Mesopotamian literature, however, is nothing if not ironic, so Enkidu does exactly the opposite of what he is supposed to do and remains trapped in the land of the dead. The story ends with Enkidu giving a doleful account of life among the dead. This was part of his I belief that his contemporaries had betrayed the very basis of authentic art its moral purpose and his opposition to writers in the West who were getting by, he thought, with flashy technique and hollow dehumanizing pessimism. Gardner believed strongly in the traditional view that true art should seek to improve life, not debase it. Art which tends toward destruction, the art of nihilists and cynics, is not proper art at all.
Art is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy.
For John Gardner, it became his supreme fiction. John R. Maier, an English professor at SUNY Brockport, has studied ancient Sumerian and Akkadian literature and, in 1979-1980, was a Fulbright Lecturer at the universities of Aleppo and Jordan. He has also worked on contemporary Arabic fiction. Back to Articles about John Gardner .