all the more real on account of Kuzitski having driven his truck through a guardrail to his death; in the same novel Simon Bale dies of a fall as well, though he falls down a set of stairs; James Page drives into a ravine but survives; Luke Hodge is freed from the anguish of his debilitating headaches by deliberately driving his truck off a bridge, though he does so for a higher purpose; Peter Wagner deliberately drops off the Golden Gate bridge in his failed suicide attempt; Peter Mickelsson, sunk in his own personal nihilism, commutes to Binghampton with the Endless Mountains on one side and valleys, ravines, and the Susquehanna river to the other--and drives off the road once to avoid men illegally dumping toxic waste and again when forced off by Dr. Bauer--it's no wonder that at night his windowpanes look "out on what might have been deep space or the center of the earth" (170), and that, when he's almost asleep, he's "freefalling through space" (179).

In questioning why Gardner repeatedly brings the reader into a confrontation with an abyss, I've been tempted to dismiss this phenomenon in two ways--to write it off as a inpenetrable curiosity--the kind of idiosyncracy sometimes expect of artists--or to read it as repetitions in a predictable pattern--that is, that Gardner shows us the abyss only so that we can reaffirm life along with the character involved. I've come to suspect, however, that the abyss functions in Gardner's fiction as a site where an unresolved attitude towards order and disorder is revealed, and that it speaks to a question that On Moral Fiction doesn't adequately answer: Do moral artists rediscover existing truths or bring to life new ones? Gardner's training as a Medievalist might prove enlightening in this respect, for the question mirrors the Medieval question of whether the universe was created from chaos, that is, unformed matter, or instead ex nihilo, out of nothing, like John Napper, "creating the world out of nothing with luminous eyes" (122); Gardner believed (at least sometimes) that the moral artist's task is a holy one. That Gardner argues in On Moral Fiction that the moral artist must affirm order is without dispute; what I feel is missing from On Moral Fiction, and what I like to think of is its own rhetorical void, is a discussion on the occasional moral and artistic value of disorder, for the body of his fiction reveals both an artist "flooring the ancient abyss with art" and a wary advisor counseling readers to embrace, like Henry Soames eventually does in Nickel Mountain, the "buzzing, blooming confusion" that is life.

Works Cited

Cowart, David. Arches & Light: The Fiction of John Gardner. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1983.

Gardner, John. Grendel. New York: Knopf, 1971.

---. "John Napper Sailing Through the Universe." The King's Indian: Stories and Tales. New York: Knopf, 1974. 120-34.

"The King's Indian: A Tale." The King's Indian: Stories and Tales. New York: Knopf, 1974. 197-323.

---. Mickelsson's Ghosts. New York: Knopf, 1982.

---. "Nicholas Vergette 1923-1974." Poems. Northridge, California: Lord John Press, 1978. 22-25.

---. On Becoming a Novelist. For. Raymond Carver. New York: Harper & Row, 1983.

---. The Resurrection. New York: New American Library, 1966.

---. "Stillness." The Art of Living and Other Stories. New York: Knopf, 1981. 49-64.

---. Stillness and Shadows. Ed. Nicholas Delbanco. New York: Knopf, 1986.

---. "The Temptation of St. Ivo." The King's Indian: Stories and Tales. New York: Knopf, 1974. 69-89.

Harvey, Marshall L. "Where Philosophy and Fiction Meet: An Interview with John Gardner." Chavkin, Allen, ed. Conversations with John Gardner. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990. 84-98.

Henderson, Jeff. John Gardner: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1990.

Howell, John M. Understanding John Gardner. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1993.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Intro. and Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956.

Ziegler, Heide. "John Gardner." Chavkin, Allen, ed. Conversations with John Gardner. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990. 117-42.

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