Portrait of an Eclipse

DURING THE HARNESS racing season, the gamblers of Buffalo, N.Y.--the adolescent mafioso would-be's and syphilitic has-beens--can take a bus going to Batavia Downs to "maybe someday hit it big." Batavia isn't known for much else--it certainly isn't a very likely setting for a novel with the high aspirations of John Gardner's The Sunlight Dialogues. But poor Batavia is not as much to blame as John Gardner.

The Sunlight Dialogues evolves from the return of a once-prominent local lawyer to Batavia; self-exiled because of personal and financial disasters. No longer quite sane, Taggart Hodge assumes the pseudonym of the "Sunlight Man," a mystic, magician and aspiring philosopher king. Much of the story takes the shape of a thriller, replete with jail-break, murder, appearances and disappearances. But Medievalist Gardner doesn't stop here. The secretive dialogues of Hodge, an elusive and outspoken anarchist, with Batavia's strict law-and-order police chief (hence the title) are strangely reminiscent of Grendel's talks with Unferth in Grendel.

The Beowulf epic has once again risen from its grave; but even the Christians knew better than to resurrect the dead more than once. Still not content, Gardner spices his novel with allusions to Arthurian legend. And to all this he adds his own version of that classic Faulknerian tale of the decay of the proud and respected Compson family. It is all done in the same battered, albeit rigid, multi-consciousness point of view.

Perhaps some perspective will help. John Gardner's two previous novels set out on much the same course as The Sunlight Dialogues: In The Wreckage of Agathon, an old, muddled Athenian seer is imprisoned in Sparta for aiding the Helot rebellion. Using this one dominating character, set apart from the world, Gardner waxes and wanes between the philosophical and the lewd, providing an overview that is at once serious and hilarious. Again, in Grendel, the monster's ability to stand back and look at man from a unique perspective makes the novel both exciting and valuable reading. This remains true even after the novelty of relating the Beowulf epic has worn off.

A dominating theme in both Grendel and The Wreckage of Agathon is individual freedom within a mass consciousness. Agathon chose total individual freedom, rebelling against the Spartans' strict sense of uniformity. And although he died, his ideals achieve a harmonious serenity with the hopes of his more worldly-wise student, Demodokos. Grendel, too, embodies a kind of selfhood, which is more barbaric and cynical: he believes completely in himself only because there is no hope of being accepted within a greater whole. It's hard to suppress sympathy for this Cain-like character, but in the end the victory of mankind over the individual is inevitable.

THE SUNLIGHT DIALOGUES is harder to deal with. The Sunlight Man like Agathon, chooses freedom. And Gardner chooses neither the individual nor society for the victor; instead, he selects meaninglessness. It's one thing to accept a well written novel that opts for the absurdity of it all, but it's quite another thing if that kind of work must be buttressed by insignificant novelistic devices. Gardner loses his credibility.

Here lies the problem. The Sunlight Man also offers a singular viewpoint, based like Agathon and Grendel on a belief in a "cosmic order...indifferent to man." But where Agathon, Grendel, and their stories become complete in themselves, exclusive of and only supplemented by other devices, the Sunlight Man is lost in the shuffle of overburdening plot and structure complexities that never really hold their own.

If The Sunlight Dialogues were less of an object, with cumbersome physical structures, and more of an ongoing experience in which the reader could become involved, it would fare much better. But it isn't and it doesn't. It fails, and there's much better reading to be had. Some of it's by Gardner himself; that makes it even harder to say Dialogues isn't worth the time. Or as one of the novel's characters put it: "She realized, briefly, that she was merely a character in an endless, meaningless novel, then forgot."