Word: agathon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Perhaps some perspective will help. John Gardner's two previous novels set out on much the same course as The Sunlight Dialogues: In The Wreckage of Agathon, an old, muddled Athenian seer is imprisoned in Sparta for aiding the Helot rebellion. Using this one dominating character, set apart from the world, Gardner waxes and wanes between the philosophical and the lewd, providing an overview that is at once serious and hilarious. Again, in Grendel, the monster's ability to stand back and look at man from a unique perspective makes the novel both exciting and valuable reading. This remains true...
...dominating theme in both Grendel and The Wreckage of Agathon is individual freedom within a mass consciousness. Agathon chose total individual freedom, rebelling against the Spartans' strict sense of uniformity. And although he died, his ideals achieve a harmonious serenity with the hopes of his more worldly-wise student, Demodokos. Grendel, too, embodies a kind of selfhood, which is more barbaric and cynical: he believes completely in himself only because there is no hope of being accepted within a greater whole. It's hard to suppress sympathy for this Cain-like character, but in the end the victory of mankind...
...SUNLIGHT DIALOGUES is harder to deal with. The Sunlight Man like Agathon, chooses freedom. And Gardner chooses neither the individual nor society for the victor; instead, he selects meaninglessness. It's one thing to accept a well written novel that opts for the absurdity of it all, but it's quite another thing if that kind of work must be buttressed by insignificant novelistic devices. Gardner loses his credibility...
Here lies the problem. The Sunlight Man also offers a singular viewpoint, based like Agathon and Grendel on a belief in a "cosmic order...indifferent to man." But where Agathon, Grendel, and their stories become complete in themselves, exclusive of and only supplemented by other devices, the Sunlight Man is lost in the shuffle of overburdening plot and structure complexities that never really hold their...
...takes more than an intelligent novelist to bring off what Gardner has attempted. That "good" exists in filth and inspired lunacy is a common enough idea; Agathon is a good personification of it. To prove that good can rise from its wreckage and triumph requires a breadth of vision and a moral force The Wreckage of Agathon lacks...