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COPYRIGHT 1999 Southern Illinois University
Bo G. Ekelund. In the Pathless Forest: John Gardner's Literary Project. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1995. 397pp. Paper $62.50.
Reading the two books under review here, one begins to wonder whether they are even about the same John Gardner, for Bo Ekelund and Ronald Nutter not only take very different approaches to Gardner and his work; they reach very different conclusions as well. However, after the publication of so many books that have offered up essentially the same Gardner, playing variations on a theme established by Gardner himself, this recent parting of the ways may not be a bad thing for "Gardner studies" and might just be worth celebrating despite the considerable shortcomings of both books.
The novelty and importance of Ekelund's study derives from his use of Pierre Bourdieu's sociological model of literary production in an attempt to understand not only Gardner but, through him, the whole of postwar American fiction as well. It is an ambitious undertaking, one in which Ekelund largely succeeds, though not as well as he might have. Recognizing the contradictions Gardner embodied but believing (as Charles Sanders Peirce put it) that "it is the belief men betray, and not that which they parade, which has to be studied," Ekelund examines Gardner's "literary project" in terms of its "trajectory," the strategies Gardner utilized and the positions he took as he negotiated--to a degree consciously, to a degree not--between "habitus" and "field." (Because Gardner studies have been so free, or innocent, of theory and its terminology, many Gardnerians may be put off by Ekelund's use of a Bourdieu-ese that, although at times distracting and reductively deployed, proves more useful than not.) "Habitus" is the "incorporated system of dispositions which is structured by the individual's social background and his social trajectory and which, in turn, structures his orientation towards the world he finds himself in." Gardner's habitus, the "sum of his durable dispositions," includes his rural background, religious upbringing, and faith in high culture. It was his faith in art which led him to aspire to become a writer, but it was an aspiration which entailed his having to repudiate his rural-religious past. The stories and novels Gardner wrote early in his career reflect (or embody, as Ekelund puts it) his habitus both accurately and directly. But these were the very...
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