John Champlin Gardner was born in
Batavia, New York, on July 21, 1933, to John
Champlin, a dairy farmer and lay Presbyterian preacher, and Priscilla
Gardner, an English teacher. A few months shy of his twelfth birthday,
Gardner inadvertently killed his younger brother Gilbert in a gruesome accident,
running him over with a heavy farm machine. The incident haunted
Gardner for the rest of his life in the form of nightmares and flashbacks,
and the deep psychological wound it caused inspired and informed
much of Gardner’s work, particularly the posthumously published
novel Stillness (1986).
In his youth, Gardner developed an interest in cartoons
and comics, and that medium’s fantastic, over-the-top quality pervades
his fiction. Gardner often uses grotesque, cartoonish imagery to
distance readers emotionally from his characters, so as to avoid
overly sentimental interpretations. An avid cartoonist and illustrator
himself, Gardner insisted that all of his novels written for the
Knopf publishing firm be illustrated. Grendel (1971), for
example, features the nearly abstract woodcuts of Emil Antonucci,
which serve to enhance the novel’s surreal, fanciful tone.
Gardner went on to graduate Phi Beta Kappa from Washington University
in St. Louis in 1955 and then attended the
University of Iowa for graduate study. At Iowa he studied medieval
literature and creative writing, eventually combining his two academic
interests in his doctoral dissertation, a novel called The
Old Men. Gardner accepted a teaching position at Oberlin
College in Ohio directly after leaving Iowa, and he continued to
teach at various universities for the rest of his life. He gained
prominence as a teacher of creative writing, particularly at institutions
such as the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in Middlebury, Vermont.
Gardner was a prolific and mercurial writer, producing
a remarkable thirty-five volumes in just twenty-five years. The
breadth of his output is equally impressive: though most noted for
his novels, Gardner also published poetry, plays, short stories,
opera librettos, scholarly texts, and children’s picture books.
Even his novels do not share a coherent, sustained style or tone:
they vary from the highly stylized, densely allusive Grendel to
more traditionally realist works such as Nickel Mountain (1973).
Critical response to Gardner’s work has been equally divided, and
throughout his publishing career the release of a new Gardner work
was an occasion for much critical debate. Grendel was,
in fact, the first and only Gardner volume to receive near-unanimous
critical acclaim, though three of his novels—The Sunlight
Dialogues (1972), Nickel
Mountain, and October Light (1976)—were
popular best-sellers.
Gardner’s work is often classified as postmodernist. In
the early part of the century, writers such as T.S. Eliot, Virginia
Woolf, and James Joyce experimented with an idea that came to be
known as modernism, characterized by experimentation with new, nontraditional
forms of expression. These modernist writers discarded nineteenth-century
writers’ emphasis on realistic, authoritative narration in favor
of a style that was more subjective and impressionistic, focusing
more on how people look at the world than on what
they actually see. As experimentation with modernism developed,
boundaries between literary genres began to break down, and writers
explored ideas of fragmentation and discontinuity in both subject
matter and stylistic form. Modernist pieces often display an acute
sense of meta-awareness, meaning they are conscious of their status
as artistic works—representations of reality rather than reality
itself. Many modernist authors use these techniques to convey a mournful
nostalgia for a world they perceive as having passed. Postmodernism,
on the other hand, celebrates fragmentation rather than mourning
its necessity: postmodern works frequently find liberation and exhilaration
in the breakdown of what are seen as outdated, claustrophobic categories.
Though Gardner and his contemporaries—who included William
Gass, John Barth, and Donald Barthelme—wrote highly inventive, genre-bending
works of literature in the 1970s, Gardner
was never a career postmodernist. In fact, he frustrated many critics because
of his seemingly arbitrary use of postmodern techniques, which factored
heavily in some of his novels but disappeared entirely from others.
Critics could never seem to agree whether Gardner was a traditionalist
masquerading as an innovator or vice versa. Gardner himself rejected
the postmodern label, as he associated it with a school of writers
he considered too harsh and cynical.
Grendel, one of Gardner’s more stylistically
and thematically postmodern novels, is an example of a metafiction—fiction
about fiction. The plot and characters of the novel come from the
sixth-century Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, a text
that Gardner had been teaching at the university level for some
time. Beowulf is a heroic epic chronicling the
illustrious deeds of the great Geatish warrior Beowulf, who voyages
across the sea to rid the Danes of a horrible monster, Grendel,
who has been terrorizing their kingdom. Gardner’s twist on the tale
is his choice to narrate the story from the monster’s point of view,
transforming a snarling, terrible beast into a lonely but intelligent
outsider who bears a striking resemblance to his human adversaries.
In his retelling of the Beowulf story, Gardner comments
not only on the Anglo-Saxon civilization and moral code the original
poem depicts, but also on the human condition more generally.
Gardner’s perhaps most vexing publication is his literary
manifesto On Moral Fiction (1978),
in which the author calls for art that uplifts and celebrates faith,
decrying the mass of contemporary literature as too cynical and
fatalistic. The book’s self-aggrandizing, moralistic tone enraged
and inflamed the normally rarefied literary community, and it sparked
a nationwide debate that was played out in the popular media. Reviewers
attacked not only Gardner’s smugness but also what they perceived
as shoddy reasoning and messy scholarship. Perhaps the most damaging
effect of On Moral Fiction’s publication, though,
has been the subsequent tendency to read Gardner’s own philosophically
provocative and complex novels through his straitlaced moral frameworks.
Gardner published several more works after the publicity
disaster of On Moral Fiction, but, with the possible
exception of Freddy’s Book (1980),
none were particularly well received. Gardner died in a motorcycle
accident near Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, on September 14,
1982, just days before he was to wed his third wife,
Susan Thornton.
