Word: medeia
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...John Gardner has made being a novelist a hyphenated art. In The Sunlight Dialogues he did a brilliant turn as philosopher-novelist, debating issues of law and dissent while nimbly stage-managing a family melodrama in upstate New York. In his re-creations of myth, Grendel and Jason and Medeia, he played the novelist-as-epic-poet, perhaps a little consciously; but once again he revealed his consistent longing for Significance, for the Big Theme, for some dimension that extends beyond the modern novel into older, more classical forms...
Jason is no longer the young, virile hero, wandering aimlessly through the Hellenic world so absolutely self-confident. He is a king without a country, a thinker with no outlet for his ideals. His cold, calculating mind obliterates any feelings he might have for Medeia or his two children. Pride and vanity urge him to gain Corinth. Jason has already won Pyripta's hand as Euripides's Medeia begins. But the greatest beauty of Jason and Medeia lies in its concentration on the imaginatively conceived contest for the princess of Corinth (an event which never occurred in ancient versions...
...first, Jason is unsure whether he wants to leave Medeia. But as he is prompted by Kreon to tell his tale of the Argonauts, he starts off on a new voyage into his own psyche, distorting the original story to fit his purposes. Kreon best describes Jason's inward journey...
...best approach then, to Jason and Medeia is prescribed by the philosopher-critic, William Gass. In terms of esthetics, Gass is probably Gardner's strongest source (indeed, Kropopros's final philosophical argument in Jason is based on one of Gass's essays). According to Gass, fiction has too long been regarded as a way of looking at reality, when it is, in fact, an addition to it. The author is not mirroring the real world, he's creating a new one--a world of language and ideas, where character and plot become subordinated. Jason and Medeia is just such...
...obvious prat-falls of the metafiction, and certainly of this poem, is its lack of warmth. Only mathematicians could tolerate a steady diet of these theoretical enterprises. But taken on its own level of the idea, Jason and Medeia is intriguing...