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Surviving The Wreckage ofAgathon: John Gardner's tale of lossand compensationBo G. Ekelund aa Department of English , Uppsala University , Box 513,Uppsala, S‐751 20, SwedenPublished online: 21 Jul 2008.

To cite this article: Bo G. Ekelund (1997) Surviving The Wreckage of Agathon: JohnGardner's tale of loss and compensation, Studia Neophilologica, 69:1, 21-36, DOI:10.1080/00393279708588193

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Studia Neophilologica 69: 21-36, 1997

Surviving The Wreckage of Agathon: John Gardner's Tale ofLoss and Compensation

BO G. EKELUND

The Importance of Turning EarnestSurveying the literature written by his contemporaries after the mid-sixties, John Gardnerfound it fashionably fascinated with dark and troubling visions of society. He wrote it offas books which were getting published because "alienation is in."1 On the other hand, hewas undoubtedly aware of the fact that many of the most respected young writers of fictionwere producing works which had abandoned the humanist vision of the great realists, andas I have shown elsewhere, Gardner was not unaffected by this emerging orthodoxy.2 Tounderstand Gardner's own literary production at this point, it is necessary to draw onPierre Bourdieu's concepts habitus and field. Put very simply, the habitus is an indi-vidual's or group's habitual way of perceiving the social world and orienting themselves inpractice. It consists of a durable set of values and classificatory schemes which enter intoall acts of perception, that is, it is marked by a certain inertia.3 The literary field, on theother hand, is organized according to a constant negotiation of values corresponding to andsubordinated to available positions, themselves the product of this struggle. The field, thatis, is a dynamic structure, marked by endless challenges out of which orthodoxies areformed. It is out of the dilemma constituted by the different requirements of habitus andfield that Gardner started writing The Wreckage ofAgathon and it is the tension betweenthem that explains the strange formal and thematic distortions of the novel. On one level,this was a tension between an "earnest" and an ironic attitude, and it is well expressed byGardner in a letter to his agent in 1969 where he says about The Wreckage ofAgathonthat it

[sjtarted as a spoof of all the modern cliches—the historical novel, search for father, race-problem, black comic,etc., nonsense of the age. (By now I'd quit writing stories and was writing reviews for money, so that I'd had toread all that stuff.) Somewhere along the way it turned earnest, as things do.4

Gardner's literary trajectory up to this point is marked by the same polarity. After the"sincere" fiction of "The Old Men" (never published), The Resurrection and thestories that were later to constitute Nickel Mountain, Gardner turned to parody inboth The Sunlight Dialogues and The Wreckage of Agathon, but a serious modewas then superimposed on the parodic.5 In Gardner's way of seeing things, onemight say, this is the way of the world: things do turn earnest, and parody, satire, andblack comedy are just so many evasions of the general trend towards seriousness. Gravityalways reasserts itself. The grimaces in The Wreckage of Agathon, however, neverdid turn entirely straight-faced, and there is no reason to assume that unadulter-ated seriousness was what Gardner strove for at this point. Reviewers correctly placed

1 John Gardner, "An Invective Against Mere Fiction," Southern Review N.S. 3 (1967), p. 447.2 Bo G. Ekelund, In the Pathless Forest: John Gardner's Literary Project (Uppsala: Acta UniversitatisUpsaliensis, 1995).3 The concept habitus is discussed in every major work by Bourdieu, but see especially Pierre Bourdieu and LoïcJ D Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992), pp. 115-140, for a helpfuldiscussion.4 John Gardner, letter to Georges Borchardt, Nov. 21, 1969, Special collections, Butler Library, Columbia University.5 The Resurrection (New York: New American Library, 1966. Rev. ed. New York: Ballantine, 1974); NickelMountain: A Pastoral Novel (New York: Knopf, 1973); The Sunlight Dialogues (New York: Knopf, 1972);Wreckage of Agathon (New York: Harper, 1970). References to the latter will be given in parentheses in the text.

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22 Bo G. Ekelutld Studia Neophil 69 (1997)

The Wreckage ofAgathon among the satirical and darkly humorous works with which ithad so many characteristics in common. It is only with a hindsight screened by Gardner'slater re-definition of his work that one can be scandalized by its reception.6

Imprisoned VisionIt is useful to approach The Wreckage ofAgathon by looking first at the relation between asuperstructure concerned with a moral-philosophical vision and an underlying structureof social determinants. Although I am reluctant to spell out some Mr-schema that ismanifested again and again in Gardner's fiction, it seems a valid observation that these twoelements are present in most of the novels even though they are articulated differently, andare employed to express different contents in each of them.

At one level, all Gardner's novels present a protagonist's attempts to deal with a visionor situation of disconnectedness in a world which in various ways is defined, by the authorof the text, as one of essential connectedness.7 Thus, a major thematic concern, and alsoone of the most important devices in these narratives, is faulty perception. But thisformulation is imprecise, because in all of these stories perception is a given (and nowheremore so than in The Wreckage o/Agathon, where Agathon as a Seer is given visions byApollo, visions he cannot avert his eyes from even if he would wish to): the protagonist isset at a vantage point from which his vision is necessarily flawed, like Bartleby sitting infront of his wall.8 The basic situation of these narratives is the same as in Plato's parableabout the prisoners in the cave. Of course, like Plato's prisoners, Gardner's charactersthink they are seeing the real thing, and make their deductions about values accordingly.Since the textual world beyond their purview is defined by an external, omnipotentobserver as different, and better, than they assume it to be, and since other characters or theinterplay of different perspectives display the power of' 'whole vision,' '9 it remains for thereader to pass judgment on protagonists who cannot help seeing the world as they do, butwho still ought to see the world differently. In a late manuscript for an essay on "Taste,"Gardner made this absurd demand explicit: "[i]t is thus grossly insufficient to say withSantayana that the man who has 'no taste,' the man for whom the beauty in a work of art isinvisible, cannot reasonably be told that the [sic] ought to see what he doesn't see. Becausethe fact is that, whether or not the demand is wholly reasonable, he ought to" (p. 7).Although Gardner's observation pertains to the restricted realm of aesthetic apprecia-tion, the persistent structure found in his fictions bespeaks its wider application.10 Alwaysimplicit in this demand is the restrained triumphalism of Gardner's own achievement offull vision, despite the perils of his trajectory. Only after having secured a greater measureof literary recognition did Gardner spell out this specific relation which holds vis-å-vis hisflawed characters as well as his flawed colleagues. In On Moral Fiction he notes that manyartists are subject to a "more ordinary alienation"—ordinary because of its social ratherthan metaphysical nature—which is due to the "social displacement which occurs when[...] the contemporary novelist leaves Harlem, Brooklyn, Texas, Ohio, or Nebraska forAcademia. [ ] Such displacement is so common in the lives of artists as almost to be a

6 Gregory P. Morris writes: "Gardner was hailed as a political satirist, a black humorist, a writer (however oddly)in the Sartrean—Swiftian vein; and the novel drew nearly as much misinterpretation as Grendel later would" (AWorld of Order and Light: The Fiction of John Gardner (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1984), p. 38). And he adds,somewhat righteously, that some critics did "rightly perceive the novel's elemental strain of hope."7 This recurrent theme has been thoroughly investigated by critics like Morris, David Cowart, Arches and Light:The Fiction of John Gardner (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1983); and Per Winther, The Art of JohnGardner: Instruction and Exploration (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992).8 See Ekelund 1995 for an analysis of Gardner's analysis of Melville's story (pp. 135-140).9 Gardner's immense admiration for John Fowles's Daniel Martin may well have been consolidated once and forall when he read its opening sentence: "Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation" (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997,p. 7). See Gardner's review of Daniel Martin ("In Defense of the Real," Saturday Review, 1 Oct. 1977: pp. 22-24).

10 Ts. in the John Gardner Collection, University of Rochester, p. 7.

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law of artistic success." Gardner then moves even closer to home when he speaks of thestructural relation between country and city in the formation of the artist: "the country boyhas almost no choice but to head for the city if he wants to be an artist. "This move has itsconsequences for, precisely, vision. "In the unlucky, social displacement leads to mal-adjustment and to art that whimpers or snarls. In the lucky, it leads to a healthy doublenessof vision, the healthy alternative—crucial in art—to disorientation and emotionalinsecurity, the anxiety and ambivalence of the neurotic."11 If luck seems a neutralcatalyst at work in this alchemy of souls, it only substitutes for the will to faith thatotherwise determines vision in Gardner's habitual view of art.

The act of will by which one's perception of the world is changed occurs in one of theliterary loci to which Gardner persistently returned, namely a passage in Blake's "TheMarriage of Heaven and Hell."12 Blake's narrator describes how he was brought by anangel to a place where he was given a terrifying vision of the fiery abyss which will be hiseternal lot. Through an act of faith and will, however, he rejects this vision which wasthere "owing to [the angel's] metaphysics" only, and after his denial of its validity anidyllic vista is revealed in its stead. From his essay on "Bartleby" onwards, this scenariois the one by which Gardner judges his characters as well as the protagonists andantagonists of the literary field. The nihilistic vision is a character flaw, a radical lackof the faith in and the will to benevolent vision, and it is invariably nurtured by anexaggerated trust in the intellect.

In Gardner's fictions, this failure of vision regularly leads to a concrete sacrifice that isthen symbolically compensated for. What we might term "the Bartleby model" operateshere. In "Bartleby," at least according to Gardner's interpretation, the narrator compen-sates for the ruination of his scrivener by resurrecting him artistically, after having allowedhis wreckage rather than break the rules of the community. Another Melville survivorcomes to mind: Ishmael alone escaping the wreck of the Pequod to tell us about it. Thisrole is played by Demodokos in the novel under discussion: travelling by ship for threedays after Agathon's death—the three days between death and resurrection—Demodokosarrives in Athens, and tells himself, "I begin to believe I have mysteriously escaped"(234). There is no doubt that this is a conscious allusion.13 Gardner made great, evenexcessive use of a number of literary topoi, which all served to displace a social prob-lematic to a moral-metaphysical level where it could then be redeemed in the imagination.

In this general economy of denial and redemption it is the figure of the survivor, and thenotion of compensation, which will be the final object of my analysis, but in order toaccount for this motif, it is necessary to look first at the character of the social wreckage,and survey the landscape across which the escape is made excellent.

Backgrounding the Social ProblematicIn The Resurrection and The Wreckage of Agathon the disintegration of Chandler andAgathon is paralleled by social upheaval on a larger scale. In The Resurrection, thephilosopher-protagonist Chandler's death is mirrored by the social disintegration ofBatavia. In The Wreckage of Agathon, Agathon's sickness and death parallels the ruin ofthe social experiment of Sparta, a society based on rural virtues and the vices of systematicoppression. Demodokos, the survivor of the wreckage, escapes to Athens, the epitome of

11 John Gardner, On Moral Fiction (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 184.12 Helen B. Ellis and Warren U. Ober have discussed this poem, especially as regards its relevance to Grendel, in"Grendel and Blake:The Contraries of Existence'', in Robert A. Morace and Kathryn VanSpanckeren, eds., JohnGardner: Critical Perspectives (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1982), pp. 46-61.13 See Gardner's admission that he had originally included the quote "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee"in The Sunlight Dialogues, but had then ' 'decided that there was enough quotation of other people quoting otherpeople," and cut it. Quoted in Heide Ziegler, "John Gardner." Reprinted in Allan Chavkin, Conversations withJohn Gardner (Jackson, Miss.: UP of Mississippi, 1993), p. 127.

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24 Bo G. Ekelund Studia NeophU 69 (1997)

the cives, the representative par preference of civilization and urban culture, but also aplace where the old aristocracy has recently been replaced by a vulgar, commercial classof merchants, represented in the novel by the debauched law-giver Solon. In the novel thatGardner wrote next, Grendel, the monster's death figures as the necessary outcome of the"city-building" begun on a small scale with Hrothgar's mead hall. The figure ofGrendel, that lonely rim-walker, the last offspring of a wild breed, fatally attracted to theculture and the civilizatory work of the Danes, embodies the whole pathos of a doomedway of life, and in the "mythic" opposition set up between culture and nature, town andcountry, the defeat of Grendel is a foregone conclusion.15 The disintegration of a life-world is also elaborately plotted in the family-chronicle dimension of The SunlightDialogues, and Gardner returns to a mythical treatment of the theme in Freddy's Bookin which the death of the Devil opens the door to a new world where there was ' 'no lightanywhere, except for the yellow light of cities."16 A ground-swell in most of Gardner'snovels carries the debris of this kind of wreckage, a process diffused through a wholeuniverse of relations, collective and social rather than individual and existential. Thecontrast between the inexorable power of urban culture and the loss of rural values, indeedthe loss of a specific rural life-world, lies at the bottom of most conflicts in Gardner'sfiction. If his rural habitus prompted him to take this conflict seriously and to giveunequivocal voice to the values at stake, the literary field demanded, for his bid forrecognition to be successful, a different attitude. In a symptomatic article in the New YorkTimes Book Review on June 6, 1965, Richard Kostelanetz focused on the phenomenon of"a large body of absurd fiction" appearing in America in the 1960s.17 This fiction, bywriters such as Donald Barthelme, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon and John Barth,emphasizes literariness at the expense of realism, and by his play with fictional conven-tions, a writer like Barth is said to "undercut literature's pretensions to comprehendinglife."18 It is necessary to take these "literary mores" into account if we are to understandthe formal and thematic development of Gardner's literary trajectory.19 The fiction thatKostelanetz gave attention to represented a successful challenge to the fifties orthodoxy,and Gardner wrote The Wreckage of Agathon and Grendel under the sway of this newliterary dominant. Only by focussing on the uneasy relationship between a social prob-lematic and a metaphysical tendency can the dominated character of Gardner's writing beseen.

The tendency of Gardner criticism, however, has been to focus on the individual-existential dimension—the vision which owes its character only to metaphysics, as inBlake's poem—and to elevate it to universality, often by relating it to mythic patterns andstructures. To me, universality is the least interesting thing about Gardner's work;accordingly I will attempt to restore some specificity.

In all these fables of doomed social worlds, the ostensible interest of the story, theforeground of the narratives, is invested in how different individuals cope with the collapseof life-worlds, or, in Gardner's universalizing word-choice, with "mutability" as theprinciple of life, time as ' 'perpetual perishing.' As a consequence, interpretations of TheWreckage of Agathon have so far consisted in extended commentaries on the value of thedifferent characters' responses to a situation in which structures of personal relationships

14 Grendel (New York: Knopf, 1971).15 See Ekelund 1995 for a full discussion of this thematic structure in Grendel.16 Freddy's Book (New York: Knopf, 1980).17 Richard Kostelanetz, "The Point Is That Life Doesn't Have a Point," New York Times Book Review, June 6,1965: p. 3.18 Kostelanetz, p. 28.19 See Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History—Doctrine (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1981), p. 125,for a discussion of this notion of Boris Ejxenbaum's, which in some ways anticipates Bourdieu's focus on field-relevant structures.2 0 See Ekelund 1995, esp. the conclusion, for a discussion of this principle in Gardner's thought.

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as well as political structures are collapsing. This can be illustrated with the case ofAgathon: David Cowart finds that Agathon is "essentially noble" although "flawed";21

while Gregory Morris sees him as an egotistical tyrant and betrayer with a "flawedintellect," who is irresponsible, emotionally crippled, incapable of sympathy, and whorepresents "a complete and unforgivable submission to substance and space and time."22

Alison Payne claims that Agathon is a "morally despicable" figure23 while DeanMe Williams more moderately draws out a lack of integrity in Agathon when comparedwith other dialogic voices in the novel.24

The type of analysis found in these examples is one which tends to state staticoppositions between values embodied in characters. It seems to me that the lack ofdynamics is due to the fact that the textual analysis deals only with those codes of the textwhich pertain to that superstructure of' 'visions'' which I mentioned above, while ignoringthe matrix out of which these visions spring, that is, all the chains of signification whichconstruct a textual universe of social determinants in which the characters are situated.

In fact, very little attention has been given to the social problematics in Gardner'sfiction. This should surprise us at least in the cases of The Wreckage of Agathon andThe Sunlight Dialogues, where social mobility is a salient point of the narratives; NickelMountain, where a particular type of socio-geographical movement and its consequencesare equally in evidence; and October Light which is built around the theme of immi-gration;25 but the "moral" horizon of Gardner's critics precludes such mundane matters.Cowart, for example, who interprets Gardner's three early novels The Resurrection, TheWreckage of Agathon and Nickel Mountain under the rubric "pastoral," confesses a debtto William Empson but manages conveniently to disregard the social dimension Empsonascribes to the form.26

Gardner's fictions appear static and excessively "philosophical" once the socialdynamic which animates his characters is removed. This stasis is duplicated by thecritical move to set up a steadfast "moral" intention as the source of the fiction. If literarycriticism returns to the author it must be to an agent engaged in a struggle for expressionthat involves much more than an essential and unwavering "intention." Gardner, for hispart, is animated by a social conflict including a socio-geographical dislocation and aforced confrontation with an urban-academic mentality. In his fictions, he is preoccupiedwith the process that has taken him from an idealized rural certitude to a conflicted, socialin-between-ness. No wonder then, that movement through social space energizes so manyof his narratives. It is true that the Spartan prison in The Wreckage of Agathon provides aclosed-off space where the two main characters temporarily are on an equal footing, wheretheir past and future are bracketed. Nevertheless, the paths which led them to this placebecome the objects of their meditations, no less than the cause of them. Agathon andDemodokos, we learn, are both social climbers, counting on education, and more speci-fically a high degree of literacy, to help them achieve their move from one position toanother. Among other things, The Wreckage of Agathon belongs to the genre of theErziehungsroman, the novel of "upbringing" or "education," the earliest example ofwhich is Wieland's Agathon?1 Demodokos is the young disciple who matures in the

21 Cowart 1983, pp. 28-29.22 Morris 1984, pp. 38-50, quotes from p. 39 and p. 50.23 Alison R. Payne, "Clown, Monster, Magician: The purpose of Lunacy in John Gardner 's Fiction," in JeffHenderson, ed., Thor's Hammer: Essays on John Gardner (Conway: U of Central Arkansas P, 1985), p. 158.24 Dean McWilliams, John Gardner, Twayne United States Authors Series 561 (Boston: Twayne, 1990), pp. 23-28.25 October Light (New York: Knopf, 1976).26 Cowart 1983, p . 206n, and William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral: A Study of the Pastoral Form inLiterature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), especially the section entitled "Proletarian Literature." See alsoTerry Eagleton's generous critique of Empson in " T h e Critic as Clown," in Lawrence Grossberger and CaryNelson, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988).27 J. A. Cuddon, Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 3rd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p . 88.

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26 Bo G. Ekelund Studia Neophil 69 (1997)

course of the novel. His trajectory is played against that of his mentor Agathon: in theSpartan prison we see Agathon at the end of his trajectory, fallen from the heights he hadscaled to the very bottom of society and trying to deal with the implications of what he hasgone through, while Demodokos has still to move upwards from that same social nadir.

The paths drawn up and projected in this social chronology form a stable substrate forthe elaborate weaving of time structures in the narration. In fact, the disjointed chronologyof the récit would seem to form an intricate camouflage thrown over the relentlesslyunidirectional thrust of social destiny. My complaints about the selective attention ofearlier criticism can now be rephrased: in such interpretations of Gardner's fiction, theovert philosophizing and the thematizing of different philosophical positions has con-cealed and camouflaged other references, especially the references to social destiny; thatis, the labor of foregrounding always implies a "backgrounding," and this is itseuphemizing function. Existential and universalizing themes and motifs have persistentlytaken precedence in the readings of this novel.

To include the social dynamic of the novel in an analysis we must swerve away fromthat precedence. How does the text make possible such a change of directions? The novelopens with an obvious parody of Kafka's The Trial and the first words we read areAgathon's enraged question "What charge?" True to Kafka, this question is neveranswered, but eternally postponed, and the strange device of the writing materials given tothe two prisoners is the necessary one for bringing out the existential guilt which circlesmothlike around this question without ever providing an answer to it. The existentialtheme of authenticity in contrast to a living in Das Mann, a life of playing the acceptedroles, is continually present, either made explicit or figuring metaphorically. References toinauthentic existence fall thick as rain in this book. Indeed, the relations between authenticbeing and mock being may be "central" to the novel, but they are played out within aparodic framework. If the spoof indeed turned earnest, as Gardner claimed, it was no morethan a half turn. The mixture of parody and earnestness in The Wreckage of Agathonsuggests a logic following the reverse order: the ironic-parodic form serves to euphemizecontents derived from Gardner's expressive drive, the most basic coordinates of hishabitus: one such euphemized urge is found in the simple, sentimental oppositions set upbetween Dorkis on the one hand and Lykourgos and Agathon on the other; that is, thereligious, "connected" man who is able to embrace mutability is contrasted first with thenihilistic-Nietzschean, isolated "lunatic" trying to force his own rigid order on the worldand then with the urban intellectual who is unmoored from all stable frameworks of value.In the scheme of oppositions set up in the book, the one between Dorkis and Lykourgos issituated within the "rural" pole which opposes the "urban-decadent" pole. This preciselymatches Gardner's dual rejection: the backwardness of his rural origins and the lack ofmoral stamina in the world of urban-cosmopolitan values are both refused.28 What makeshim perform these rejections is his imperfectly renounced social origin, and the conflictedform of these refusals is one measure of the hysteresis effect of his habitus.29 Another urgerefracted by the novel's form is the desire to philosophize, to function as a guide in a worldof ideas. This desire, understandable in someone who feels he has avoided the trap of anunhealthy singleness of vision, is displaced through the strategy of undercutting: in aninterview in 1972 Gardner opposed the new ironic fiction to the ' ' straight'' art of an earliergeneration and explained that "[wjhenever I have any inclination toward a message, Icreate a funny character—a fat, old drunk maybe—and he says what I think. The character

28 To say that Gardner 's emotional metaphysics implied that "a l l systems fail ," as Morris does, is to give thesublimated and euphemized figure for a more basic experience of failure (p. 42).29 See the wonderful comment made by Gardner about Chaucer 's ability to reconcile old and new socialstructures: " T o the aristocratic activites [sic] of diplomacy and poetry, Chaucer brought an imperfectlyrenounced middle-class mode of thinking and feel ing" (On Moral Fiction, p . 184). For a discussion of thehysteresis effect, see Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990), p . 63 .

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undercuts what I say."30 In a dual move, sentimental earnestness is deflected by irony,parody is tempered by gravitas. The effect is to suspend judgment, or make possiblecontrasting judgments on this level of discourse, but also to scramble and "background" aseries of social evaluations as well as an entire fable of social mobility.

However, the passage that leads the reader into the existential-philosophical thematicof the book can instead serve as an entry into its social problematic. "I understand nothing,for all my fine reputation," says Agathon. This wedge between reputation and actualachievement is firmly driven in at the beginning of the text. Demodokos describesAgathon as an obscene fool and derelict, but claims also that the guards who arrestAgathon are ill at ease about treating a "famous and respected seer" this way (2). As if todemonstrate this gap, Agathon utters a curse meant to start an earthquake, then laughs andjovially asserts that he is "impotent." The fact that Agathon affirms, even delights in hisimpotence subverts the relation between symbolic role and social position; in this wayAgathon's "disconnectedness" is articulated in the sphere of social positions. Agathondoes not have the powers ascribed to his office, he is not at home in his position. If thisdetachment makes it possible for Agathon to describe his situation, and also to perform therole of mocker and gadfly, the price he pays is the loss of all convictions and of the powerto act coherently, since he is without illusio, that is, he no longer has any investment in asocial game. His acts come to be initiated solely by the actions of others: mockery is totallyderivative. The self-reflexive consciousness Agathon displays in the present of the:;

narrative is an end station: it can lead nowhere of its own power. Thus, his social nadirindeed has a philosophical dimension, but it is produced according to a social logic whichthat dimension blots out. It will therefore be necessary to summarize the events thatconstitute Agathon's social trajectory.

The Oil Merchant's Son and the Woman of BreedingAgathon's father is an oil merchant, a position which in his Athenian society combinesmoney with a lack of social status. He harbors hopes of' 'rising in the world," and these heprojects onto Agathon, or, more precisely, onto Agathon's cleverness, after the death of ayounger, more promising son (58). Agathon is sent to a renowned teacher, Klinias, whosecultural capital derives chiefly from his having studied with Thales of Miletos. Klinias'sposition is odd: he is "attached to the house of Philombrotos," who is at that point one ofthe most powerful of the land-owning aristocracy (58). The fact that Klinias lives in asmall stone hut at the periphery of Philombrotos's grounds offers a telling commentary onthe relation of those who command only a highly specialized form of cultural capital tothose who are rich in both economic and general cultural capital. The oil merchants, whohold only economic capital—and an illegitimate kind of economic capital at that—areinferior to both in this scheme. Agathon is ' 'ambitious'' as is his fellow student Konon,also of merchant-family stock. But Agathon is also embarrassed at any display ofambition, and he nurtures feelings of resentment aimed at both his father for hisobsequious eagerness to "rise" and at those above him. Ambition is joined to spite inAgathon's habitus. This is ressentiment, the urge to destroy that which seems sociallyunattainable: "Someday, I was going to be avenged" (59).

All the contradictions of his position are present in his first encounter with Tuka, thedaughter of Philombrotos (58-60). She looks down on him from a window "high above"him as he is performing the menial chores which are expected of him as Klinias'sapprentice. The distance between her vantage point and his place in the vineyard is a socialdistance that can be bridged by only one of them. Tuka approaches him, her friends andslaves in attendance. She embodies privilege to an extent that makes Agathon powerless:he is observed by her ' 'like something owned," and her ' 'bold steady gaze'' unnerves him.

30 "John Gardner: -Great age of the novel is returning.'" Interview. Women's Wear Daily, Dec. 8, 1972: p. 16.

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Agathon blushes, laughs inappropriately, mumbles an excuse; in short, he is unable toexert any control over the situation. The text brings out the sociological truth that ameeting of two individuals is in reality the meeting of two social structures. "I was," saysAgathon, "very conscious, of course, of my social class—and hers" (59). The tables willbe turned later on, but not, ultimately, to Agathon's advantage. Despite everything, Tukaand Agathon fall in love and eventually marry, very much against her father's wishes.Again the social distance is bridged by Tuka, perhaps out of a sense for imminent socialchange. Agathon himself, on the other hand, is locked into his consciousness of socialdistances. He has no designs on Tuka: "I understood my lot." He accepts that he is not likethe "lean and elegant boys of her own class" (69). Nevertheless, he makes the most of hisscholarly capital: "sometimes I tried to dazzle Tuka with a grim, disturbing theory I hadabout the prima materia" (61). Agathon's power of attraction on Tuka is never wellaccounted for, but events on a macro-social level play into his hands. Simultaneous withAgathon's rise there is a shift in class relations generally, and the emergent middle classreaches a position of dominance within the span of a generation. Agathon manages to allyhimself to this rising force in its most potent representative, the lawgiver Solon. Heproudly declares, "I was Solon's aide and Solon was the future" (83). Fittingly enough,when Philombrotos dies, it is Solon who takes his place (82).

The Athenian aristocracy of The Wreckage of Agathon empowers Solon in a last-ditchattempt to avert serious social unrest, but by doing so they yield their power to the classthat challenges them, and it is no wonder that they are tempted by the model ofLykourgos's fascist experiment in Sparta. In Agathon's account, the class conflict isvisible in differences of taste and physical appearance. Solon is immensely fat andeffeminate, he reads and eats like a glutton, has no ear for music, writes poems that arepopular with the commoners—self-mockingly he exclaims: "A terrible condemnation[...] Such taste!" (71)—while the aristocrats, like Lykourgos, are lean, masculine orasexual, abhor the hearty eating of peasants, and, as represented by Tuka, they excel in themost disciplined and abstract of the arts, music.31

Seen from a sociological point of view, Agathon's marriage to Tuka constitutes animage of class opportunism, a representative of the rising class marrying one of a decliningbut still socially enviable class. "In [Philombrotos's] own house common blood hadseized a place" (82). Agathon's next career move is more ambiguous. At his ownrequest—although Solon had first suggested this possibility two years earlier—Agathonleaves Athens for Lykourgos's Sparta (86-87).32 He makes this move at the expense of the

31 I am aware that a great many of the oppositions outlined in this chapter can be mapped onto the relationshipbetween Gardner and his first wife Joan, and the desire to tell their story, again and again, seems to have had aprominent place in Gardner's expressive drive—see not just The Wreckage of Agathon, but also "The King'sIndian" in The King's Indian: Stories and Tales (New York: Knopf, 1974), and the posthumously published"Stillness" in Stillness/Shadows (New York: Knopf, 1986). It seems to me that the censorship of the field ineffect demanded the transformations of the story that one finds in the two former, just as it demanded thesuppression of the less euphemized account in' 'Stillness,'' a demand that was spelled out in a letter from Gottliebto Gardner (11 April 1975, John Gardner Collection, University of Rochester). Gottlieb admonishes Gardner tothink of Proust who waited twenty years before using his autobiographical material, while Gardner's materialcomes from "last week practically, in fact literally." Gottlieb's literary logic, taking into account Gardner'sposition in the literary field, translates the social logic which rewards self-control and formality into the advice tospurn the "confessional," autobiographical mode.

32 This is one point of many in the novel where an autobiographical code of reading intervenes, since Agathon'sdecision to leave urban, sophisticated Athens for rural, provincial Sparta exactly parallels Gardner's move fromSan Francisco to Carbondale, Illinois. Joan Gardner did not want to leave cosmopolitan San Francisco where shehad her career as a concert pianist (cf. Tuka's harp-playing), and where she enjoyed the social scene. The clearcharacter of social violence in Agathon's making the decision for his family is of course only readable as ananachronism, and the entire "domestic tragedy" part of the novel is the one which is least assimilated into theclassical frame-work. It has no verisimilitude as a historical fiction, and the drivenness of Agathon'sautobiographical writing seems to be matched by the urgency felt by Gardner to get these events into fictionalform. See John M. Howell, John Gardner: A Bibliographical Profile (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1980).

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social expectations of his wife, who is at her ease in the high Athenian society whereAgathon feels out of place. Tuka is all but coerced into leaving Athens (146). The changeof scene has obvious social implications. Agathon gains a virgin territory in which to usehis scholarly capital—he takes students and acts as an informal adviser to and envoy forLykourgos—while for Tuka the entire social network which constituted her social capitalis taken from her. Agathon adds insult to the injury he has inflicted on her when he scornsthe mock-Athenian social life Tuka tries to establish in Sparta, describing her as playingthe role of "aristocratic lady in a dung heap" (146). Clearly, Agathon is being avenged forhis lowly origins here, and he rightly sees that Sparta saves him from "society." He staysaway from the "refined" expatriate Athenians, these "fat parasites"—refined mannersdo not cut any ice with Agathon, who was happiest with the "crude" manners of Kliniasand Solon (120).

In this new world, Agathon at any rate is successful, and he and Tuka live "what isknown as a rich life [...], sealed off from the ordinary work of the world" (122). In aparticularly jarring anachronism which serves to bring out the emptiness of this "richlife," Agathon describes himself as "a high-class odd-jobs man with a company horse"(122). The description of their social life in Sparta, with its reckless partying and partner-swapping, owes a lot to the fictional appropriation of suburban mores which had beenperformed in the fictions of John Updike and John Cheever in the fifties and sixties.33

There is a salient contradiction involved in Agathon's behavior in Sparta. On the onehand, he asserts that he was still an "ambitious" young man, and his diplomatic missionsfor Lykourgos, although unofficial, surely constitute another step on the ladder. On theother hand, he shuns the social context that would define his success as such, and is drawninto a close relationship with the Helot couple Iona and Dorkis, who are, as Tuka puts it,"practically slaves" (146).34 In this description Tuka shows her awareness of the socialvalues at stake, those of symbolic capital, while Agathon's self-proclaimed total"indifference to the nonsense people say" (146) displays a drive towards a negation ofspecifically social values or even towards a kind of social self-destructiveness rather than adeveloped social conscience or sympathy for the cause of Helot liberation.

At some point during the course of the domestic drama involving Agathon, Tuka,Dorkis and Iona—with the Athenian-Egyptian couple Hamrah and Thalia providinga parallel—a sense of ruptured connections intervenes. In Agathon's description thisquickly takes on existential-metaphysical dimensions, and we are seemingly left in thelurch for explanations; it is from such an interpretive position one all too easily drifts intothe deterministic view of Agathon as "doomed" by a flaw of vision which is equivalent toa moral failure. Agathon's own preoccupation with determinism and destiny, the "deadlyinevitability" he senses in himself, seconds such a drift of the reading. It should be clear,however, that Agathon has not always been the victim of the "accidents" staged by fate:in his earlier, ambitious phase he hitched his cart to the star of Solon and then moved awayfrom urban Athens to witness and participate in the social experiment of Lykourgos'sSparta.

One gets closer to the significance of Agathon's development, if one sees that the inertiathat befalls Agathon forms a counterpoint to the activity of the other individuals involved,especially the women. Agathon at one point describes himself as a person caught betweentwo goddesses, and as his social trajectory becomes more ambiguous, the ambitions of

3 3 The displacement of this recently established topos to an ancient Greek setting is not always felicitous, and thedevice is nowhere as heavy-handed as when the narrator sets down the "radiant" conversation of Tuka at a party(p. 45). The defamiliarizing setting also tends to defuse the socio-moral analysis which is such an integral part ofUpdike's and Cheever's novels.34 The allegorical identification of the Helots with the African-Americans of Gardner's present, added to themany autobiographical vectors of the "domestic tragedy" part, raises a whole number of questions which abiographical approach to Gardner's writing would need to address.

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Tuka and Iona eclipse his. "Between them, I was as helpless as a ship in a hurricane" (55).In this simile, we see Agathon's wreckage presaged. While his will is sapped intotumultuous emotion, Tuka and Iona transform the force of their emotions into sociallyefficacious will. Tuka returns to Athens, the social market where her products can findtheir right price and where her symbolic and social inheritance awaits her claim. We seeher later through Demodokos's eyes as a perfectly self-possessed, dignified "materfamilias." Iona, on the other hand, performs a creative revision of her feelings forAgathon: they were just a guise for an urge to revolt. This revolt is aimed first at the"drudgery of a wife," and is then directed against the Spartans' oppressive tyranny.Consequently, she turns her ambitions to the organization of revolution (160-61). Clearly,both women function as indices of Agathon's ruin, if not its cause. Again, Gardnerperforms a dual rejection: the entrenched social privileges of Tuka and the radical chal-lenge of Iona are precisely the forces in a conflict which the ' 'healthy artist'' must reconcile.35

At the time of the narration, Agathon's social wreckage is already complete. Fallen outof Lykourgos's grace, bereft of family and social contacts, Agathon suffers the final blowwhen his Philosopher's book, the one material inheritance of scholarly capital from histeacher Klinias, is destroyed. His loss of the book constitutes a climactic point in the novel.Agathon has hidden the many scrolls of parchment in a crypt with a secret entrance. Afterthe first revolutionary coup, the burning of the hall of Ephors, Agathon is persuaded byDorkis and Iona to show them the secret hiding-place. A group of Helots hide there, butthey are detected and burned alive by the Spartans. When the Helots are identifying thecorpses and mourning their dead, Agathon runs around picking up the charred remains ofhis book (164-167). In this event Gardner stages a confrontation between the basic stancesof detached intellectualism and "connected" empathy. The passage in question is oddlydistorted in its narration—although Demodokos tells the story at a remove, he does it inthe manner of an eyewitness and with a barrage of emotionally charged adjectives andsimiles. The orchestration of the symbolism of the passage is highly melodramatic. Todrive the point home, Gardner leaves it to Dorkis to spell out the meaning of what hastranspired, in his claim that Agathon cares more for knowledge than for people. Thiscomes in Dorkis's last speech to Agathon, delivered right before Dorkis is executed for hispart in the revolutionary plot. In a piece of melodrama that would have made Dickensblush, it is revealed that Dorkis's part in the rebellion was somehow exposed by hisintervention to save Agathon from the rage of the other mourners at the crypt. As in TheResurrection, Gardner criticizes academic-intellectual values, the love of "dead knowl-edge' ' at the expense of human ties and emotional commitment, but he does it here with avindictiveness akin to Agathon's own urge to be "avenged," and this drive distorts thenarrative. The whole scene with Agathon so distraught over the loss of his book as to beoblivious of the Helots around him counting their dead is well beyond the limits of that"sentimentality" which Gardner later proscribed as immoral in fiction.

In order to make sense of the melodrama of this scene, it must be seen that the narrativeconstrues it as the culmination of Agathon's betrayals. Demodokos rounds off the accountof the episode above by noting that Agathon's claims for the virtues of suffering derivefrom his "betraying everything [he] ever loved without lifting a goddamn finger" (167).There is a strange tension here between the active mode implied by the verb betray, and thefundamental passivity ascribed to Agathon, a passivity which is enforced by his ownpreoccupation with destiny, impulse, accident. If we look at the betrayal of Konon, whichis obviously a conscious act, we are left with an unsatisfactory vagueness regardingAgathon's motivation.

I think this blank space of Agathon's psychology signifies the deeper strata at which his

35 See On Moral Fiction, p. 184. This reconciliation between the (socially) old and new is what Shakespeare andChaucer were capable of, in Gardner's view.

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"betrayal" takes place. His problematic trajectory, with its tortuous mixture of ambitionand evasion, starts with his rise within Athenian society, but then proceeds with his escapefrom Athens, which has been taken over by the ' 'middle class'' merchant values of Solon,and his ambivalent fascination with the Spartan social experiment. In this situation, as wehave seen, his ambitions become unclear and he loses his impetus. Unable to give hiswhole-hearted support to the Helot rebellion and with his influence on Lykourgos dissi-pated, Agathon has no social or political position left to inhabit. At this point he takes on,as he says to his son Kleon, the ' 'character of a local seer'' (203). Agathon has run througha bewildering gamut of social antipathies and sympathies, only to end up unable to affirmany of them. His position finally becomes that of an absolute outsider. In this development,Agathon parallels the foregrounding of vision in the narrative as a whole: vision is achieved atthe expense of social specificity. But this total deracination is precisely what distortsvision. In this contradiction we see the double bind which Gardner is trying to dramatizeand get out of all at the same time: how can the alienation from original values, from thehome culture, be a means to rescue those values? The artist's life—the conquest of literaryrecognition—is based on the loss of the meaningful context once supplied by the homeculture. In Agathon, Gardner could only give the dilemma the form of a caricature, atravesty which pitilessly suggests the dead end of the uprooted intellectual. How else canthat social dislocation, constitutive of Gardner's habitus, be creatively re-formulated?

Before we turn our attention to Demodokos as an alternative version of the fable of socialmobility through literacy, we must note that we are very far from a satisfactory internalanalysis of why Agathon's project meets a dead end, and I will argue that the text offers nosuch account, except in what it does not explicitly deal with, namely the strange allocationof values and allegorical positions between the poles of the rural and the urban, conser-vatism and radicalism. I will return to this after having delineated Demodokos's trajectory.

The Apple-peddlar's Son and the ScholarFirst of all, the homology between Agathon and Demodokos must be emphasized. Just asAgathon was Klinias's disciple, Demodokos is Agathon's; ambitious as Agathon was, so isDemodokos. The sense of social inferiority brings to both the sharp pangs of inadequacy intheir dealings with the other sex.36 There is another, chiastic symmetry as well. Agathon'sstory traces his rise, but focuses on his "wreckage," and shows his decline from riches to,literally, rags. Demodokos's story, on the other hand, is one of rags to riches. For both, thevehicle of their social mobility is that supremely stationary activity, writing.

Demodokos's trajectory starts at the lowest possible level. At the age of eighteen, he isstill only helping his mother in her apple-peddling trade, and he is not even a very goodhelper. From this perspective, Agathon represents hope, and even as Demodokos becomesincreasingly disenchanted with his apprenticeship, he cannot countenance returning to hismother (6). He is acutely embarrassed by his lack of social success: he is twenty when thestory starts, but he still amounts to nothing (8). There are a number of signals that point tothe extreme domination under which Demodokos is laboring, and which he graduallyovercomes. In the first chapter, he is referring to Agathon for many of the words he isusing. "His words, not mine," he says about the philosophical terminology he resorts to,(1) and there are other passages in this chapter which testify directly to the power ofdominant language (4). By way of contrast, there are no overt signs of his dependence onAgathon's language in the final chapter where a self-assured Demodokos indulges in aliterary description of Athens and then chooses, with the story-teller's authority, to havedone with this display of his literacy: "But never mind that" (234).

The distance from being dominated to having appropriated the dominating discourse is

36 See especially Chapter 14 for Demodokos's description of himself, p. 90, for his lack of progress in the sexualrace.

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traversed in the course of Agathon's "sentimental education" of Demodokos, his twostories of love and hate along with his show of disrespect for political power, and hisattempts to bring about communication with their taciturn jailer. Demodokos is not sure ofthe value of these teachings. He laments the fact that Agathon is writing of his private liferather than putting down the wisdom of the sages, that is, legitimate scholarly capital, andhe pins his hopes on the obvious representative of political and physical power, the tall,cool ephor who comes regularly to question them (49-50,107).37 It is part of Demodokos'smaturation that he comes to see through the games which the holders of power play inorder to disguise the real relations of power, and this achievement of vision is enabled byAgathon's mockery of such games.

Demodokos's passage from darkness to light is graphically presented in his descent intothe rebels' cave and his journey from this rock grave to Athens. Gardner thus repeats theresurrection symbolism of The Resurrection. Moreover, Demodokos symbolically resur-rects Agathon for the benefit of his wife and children. In the process, he claims aninheritance from his master. To deal with Athens and with Tuka is the test by whichDemodokos will know he has risen, not so much from the dead as in the world. Thisnarrative teleology is alluded to by a minor but meaningful incident on the way. Peeker isunable to find Philombrotos's palace on his own, and the Athenians are suspicious of thisraggedy boy. Finally a peddler takes pity on him, and Demodokos follows him for half aday before reaching the palace (234). In a Dickensian turn of events he is welcomed,bathed, and given new clothes. His literary compstence is displayed, as already noted, inhis description of Athens, but also in his awareness of the technical problem of simul-taneity in narration (239). The real test of his capacity, however, comes with the telling ofAgathon's story. "I told it like a poet," he tells us (240). And this is the point whereDemodokos "makes his name," because of course he is named for the rhapsodeDemodokos in the Odyssey, he who tells the story of Troy's fall "in the right way."

In the final scene, Demodokos is alone with Tuka and passes another test with her, bydisplaying a light, ironic touch, as she confesses that her account of what led her to leaveAgathon is yet another fiction. "But interesting," adds Demodokos, whereupon Tukalaughs and exclaims "You do me good" (243). In a novel of manifold textual echoes,Gardner charges this final exchange by giving it the ring of earlier phrases. Demodokos, inhis comment, is true to Agathon's philosophic legacy that the important thing is not what istrue, but what is interesting (33). Tuka's phrase, the last piece of dialogue in the novel,affirms the bond of communication, by echoing Agathon's comment at the end of his long-waged campaign to make the jailer speak (206).

It is suggested that Demodokos's "reward"—perhaps plotted by Agathon—will be an"attachment" to the house of Philombrotos, by way of Diana's hand. The circle is thusclosed. The social position of the scholar in its original state, that of Klinias, suffered adislocation through the ambitions of Agathon during a time of social upheaval, but is nowrestored. Of course, the openness of the ending lends itself to other interpretations, andits kinship with a kind of ' 'Oliver Twist'' sentimentalism puts its character of resolutionfirmly within ironical brackets.

What seems the most important element among the finale's variations on the originalsituation is the fact that Demodokos brings together the lowest social level of rural Spartawith the highest social level of urban Athens. His is a giant social leap, effected throughAgathon's education. The two poles that are thus brought together constitute the mostfundamental structure of the novel. For all that it has gone unnoticed by Gardner critics,

3 7 It seems an obvious stumbling-block for those who would argue that Peeker consistently sees more than the" S e e r " that Agathon early on can diagnose Peeker's admiration for the ephor as an instance of adhering to afascist scale of values, long before Peeker himself realizes that his allegiances have been direly misplaced.3 8 This is a rather unattractive motif in the novel: earlier Tuka offered her naked body as a ' ' reward' ' to Agathon;the availability of a female body functions as a seal on social advancement.

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the way that rural and urban values are played against each other in this book forms an all-encompassing frame for understanding the movements of its characters.

Polis and CountryAthens represents urban civilization, commerce, democracy and the disintegration oftraditional hierarchies. Sparta, in stark contrast, is consciously built around a rural way oflife, with an aim towards becoming impervious to change. Lykourgos's cruel reforms areattempts to push the rural structure to its logical conclusions: commerce is madeimpossible, the binary hierarchy of Spartans and Helots is made absolute—all in orderto create a military machinery able to defend the rich soil of the country.

Gardner sets up a fundamental tension by transplanting an Athenian to Sparta, and thiswould seem an effective device for playing the two systems against one another, oneembodied in the sophisticated scholar-poet sent out by the self-proclaimed "humanist"Solon, the other system falling under Agathon's gaze, perhaps resisting his attempts tounderstand it. But this is not quite how the device works. Against all expectations, and tohis own surprise, Agathon is impressed with the Spartan experiment, or "adventure" (87).From this point, antinomies abound between the structural set-up and the symbolicaltensions embodied in characters. Tuka becomes the true representative of Athens, whileAgathon becomes an ambiguous aider and abetter of the Spartan experiment. His unde-cided status is marked by his position as an "informal" envoy and diplomat of Lykourgos,playing a game which may at any moment turn "earnest," in an interesting turn of phrase(123). While rejecting Lykourgos's excesses of rigor, this merchant's son embraces hisanti-commercial experiment, and he can only view the Athenian merchants in Sparta as"fat parasites" (120). There are shifts in perspective which go against the basic Athens-Sparta opposition, displacing it, making it irrelevant. At one point Agathon describes theeffect of "a vast and sprawling city" on social life:

mankind stands thick as a field of wheat, a mixed and mingled half-breed or many-breed humanity that by itsdiverse character threatens all that any one man may stand for. [...] What is a man to make of himself, or of hisfather's codes, in such confusion? [...] Who could survive, in such a city, except by supporting what was best inhimself—or whatever was worst, what cried out in anguish for nemesis—by the sleight-of-hand of friendship, thebuttress of some similar nature, bad or good? (119-120)

But this is not Athens, it is Sparta at festival time, the same Sparta which impressesAgathon with the "studied simplicity of the world Lykourgos had recreated" (87). Per-spectives are turned upside-down: Agathon, the Athenian transplanted to rural Sparta,becomes the lover of rural simplicity distressed by the "confusion" of bustling city-life inSparta. What kind of game is Gardner playing here? Let us see what may be concealed byAgathon's rhetorical questions. What would Agathon mean by "his father's codes"?Again this is a matter of symbolic inheritance. But Agathon's father has only beenrepresented as an opportunist, obsequiously flirting with social status, a merchant aimingto increase his cultural capital through the agency of his son, who, in turn, feels onlyressentiment and shame. In the context of Agathon's story, his question has no meaning. Itis meaningful only to those who can contrast a stable, inherited code, a tradition, with thedissolution of all norms that urban life effects. Agathon's question about the validity ofcodes in urban confusion marks one of many points where Gardner's expressive drive hasnot been fully euphemized.39 One might reconstruct the question as follows: how can

39 It is true that this lapse in the verisimilitude of constructed character can be construed as an aporia, but in thiscase it is not so much a matter of the rhetorical force of language disrupting what that language was meant to say,as an insufficiency in the euphemizing transformation effected by the literary form on the expressive drive. Wheredeconstruction rejects a pre-intention, or a pre-existing content, and moves along the surfaces and cracks of ahypostatized non-system of "language" or "rhetoricity," socio-analysis of texts construes as its object aninterplay between different structures, all of them socially constructed, all of them articulated in an immensevariety of linguistic and non-discursive practices.

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one's father's codes—the "home truths" that one bums to give voice to—be articulatedin a literary form which must not seem to give a univocal voice to them? This is, inessence, the encounter between habitus and field. And it is in the form Gardner created forThe Wreckage of Agathon that this question is answered: in a mixed and mingled half-breed or many-breed textuality that by its diverse character threatens all that any oneinterpretation may stand for.

Another example may serve to clarify this. As the Helot revolutionaries set fire to thegrain storages in order to divert Spartan attention from the prison so that Agathon andDemodokos can be sprung from there, Agathon watches the conflagration together withhis jailer, and with equal sadness. In this moment, Agathon affirms his love for Sparta."For all its sicknesses, it has stumbled to certain virtues. It does not have, like Athens, thecancer of slavery. Even a Helot has more humanity than a slave" (207). Here, first of all,many of the allegorical schemata seem to break down. If Sparta is Communism in itsRussian or Chinese form, and Athens the West, the question of slavery becomes confusedand the same goes for a contrast between the Yankee north and the Agrarian South.Agathon adds that Tuka would not agree with his judgment. "She couldn't see it; arkhon'sdaughter, fat-souled with wealth" (207). Furthermore, he contrasts the fundamentaleconomic equality of this rural, collectivized society with the inequality of Athens,where "the rich stand on the broken heads of the poor" (208). This observation echoesDemodokos's allegiance to the Spartan vision of "Equality and Justice" without wealthand sloth, an observation linked to communist China by its use of the phrase "unfinishedexperiment" (107). In the context of the latter half of the sixties, there can be no doubt thatallusions to a vast social experiment concerning a rural mode of production refer toCommunist China, and Lykourgos's radical reforms concerning manners and collectiveliving are clearly paralleled by the Cultural Revolution, in which Gardner took a greatinterest. In that distorted allegorical equation, the lack of freedom of the Chinese peasantrycontrasts with the wage-slavery of the commercialized-industrialized nations. ° On theother hand, throughout the novel the Helots can consistently be taken to represent African-Americans, the oppressed population of the rural South; and the Spartan war abroad, on thestrength of other references, equals the American one in Vietnam, led by Lykourgos/Nixon. There is simply no working out of these allegorical gestures.

As the opposition between rural and urban is confused and broken up in the individualprojects of the characters and then, in its separate fragments, attached to the criss-crossingallegorical-political schemata a form is created which defies any simple analysis. Nosorting out of individual strands, or of coherently treated themes, is possible. More than a"calculated 'carelessness'" designed to distance the novel from the form of traditionalhistorical novels,41 the multiple textual confusions are the field's refractions of a desire tospeak "home truths." This is the literary achievement of The Wreckage of Agathon, aform which effectively undoes any single perspective, and which allows a proliferation ofinterpretations.

It manages to express sympathies for black Americans while condemning armed revolt;an admiration for the great social experiment of Communist China is carried in this vesselalong with a denunciation of ' 'totalitarian'' tyranny; it achieves the feat of displaying theimbalance and the wreckage which follow on exaggerated social ambition while at thesame time celebrating an individual's escape from unprivileged conditions through edu-cation; it condemns the Vietnam war while it affirms the wisdom of accumulating thenecessary strength to defend a rich land from further conquest once one has conquered it.

4 0 See Gardner's "The Sunlight Dialogues: General p lan" : The capitalistic foundations of individualist westernsociety are untenable in the long run, he claims. And while China and Africa provide different premises,"valuable in that they correct the error of capitalism," they are flawed in their lack of care for the individual life(Ts. The John Gardner Collection, University of Rochester, p. 27).4 1 See Cowart 1983, p. 30.

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studio Neophii 69 (1997) Surviving The Wreckage of Agathon 35

This last insight is, as Agathon puts it, a matter of "simple geography" (87). Agathon'sMontesquieuan insight into the forces behind Sparta's development adds to a specificideological charge in the novel. Dispersed throughout, in the form of imagery as well as insymbolic oppositions, Gardner is working out a particular ideological equivalent to thesociological pair urban/rural, namely complex/simple. The confusion of the city, of thefestival crowds, of political and domestic intrigue are all sharply contrasted with thesimplicity of two men in a cell, men without women, as it were. Simple, requited love islamented by Agathon after the complexity of partner-swapping and jealousy (132). Thesimplicity of childhood beliefs is discerned as such only in the full awareness of the"accidents" of experience which will make them untenable. Dorkis's saintlike acceptanceof the world is seen by Agathon as simple-minded: ' 'Their ideas are ludicrous, when youlook at them. Peasant ideas. Childlike" (153). The tactical diversity of Agathon'sdiscourse cannot be matched by Lykourgos, since the "old Lawgiver's mind and heartwere as simple and rural as a barn" (95). The rural and the childlike become the operativeterms for the general category of simplicity.42

To cling to these states, to give in to the "hunger for simplicity" is not evil in itself,but transformed into rigidity—the parallel in terms of emotional life is given in Tuka'sspells of catatonic paralysis—it becomes a refusal of the processes of nature itself, whichimplement constant change. And it is in the comparison of all other systems of ' 'law-giving" with the "laws" of nature that the novel finally affirms a scale of values whichissues from the "rural" experience of natural change. More than just a clue to the themeof people turning wolfish, as Morris interprets it,43 the epigraph from Schopenhauerexpresses the insight which Agathon ascribes to Dorkis, who learns to accept the principleof "creative destruction." It is all too easy to inscribe in this phrase the gist of thathistorical force which Schumpeter labeled just so and which Marx described turning allthat is solid into air, and thus to interpret Gardner's preoccupation with this principle—itforms a major theme in every Gardner novel—as a vexed affirmation of the inexorableworkings of capitalism. The fact that the connection is so apparent should not deter usfrom making it, but in terms of the wreckage of Agathon, it should rather make us attentiveto the fact that Gardner sets up the principle of "creative destruction" against the figuresof too rapid change which the novel presents. The conservatism which combines with adesire to accept change is at the heart of Gardner's habitus and can be studied in thecomplicated career of Agathon. Agathon's steep social trajectory lashes back at him, andhe is unable to reap the social rewards attending to his position. Instead, he turns his backon the society in which he has risen, and cultivates an infatuation with a backward societyand its oppressed laboring class. To take another example, Iona's mistake in persuadingDorkis to take part in the revolutionary plot was that she ' 'pushed him too fast, refused toallow him his nature" (214). Agathon draws this logic further in the final dialoguebetween the revolutionary and the passive dissenter: the world can only be moved by itsown laws, and judged by these laws Iona's revolution is wrong (214). Agathon's speechhere echoes the essence of Dorkis's view of the world as a wind that one must ride like abird, and there is a great deal of evidence that the story as a whole supports this thesis.

The bird and the rock are the two most powerful recurring images of the book. The onewill, for a time, defy gravity, the other will abide by it and sink. The thorough"naturalization" of the social and the political which is performed in The Wreckage ofAgathon leaves the question of determinism—social and metaphysical—in a precariousbalance. Agathon's insistence on finding his "Destiny" is identical with a project to find astable social status for the individual rather than engage in an endless negotiation ofexternal forces through an articulation of collective interests. The self-reflexivity of this

4 2 See the similar structural development in Gardner's essay "The Way We Write Now," New York Times BookReview, 9 July 1972, pp. 2, 32-33.4 3 Morris 1984, p. 49.

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36 Bo G. Ekelund Studia NeopM 69 (1997)

project is paralyzing, and it leads Agathon to an end station which is at the same timelower—the disreputable drunkard—and higher—the inspired seer—than his startingpoint. In the figure of Demodokos, however, the laws of social gravity are defied, and thesingularity of the individual's social destiny, along with the possibility of the miraculousexception, is affirmed. In this figure Gardner invested the hope of survival as a mode ofadaptation, at a point in his career when this seemed the only successful strategy. Like hisnamesake in the Odyssey, Demodokos tells the story "in the right way," that is, so as towin the approval of a select audience. With The Wreckage of Agathon Gardner had foundthe compromise form that he would perfect in Grendel: one that would make him a literarysurvivor in the black-humor, postmodern, metafictional literary culture of the late sixtiesand early seventies.

Seen in this way, The Wreckage of Agathon performs several functions: it elaborates aform that, by masking them, allows Gardner's "home truths" about rural values, urbanmodernity and social mobility to be spoken; it is a critique of intellectualism; it establishesGardner as a practitioner of black humor and the new brand of anachronistic historicalfiction;44 it dramatizes, in ambivalent fashion, the question of social survival through theagency of literacy. To pursue the meaning of the title, the wreckage of Agathon may betaken to refer to the breaking up of a simple goodness—his father's codes, the farm home,the cold-war certainties of the fifties, the univocal seriousness of the realist novel—into acomplex, disarticulated state of things—"disturbing philosophies,"45 the pressures of anacademic career, the counter-cultural sixties, the irreverence and ventriloquism of the newfiction. In the negotiations between habitus and field, the awkward task that was set forGardner in this and other novels was to speak of lost simplicity in the language ofalienating complexity. The qualified agathist doctrine that followed made him createstories of social wreckage, literary survival and symbolic compensation.

Department of EnglishUppsala UniversityBox 513S-751 20 UppsalaSweden

4 4 Or "historiographic metafiction" in Linda Hutcheon's term. See The Politics of Postmodernism (New York:Routledge, 1989).4 5 The phrase taken from Digby Dielh's interview with Gardner, "Medievalist in Illinois Ozarks," Los AngelesTimes Calendar, 5 September 1971, p. 43 .

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