Word: agathon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that I mind relevance, it's just that it can be pretty depressing to discover that people in the olden days are supposed to have had those same old problems which had no solution then and have no solution now. The chief virtue of The Wreckage of Agathon is that it avoids the obvious temptations of easy relevance in favor of a more complex view of the nature of good and evil. John Gardner attempts great things in his novel, but succeeds only in creating a small, funny metaphysical novel that doesn't quite suffice for the problems it raises...
...Agathon, once an adviser to Lykourgos, has now been thrown into prison, officially for complicity in the Helot rebellion but actually because he represents a different, more serious threat to Lykourgos's rule. A leering, over-weight, foul-minded old mystic, constantly eating onions, farting, and peeking in windows to watch elderly couples making love. Agathon scorns the Spartan ideal and gleefully embodies its antithesis. The novel deals with how he got this way and how he views himself, the people he knows, the universe he inhabits. Gardner adroitly uses the device of alternating two manuscripts: Agathon's disjointed writings...
...weakest parts of the novel are Agathon's reminiscences about his past before he became a seer. He tells us of his marriage to Tuka, the beautiful daughter of an Athenian nobleman at whose home he was tutored, of his involvement with the gross but practical Solon, of his fascination with the Helot Iona, who later becomes a leader of the rebellion. Interesting enough, but all this smacks of soap opera, and at any rate the young Agathon seems pale in comparison to what he becomes...
This may seem more than enough to fit into a middling-short novel. But the author, in addition, sets out on a number of symbolic quests. At times Agathon, whose name in Greek means the Good, stands for the whole Western tradition of humane tolerance, now threatened by the twin fanaticisms of repression and revolution. At others, he is some kind of primordial natural force, a witness to agelong woe and fatality. At still others, when what he calls facticity catches up with him, Agathon is just a slobbish old lecher smelling of onions. In this guise he represents...
...this guise, Agathon saves the book too. With his rambling wit, his irrelevancies, rages, blunderings, unfairnesses, with his tender-rough efforts to jerk his friend Pecker to wisdom through the muck of the world, he emerges as one of those scapegrace saints who have adorned literature from Socrates to Gulley Jimson. Robert Wernick