The following paper delivered by Ron Nutter is fully copyrighted and may not be reproduced in full or part without express written consent of the author, Ron Nutter.

What follows is a written version of the extemporaneous talk I gave at the First Annual John Gardner Conference. I had been originally asked to give an informal overview of my new book on Gardner, so I simply talked from an outline. When Charley Boyd talked of having presenters leave copies of their remarks to be placed on the John Gardner Appreciation webpage, it was decided that I should try to write down what I said. So, this will try to follow as best as I am able what was said that day. No doubt, there are items contained here that were not actually said at the conference, and others that were said that did not make it to this written version. Alas, oral traditions are troubling things.

General Overview of A Dream of Peace: Art and Death in the Fiction of John Gardner

It was not until 1978 that I knew anything of John Gardner. At the time I was writing a thesis on the American metafictionist author Robert Coover in order to complete requirements for my Master of Arts degree in Humanities from Western Kentucky University. My habit was to look at books on literature whenever I happened to find myself in a bookstore, checking to see if there were any references to Coover. One day I saw a new book on the shelf, Gardner's _On Moral Fiction_. I picked it up and checked the index. Sure enough, there were several references to Coover. To my surprise/delight/shock, Gardner trashed him. Coover's popular short story, "A Pedestrian Accident," was ravaged by Gardner. While I certainly held Coover in higher regard than did Gardner, I was nonetheless struck by Gardner's comments. Indeed, perusing the book as a whole it seemed interesting enough to go ahead and spring for my own copy. 

I enjoyed much of _On Moral Fiction_, particularly his use of folk tales and stark imagery in describing the work of an artist. However, I also took note of his despairing comments on many of my favorite writers. I enjoy Barth's work, and especially like the work of Updike, Malamud and Bellow. Pynchon, Vonnegut and Coover, while enjoyable, always left me unfulfilled for reasons I did not quite understand, though I think I do now. As a result of this, my first impression of Gardner was of a very gifted and talented writer who was a bit of a crank. At some level, though, I did feel an affinity with what Gardner was arguing in _On Moral Fiction_. The best way I have to express that affinity is to use a line from Miguel de Unamuno from _The Tragic Sense of Life_: "For those who feel, life is a  tragedy, and a comedy for those who think." At least as far as metafictionists like Coover are concerned, this pretty well states what I take to be the difference between them and a writer like Gardner.

Some time later I had occasion to read _Grendel_, which I found to be a delight. I did note at the time how the character Ork, a blind priest, gave a speech in which he directly quotes Alfred North Whitehead's _Process and Reality_. Later still, my wife told me of another Gardner novel that was assigned to her as required reading in a college theology course: _Nickel Mountain_. So I read that as well, and found it to be a very sweet book about love, guilt, and human responsibility. But each of my encounters with Gardner were ad hoc occurrences.

As a doctoral student in the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Religion, I was casting about for a dissertation topic. My area of study was Religion and Culture, particularly the interdisciplinary area of Religion and Literature. In the early 1980's I did an independent study with a faculty member in the English Department reading a number of modern and contemporary novelists, including Gardner. It peaked my interest in Gardner, and I later set up another independent study with a faculty member from my own department to read all of Gardner's material we could lay our hands on. That cinched it.

There are several reasons why I chose John Gardner for my dissertation subject. First of all, I felt a personal identification with him. For reasons unknown to me at the time, his novels and short stories usually dealt with death and guilt. As one whose earliest memories include the death of a father, I have always been drawn to the subject of death in literature. When people ask what I was like as a child, I often tell them I was the only 10-year-old existentialist walking the streets of Kensington, Maryland. In time I learned the story of the accidental death of John Gardner's brother, Gilbert, and of the burden of guilt the elder John felt as a result. Then, reading Gardner's short story "Redemption," it occurred to me that the work of psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton, best known for his study of Holocaust survivors and survivors of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was particularly relevant. Lifton cites five characteristics that mark a survivor of a tragic death: a death imprint, survivor guilt, psychic numbing, conflicts of nurture and contamination, and a need for a conceptual schema to understand death. The first four of these elements is present in the short story. After reviewing a number of Gardner interviews, it also became apparent that each of the four characteristics is also made manifest in Gardner's life. The fifth characteristic, the need for a conceptual schema, is a life-long project which I argue is at the core of Gardner's almost messianic approach to literature that is morally serious.

Also of note to me in reading Gardner's fiction is the constant referencing of the work of Alfred North Whitehead, either through direct quotation (without the quotation marks) or through paraphrase. Susanne Langer was also a clear influence on his work, explicitly so in his short story "The Library Horror." An idea that Gardner raises often, especially in The Art of Fiction, is that fiction ought to be a "vivid and continuous dream." While he has said in an interview that he gets the notion of "dream" from Robert Louis Stevenson, I argue that his use of the term has a clear lineage back to Langer. A question that immediately is raised in my mind is: a vivid and continuous dream of what? I argue that in his fiction he works toward a vivid and continuous dream of "peace" as used by Whitehead in his _Adventures of Ideas_. As developed by Whitehead, "peace" has close associations with the hebraic notion of "wisdom" in Jewish scripture, a notion which recognizes the value of life even in the midst of ongoing pain and suffering.

Why Whitehead? I lay the groundwork to argue that Western thought has found itself trapped in an epistemic box by the middle of the 20th century. This has resulted, in part, from a Cartesian dualism which bifurcates mental and physical experience, a Humean sensationalism which argues we can know of nothing but the "bundle" of our own private sensations, and a Kantian phenomenalism which concludes we can only know the world as "interpreted" by our own subjectivity. As a result, as I write in my book, the human situation is:

that of a living individual, separate, distinct, and unrelated to his material environment, restricted to experiencing his own sensations only, living in a noumenal world he can know only as a phenomenal appearance. This is the existentialist view of "absurd" man. It is important to realize that the absurdity is not in the man or woman, nor in the world. According to Albert Camus, it is the disrelationship between an individual asking the question of meaning and significance of her life, and a universe which responds with mute silence that is the "absurd."

Walter Kaufmann, surveying the philosophical situation at mid-century, writes in _Existentialism from Dostoievski to Sartre_ that there are only two real chcoices for those pursuing philosophy: either one turns toward philosophical analysis or one turns toward existentialism. As an undergraduate philosophy major I understand the modern turn toward analysis. It seemed each undergraduate class we would first make a sort of intellectual genuflect toward Cambridge, then turn our attention to analyzing our way toward philosophic truth. That truth, however, though gained through great cleanliness and rigor, tended to be trivial kinds of truth. How do I know that patch is "red"? That sort of thing. The big questions: Why do we exist? What is the good life? Is there a God? Why death? tended to be the subject matter of those grouped under the heading of existentialists. But their approach, often through the indirect vehicle of literature and the other arts, was often so evocative and vague that they raised more problems than they resolved. Part of the challenge Gardner laid out for himself was that he wanted to address the questions of the existentialists using the very medium of existentialists (i.e. the arts) without succumbing to the despair and cynicism of these same existentialists. Whitehead's philosophy was one way to get out of that "epistemic box" that entrapped others.

All of this I recognized as being at work in Gardner's fiction.  But, after all, this was to be a dissertation in the Department of Religion. So what was "religious" about Gardner's work? To begin, Gardner doesn't speak of religion very often, at least not specifically so, and when he does he tends to write of it in negative terms. As I write in my book:

In _The Art of Fiction_ Gardner argues that when a writer advocates truths in his fiction that have already been established within a society as doctrine, but without having tested the contemporary worth of those doctrinal truths, "the effect of his  work, admirable or otherwise, is not the effect of true art but of something else: pedagogy, propaganda, or religion."  (130) By contrast, Gardner also speaks of the rhetoric of great drama which "can raise our joy or grief to a keen  intensity that transcends the mundane and takes on the richness and universality of ritual. What begins in the real, in  other words, can be uplifted by style to something we recognize, even as we read, as at once the real and the real  transmuted." (116-17) For Gardner, when religion is in league with story-telling seeking to understand the sort of  world in which we do live and the values by which we should live, it is an important--indeed necessary--human activity.

A definition of religion which I believe is an appropriate one in approaching Gardner's work is that of anthropologist Clifford Geertz. In his much-anthologized essay, "Religion as a Cultural System," he avoids sectarian and essentialist definitions by defining religion as "a system of symbols which act to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence, and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." As defined, there is a great affinity between this and Gardner's approach to fiction, for he sees fiction as "a system of symbols which act to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men . . ." etc., etc. It is the "clothing" of conceptions of existence which is the test of the technical skill of a writer. In effect, if one can generate a "vivid and continuous dream" one can "establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations" in readers. Gardner genuinely respects Sartre as a writer, and says one immediately believes whatever Sartre has to say because of the way he says it. But Sartre, Gardner continues, is a monster morally and intellectually.

Geertz, in his social-scientific effort to remain objectively neutral, avoids the whole issue of whether a religion is, in fact, true. Such a question cannot even be asked, much less answered, he writes. He does point to ritual, however, as a key, noting that the "veridical nature of religion is tied into ritual." Geertz's own work in ritual, in which he attends mostly to those rituals which valorize the status quo, is inadequate for our purposes. Anthropologist Victor Turner, however, does provide an approach to ritual which is flexible enough to see Gardner's fiction as a ritual approach to art and death. Turner sees ritual as a kind of social drama and the ground of social change. Adopting the terminology of Arnold van Gennep, Turner uses the term "liminality" to identify those periods of time and space when the normal conceptions and rules of a society are suspended, such as an initiation rite. What is a "not-boy not-man"? No longer a boy and not yet a man, the initiand is suspended, betwixt and between, those defined expectations and obligations that a society places on boys and men, girls and women. During these liminal periods, it is possible for there to be a great level of freedom and creativity which can be the seed for future societal change. Thus, such liminal periods can be seen as a threat to the status quo, and rites of initiation are bounded by various taboos and prohibitions in order to "control" liminality and maintain a stable society. Turner reserves the term "liminoid" for similar brackets of space and time which are free from practical, political and conceptual restraint. Fiction is one such liminoid activity. It, too, is an arena of freedom and creativity which can be the seed for future societal change, and as such can be seen as a threat to the stability of society. Thus taboos and prohibitions in the form of censorship seek to control it.

Ronald Grimes provides a taxonomy for ritual activity ranging from the bio-physical and unconscious acts of animals to highly abstract and aesthetically powerful human celebrations. I argue a basic congruity between Whitehead's notion of "novelty," Turner's notion of "liminality," Grimes's notion of "celebration," and Gardner's work as an artist.   Hence, I try to argue that Gardner's is a ritual approach to art and death in which the vivid and continuous dream he would have us dream is a vision of peace, that wisdom that intuits a moral permanence immanent in nature's flux.

Now, here's the real story of how my book came to be. When I completed my comprehensive examinations, and when my dissertation proposal was accepted, I took a temporary position as Assistant Dean and Registrar with Semester-at-Sea, allowing me to voyage around the world in the Spring of 1988 while reading for the umpteenth time the works of John Gardner. My wife, meanwhile, began her medical school education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The plan was for me to finish the voyage and then move to Chapel Hill. There I would find acceptable employment, write the dissertation, and live happily ever after. Didn't work. Innocent that I was, I hadn't realized that with UNC-Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, and Duke University all within 20 miles of each other, ABD's like me were a dime a dozen. After several months of frustrated job searching in the area, it was decided that I should accept a job offer from a regional campus of The Ohio State University.

So Laura and I had to live for three years separated from each other. However, both of us being "older" students, we wanted to get started with a family. We timed our first child perfectly. She became pregnant during her third year, which is the most demanding year of medical school training. Her delivery was timed for the beginning of her fourth year, a much less demanding period of elective clerkships. In the meantime, Dean McWilliams came out with a new book on Gardner, meaning I had to somehow make it a part of my own Gardner project. Being an ABD graduate student, and therefore having no shame, I tracked down his telephone number, called McWilliams and asked if I might have a free copy of his book. He kindly declined my "offer," saying he had already distributed his own copies to friends and colleagues. In conversation, however, he learned of my own project and was kind enough to agree to read the three chapters I had written up to that point. (These chapters, by the way, correspond to the first two chapters of the current book, having gotten rid of that material only a dissertation committee would love.) I gladly sent them off. Many months went by without hearing from him, and I came to think I would probably not hear from him at all.

There came a time, however, when hearing from Dr. McWilliams was among the least of my concerns. My wife had learned that our unborn child had a serious anomaly; he had a diaphragmatic hernia which allowed organs from his abdomen to migrate into his thorax, thus making it impossible for his lungs to develop normally. In utero, his oxygen needs were being met by his mother. Upon birth, however, his breathing would be difficult at best. Knowing it to be a life-threatening situation, we arranged for our son to be born in Louisville where there were specialists who dealt with just this kind of situation. Despite all medicine could offer, our son, Zadok, lived only 12 days hooked up to a machine which oxygenated his blood from outside his body, bypassing the lungs so they might develop in the meantime. After his death, his mother returned to medical school at North Carolina and I returned to my job at The Ohio State University.

I did not pick up the dissertation when I returned. Frankly, I had a strong feeling of the pointlessness of it all. For several months the Gardner project lay fallow. Then, seemingly out of the blue, I get a letter from Dean McWilliams. He apologized for the delay, then wrote:

I recall my first reading, and at that time my reaction was one of general approval. One of the reasons that I didn't write  then, I think, was the feeling that I really did not have much to say except that I liked what you had done. I have just gotten around to going through the three chapters that you sent me again, and my reaction is much the same as before. Many people have noted the references to Whitehead in Gardner, but no one has gone as far as you in explaining their importance.Something that, as far as I know, no one has commented on before is the connection with Susan Langer. This influence is very likely, granted her prominence during the years of Gardner's intellectual formation. Here again you handle the connections clearly and convincingly.

Dr. McWilliams's letter was very encouraging, and it was what finally got me off my duff to begin again work on the dissertation. I did notice an important difference, however. Existentialists will make the distinction between "objective" and "subjective" knowledge. Whereas before I had been handling the Gardner materials in an objectively scholarly manner, I found myself after the death of my son experiencing my project in an entirely different way. I tried to capture this difference in my dedication of the book where I wrote:

To Zadok William Nutter 7/2/90-7/14/90 who, in his twelve days of life, helped teach me that Death is more than just  words on a page, and Peace more than just an intellectual idea.

I successfully defended the dissertation in August, 1991, and immediately accepted a faculty position at Alderson-Broaddus College as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Religion and Literature. My wife and I were able, finally, to live together as she was "matched" to the residency program at Clarksburg, WV, about 25 miles from the college. My first year there I received a letter from Heidi Burns, an acquisitions editor with Peter Lang Publishing. She said she had read of my dissertation in Dissertation Abstracts (it must be in her job description; I can think of no more dreary reading than Dissertation Abstracts) and was interested in hearing more about it. I telephoned her, and came to find out she was a Gardner fan who was bitterly disappointed at not getting a chance to meet him. It seems he was scheduled to visit the University of Southern Illinois, where she was a graduate student, when he had his motorcycle accident in 1982. She told me she was first pleased to see a dissertation on Gardner, then puzzled at how one would write a Religion dissertation with Gardner as the subject. After explaining my project to her, she asked that I sent her a copy to review for possible publication. Knowing such a project would be very time consuming, and knowing further that my appointment emphasized teaching and student contact rather than publishing, I declined.

As circumstances would have it, however, my wife was unable to find a suitable job situation near the college. So we were left with a choice: we could either remain in West Virginia and live off the salary of an Assistant Professor, or move somewhere else and live off the salary of a physician. It seemed a no-brainer. So the both of us, along with our young son Chapin, moved to Ludington, MI where we currently live. I had told myself that if ever I had the opportunity I would like to do some writing. Now that I had the opportunity, I placed a call to Heidi Burns and learned that she still was interested in seeing my manuscript. After years of writing and re-writing, what has emerged is _A Dream of Peace: Art and Death in the Fiction of John Gardner_.

Regardless of whatever else may come in my life, I will always feel a very personal connection to this book. It is certainly not dry scholarship, at least not from my perspective. Perhaps the best way to sum up the book is to simply quote from near the end of it, where I write:

Gardner not only presents images of peace in his fiction, but his life as an artist is one embodying the notion of peace. He has faced tragedy in his own life, and is able to find in Process thought concepts by which to comprehend his personal tragedy. As an artist he shares with readers his own emotional and spiritual crises, and thus allows his art to serve, superjectively, as a model by which they might entertain a "virtual life" of thought and action. In striving to be technically competent and morally serious, Gardner is allowing readers a dream of peace which may be integrated into their own novel attainments of satisfaction. Art, for Gardner, is a ritual embodiment of truthful beauty by which he might explore the terrible, though fruitful, role death plays in the lives of men and women. His art, then, is an adventurous dream--a vivid and continuous dream--of peace. His art is a dream of fine action that is valued in the very nature of things and that nurtures future generations into a life of zestful adventure.

The appropriateness of death, viewed from a Whiteheadian perspective, is at the heart of James Chandler's thoughts near the end of _The Resurrection_ when he suddenly thinks of that last line in Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning." Though evocative more than discursive, the poem does touch on the intuition of peace. The poet speaks of death being the creative ground of beauty, and hence the fulfillment of human dreams and desires, while Gardner speaks of death as a "wound" which prods him toward a deeper understanding of the world and our place in it. Death is certainly seen as a troubling and tragic end, but when one attains the quality of peace--that wisdom which intuits a permanence immanent in nature's flux--we come to see death less as a metaphysical insult and more as a fitting end to our lives as we approach our own journey "downward" towards the darkness.

Gardner's is essentially a religious vision, but not of the treacly kind. Gardner's vision is passionate, visceral, and sheds tears. Yet it is also hopeful, and thankful, and mindful of future generations which will face the same questions and doubts as have we in our modern age. He wouldn't want it any other way. When all is said and done, however, despite whatever tragedies life has in store--whether it be the accidental death of a younger brother, soured love affairs, strained relations with colleagues, colon cancer, or ending one's life smeared along a curving Pennsylvania road under a motorcycle--when all is said and done life is good. And more importantly, as several of his characters say at one time or another, life goes on. Loved ones die; life goes on. We feel guilt because of our actions; life goes on. Newspapers chronicle unending human brutality; life goes on. And life is good.

Ron Nutter, Ph.D, West Shore Community College  nutter@westshore.cc.mi.us

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last updated on May 8, 1998