When one stands back to consider the shape of John Gardner's works as a whole, certain recurring "obsessive metaphors" or polysemous "figures" (in the terminology of Charles Mauron and the Russian Formalists) force themselves upon the imagination. One of the most resonant of these figures is the magician as artist or criminal. The figure involves the idea of a shaper—part magician, part storyteller—who purposely manipulates reality and therefore may either enhance or violate it.

If the shaper's medium is verbal, he becomes a fabulist, liar, or poetic visionary. The seer Agathon, with his queerly sunlit eyes, Taggert Hodge the Sunlight Man, and Jonathan Upchurch, glib Yankee fan of magicians, are compulsive talkers. They are also in several ways fictional analogues of the artist as writer (talker) and seer. Ordinary people in Gardner's books are likely to fly off the verbal handle as well, becoming temporary sybils or ranters. One thinks of James Chandler philosophizing, and of John Horne in the same book; of the shaper-skald and Grendel; of Henry Soames and Fred Clumly, whose novel resolves itself in his public speech. As the 107-year-old poetess Miss Woodworth remarks irritably in The Sunlight Dialogues, "yakety yakety yakety." (p. 114)

Of the great talkers in Gardner, a striking number are criminals as defined by society—hunted outlaws or prisoners. The obvious examples are Agathon, the imprisoned cynical Socratic character whose incessant and intemperate speech is a devious tool to provoke and enlighten his disciple, Peeker; Taggert Hodge, who likewise is either in jail or in hiding throughout his book, and whose talk similarly is both inadvertent compulsion and purposeful manipulation meant to deceive or instruct; and the Devil, archetypal criminal, whose powers of persuasion and magic cause the events in Freddy's Book…. The notion of words and stories as "smugglers," potent as marijuana at heightening or replacing (violating) our sense of reality, returns us through another circular path to our figure of the artist as potential criminal, at worst a Captain Fist.

Metaphoric prisons, containments and preventions abound in Gardner. Like plots or rules of conduct, they often offer the imprisoned characters a structure within which to work. Freddy's book, for example, is his only means of expressing himself from his voluntary imprisonment in his room. Another imprisonment which facilitates transcendent understanding is James Chandler's apprehension of nearing death, which urges him towards a more generous and emotional sense of human life. Chandler's death is brought about by an act of generosity: breaking the doctor's orders, Chandler leaves his house to assist a dubious Magdalene-like girl. The novel's final tableau of the dead Chandler ("candle maker") lying in a grotesque crucifixion, somewhat heavy-handedly proclaims that his gesture is an imitation of Christ that redefines a narrowly medical idea of "health" to include the spiritual. To break the doctor's law is to restore the law of humanity. (p. 115)

The virtue of laws and prisons is that, like artistic conventions, they give one something to violate or defend. Prisons and crosses not only martyrs make: they construct a reality with depth of landscape, history, and human significance. Like God, Gardner makes humanity and sets it in a walled garden (for his work is also pastoral). There is no escape except into "singing the wall," as he shows in Grendel and elsewhere. There is no magical short cut, no exit….

Language is never neutral in Gardner. It either imprisons or liberates. Again and again an imprisoned man chooses between the language of liberation and the language of slavery. Often the languages are disguised. Grendel allows his fear to extend to language, which in turn paints a fearful landscape. "I shrieked in fear; still no one came" he wails as he hangs in the tree trunk and is charged by a bull in the Taurus chapter. (p. 116)

Yet all one has is language and its silent partners, emotion and thought. If they are solipsistic, what recourse is there? The notion of life as an unsolved question, or wall, is central in Gardner. Main characters are set the task of solving the riddle, on pain of one or another form of death. (p. 117)

The syntactic analogue of imprisonment is enchassement or embedding. The term, taken from traditional poetics, denotes the projection of the grammatical figure of subordination into a closed narrative structure so that one gets framed stories within stories, each ending where it began and serving to delay the action of the main tale…. Essentially it is a folk tale structure; as such embedding would appeal to Gardner the historian and medievalist. (p. 118)

Virtually all of Gardner's novels are embedded. All of them backtrack and use flashbacks to prolong reaching the end. Amazingly, all the novels except Nickel Mountain employ explicit frame stories or other clear framing devices which enclose or divide the works by returning to the same setting or motif. The Resurrection begins in the graveyard where Chandler is buried and returns to retrace his life; the whole novel is a flashback, as is The Sunlight Dialogues, whose prologue takes place after the events and after Clumly's wife has died. "The King's Indian" opens with the aged Upchurch qua Ancient Mariner recounting the novella as a story from his youth: it, too, is a flashback. Every few chapters Gardner brings back his reflexive frame in which Upchurch recounts his tale to the angel who sits in embarrassed judgment. The Wreckage of Agathon, too, starts near the ending of the chain of events in the book, with chapters alternately divided between Agathon and Peeker until the end, where a mature Peeker's vantage envelops the dead Agathon's. Jason and Medeia's narrator returns periodically; his reactions frame and punctuate the tale, which like Grendel, is a return to the past in several senses. October Light and Freddy's Book provide obvious examples of embedding. (pp. 118-19)

Delay is a temporal analogue of imprisonment. Gardner's technique resembles the opposed story and plot movements Todorov finds in popular fiction and which appear in the form of embedding in folk stories. Gardner insists on suspense as morally necessary as well as being a cornerstone for plot (by which he means structured and hence meaningful experience which offers more than texture and stylistic felicity). His defense of suspense, which he typically achieves through embedding structures, is central to his artistic and moral purpose…. (p. 119)

Gardner repeatedly delays action on one plot line to further another line, or interrupts one with an intrusive narrative from a frame story or a different text, until the novel's main level of reality is, if not called into question (as in Freddy's Book), at least modified and substantially deepened. Essential to this discontinuity and the paradox or riddle Gardner means to convey is suspense, which he achieves in three ways: through flashbacks, delays in the plots (often occasioned by scenes of entrapment), and imagery. In a large sense, all are forms of embedding.

Suspense often takes the form of flashback given in characters' memories. Through flashbacks Gardner reveals his abiding concern with history and how people can come to terms with it or try to escape it. Given Gardner's commitment to character—which more than anything else sets him apart from many contemporary novelists—flashbacks are a natural way for him to show what is significant about a situation for the person living through it. (p. 120)

Both The Sunlight Dialogues and The Wreckage of Agathon are delayed by long prison scenes that occasion flashbacks. Static imprisonment scenes are given very early in both novels and are held like a long cinematic still or a strongly stated key signature. The scenes of imprisonment extend through many chapters, damming the flow of plot…. Confinements throw the alternatives each character embodies into sharp relief as people literally jostle each other under pressure; imprisonments also offer Gardner occasions to interweave alternative texts or plot lines, as in October Light and Jason and Medeia. And every time Gardner shifts his book to different sets of characters, he has a chance to delay the interrupted plot.

Through imagery Gardner also creates suspense. Attica prison looms on Batavia's skyline throughout The Sunlight Dialogues. Grendel lives in caves and is obsessed with existential walls. Often a delicate nostalgia hints at a vulnerable, finite humanity caught in immensity's chaotic flux. (p. 121)

Sometimes Gardner shifts scenes so rapidly that plot merges with imagery to suspend action. A description from the first chapter of The Sunlight Dialogues, "The Watchdog," marks time while the Sunlight Man waits in prison and Clumly and his wife sleep in their house…. The imagery evokes how the lawless life of adolescents, lovers, and hunters heedlessly breaks through a multiplicity of metaphoric confinements and how this vital chaos illuminates, and dwarfs, the small drama of Clumly and Taggert Hodge. The imagery shoots beyond the tale to paint the walls of the universe, while the sleeping actors lie suspended in their lives' cocoons. (p. 122)

Gardner's paradoxes pose characters an ethical choice: whether to attribute paradox to the world or to themselves. If, as Grendel at first does, a character gives up and assumes the world is merely relative, unintelligible, and therefore deserving no allegiance or engagement, he makes a moral choice leading, as we have seen, to mute solipsism. But to choose to accept the paradox as a mysterious wall or limitation caused by one's narrow perspective and determine to solve it by extending one's scope and reaching out into another's experience, as Clumly and the Sunlight Man do, requires a certain belief, a sense of significance about people and the world.

To embody this heightened and firm communication with outer reality, Gardner's writing depends heavily on descriptions so distinct and original that they can magically heighten the most mundane subjects. Time and again Gardner indulges us with metaphors, similes, and adjectives slipped in before nouns…. Usually the descriptions are embedded in a surrounding sentence. Interjections between dashes, parenthetical remarks, and other devices that sandwich description into sentences are numerous…. (p. 123)

More than his peers, Gardner uses frames to question fictive reality and moral vision. His more recent works, The King's Indian and Freddy's Book, and the epic poetic novel Jason and Medeia, increasingly draw on framing devices and odd narratives using heightened language—Spencer's description of closed novels fits them perfectly…. Frames allow Gardner three major innovations: the use of the text as a character, the deliberate placement of the reader in opposed fictive realities, and the entrapment of the reader in the narrative paradox.

Gardner uses the device of the frame, which sets off disparate texts, to make texts into analogues of characters. He opposes stories within stories as he opposes characters within the same plot line—say Taggert and Clumly, or Jason and Medeia. A text—The Smugglers of Lost Souls' Rock or King Gustav & the Devil—is made to bear ethical weight and occupy significant space (as many or more pages than the ostensibly "real" or enclosing narrative), and is elevated to the stature held by a person whose choices, in this case, must be deduced from the odd, often hidden narrator's implicitly moral, or amoral, viewpoint of the world. The text's actions and language bear on the novel's total interpretation as if they belonged to a chief character in the main line of the plot, but they exist on a higher dimension which transcends the division between text and containing novel.

The reader's placement within opposed and alternating realities is an issue in all of Gardner's recent works. In Freddy's Book, for example, the reader is stranded in the inset tale at the book's end somewhere in medieval Scandinavia. In "The King's Indian" the reader is drawn sometimes to the sympathetic listening angel, eager to be pleased but made of delicate sensibilities and easily offended by poor taste and improbable lies. Other times, during the more realistic passages, the reader obliviously inhabits Upchurch. The ability to manipulate the reader's imaginative locale makes for an effortless reflexivity; every time Gardner shifts us, the reader's dislocation is an implicit comment on what went before. When the angel balks at the great white boobylike albatross which flops on the deck of the Jerusalem after Upchurch downs a psychedelic given him by an avatar of Queequeg, it is hard not to think of the discriminating angel as the reader; the angel's objections are also a sly comment on the absurdities of much postcontemporary writing.

In using the frame this subtly, Gardner almost dissolves it. In his hands the metaphoric wall between fictive spaces becomes more like a door or window inviting the reader one step beyond. The wildly different texts make the novels mysterious and unresolved: there is nothing in the novels that contains all the frames and texts in a final interpretation. The reader's mind is essential as only his consciousness contains all the stories and can read the complex message of their relationships. The reader completes the novel in the process of reading and thus supplies the answer to the books' deliberate paradox. In the end it is the reader who confronts the Sphinx of the novels.

In conclusion, the magician in Gardner operates as the shaper of frames but also passes through them to gain a greater perspective on the known social structure and make forays into the unknown. The reader also participates in magic; to read him is to be creator and escape artist, to claim kin with magicians. Gardner sometimes sees himself as a mystic and will remark on his intuitions and his family's interest in magic. Yet he is also distinctly unassuming. Whether or not one draws parallels, it is evident that again and again Gardner opposes texts or characters who exemplify, in Frye's categorization, the eiron or self-deprecator and the alazon or impostor. The true magician in Gardner is the self-deprecating eiron: the humane, passive Agathon as opposed to the dangerous, deluded and deluding false magician Taggert, who manipulates in order to confuse. Clumly, and even more Clumly's suffering wife, are the eirons to Taggert's alazon. As text, The Smugglers of Lost Souls' Rock is alazon to the eiron of the surrounding novel, as a trumpet to a quiet landscape. In Gardner's balancings, appearances deceive: when a character speaks truth he is likely to sound ridiculous. If a man starts out idealistic and handsome (Taggert, Agathon) he will tend to end as an unsightly, mad wreck. Life is grim enough in Gardner. Yet—and here lies his hopefulness—suffering can ennoble. Work pays. Nothing ventured in good faith, with belief and compassion, is wholly lost. It is true that thematic resolutions and transcendences often accompany brutal accidental deaths in Gardner: Bale's death tries Soames and offers him a fatal choice—to learn or die. But if Gardner sees no good as unmixed, then (such is his humanism) an evil, once confronted, can bring good. The criminal can be society's surgeon. Even the false magician can startle insight and provoke us beyond his frame. (pp. 126-28)