The best key, although a reductive one, to John Gardner's fiction is the narrator's question in Jason and Medeia: "Is nothing serious?" In his fiction Gardner engages us in a search for the answer to this question, a search to determine if life is nothing more than a series of comical, meaningless exercises. A representative of order and one of disorder, an adherent to forms and a believer in magical chaos, conduct the quest through a series of bizarre confrontations…. Mythic and quotidian realities inevitably merge in Gardner's work. The answer to his question lies in the merging of contradictions: "the true measure of human adaptability is man's power to find, despite overwhelming arguments, something in himself to love." Man is ridiculous, his actions are absurd; but such perception and his ability to love regardless grant man his seriousness.
Gardner is, of course, telling us nothing new. He recreates new forms and revitalizes old ones for a new perception of the often-conducted search for meaning. His astoundingly visual prose, his reworking of myths, and his resurrection of old forms (pastoral novel, epic poem) shock us out of our complacency about the nearly exhausted question and its equally repetitive answer. His use of magic and deformity, of the mythic and the common, and his insistence on the positive power of love transport a tired search into an active playground…. Gardner lets us laugh precisely because we are laughable, and only in our ability to laugh can we approach our seriousness. The ridiculous and the serious are inseparable in his fiction; operating simultaneously with and against each other, they bring us into Gardner's funhouse and out into his gravity.
This is a free excerpt of 276 words. There are 849 words (approx.
3 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Gardner, John 1933–: Critical Essay by Judy Smith Murr Access Pass.
