by

Jeff Henderson

    When Chaucer in the early or mid-1380s finished off his prose translation of Boethius and put aside work on what would become the Knight's Tale and got down to the business of composing the greatest complete poem he would ever write, Troilus and Criseyde, he had to work with most directly a French translation of Boccaccio's Filostrato, and very likely the original Italian as well. Besides that, he had direct and indirect knowledge of his favorite ancient auctors, Virgil and Ovid and others, as well as the multitude of ancient and medieval redactors of the Troy story. One way or another, he used them all. Most of all, he used Boccaccio, who had died only a decade before. But he did not merely translate the Filostrato, as he had just done with Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy or as he had done with the Romance of the Rose so long before. Stephen Barney, a recent editor of Troilus and Criseyde, characterizes Chaucer's treatment of his primary source thus:

Chaucer's poem, Barney continues, "is at once funnier and graver, more learned and more light-hearted, tighter in organization and broader in implication" than its source (Riverside Chaucer, 472). That is to say, Chaucer took the most recent redaction of a body of traditional material deriving ultimately from the Iliad and made it uniquely his own and at the same time the greatest rendition before or since, including Shakespeare's rendition in his play Troilus and Cressida. Moreover, Chaucer filtered the material through the persona of his comically earnest and somewhat pedantic narrator, who, in a brilliant fiction on Chaucer's part, claims to be translating, slavishly, word for word, the work of that great authority on Troy whom no one else has ever heard of, Lollius.

    Shakespeare worked the same way, plundering the available translations of Latin works for his Roman plays, and English chroniclers like Holinshed, Grafton, and Halle for his English history plays. It is always a startling and illuminating experience to place a passage from one of these sources side by side with a speech from one of Shakespeare's plays and note both the changes the poet made and, often more strikingly, the changes he did not make. A familiar example from Julius Caesar makes the point: Shakespeare took Caesar's comment on Cassius from Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives, "What will Cassius do, think ye? I like not his pale looks," and just later his reservations about Antonius and Dolabella: "As for those fat men and smooth-combed heads,' quoth he, 'I never reckon of them, but these pale-visaged and carrion-lean people, I fear them most'" (The Renaissance in England, 550). Shakespeare transformed and metered these words into some of the most remembered, if not most memorable lines he ever wrote: "Let me have men about me that are fat, / Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o' nights. / Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look, / He thinks too much; such men are dangerous"(I.ii.192-95). "Would he were fatter" (I.ii.198). More revealing, however, is the poet's ability to take the barest hint in his source and amplify it into a powerful image. Plutarch's account of the ominous marvels presaging Caesar's death includes the spectacular accounts of fire in the sky, the flame from the slave's hand, the solitary birds at noon in the marketplace, and so on, that are familiar to us in Shakespeare's reworking of them. But one especially striking detail in the play has but slender warrant in Plutarch, who included among the "wonderful signs . . . seen before Caesar's death" "fires in the element and spirits running up and down in the night, and also these solitary birds. . . ." Of the reference to "spirits running up and down in the night" Shakespeare made ". . . graves have yawned and yielded up their dead . . . / . . . And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets" (II.ii.18, 24). He liked that detail so well that he used it again, in improved form, in Hamlet, where Horatio cites it in comparison with the apparition on the castle wall: "In the most high and palmy state of Rome, / A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, / The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead / Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets" (I.i.113-116).

    And when Milton came to write the world's last epic poem that was both great and successful, he assembled in his mind and accessed there what was probably the most extensive such database then on the planet. A single instance will suffice. A number of details in Milton's description of Satan and Hell in Book I of Paradise Lost derive from Phineas Fletcher's bizarre poem The Apollyonists, published in 1627, but perhaps none more memorably than Satan's lines in what amounts to his acceptance speech as Governor of Hell. Milton wrote, "Here at least / We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built / Here for his envy, will not drive us hence: / Here we may reign secure, and in my choice / To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell: / Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav'n" (I, 258-263). Many years before, Fletcher had written of Satan, presiding over Hell, ". . . in state / Sat lordly Lucifer; his fiery eye, / Much swoll'n with pride, but more with rage and hate, / As censor mustered all his company . . . / . . . Change God for Satan, heaven's for hell's sovereign: / O let him serve in hell, who scorns in heaven to reign!" (Apollyonists, I, 156-162). And again he wrote, "To be in heaven the second he disdains; / So now the first in hell and flames he reigns, / Crowned once with joy and light, crowned now with fire and pains" (I, 178-180). Obviously, Milton improved upon his source.

    The point I have tried to substantiate through these examples is that all--or most--of the great writers work in essentially the same ways that Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton did, as far as their use of sources is concerned. They borrow, or steal, profusely and omnivorously, both consciously and unconsciously, from the enormous literary context that surrounds and precedes them. That context and individual writers' relations with it is what I mean, more or less, by the "great tradition" in which Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and all the rest in their respective centuries--and John Gardner in his--worked. And no author, I venture to say, was more acutely conscious of that relationship or more intimately familiar with its operations than John Gardner. Moreover, I am inclined to believe that Gardner habitually made more abundant and varied use of sources than perhaps any other modern writer of comparable stature. As I hope to show, in none of Gardner's other works is this use of sources, this relationship with the tradition, as pervasive or as rich and varied, as in his epic poem Jason and Medeia.

    In 1972 John Gardner published his largest and perhaps most complex novel, The Sunlight Dialogues--a work that enjoyed a respectable tenure on the best-seller lists and prompted some exuberant reviewers to compare its author with William Faulkner. It is a successful work that many of Gardner's critics rightly locate at the aesthetic and philosophical center of his canon. The next year he followed up that novel with a work of comparable length and perhaps even greater complexity: the epic poem Jason and Medeia. As far as sales and popularity are concerned--among reviewers, what few readers there were, and critics--the poem was an abject failure. Reviewers panned it, readers didn't buy it, and with only three or four exceptions (of which myself am one) critics virtually ignored it.

    I believe that this reception and assessment of Jason and Medeia is totally wrongheaded on all counts. The poem is every bit as central in the Gardner canon as The Sunlight Dialogues, and perhaps more so. More importantly, I have always believed that the poem is a brilliant and probably even great literary achievement. Here, I wish, first, to suggest some of the reasons I think account for the poem's failure in the eyes of readers and critics, and then to point to some of the poem's magnificent virtues.

    Though no one actually said so, I think reviewers were initially baffled by a problem of classification: Just what kind of creature are we dealing with here? What kind of book is this? It can't be legitimately what it claims to be, an epic poem. Nobody writes epics now, in the world's last age. Values are exhausted, attenuated past belief; neither are there heroes, nor belief in heroes, epic therefore no more viable than tragic drama. The genre has been dead for three centuries, since Milton. For proof, I would offer the dubious approximations of the past two centuries: Tennyson's brooding and unjustly maligned Idylls of the King qualify only marginally if at all as epic poetry, and Longfellow's trochaic tom-tom taps in The Song of Hiawatha simply lack the strength to save themselves from derision. Stephen Vincent Benet's Civil War entry, John Brown's Body, comes closer perhaps, but ultimately fails as epic, carrying its destruction in its genes: drab realism. As for Dr. Williams' Paterson, I simply do not agree that it is an epic poem at all.

    Gardner had long contemplated a book on epic poetry he intended to call "The Epic Conversation," the title suggesting a dialogue of epic poets spanning millennia, each one commenting on and redefining the genre from the perspective of his own age. Inevitably, Gardner was led past that original conception to make his own redefinition of the genre, his own contribution to the dialogue. He faced enormous problems and risks: our age is unpropitious for long narrative poems of any type. Still, Gardner possessed the skills and tools requisite to the attempt, as well as comfortable access to that which failed modern epic poets had not: the antique sources--"oolde approved stories," as Chaucer calls them in his Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, which by an interesting coincidence has always been a critical and popular "failure" in the Chaucer canon comparable with Gardner's apparent failure in his epic. And like Chaucer or Shakespeare, he had the synthesizing, transmuting power to take those sources and blend, alter, amplify, and embellish them, filtering their potential meanings through his own consciousness, and produce a poem of power, grandeur, and moral profluence unrivaled in the modern age, worthy to stand with its great predecessors. That is, he did what Homer did, what Virgil, the Beowulf poet, and Milton did: he wrote the epic poem possible in his age, and in so doing resurrected, extended, and redefined the genre. In a way not possible in a book about the epic, he joined the conversation.

    One problem Gardner faced was the impossibility of one age's duplication of the epos of another, what with changing religions, myths, cosmologies, and politics that tend to make the grand and serious of one time seem silly or inconsequential to another. He solved it in two ways, mainly. First, to maintain epic scale and scope, he expanded the theater of the poem's physical and mental action beyond particular time and place in the "known world" of antiquity and chose instead to operate on a temporal scale not only of "a distant time" but of "all our times" and on a spatial scale that invokes black holes, the wheeling galaxies, and "the clocks at the ends of the universe." To counter the reluctance of the modern consciousness to accept the possibility of significant human action--that is, doubt of man's capacity for either heroism or tragedy--Gardner invested the action of his poem with "significance" through his characteristic notion of the "crucial moment" in history, and it is a hallmark of his fiction that tragedy and heroism are constants in human experience. Man innately possesses the capacity for tragedy: he can fail and he can die. Heroism resides in the ways one confronts these potentials. In a passage notable for its poetic power and philosophic density, the old seer Phineus attributes an appreciation for both capacities to the mind of Oidipus:

Gardner thus combined the traditional subject matter of epic--a body of ancient legend--with an expanded worldview and an updated sensibility, thereby preserving the important attributes of grandeur, scale, and significance. And although the traditional epic attributes of the marvelous or supernatural were abundantly explicit in his sources, Gardner added a modern analogue to them in the time-traveling narrator and in Jason's visions of a future beyond our own time--a future that contains alternative potentials for thermonuclear war and space travel: at times Jason dreams of the world on fire, at other times he dreams that "it was stars we sailed / and our oars stirred dust on the moon, or our shadow stretched out, prow / to stern, in the shadows that tremble and float down Jupiter" (251-52).

    Gardner's greater challenge was to create a structure that would succeed both as narrative and as poetry. Since he had already demonstrated his mastery of narrative techniques and perspectives in four novels, it is neither surprising nor fortuitous that the long, unrhymed accentual hexameters of Jason and Medeia--a loose approximation of Greek epic form--flow as smoothly as the author's best prose. Moreover, Gardner's language here possesses the syntactic, semantic, and metaphoric compression and density, as well as the imaginative and imagistic power and resonance, that we associate with the best poetry. Consider, for example, a passage in which Death has appeared to Jason with a visionary warning of the potential future of man:

This evocation of the "final conflagration" that possibly awaits mankind --depending, perhaps, on Jason's agonized choices--is a motif that hovers over the poem from beginning to end, haunting Jason, the narrator, and the reader. Gardner's achievement in poetic structure is that this large poem, narrated from several perspectives and uniting times millennia apart, displaying the most diverse characters, events, and shifts in feeling and intensity, nevertheless possesses a coherence of parts and unity of tone and effect that should rank it with the world's great art.

The two primary sources of Jason and Medeia are the four books of Apollonius's Argonautica (a short epic) and Euripides' play Medea. These form the heart of Gardner's narrative, and it is amazing to note how closely he follows them. But even more remarkable is the seemingly independent vitality and freshness he confers on these old materials, blending them with each other and with the Theban and Trojan cycles as well as with other ancient and modern traditions and influences too numerous to catalogue, and placing them all in a narrative frame of which they seem organic, coherent parts. The result is an amazingly intrinsicate, subtly intertextured artifact, as seamless and cunningly wrought as the fabric Argus wove from the golden fleece. We note too that Gardner does not incorporate the two major sources entirely, and that in any case the combined length of the Argonautica and Medea is only about 7250 lines, some 5000 lines short of the length of Jason and Medeia. Gardner's additions and embellishments nearly doubled the length of his sources.

Our chief interest in sources thus lies in Gardner's alterations and additions and the meanings he teases from them. Consider, for example, the Argonauts' first glimpse of the fleece, hanging in the branches of the serpent-guarded oak. Apollonius renders the scene thus: "And they two came by the pathway to the sacred grove, seeking the huge oak on which was hung the fleece, like to a cloud that blushes red with the fiery beams of the rising sun" (The Argonautica, 303). The elaborate simile notwithstanding, this merely describes the fleece; what it means, if anything, remains obscure. Here is Gardner's fleece:

I am liking this so well that I cannot forbear one more of the multitudinous instances where Gardner renders a scene from Apollonius or Euripides but by fleshing it out, setting it in his context, and processing it through his sensibility invests it with power and meaning unhinted in the original. Apollonius' rendition of the Argonauts' brush with the Sirens occupies thirty lines. He names their island, gives a flowery genealogy and history of the Sirens, and baldly narrates the facts of the encounter: Orpheus' playing his lyre to cancel the Sirens' song, the loss overboard of "the goodly son of Teleon, . . . even Butes, his soul melted by the clear ringing voice of the Sirens" (357). But what do the Sirens ceaselessly sing, in their "lily-like voice," that beguiles and destroys sailors, "consuming them with wasting desire"? What put such toys of desperation into stolid Butes' mind? In Apollonius we haven't a clue.

    Gardner devotes fifty-three lines to the scene, an expansion virtually identical in proportion to the overall expansion of Jason and Medeia beyond its two principal sources. Moreover, Gardner's scene is related not by the author-as-narrator but by Jason, whose words are reported by Gardner's own visionary narrator--an altered and distanced narrative perspective that allows for Jason's personal assessment and commentary. Suppressing genealogy and history but keeping the facts, Gardner adds the content of the song and Jason's reflection. I do the passage a disservice by quoting only lines that characterize the song:

    I would argue, in the pompous language of the abstract Charley published on the web page, that Jason and Medeia can legitimately be viewed as a sort of matrix or general blueprint for the entire Gardner Canon, as a "paradigmatic master work of artistic and fictional method toward which the others tend and whence they flow." This view admittedly requires some tinkering with ordinary perceptions of the way time operates, but as I've suggested elsewhere, in Gardner's fiction--especially in Jason and Medeia, but also in the earlier Wreckage of Agathon and the later October Light and Mickelsson's Ghosts--Time's Arrow is not necessarily posted on a one-way street, or there may be no arrow at all.

Notes

1. The following discussion of Jason and Medeia adapts some material from my essays "The Avenues of Mundane Salvation: Time and Change in the Fiction of John Gardner" and "John Gardner's Jason and Medeia: The Resurrection of a Genre," published respectively in American Literature ( 1983) and Papers on Language and Literature (1986).

2. For a fuller discussion of Gardner's use of Browning's poems in these two stories, see John Gardner: A Study of the Short Fiction, 22-25 and 90-98.

References

Apollonius. The Argonautica, trans. R. C. Seaton. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1963.

Barney, Stephen. Introduction to Troilus and Criseyde. The Riverside Chaucer,         ed. Larry D. Benson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Fletcher, Phineas. The Apollyonists. Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose, ed.      Alexander Witherspoon and Frank Wamke. New York: Harcourt, 1963.

 Gardner, John. Jason and Medeia. New York: Knopf, 1973.

_____. Stillness and Shadows, ed. Nicholas Delbanco. New York: Knopf, 1986.

Henderson, Jeff. "The Avenues of Mundane Salvation: Time and Change in the      Fiction of John Gardner." American Literature 55 (1983):611-33.

 _____"John Gardner's Jason and Medeia: The Resurrection of a Genre." Papers       on Language and Literature 22.1 (Winter 1986):76-95.

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

Plutarch. Lives, trans. Thomas North. The Renaissance in England, ed. Hyder         Rollins and Herschel Baker. Boston: Heath, 1954.

click here to contact Jeff Hendersonmailto:jeffh@mail.uca.edu

updated April 27, 1998