Books: Seer v. Slob | TIME
THE WRECKAGE OF AGATHON by John Gardner. 243 pages. Harper & Row. $6.95.
Dying in a Spartan jail in the year 500-and-something B.C., the hero of this sharp and provoking little antihistorical novel finds no difficulty in giving verbatim quotations from the Dryden translation (17th century A.D.) of Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus (2nd century A.D.). It is true that he is a certified Seer of Apollo, and the future drifts before his eyes as effortlessly as the past or the present. So the reader need not be really surprised to find Lycurgus (spelled Ly-kourgos, in the barbarous tradition of contemporary university classics departments), a dim semi-mythological figure, flinging out his arms in V-for-victory signs like General de Gaulle, or to hear members of the Lacedaemonian jet set chatter psychoanalysis, market analysis and Black Panther ideology while they swap wives by the suburban swimming pool.
The seer’s name is Agathon. He shares his cell with a family of rats that nibble his toes when he sleeps, and a gawky, earnest boy-disciple named Demodokos, who being only an apprentice seer is called Peeker. In alternated monologues, Seer and Peeker describe the cycles of personal passion and international politics that brought them to their stinking dungeon, lit at night by government buildings burned at the hands of revolting Helots, the Spartan slaves.
Agathon was once a handsome and ambitious academic-political young man, an Archaic Period Kissinger to the John Mitchell of Lycurgus, the famous lawgiver who recast the constitution of Sparta in a fierce authoritarian mold. Now Agathon is a drunken old bum. In between, he has fought a battle disguised as a woman, seduced and married the daughter of an archon, helped the Ionian philosophers invent humanism, rationalism and Western civilization, betrayed his best friend to the Athenian FBI, and made love to the wives of all his friends. By teaching his greatest love, a Helot woman, to read and write and think politically, he has set events in motion that end in a blaze of atrocity and civil war.
This may seem more than enough to fit into a middling-short novel. But the author, in addition, sets out on a number of symbolic quests. At times Agathon, whose name in Greek means the Good, stands for the whole Western tradition of humane tolerance, now threatened by the twin fanaticisms of repression and revolution. At others, he is some kind of primordial natural force, a witness to agelong woe and fatality. At still others, when what he calls facticity catches up with him, Agathon is just a slobbish old lecher smelling of onions. In this guise he represents the irreducible, incorrigible lump of humanity that always jams up the bright theoretical machines continually being invented by one Lycurgus or another, and thus saves mankind from betterment.
In this guise, Agathon saves the book too. With his rambling wit, his irrelevancies, rages, blunderings, unfairnesses, with his tender-rough efforts to jerk his friend Pecker to wisdom through the muck of the world, he emerges as one of those scapegrace saints who have adorned literature from Socrates to Gulley Jimson. Robert Wernick
ncG1vNJzZmismaKyb6%2FOpmaaqpOdtrexjm9vcG5jbYJwrs6ooqxlo5qys3nVZqqlp5Jk