The Resurrection by John Gardner

First published: 1966

Type of plot: Metaphysical

Time of work: The early 1960’s

Locale: San Francisco, California, and western New York State

Principal Characters:

• James Chandler, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley
• Maria Chandler, his wife, a caring and practical woman
• Karen Chandler, their oldest daughter, age eight, already a thinker
• Susan Chandler, their middle daughter, age six, a game player
• Anne Chandler, their youngest daughter, age two, who looks remarkably like James
• Rose Chandler, James’s mother, puzzled by her late husband and already mourning her son
• Aunt Emma Staley, a painter, now senile
• Aunt Betsy Staley, a pianist and cultural leader of Batavia
• Aunt Maud Staley, a singer, now deaf
• Viola Staley, the niece of the three Staley sisters, bitter and nearly insane
• John Horne, a lawyer, librarian, and lay philosopher

The Novel

The specific gravity of The Resurrection is very great. James Chandler, a metaphysician living in a time of analysis, feels that he was born out of time. Because of his interests, however perverse for this age, and because he is dying from leukemia, he might be forgiven for being concerned about important questions that, as a philosopher, he is prepared to discuss at an elevated level. Since James Chandler is a philosopher who comes from the mind of a novelist, he also might be forgiven for having an interest in aesthetics, though of course it is the novel itself that is Gardner’s aesthetic response to very heavy questions.

Immediately after the diagnosis of his illness, Chandler decides to return to Batavia in western New York, the town in and near which he (and the author) grew up. He, his wife, and their daughters stay there with his mother, still alive though failing; his father, an undereducated man of intelligence who spent much of his time trying to perfect a perpetual-motion machine, has died. Also still alive are the Staley sisters, whom Chandler soon visits, all mediocrities but important in the town in their day: One was a painter, though she now is senile; one still gives piano lessons; and one, now deaf, was a singer. Their vestigial status says much about the culture of Batavia. Their niece, Viola, takes care of them and their house and, ill-used by them and by life, is bitter. She becomes much less so as she comes to love James Chandler, a pipe-smoking, fair-haired, owl-faced man with glasses, who—glasses excepted—resembles Gardner.

The sisters in their varying artistic ways are trying to order life, to make it conform to some rules. So are some students at a local institution for the blind, watched in fascination by the Chandler girls, as they try to play baseball. Of course, once the ball stops rolling, the players have no way to find it except by groping—a nice trope for the metaphysician the girls’ father is. The girls themselves do something similar by playing a game that they have invented, the rules of which they occasionally violate. Meanwhile, Chandler dreams of a wizened old woman with a face like a monkey and a mouth full of blood—in his weakened state of mind, she often is not far away from him. The mind, he decides, cannot handle the idea of personal death and thus comes up with such images.

Marie, his wife, is a caring and practical soul who takes care of her family and tries to care for her husband, whom she loves. She is always in the background, but she shares few concerns with James, who has decided in his last days to “seize existence by the scrotum.” On returning from a visit to the Staleys, he falls and is rescued, bleeding, by Viola. From then on, her concern for him grows.

When Marie visits her husband in the hospital, she meets John Horne, an attorney who never practiced as such, but rather gave himself to being a law librarian, a scholar, and a lay philosopher. He is grotesque, misshapen, probably dying, and something of a mental patient. Mainly, however, he exists as a deus ex machina to ask the same sorts of questions Chandler does, though he comes up with a different answer—nihilism—than does the associate professor.

Like Chandler, however, he cannot be “cured” by logical positivism (a doctrine that assumes that any question is invalid if it cannot be analyzed by the senses; thus “God” and “afterlife,” for example, are non-questions) from asking metaphysical questions. Horne confesses that he is in despair. He does get off some good lines—“Art is the self-sacrifice of a man incapable of sacrificing himself in real life”—a line that fits Chandler fairly well too. He repeatedly reminds himself that he has not involved himself fairly with his wife, his daughters, or, lately, Viola, and now he avoids Horne. Chandler begins his last work, “Notes Toward an Aesthetic Theory.”

A country man tells the senior Mrs. Chandler that “Everything in the world was made to go to waste” and that “the only difference between people and trees is trees don’t fret about it.” Chandler, dying, has his mother drive him to Viola, where, bleeding and able only to crawl, he grasps her foot in expiation. His wife and children, meanwhile, are at Betsy Staley’s last-ever recital, where the pianist bursts into no melody at all, “a monstrous retribution of sound, the mindless roar of things in motion, on the meddlesome mind of man.” The audience stares at their feet “as if deeply impressed.”

The Characters

James Chandler, who is dead at the beginning of the book, is a philosopher mainly concerned with metaphysics and aesthetics. Since the prologue opens with four women visiting his grave (his mother, his widow, his oldest daughter, and Viola Staley), one feels he was justified in asking questions about ultimate reality—indeed, from chapter 1, he has known he was dying. He is a man who loves, but he feels continually that he does not give people their due, especially those closest to him. His thoughts about various issues in his life’s work intersperse the book, as do new thoughts raised by his immediate situation and by his visit to his old town, his former piano teacher, his father’s workshop, and John Horne. Like John Gardner in appearance, Chandler also resembles him in his mystical tendencies and his interest in issues that logical positivists would say are nonsense.

Maria Chandler is an intelligent woman uninterested in her husband’s work. She worries what meals will be nutritious for him in his last days and wonders where she will rear their daughters after his death. She is the sort who makes the living of a decent life possible for the James Chandlers of the world.

Karen, Susan, and Anne Chandler are too young to do much more than be girls, though Karen already is showing signs of becoming serious-minded. She asks Viola if there is a God, and she notices much, including how people play various games, in some of which she leads her sisters. Anne is owl-faced like her father, and he worries that she may be like him in other ways.

Rose Chandler, James’s mother, is an ordinary woman who has lived her life in and near Batavia. She has put up with a husband whose shop always just made it; James’s father was himself a tinkerer, though with things rather than ideas, so there was precedent for their son.

The Staley sisters all are old maids now watched after by their brother’s daughter, but they once were the artistic center of the old Batavia. Although the singing teacher is now deaf and the painting sister is demented, the pianist sister still gives lessons, and the preparations for her annual recital resonate through the book. Its occurrence serves as the novel’s conclusion.

Viola Staley, a young woman stuck with taking care of her aunts, is bitter about her lot, but she is capable of growth and change after she finds in James Chandler someone to love, though he is long in realizing the importance of her gift. Through her association with the Chandler family, she reverses a dementia and reclusiveness that seemed at first inevitable.

John Horne is grotesque in every sense. His face is distorted by disease, and his mind is concerned with questions normally encountered only in college courses in philosophy. He serves to show that Chandler is not alone in his questionings. Also, he empties out the bucket of ideas that Gardner wants emptied, without having Chandler do it; such a role would overload the character of the professional philosopher. Horne will talk to anyone who will listen, or pretend to; through him, it all gets said.

Critical Context

The Resurrection was John Gardner’s first novel. While the book was received more favorably than most first novels, Gardner’s later works did better in that regard, and it was not until after the author’s death that a critical reassessment of his work began. The Resurrection is now viewed as the novel in which Gardner sets forth his concern for the primacy of art, especially as a way of bringing apparent order out of apparent chaos. This is the “moral” task Gardner set for himself, a task he wished others also would follow.

Gardner’s comparatively short career—he was killed in a motorcycle accident before he was fifty—was extremely prolific. He published widely in long and short fiction, wrote the libretto for an opera, did children’s stories, and was a prominent critic, especially of medieval subjects.

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; 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.”