HOW CAN THE modern writer resist returning to the Greek myths to explore their endless, labyrinthine paths and to remap their ambiguous meanings into the maze of the twentieth century? The myths are so rich in tragedy, epic lives, passionate ideals, saturnalian revelry, and comic twists of fate that they beg for modernization. Claiming such undertakings to be bastardizations, staid classicists might curse the lack of inspiration, the sterility of these transformations. "Myths," said Camus, "are made for the imagination to breathe life into them." John Gardner's epic poem, Jason amd Medeia shows that the modern imagination, violently panting while it makes love to mythology, is still very potent indeed.

The poem, divided into 24 parts, is a cumulative free-translation/interpretation of the full mythic cycle of Jason and the Golden Fleece. Taking as its sources the Argonautica of Apollonios Rhodios and Euripides's Medeia, its story goes as follows: Jason, feared by his uncle, Pelias, king of Iolcus, because an oracle has said Jason will kill him, is sent to fetch the Golden Fleece in the eastern land of Kolchis. Pelias has promised Jason the kingdom--if he can return. Jason reaches Kolchis and finds the Fleece well protected by Aeetes, king of Kolchis. But Medeia, the sorceress princess, finally helps him. Inevitably, Jason vows to marry her, and with Golden Fleece in hand, they flee Aeetes's wrath. But before they can return safely home, Jason, Medeia, and the Argonauts brave many of the same perils Odysseus would a generation later. Back in Iolcus, Jason finds that his troubles have brought him only half the kingdom. Ironically, it is Medeia who kills Pelias. She and Jason are exiled. But after finding refuge in Corinth, Jason ignores his marriage vows to Medeia and vies for the hand of King Kreon's daughter, Pyripta. This classic betrayal's denouement is soon at hand, but Jason and Medeia is only beginning.

PARADOXICAL, you might say, to begin at the end. But then, Gardner revels in paradox. In fact, his poem is not actually poetry at all. In the deep recesses of the classical unrhymed hexameter narrative lurks the novelist's imagination, concerned more with mechanics than pure, precise wordsway. John Gardner cannot deny his place in the traditional world of Henry James and the Novel of Ideas. Jason and Medeia affirms that fact once more.

The poem also remains a testament to Gardner's virtuoso technique, his deft control of the cumbersome epic. Take, for example, his handling of the narrative point of view, his own relationship as writer to his story. The first person narrator is cast into an epic-dream, brought to Corinth by the gods to record for posterity the sad details of Jason's split from Medeia. While this anonymous poet is only a neutral observer, he tries desperately to alter the course of events by reconciling the couple. Only Medeia can see him, and she thinks he's a devil. Gardner's helpless narrator is the hilarious antithesis to the traditional omniscient, omnipotent story-teller. At one point he is actually transformed into flesh and almost killed in a Corinthian slave uprising. While this clown stumbles about Corinth like Jimmy Olson, cub reporter for the Daily Planet, Superman Gardner delves into more universal themes, mustering all of his authorial prowess to drastically alter the mythic conception of Jason and Medeia.

Jason is no longer the young, virile hero, wandering aimlessly through the Hellenic world so absolutely self-confident. He is a king without a country, a thinker with no outlet for his ideals. His cold, calculating mind obliterates any feelings he might have for Medeia or his two children. Pride and vanity urge him to gain Corinth. Jason has already won Pyripta's hand as Euripides's Medeia begins. But the greatest beauty of Jason and Medeia lies in its concentration on the imaginatively conceived contest for the princess of Corinth (an event which never occurred in ancient versions).

At first, Jason is unsure whether he wants to leave Medeia. But as he is prompted by Kreon to tell his tale of the Argonauts, he starts off on a new voyage into his own psyche, distorting the original story to fit his purposes. Kreon best describes Jason's inward journey:

The pilot's eyes have changed; the world he sailed, all childish bravura, has grown more dark. Shall we pretend that his darkened seas are a harmless phantasy?...Alas, my friend, he's turned the Argo's prow to the void. We'll watch and wait, follow him into the darkness and through it.

Jason weaves his story of the separate episodes of the Argo's voyage into dark-webbed allegories of faithlessness and the absurdity of existence. His final conclusion is not terribly unpredictable:

We sail between nonsense and terrible absurdity--sail between stiff, coherent system which has nothing to do with the universe (the stiffness of numbers, grammatical constructions) and the universe, which has nothing to do with the names we give or seize our leverage by. Let man take his reasoning place, expecting nothing, since man is not the invisible player but the player's pawn. Seize the whole board, snatch after godhood, and all turns useless waste. Such is my story.

And so the Platonic Philosopher King, embracing reason, rejects all notions of love--an action for which he will soon pay dearly.

BUT THERE are other noblemen desiring the kingdom of Corinth: Paidoboron, the weather-beaten visionary of the North, who reads in the stars impending doom; and Koprophoros, the mystic Asiatic, who suggests finally that reason alone is not good enough in Jason's absurd world, and that men cannot deny the passions of their bodies. The philosophical argument is set: reason vs. love, mind vs. body, nature vs. civilization, law vs. chaos. And through it all there is another voyage. John Gardner too, has set out on an impossible quest. Oddly enough he has Jason pronounce his presence:

We on the Argo were the head, limbs, trunk of a creature, a living thing larger than ourselves,...a thing puzzling out its nature, its swim through process.

How can one possibly penetrate all of the levels of this great metaphysical mess. Surely, traditional critical approaches are useless. Gardner has demonstrated in his novels his disapproval of rendering the world as it is. Grendel set about to reshape the Beowulf epic into the same philosophical query, using the skeptical monster as its prime agent. The small scale of that work, and its ingenius conception made it much more approachable. The came the Sunlight Dialogues, a very lengthy piece of prose with over 100 characters. Here, a great conglomeration of metaphysics is structured along the lines of a modern Grail Quest. Its one redeeming quality seems to be the real world Gardner so cautiously avoids.

The best approach then, to Jason and Medeia is prescribed by the philosopher-critic, William Gass. In terms of esthetics, Gass is probably Gardner's strongest source (indeed, Kropopros's final philosophical argument in Jason is based on one of Gass's essays). According to Gass, fiction has too long been regarded as a way of looking at reality, when it is, in fact, an addition to it. The author is not mirroring the real world, he's creating a new one--a world of language and ideas, where character and plot become subordinated. Jason and Medeia is just such a "conceptual system." It is a truly novel epic poem, "an absolute tissue of rules." But more than that, it is what Gass calls a metafiction, a compound of fictional forms, new built into old, with layer upon layer of meaning.

One of the obvious prat-falls of the metafiction, and certainly of this poem, is its lack of warmth. Only mathematicians could tolerate a steady diet of these theoretical enterprises. But taken on its own level of the idea, Jason and Medeia is intriguing.