John Gardner (writer, 1933)

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John Champlin Gardner junior (born July 21, 1933 in Batavia , New York , † September 14, 1982 in Susquehanna , Pennsylvania ) was an American author and university professor.

Life

John Gardner's father was a dairy farmer and lay preacher, and his mother taught English at a local school. Both parents loved Shakespeare and often recited from his works. In April 1945, when Gardner was 11 years old, his younger brother Gilbert was killed in an accident in which Gardner was driving the tractor. Gardner suffered all his life from nightmares and feelings of guilt because he felt responsible for the death of his brother, which also had a strong influence on his artistic work. This incident is told in the 1977 short story "Redemption".

Gardner began studying at DePauw University and completed his undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 1955 . He earned his master's degree in 1956 from the University of Iowa , from which he also received his doctorate two years later. Following this award of the academic degree of a Ph.D. he began working as a college and later university professor at various universities.

In the context of his teaching and academic work, Gardner was not primarily concerned, like many other authors, with the dissemination of his own literary theoretical views, but above all with opening up literary tradition for the present. Through critically commented new editions, but also by retelling and retelling the stories from the old works, he tried to make past English literature accessible again to modern readers. He focused primarily on works from the Middle Ages, which he published in new translations. In addition to the circle of legends about King Arthur , he reconstructed medieval mystery plays and edited poems by Chaucer . In scientific or academic circles, however, Gardner's efforts were often dismissed as popular science.

In contrast, the formal aspects of Gardner's literary work can definitely be attributed to postmodern experimental literature , since he experimented heavily in his narrative style and wrote metafictional texts by telling new classical subjects that he believed the reader should be familiar with . In contrast to other experimental narrators of his time, however, he rejected a nihilistic view and did not share the resignation of other contemporary writers to be able to make sense of the world or life at all. In his book-form essay On Moral Fiction , which attracted a great deal of attention when it was published in 1978 and led to a public controversy with the writer and university professor William Gass , he formulated the claim that his literary works are intended to teach. Although they are not didactic in the narrower sense, they are “moral”.

In June 1953 he married his cousin Joan Louise Patterson. After divorcing her, he married the poet Elizabeth Rosenberg in 1980 , a marriage that later also fell apart. A few days before his planned wedding to Susan Thornton , he suffered a fatal motorcycle accident at the age of 49. Thornton's 2000 memoir On Broken Glass: Loving and Losing John Gardner describes the author's relationship with Gardner.

Gardner was buried next to his brother Gilbert in Batavia's Grandview Cemetery.

Literary work and effect

Gardner's best-known works were The Sunlight Dialogues and Grendel , a retelling and redesign of the Beowulf legend from the perspective of the monster Grendel . Both books are tales of brutal monsters in search of integrity and understanding.

In Gardner's transformation of the Beowulf material, the heroic deeds of Beowulf and the Nordic fighters are valued completely differently than in the epic and, from Grendel's perspective, are presented as the great boast and lie of the Scop , i.e. the Anglo-Saxon poet , or Shaper , as he is called in Gardner's novel . However, as Beowulf's antagonist , Grendel in no way becomes a new hero or a figure to identify with for the reader. During the Shaper's song about the creation of the world, Grendel realizes that he belongs to the dark side of creation and the god-damned descendants of Cain ( “He told of an ancient feud between two brothers which split all the world between darkness and light. And I, Grendel, was the dark side. [...] The terrible race that God cursed ” , p. 43). With this Grendel becomes the representative of evil in this world, in which the conflict between good and evil or heaven and hell determines human existence. As in William Blake 's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , which, like the Beowulf epic, served as a further literary model for Gardner's novel, the orthodox categories of morality are also called into question: good and bad, reason and energy are inseparable.

With Gardner's re-telling of the Beowulf story, the essential lesson from Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is expressed in a new form: “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to human existence. [...] Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy " ( Eng .:" Without opposites there is no development. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate are necessary for human existence. [...] What is passive is what is good Reason obeys. Evil is the active that springs from the energy ”).

The novel Grendel inspired the poet and singer Derek William Dick (Fish) to write an 18-minute song of the same name, which was released by the prog rock group Marillion in 1981.

Based on the novel Grendel , a libretto by Julie Taymor and J D. McClatchy and music by Elliot Goldenthal resulted in the opera Grendel , which was premiered in 2006 by the LA Opera.

Works

Novels, short stories, short stories

  • The Resurrection , 1966
  • The Wreckage of Agathon , 1968
  • Grendel , 1971 (German Grendel ; Milena, Vienna 2009 ISBN 978-3-85286-174-6 )
  • The Sunlight Dialogues , 1972 (Eng. The Troublemaker or the Conversations with the Sun Man , 1977)
  • Jason and Medeia , 1973
  • Nickel Mountain , 1973
  • The King's Indian , 1974
  • October Light , 1976
  • Freddy's Book , 1980
  • The Art of Living and Other Stories , 1981
  • Mickelsson's Ghosts , 1982
  • The King's Indian: Stories and Tales

Children's books

  • Dragon, Dragon (and Other Tales) , 1975
  • Gudgekin The Thistle Girl (and Other Tales) , 1976
  • The King of the Hummingbirds (and Other Tales) , 1977
  • A Child's Bestiary , 1977

Textbooks

  • The Poetry of Chaucer , 1977
  • On Moral Fiction , 1978
  • On Becoming a Novelist , 1983
  • The Art of Fiction , 1983

biography

  • The Life and Times of Chaucer , 1977

Essays

  • On Writers and Writing , 1994

Translations

  • The Complete Works of the Gawain Poet , 1965
  • The Alliterative Morte Arthure and Other Middle English Poems , 1971
  • Tengu Child , with Nobuko Tsukui, 1983
  • Gilgamesh , with John Maier, Richard A. Henshaw, 1984

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Allan Chavkin (Ed.): Conversations with John Gardner . University Press of Mississippi, 1990, ISBN 0-87805-422-7 .
  2. ^ Gardner. In: Pennsylvania Center for the Book. Retrieved March 8, 2020 .
  3. ^ Cf. Franz Link: John Gardner, 1933-1982 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 363–374, here p. 363. See also Martin Schulze: History of American Literature . Propylaen-Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-549-05776-8 , p. 574.
  4. ↑ See Dwight Garner: John Gardner, Pugilist at Rest . [1] . On: Arts Beat ( The New York Times ) September 14, 2007. Retrieved January 7, 2015.
  5. ^ Cf. Franz Link: John Gardner, 1933-1982 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 363-374, here pp. 363f. See also Gardner's remarks in: Interview with John Gardner , The Paris Review 75, 1979.
  6. ^ According to Franz Link: Grendel, 1971 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 364-366, here p. 364.
  7. ↑ GRENDEL ( English ) Fraser Marshall, Matthew Anderson & Bert ter Steege. Retrieved May 22, 2019.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Gardner, John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gardner, John Champlin Jr.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American author
DATE OF BIRTH July 21, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Batavia, New York (State)
DATE OF DEATH September 14, 1982
Place of death near Susquehanna, Pennsylvania