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W(H)ITHER GARDNER STUDIES

by Robert Morace

    "Whatever happened to Fay Wray, / That delicate, satin-draped form, / As it clung to her thigh, / How I started to cry, / Cause I wanted to be dressed just the same." Those are, of course, the words Dr. Frank N. Furter sings so delicately, while in drag, in Rocky Horror Picture Show. We might well ask, if not quite sing, much the same question of John Gardner, whose virtual disappearance from the American fiction scene has been nearly as meteoric as his rise a little more than a quarter century ago. How did he, and we, come to so sad a pass?

    At the very end of the seventies, I began compiling what would eventually become John Gardner: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography. I thought it important then to include even brief mentions of Gardner and his work so that we could have as complete a record of the early phase of his critical reception as possible. Even as I did so, watching the bibliography swell to nearly four hundred densely packed pages, I believed that so thorough a gleaning would prove both impractical and unnecessary in the future as the number of reviews, critical essays, and books continued to grow. Gardner's death changed all that. Much of my final work on the bibliography involved gathering and annotating obituaries. Instead of being the first installment in the ongoing bibliographical assessment of John Gardner's literally ~a-mazing career, which for all its twists and turns had seemed, liked Christ's poor, always with us, my bibliographical homage, published in 1984, appeared at an all-too-dramatic turning point in what for want of a better term I would like to call, a little optimistically, even naively, "Gardner studies." Those of us who had become, Grendel-like, addicted to the torrent of books pouring from Gardner's well stocked mind and perhaps overly prolific pen, and addicted too, a tad sado-masochistically, to the many punishing notices that began appearing in 1978, found at least some measure of solace in looking ahead to the task of critically reassessing the extraordinary work of an extraordinary writer. Soon after, at a very well attended MLA session devoted to Gardner and organized by Jeff Henderson, I suggested that we could better understand the task that lay ahead by looking back to Gardner's reviewers. And so I will begin my remarks this evening with the observation I made at the end of my paper then: "As reviewers Margaret Manning and Edmund Fuller pointed out so often in the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal, Gardner's works have been read because they are more humane, more ambitious, and more morally searching than the writings of most contemporary writers. The most difficult task facing Gardner's critics may very well be to prove or to refute this rather sweeping but nonetheless persuasive claim."

    How have Gardner studies fared since, in addressing this task or any other? Not well, I'm afraid. Then again, maybe the project was doomed from the start. Some clearly felt so. In what I can only regard as one of the worst cases of bad timing, and perhaps worse taste, Lance Morris, in a Time magazine piece entitled "We Need More Writers That We'd Miss" which appeared just before Gardner's fatal accident, included Gardner among those contemporary writers whose silence would not be a great loss for contemporary American fiction. Gardner had, of course, survived attack before, proving rumors of his literary demise premature. D. S. Carne-Ross, for example, had declared Jason and Medeia "a full-scale literary disaster just a year before William Kennedy hailed the author of The King's Indian  as "the Lon Cheney of contemporary fiction." Admittedly, by 1978 the ever-metamorphosing writer with a thousand faces and an equal number of styles seemed transmogrified into an entirely static and everlugubrious Bela Lugosi, all dressed up in the Dracula-drag of On Moral Fiction and more than one reviewer's stake in his fat black heart. Having risen before, could he rise again?

    And so we can conclude that Gardner studies are alive and well and thriving, right? Would it were so. As the number of books on Gardner and his work increased, interest in reviewing the posthumous publications steadily decreased and the number of critical articles in scholarly journals and collections dwindled. Since 1987, the number of significant essays can be counted on one hand: Heide Ziegler's on Grendel and the art of postmodern parody in lntertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, edited by Robert Con Davis and Patrick O'Donnell (1989) Barry Fawcett and Elizabeth Jones's,on Grendel in American Literature (1990), my Bakhtinian reading of The Sunlight Dialogues in Modern Language Studies(1993),and BoEkelund's on OctoberLight in Novel:A Forum on Fiction (1997). There has been a steady trickle of theses and dissertations over the past two decades, averaging, according to MLA Bibliography and First Search records, about one a year. Not even the high praise of two famous former students, Raymond Carver and Charles Johnson, whose National Book Awardwinning novel Middle Passage pays homage to and is in dialogue with "The King's Indian," has succeeded in provoking much interest outside a too-small group of Gardnerites.

    How can we account for this dramatic loss of interest, especially as it coexists with a passion that manifests itself in an outpouring of books that appear to have done little to stimulate others to take up the cause or the study of an author otherwise forgotten or ignored, apart from Grendel's being taught and in some cases banned in high schools? One of the ways a certain level of academic interest can be maintained and measured in terms of the number of entries in the annual MLA Bibliographv is by inclusion of the author's work in the anthologies used in undergraduate literature courses. Here Gardner suffers rather badly. He did not write much short fiction and, although I wish I could say otherwise, most of what he did write is not particularly good. As a result few of his short stories have been anthologized, fewer still in textbooks. First Search, in fact, turns up just "Redemption" (twice), "The Art of Living" (once), "Julius Caesar and the Werewolf' (in a collection of Playboy stories), and "Dragon Dragon" and "Gudgekin the Thistle Girl" (once each). Four others listed in my 1984 bibliography appeared in books now long out of print; the six cited in Howell go back farther still.

    The situation regarding the availability of Gardner's books is a bit more encouraging. Most of his books have been in print at one time or another, often for long stretches, over the past dozen years, although as of today amazon.com lists only The Art of Fiction, Gilgamesh, Grendel, October Light, On Writers and Writing, The Sunlight Dialogues, and the two Cliff s Notes as immediately available. How far the mighty, or at least the mightily prolific, have fallen. At the risk of sounding like an apostate at a gathering of true believers, I want to suggest that this is not all that bad a list and certainly not cause for lamentation or alarm. We may smile sardonically at the indestructibility of those Cliffs Notes, stare in amazement at Gilgamesh's staying power, realize a little ruefully that On Writers and Writing's days are numbered, thank all those writing instructors who have made The Art of Fiction required reading, then sit back, take stock and say that Grendel, October Light, and The Sunlight Dialogues make for a pretty good backlist of the fiction (even if I for one would like to see Nickel Mountain added to it, maybe Mickelsson's Ghosts as well). There is no evidence that Gardner has been treated any worse by his publishers than other authors have by theirs as publishing houses are forced to toe the corporate bottom line and to conform their business practices to the changes made in the tax laws during the Reagan years that make it difficult for them to keep slow or no-selling books in stock.

    But there is more, for seen in context, Gardner's fate is nothing more, and nothing less, than that of most 70's American fiction writers in these late-capitalist times and an academy made in its hyper-consumerist image. Gardner's dwindling numbers in the MLA Bibliography's equivalent of the Billboard 100 are not all that different from those of many of his contemporaries, including as mixed a bag of randomly selected golden and not-so-golden oldies as Barthelme, Burroughs, Capote, Cheever, Didion, Elkin, Federman, Hawkes, Irving, Kennedy, Kosinski, Mailer, Sukenick, and Wolfe. The Pynchon industry continues apace, ensuring him a nearly Shakespeare-size plot each year, several columns long and wide. But aside from Bellow, the annual count over the past few years shows a decided shift in fashion, away from the now old New Fiction and the formerly post-contemporary to Paul Auster and Don DeLillo on one hand, Louise Erdrich and Toni Morrison on the other. This desire for the new is not altogether bad. Indeed, the desire for the new that once facilitated ~Gardner's rise and that has contributed to Gardner's eclipse has opened up additional areas in the literary and scholarly marketplace. If before 1981 the international novel was something Jamesian, afterwards, which is to say after ~Salman Rushdie won the Booker Prize for Midnight's Children, it became something quite different and contemporary fiction, including contemporary American fiction, hasn't been the same since.

    Before we rest on our unspoken fatwas, pointing an accusatory if imaginary finger in Rushdie's direction, let's be sure to ask ourselves in what ways and to what extent so many of us now lamenting Gardner's fallen state might have inadvertently contributed to it. In the earliest book-length studies, David Cowart and Greg Morris were right to emphasize the recurrent themes and figures in Gardner's fiction. Their emphasis served to correct the plausible but mistaken notion that had been gaining favor since 1978, namely that the Gardner of and after On Moral Fiction was an altogether different and inferior writer to the earlier Gardner of Grendel and October Light. In their similar but by no means identical readings, Cowart and Morris discerned a consistency in the fiction, early and late, that belied claims that Gardner had suddenly and inexplicably swerved from New Fiction's true path to metafictional enlightenment into some moral fiction byway.

    That task completed, what have Gardner studies been up to since? In general, very little aside from fine tuning and even less by way of careful and convincing evaluation. In so closely following his ideas, as articulated in On Moral Fiction, in numerous interviews, and elsewhere, his critics have inadvertently not only undermined the author's own claims about art as a process of discovery (what kind of process is it that keeps on discovery exactly the same thing, work after work?); what is worse they have produced an altogether static Gardner, stripped of all the "buzzing blooming confusion" that drew many of us to his fiction in the first place. Fortunately, Dean McWilliams laid the groundwork for a new kind of Gardner criticism in 1990 when he decided to approach Gardner's work via Bakhtin's theory of the dialogic novel. Unfortunately, McWilliams readings of the works themselves never make good on his very promising thesis, largely I suspect because of the limitations imposed by the Twayne's United States Authors Series for which he was writing.

    That limitation gave me the loophole I needed to complete the lengthy Bakhtin-inspired essay on The Sunlight Dialogues on which I was then working. Long impressed by Gardner's complex yet deeply affecting but also jokey, self-reflexive novel, I found myself no less depressed by much of the criticism written about it. I was especially struck by the fact that in their efforts to elucidate his immensely varied body of work, so many of his critics had seized upon his moral fiction idea and as a result produced a critical discourse remarkable chiefly for its redundancy and reductiveness. Relying on ~Gardner's word as an article of faith, rather than as an interpretive convention, and emphasizing the supposed consistency of his aims and the "aesthetic wholeness" of his novels, they reached a consensus which perversely served to validate the claims of those less sympathetic readers who had dismissed, and continue to ~dismissi Gardner and his fiction as repetitive and retrograde. I wanted to trace what would happen were we to switch interpretive methodologies, away from the assumption of fiction as manifestation of the author's non-novelistic word in general and theory of moral fiction in particular and towards a more Bakhtinian, which is to say a more dialogical approach. A novel as multi-styled, as multi-toned, and as multiform as The Sunlight Dialogues demanded and deserved to be read not as a closed, unidirectional signal pointing inexorably to its end-to its meaning as well as its final sentence-but instead as an openended, multidirectional sign, a Bakhtinian utterance in all its tangled but tangible complexities.

    The same year my essay appeared, the University of South Carolina Press published John Howell's Understanding John Gardner,. This is another study in an introductory series but one which manages to transcend its limitations. Howell, a close friend of Gardner from their days together at Southern Illinois, is refreshingly blunt in his assessment of Gardner's career in general and of On Moral Fiction in particular. "October Light was Gardner's last major success. In 1977, distracted by personal, financial, and professional crises, he began to lose control over his art." As Howell sees it, On Moral Fiction "presented a distorted view of the practice, if not the purpose of Gardner's own fiction, and hurt his career.... [It] does not illuminate John Gardner's fiction so much as it illuminates the psychology of the writer who produced the fiction."

    It is tempting after so much reliance on On Moral Fiction as the critical touchstone in Gardner studies to dismiss it altogether, at least while we await the long-overdue biography that will address, in Howell's words, "the psychology of the writer who produced the fiction" and produced On Moral Fiction too. But dismissing On Moral Fiction proves nearly as vexing a problem as relying on it and harder still now that Gardner's early reviews from the 1960s have been collected in On Writers and Writing to remind us all just how long and how consistently he had conceived of fiction along moral lines. Read one way, On   Moral Fiction is what writers the caliber of John Irving and Charles Johnson have said it is: a good deal more interesting on the subject of fiction than most academic articles are. It is the 'passionate book" that, as Liz Rosenberg pointed out in the~.Boston Globe some months ago, is "worth re-reading," one "that argues that the making of fiction is a moral process, a 'laboratory' in which we can safely test our most precious ideas to see if they stand or fall," a book that "dared to suggest that there might be a connection between the values of a civilization and the value of its art." Put that way, I want not just to re-read On Moral Fiction; I want to see it reprinted, and soon.

    But is that the same book I read once upon a time and have even re-read from time to time, though without much if any pleasure or enthusiasm? Back in 1982, Larry McCaffery, then an advocate for metafiction, more recently for cyberpunk and avant-pop, judged the book "stimulating but carelessly conceived." The carelessness in matters great and small was especially unfortunate and not a little galling because it was not as if Gardner had not been warned. In a reply to his well-placed warm-up for On Moral Fiction entitled "The Way We Write Now," which appeared in 1972 in the New York Times Book Review, one of Gardner's early admirers and academic promoters, Joe David Bellamy, found Gardner's position "aesthetically retrograde" and at times "downright silly and wrong." Neither criticism kept Bellamy from including Gardner in both his New Fiction collection of interviews and his anthology of Superfiction. But apparently neither did Gardner bother to take either criticism seriously. Six years and 200 pages later, the Gardner of On Moral Fiction could be awfully good on some writers-Cheever, Calvino, and Woiwode especially, but utterly untrustworthy on most. His failure to spot, let alone appreciate the irony of Heller, Vonnegut, and others was made worse by being part of a general flailing at anything and anyone-Bellow here, Mailer there. The book was superficial at best, irascible at worst-sloppily thought out and edited yet at times weirdly fastidious, as in the aside insisting that one should read the 1958 edition of Barth's The End of the Road,, not the 1967. Gardner was not the lone voice crying in the wilderness which he seemed to think he was: witness the publication of two much more enduring and rigorously argued books along similar lines, Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism (1978) and Gerald Graffs Literature Against Itself (1979).

    Literary conservatives, of whom the Gardner of On Moral Fiction was surely one, often mistake facing the dilemma for surrendering to it. Bruce Bawer in the pages of The New Criterion edited by the same Hilton Kramer who helped arrange Gardner's moral fiction talk at the American Enterprise Institute, took Don DeLi~flo to task for creating xerox copies, rather than real characters whose lives were as "richly varied and emotionally tumultuous" as reviewer Bawer claimed his and his friends' and by implication his readers' lives were. As Jake Barnes says to Breft Ashly at the end of The Sun Also Rises, right after she rather wistfully and without a trace of irony, said what a wonderful life the two could have had together, she the nymphomaniac, he the emasculated writer, "Isn't it pretty to think so." Interestingly, it is another conservative critic, showing more sense than sensibility, who blows the Bradburyan whistle on such wistful rear-guardism as Bawer's and Gardner's. In The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts contends that popular novels such as The Bridges of Madison County "are selling the reader a fantasy of individuality and freewheeling independence at a moment we are all unconsciously trying to come to terms with the loss of these ideals in our lives. The books are not harbingers of anything; they are welltimed glances into the rearview mirror. The desire for self-assured subjective independence is bound to flare up in the eleventh hour-now, just when the social space for it has all but disappeared." A few small changes aside, much the same can be said of On Moral Fiction, though not I believe of Gardner. The  question Birkerts poses here is similar to the one Frost's Oven Bird "frames in all but words, what to make of a diminished thing," in a world 'decayed to ambiguity," as Gardner himself put it so well in The Sunlight Dialogues.

    After such knowledge what forgiveness? In the either/or world of On Moral Fiction, none. But in the essay "Not Knowing," the title piece in a recent, posthumously published collection of his nonfiction, Donald Barthelme offers something in-between. Now this Barthelme is not the one described in On Moral Fiction whose only lesson is better to be disillusioned than deluded-about as inapt a description of the author of the collections Sadness, City Life, and others as one is likely to find. This Barthe~ime contends that what contemporary art and fiction have to offer is neither timeless universal truths nor objects in space but instead local knowledge and provisional truths. To understand this limitation and work as best one can within it, sadly and ironically as Barthelme did, is not tantamount, as Gardner claimed, to the writer's abdicating his or her "proper" role as Keatsian legislator for all mankind, only a little gimpy from his requisite Freudian wound. Rather, it is accurately to assess one's situation in a culture where, as DeLillo pointed out some years ago, writers of serious fiction "are all one beat away from becoming elevator music." Believe me, I am just as uplifted by the good intentions of Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, the hard-won affirmations of Raymond Carver's later stories, and the lyrical endings of Louise Erdrich's novels-moral fictions all-and I weep if not for Little Nell then for Pete Postlethwaite's character Danny at the ending of the film Brassed Off when he gets out of his death-bed, sneaks off to London, hears the miners band he has led for years win the all-England competition at the Royal Albert Hall, and then, bless his proletarian heart, use the occasion of his acceptance speech to turn down the trophy, to turn away from his lifelong belief that "only music matters" and to speak out against the Tory policies that have closed mines and brought so much misery to so many. But I am no less moved by and find no less moral Ray Federman's haunting, unpunctuated novel The Voice in the Closet, the closing Molly Bloom-inspired monologue of Elkin's Magic Kingdom, all of Irvine Welsh's Trainspofting which I had the good luck to read while the l996 presidential campaign was dragging on, enabling me to measure the brutal, blackly humorous honesty of the one against the bland posturings and post-existentialist bad faith of the other, and finally the sad comedy of novelist Bill Gray's final futile gesture in DeLillo's Mao 11, the irony of which leads me to understand better and appreciate more deeply than anything in On Moral Fiction the writer's role and predicament in the global economy of late-capitalist, postmodern culture.

    Add to the list of complaints about On Moral Fiction in this account of mine that I intend to be not so much acerbic as emetic, the way in which Gardner's timeless, ahistorical approach to fiction, as to morality, runs counter to Bakhtin's far more persuasive description of the novel as an anti-genre which, having no form of its own, is free to cannibalize and dialogize other literary and subliterary forms, as so many of the novels of this Lon Cheney of contemporary fiction did and do so brilliantly. Their dialogic form underscores the absurdity of the questboth Gardner's and many of his critics'-for the official, final, extra-novelistic, monological word. Perhaps we should think of On Moral Fiction not as a vade mecum but instead as another sunlight dialogue, couched in the ranting, hooting, jeering style of the Sunlight Man while expressing the law and order mentality of Police Chief Fred Clumly. Read this way, Gardner's table-pounding may provide some enjoyment even if little insight into contemporary fiction or culture. Twenty years on, his argument looks as ridiculous as Grendel feels. 'The morality of music is faithfulness to the immutable laws of musical gravity," he wrote then, sounding a good deal like the priest Ork in Grendel and betraying an ignorance of or indifference to non-Western music that undermines the foundation of his hapless theory, a theory that cannot account for either the multinational character of capital and of publishing or the multicultural character of Euro-American culture. The changing demographics in the US and elsewhere involves more than just the inclusion of previously absent or marginalized groups into the cultural mainstream; rather, as David Mura pointed out a few years ago, it involves the recognition that these groups bring with them aesthetic values "which challenge notions of universal or objective standards and expose the limitations of the art long recognized in the academies."

    Long before the 1977 Atlantic Monthly interview in which Gardner described himself as half-bohemian and half upstate New York conservative, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's book editor, Robert Boyd, was struck by what he called Gardner's 'multiple personality" and "read[iness] to agree with most any observation the reviewer makes." Gardner could say the damnedest, most contradictory things: that is Grendel is an exercise in "pure style" (Los Angeles Times) and that it makes a case for heroic values (Esquire); that fiction must be moral and that Robbe-Grillet is the best living author (Philadelphia Inquirer); and that it must create a vivid and continuous dream in the reader's mind, a dream repeatedly disrupted by the illustrations he insisted be included in his own books. Shortly after his death, Priscilla Gardner suggested that her son may have written as much as he did much because he seemed to be writing for two, the other being the younger brother Gilbert for whose death he understandably but mistakenly held himself responsible. Might we go a bit further and suggest, to put a rather different spin on William Kennedy's "the Lon Cheney of contemporary fiction" tag, that he also wrote as two. Gardner's SUNY at Binghamton colleague William ~Spanos has something interesting to say about this in an interview which appeared in the second of MSS' two Gardner tributes. Struggling to find a term to characterize his late friend, Spanos rejects the clinical "schizophrenic' in favor of the Nietzschean "split soul." After offering a brief but wonderfully suggestive reading of Micke~isson's Ghosts as the triumph of Dionysian force over Apollonian principle, Spanos goes on to call Gardner "one of the human beings I have known in my life who was most driven by the impulse towards obliteration, by the death wish, which is at the same time the drive of his life." I want to be sure to represent Spanos accurately: by death wish he does not mean that he believes Gardner was suicidal or that his death was anything but an accident. (As you may recall, this was precisely the point that Terence Des Pres took such pains to refute in his 1983 Yale Review essay.)

What was On Moral Fiction but just such a 'desperate snatching": Thor's Hammer slipped from the ~hero's hand, transformed into the cartoon boomerang that returns to conk our suddenly Chaplinesque hero on his bowler-topped head (though the bowler would of course come later). And not just conk but cleave our hero in two, the better to reveal his split soul: one part taking aim at others, another shooting himself in the foot, the same foot he had so recently put in his mouth, so to speak. Poor Gardner's had an accident. So had we all. For what was our snatching at On Moral Fiction but a similarly desperate act from which we have only lately begun to extricate ourselves. One recent example of extrication is Bo Ekelund's deployment of a fresh theoretical approach, "Bourdieu's model of sociological analysis," in order to uncover "the social logic" of Gardner's work, the "social phantasms that haunt its literary form." I cannot begin to do justice to the subtlety of Ekelund's reasoning or to the many insights made possible by his scrupulous as well as wide-ranging sociological approach or to the deft use he makes of previously overlooked archival material, such as "the neo-conservative, anti-feminist Midge Decter's" having served as Gardner's editor at Basic Books for On Moral Fiction. I am encouraged by Ekelund's bringing Bourdieu to bear on Gardner's work even if I disagree with his reading Gardner as an essentially (rather than ambivalently) conservative writer whose career up to October Light "had been marked by the compromise imposed by his taking up positions which were successful but at the same time 'uncomfortable,' that is positions that were accompanied by a set of attitudes which went against Gardner's habitus, the engrained patterns with which he perceived the world" and which, Ekelund contends, are most fully articulated in On Moral Fiction. These few reservations aside, Ekelund does offer a point of departure as well as a bone of contention for future Gardner studies, helping usher in what I hope will be a new era.