The Wreckage of Agathon by John Gardner

First published: 1970

Type of plot: Philosophical pseudohistory

Time of work: The sixth century b.c.e.

Locale: Sparta, ancient Greece

Principal Characters:

• Agathon, an Athenian seer imprisoned for suspected instigation of the Helot rebellion against the Spartan tyrant Lykourgos
• Demodokos, the youthful Helot disciple, called Peeker by Agathon, who is imprisoned to serve the aged seer
• Tuka, Agathon’s wife, who returned to Athens to avoid involvement in the self-destruction or wreckage wrought by her husband
• Iona, the mistress of Agathon and a leader of the Helot rebellion
• Dorkis, a friend of Agathon and the husband of Iona, martyred for his role in the rebellion

The Novel

The action of the novel encompasses Agathon’s imprisonment for his presumed involvement in the rebellion of the Helots against the Spartan tyrant Lykourgos, his escape at the hands of the Helot rebels, and his subsequent death from plague in the Helot headquarters, a commandeered tomb turned infirmary. An epilogue to the life and action of the novel is provided when Peeker is sent by the Helots to Athens to give Tuka the scrolls that both he and Agathon produced during their imprisonment, the scrolls that comprise the content of the novel.

The form of the novel is autobiographical. Chapters from the feverish mind of Agathon are interlaced with chapters detailing the apprentice observations of the seer-in-progress, Peeker. These interlaced chapters treat the historical context for both men’s lives as well as observations on the present action. Through the minds of these imprisoned scribes, the reader comes to know the life and loves of Agathon and the impact of the culminating wreckage of that experience on Peeker.

While Agathon is the focus of the novel and its dominant spokesman, it is Peeker who is its heart. The novel is a Bildungsroman, a novel chronicling the coming of age of Peeker. Moving from youthful embarrassment at the nonconformist whom he is destined to follow through dutiful response to one in such obvious need, Peeker grows in the nature of compassion and reaches maturity in recognition that genius always has its flaws. He emerges as an emblem of hope when he offers redemptive acceptance to Tuka at the novel’s conclusion.

Peeker exists as a necessary complement to Agathon in the novel. He is destined to carry on the tradition of the thinker. His character is the growing, changing reality that completes the cycle of decay and wreckage seen in Agathon. That his chapters begin and end the novel is no accident. His is the role of interpreter, a role that he resists and is inadequate to perform, yet he is imprisoned in the form of seer and finds it to be the natural expression of his soul.

As the novel develops, Peeker grows in his ability to write, his understanding of the information he hears and the experience he perceives, and his ability to act on behalf of another person. By the time he reaches Athens, he has found the maturity to be at ease in the home of Agathon’s widow and children. A true seer now, he embodies compassion, insight, and hope.

The Characters

Both fool and troublemaker, Agathon is characterized as a human wreck by Peeker at the beginning of the novel. Little more than a drunken derelict, the old man is filthy in both mind and body, a man who dines on garbage and entertains himself by making lurid suggestions to those who pass him by. Yet Peeker acknowledges him to be a man who is curiously compelling in personality, a man capable of inspiring discipleship and gathering listeners.

While Peeker cannot at first define the positive worth of the man he follows, the reader, privy to the obsessively filled prison parchments, hears with Peeker the stories in which the seer records his early education with Konan under Klinias, his childhood-friendship-turned-lifelong-love for Tuka, and his various assignations with Thayla, Iona, and countless others whose paths he crossed. As the stories unfold, the gap between the external personage of Agathon and the internal reality of the man narrows. With Peeker, the reader balances the weaknesses of the life with the brilliance of mind that enables the thinker to compare the compassionate justice of Solon with the stifling legality of Lykourgos and to see that all systems are finite.

What the reader learns about Agathon from his autobiographical chapters must be filtered through the sophisticated consciousness of a man accustomed to designing roles to be played to accomplish certain desired results. He cannot be trusted to portray himself or others as they actually are; rather, he portrays experience as he wishes it to be perceived. Peeker, on the other hand, writes his chapters out of the guileless innocence of youth. Much of the charm of his characterization comes from revelations that he does not know he has made. He believes that he must decide whether he will become a seer; the reader knows that he has already made that decision, that it is a part of the very fabric of his existence. He believes himself to hate Agathon and all that he has become; the reader realizes that he loves the man, that the seer has become the father he has never known.

Tuka and Iona, the two major loves of Agathon’s life, represent the tension between emotion and idea in the novel. Tuka the artist is limited to an emotional response to life. She perceives all of reality from her heart and no amount of talking, of expressing ideas can fill the emotional vacuum in her being. If she does not feel reality, that reality does not exist in her consciousness. Tuka is unable to accept Agathon’s logical explanation that she is his major and lasting love, despite his relationship with Iona. His separation of emotion and idea simply increases the emotional vacuum in her being. That Agathon might be able to separate love and the idea of love is, to Tuka, part of the wreckage, the outward expression of moral distortion. Her emotional being at its extreme forces rejection of Agathon. She fears that the only way she can avoid becoming a part of the wreckage is to withdraw, to remove her family to Athens.

Iona is ruled almost entirely by her head rather than her heart. When she gives herself to a love relationship, she participates in the idea of love rather than the emotion of love. Hers is an ideological movement to some greater reality. She is motivated and compelled by what her head dictates. The possibility of writing for her is the extension or the external image of this precondition to idea that is similar to the possibility of the harp as an external image of Tuka’s emotional reality. Because Iona is ruled by the preeminence of the realm of ideas, she has the natural instincts of the revolutionary. In her extreme, she gravitates to fanatical devotion to a singular idea. This single-minded preoccupation causes her to forfeit all emotion and thus live beyond the seer’s love. The wreckage of the novel is partly realized in Agathon’s inability to find satisfactory resolution of these two feminine roles or the larger reality they represent in his life.

Just as Tuka and Iona are used to express one line of tension in the novel, so Dorkis is contrasted with Agathon to present another line. While Agathon is the man of complexity, the man unable to act because his multidimensional worldview negates the distinctive value of the individual act, Dorkis is the man of simplicity, the man who can act with dignity and even heroism because his singular worldview clarifies and dignifies the individual action. Agathon is awed by the beauty of this simplicity, but he innately doubts its truth. Dorkis dies a heroic death, according to Agathon, because he accepts the reality of evil. Such acceptance can come, however, only when evil is seen as an isolated reality distinguished from all other realities. Since Agathon can never divorce a single reality from all reality, he is destined to find escape in playing the fool.

Critical Context

The Wreckage of Agathon is Gardner’s second published novel. Its publication, four years after The Resurrection

(1966), marked his acceptance as a serious writer of fiction and in a sense paved the way for the publication of Grendel (1971) and The Sunlight Dialogues (1972), the two books generally considered to be the cornerstones of Gardner’s reputation as a writer of fiction. Because early readers and critics did not understand the carefully layered construction of his work or appreciate his heavy use of philosophical thought, The Sunlight Dialogues, completed more than a year before The Wreckage of Agathon, was rejected by three publishing houses before 1970.

As Gardner’s reputation continues to grow, so does the critical appreciation for the artistry of The Wreckage of Agathon. Early reviewers were struck by correspondences between the book and contemporary unrest, but they were somewhat impatient with the heavy reliance on philosophical argument. Current appreciation of the work rests on the depth of thought and the universal quality produced by the body of philosophical argument that the book carries.

Bibliography

Butts, Leonard. The Novels of John Gardner: Making Life Art as a Moral Process. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Butts draws his argument from Gardner himself, specifically On Moral Fiction (that art is a moral process) and discusses the ten novels in pairs, focusing on the main characters as either artists or artist figures who to varying degrees succeed or fail in transforming themselves into Gardner’s “true artist.” As Butts defines it, moral fiction is not didactic but instead a matter of aesthetic wholeness.

Chavkin, Allan, ed. Conversations with John Gardner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Reprints nineteen of the most important interviews (the majority from the crucial On Moral Fiction period) and adds one never before published interview. Chavkin’s introduction, which focuses on Gardner as he appears in these and his other numerous interviews, is especially noteworthy. The chronology updates the one in Howell (below).

Cowart, David. Arches and Light: The Fiction of John Gardner. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Discusses the published novels through Mickelsson’s Ghosts, the two story collections, and the tales for children. As good as Cowart’s intelligent and certainly readable chapters are, they suffer (as does so much Gardner criticism) insofar as they are concerned with validating Gardner’s position on moral fiction as a valid alternative to existential despair.

Henderson, Jeff. John Gardner: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Part 1 concentrates on Gardner’s short fiction, including his stories for children; part 2 contains excerpts from essays and letters in which Gardner defines his role as a writer; and part 3 provides excerpts from important Gardner critics. Includes chronology and bibliography.

Henderson, Jeff, ed. Thor’s Hammer: Essays on John Gardner. Conway: University of Central Arkansas Press, 1985. Presents fifteen original essays of varying quality, including three on Grendel. The most important are John M. Howell’s biographical essay, Robert A. Morace’s on Gardner and his reviewers, Gregory Morris’s discussion of Gardner and “plagiarism,” Samuel Coale’s on dreams, Leonard Butts’s on Mickelsson’s Ghosts, and Charles Johnson’s “A Phenomenology of On Moral Fiction.”

Howell, John M. John Gardner: A Bibliographical Profile. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980. Howell’s detailed chronology and enumerative listing of works by Gardner (down to separate editions, printings, issues, and translations), as well as the afterword written by Gardner, make this an indispensable work for any Gardner student.

McWilliams, Dean. John Gardner. Boston: Twayne, 1990. McWilliams includes little biographical material, does not try to be at all comprehensive, yet has an interesting and certainly original thesis: that Gardner’s fiction may be more fruitfully approached via Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism than via On Moral Fiction. Unfortunately, the chapters (on the novels and Jason and Medeia) tend to be rather introductory in approach and only rarely dialogical in focus.

Morace, Robert A. John Gardner: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1984. An especially thorough annotated listing of all known items (reviews, articles, significant mentions) about Gardner through 1983. The annotations of speeches and interviews are especially full (a particularly useful fact given the number of interviews and speeches the loquacious as well as prolific Gardner gave). A concluding section updates Howell’s John Gardner: A Bibliographical Profile.

Morace, Robert A., and Kathryn VanSpanckeren, eds. John Gardner: Critical Perspectives. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. This first critical book on Gardner’s work covers the full range of his literary endeavors, from his dissertation novel “The Old Men” through his then most recent fictions, “Vlemk, The Box Painter” and Freddy’s Book, with separate essays on his “epic poem” Jason and Medeia; The King’s Indian: Stories and Tales; his children’s stories; libretti; pastoral novels; use of sources, parody, and embedding; and theory of moral fiction. The volume concludes with Gardner’s afterword.

Morris, Gregory L. A World of Order and Light: The Fiction of John Gardner. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984. Like Butts and Cowart, Morris works well within the moral fiction framework which Gardner himself established. Unlike Cowart, however, Morris emphasizes moral art as a process by which order is discovered rather than (as Cowart contends) made. More specifically the novels (including Gardner’s dissertation novel “The Old Men”) and two collections of short fiction are discussed in terms of Gardner’s “luminous vision” and “magical landscapes.”