The Alien in Our Midst: Trash Culture and Good Americans in John Gardner's "October Light"

Abstract

Could a movement as rampantly anti-intellectual as New Right be said to have left any literary monuments? Is it conceivable for any link to exist between putative moral majority-anti-textbook protesters, denouncers of liberal educators-and literary field? Or should we accept conclusion of Sidney Blumenthal and Thomas Burne Edsall that the ascendancy of conservative Republicanism has not been accompanied by emergence of genuine literary or artistic support in larger public culture (Blumenthal and Edsall viii)? Howard Phillips of Conservative Caucus tersely outlined strategic thinking of New Right activists at end of 1970s: Organize discontent. That is our strategy (qtd. in Crawford 165). To mobilize socio-political resentment among consumers of literary culture, it would take a highly resentful writer who could yet speak from a recognized position, that is, a writer who was acknowledged by his peers and by reviewers as a legitimate actor. While novelist John Gardner repudiated Moral Majority and repeatedly rejected religious fundamentalism and bigotry in general, he was, like no other literary figure at time, highly disposed for literary organization of elements of conservative discontent. His writing was fueled by a bitterness at having gone unrecognized for long years in 1960s when other practitioners of what seemed to him a cynical new fiction (such as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover) commanded limelight. Both literary and socio-political, this ressentiment explains not only his angry manifesto On Moral Fiction (1978) but also helps us analyze his most acclaimed novel, October Light, as organization of discontent through euphemization; that is way Gardner gives expression to certain deep-seated social anxieties in a literary form that denied their presence. In December 1976, right in time for bicentennial Christmas book season, John Gardner's novel October Light was published by Knopf, garnering conspicuous spots in major book review media, almost without exception favorable. There were seven reprints within first six months, Book-of-the-Month club picked it as a featured alternate selection for January 1977, it was a Quality Paperback Book Club choice in December that year, and Ballantine paperback started selling in January 1978. In early spring 1977, October Light won National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction 1976, with motivation that it was an ambitious work of extraordinary philosophical, historical, social and imaginative scope. Without somber trappings of high seriousness, this book explores many contemporary issues and connects us to roots of these issues in past with daring leaps of perception (qtd. in Transcript 2-3). In many ways, October Light marked high point of a career that subsequently went into