The Sot-Weed Factor

by John Barth

  The poet shuddered. “This is too much to assimilate, Henry: Coode a hero; my father in Maryland searching for Anna and leagued with the villain Baltimore; Anna herself yet virginal; and you, after all that hath transpired—you wholly innocent and still my friend! And marry come up, you make matters no simpler when you declare my sister’s lust to be reciprocal! Such a prurient notion hath never crossed my mind!”

  Burlingame raised his eyebrows. “Then you quite deceived your servants at St. Giles. Mrs. Twigg was wont to tell me—”

  “She was a foul-fancied harridan!”

  “Why, they even had a rhyme, the which—”

  “I know their scurrilous rhyme, whate’er it be,” Ebenezer said impatiently. “I have heard a dozen such, since I was small. Nor is your wicked imputation foreign to me, if you must know, albeit I’m not a little shocked to hear you share it. Poor Anna and I since birth have breathed in an air of innuendo, the which hath oft and oft caused us to blush and lower our eyes. Since I was ten our father’s household hath assumed the worst of us, for no other reason than that we were twins. ’Twas Anna’s ill luck her body blossomed at an early age, and e’en her fondest girl friends—e’en that same Meg Bromly who took your letters to her from Thames Street—they all declared her ripening was my work and drove Anna to tears with their whispering! All this, mind, on no grounds whate’er save our twinship, and the fact that unlike many brothers and sisters we never quarreled, but preferred each other’s company to the concupiscent world’s! I cannot grasp it.”

  “Then for all thy Cambridge learning,” Burlingame laughed, “thou’rt not by half the scholar your sister is! When first I guessed her trouble, long ere she saw’t herself, we launched a long and secret enquiry into the subject of twins—their place in legend, religion, and the world. ’Twas my intent by this investigation not so much to cure Anna’s itch—which I was not at all persuaded was an ailment—as ’twas to understand it, to see it in’s perspective in the tawdry history of the species, and so contrive the most enlightened way to deal with it. I need not say my interest was as heartfelt as her own; her oft-sworn love for me, I could see clearly, was love for you, diverted and transmogrified by virtuous conscience. When she would run to me in the summer-house, ’twas as a jilted maiden runs to a convent and becomes the bride of Christ, and I sorely feared, if her case were not soon physicked, ’twould bereave her altogether of her reason or else drive her to some surrogate not so tender of her honor as was I.”

  “Dear God!”

  “For this reason I led her on,” Burlingame continued. “I declared my love for her—half in truth, you understand—and together we explored the misty land of legends, Christian and pagan. Four years we studied—from your fourteenth to your eighteenth year—and all in secret. On the face of’t our enquiry was beyond reproach, and I yearned for you to join us, but Anna would have none of’t. I’faith, Eben, what a tireless scholar is your sister!” He shook his head in reminiscent awe. “I could not find her volumes enough of voyage and travels, or heathen rites and practices: she would fall on ’em like a lioness on her prey, devour ’em in great bites, and thirst for more! I’d wager my life on’t, at seventeen years she was the world’s foremost authority on the subject of twins, and is today.”

  “And I knew naught of’t!” Ebenezer shook his head and laughed uncomprehendingly. “But what is there to know of us twins, save that we were conceived in a single swiving?”

  “Why, that Gemini is your sign and springtime your season,” Burlingame replied.

  “It wants no scholarship to hit on that. ’Tis common knowledge.”

  “As is the fact that springtime—and Maytime in particular—is the season of fertility and the year’s first thunderstorms.”

  “Don’t tease!” the poet said irritably. “This day and night have been my life’s most miserable, and I am near dead from shock and want of sleep, to say naught of misery. If all your study ploughed up no lore save this, have done with’t and let us rest. ’Tis all impertinence.”

  “On the contrary,” Burlingame declared. “So pertinent are our findings, methinks you’d as well give o’er the search for Anna unless you hear ’em: ’tis better to be lost than saved by the wrong Messiah.” His manner and tone grew serious. “You know that spring is the season of storms and fertility, but do you know, as doth your sister, that of all the things our rustic forebears feared, the three that most alarmed them were thunder, lightning, and twins? Did you know thou’rt worshipped the whole world over, whether by murther or by godhood, if not both? Through the reverence of the most benighted salvage runs this double thread of storms and fornication, and the most enlightened sages have seen in you the embodiment of dualism, polarity, and compensation. Thou’rt the Heavenly Twins, the Sons of Thunder, the Dioscuri, the Boanerges; thou’rt the twin principles of male and female, mortal and divine, good and evil, light and darkness. Your tree is the sacred oak, the thunder-tree; your flower is the twin-leaved mistletoe, seat of the oak tree’s life, whose twin white berries betoken the celestial semen and are thus employed to rejuvenate the old, fructify the barren, and turn the shy maid’s fancies to lusty thoughts of love. Your bird is the red cock Chanticleer, singer of light and love. Your emblems are legion: twin circles represent you, whether suggested by the sun and moon, the wheels of the solar chariot, the two eggs laid by Leda, the nipples of Solomon’s bride, the spectacles of Love and Knowledge, the testicles of maleness, or the staring eyes of God. Twin acorns represent you, both because they are the thunder-tree’s seed and because their two parts fit like male and female. Twin mountains represent you, the breasts of Mother Nature; the Maypole and its ring are danced round in your honor. Your sacred letters are A, C, H, I, M, O, P, S, W, X, and Z—”

  “I’Christ!” Ebenezer broke in. “ ’Tis half the alphabet!”

  “Each hath its separate import,” Burlingame explained, “yet all have common kinship with swiving, storms, and the double face of Nature. Your A, for example, is the prime and mightiest letter of the lot—a god in itself, and worshipped by heathen the great world round. It represents the forked crotch of man, the source of seed, and also, by’s peak and by’s cross-line, the union of twain into one, that I’ll speak of anon. When you set two A’s cheek by jowl you see the holy nippled paps of Mother Earth, as well as the sign of the holy Asvins, the twin charioteers of Eastern lore. Your C betokens the crescent moon, that in turn is held to resemble man’s carnal sword, unsheathed and rising to the fray; two C’s entwined are the union of Heaven and Earth, or Christ and his earthly church—”

  “In Heav’n’s name, Henry, what are these riddles thou’rt flooding me with?”

  “Anon, anon,” Burlingame said. “Your H portrays the same happy union of two into one: ’tis the zodiac sign for Gemini; the bridge ’twixt the twin pillars of light and dark, love and learning, or what have you; ’tis also the eighth letter, and inasmuch as 8 is the mystic mark of redemption (by virtue of its copulating circles), ’tis no surprise that H is the emblem of atonement—the making of two into one.”

  “Again this mystery of twos and ones!” the poet protested.

  “ ’Tis no mystery when you know about I and O,” said Burlingame. “In every land and time folk have maintained that what we see as two are the fallen halves of some ancient one—that night and day, Heaven and Earth, or man and woman were long since severed by their sinful natures, and that not till Kingdom Come will the fallen twain be a blessed one. ’Tis this lies ’neath the tale of Eve and Adam, and Plato’s fable, and the fall of Lucifer, and Heav’n knows how many other lovely lies; ’tis this the Lord Himself refers to, in the second epistle of Pope Clement: He declares His Kingdom shall come When the two shall be one, and the outside as the inside, and the male with the female. Thus all men reverence the act of fornication as portraying the fruitful union of opposites: the Heavenly Twins embraced; the Two as One!”

  Ebenezer shivered.

  “Your I and O are plainly then discovered,” B
urlingame said with a smile: “the one is male, the other female; together they are the great god Io of Egypt, the ring on the maidens’ merry Maypole, the acorn in its cup, the circumcised prepuce of the Jew, the genital letters P and Q—and the silver seal ring Anna slipped upon your finger in the post-house!”

  “I’God!”

  “As for the others, your M is the twin mountain breasts I spoke of; S is the copulation of twin C’s face to face, and is sprung as well from the sacred Z; W—the double-vow, as M is the double-we—W, I say, is a pair of Vs sack a sack: ’tis thus the sign of the Heavenly Twins of India, called Virtrahana, and the third part of the Druids’ invocation to their god, the whole of which was I.O.W. X, like A and H, is the joining of Two into One, and as such hath been venerated since long ere the murther of Christ; Z is the zigzag lightning flash of Zeus, or whatever god you please, and is ofttimes flanked, in ancient emblems, by the circles of the Heavenly Twins—”

  “Enough!” the poet cried. “This dizzies me! What is the message of’t, and what hath it to do with Anna and me?”

  “Why, naught in the world,” Burlingame responded, “save to show you how deep in the marrow of man runs this fear and reverence for twins, and their connection with coitus and the weather. All over Africa the birth of twins is followed by dances of the lewdest sort: sometimes ’tis thought to prove the mother an adultress, since husbands generally get one babe at a time; other folk think the mother hath been swived by the Holy Spirit, or that the father hath an inordinate lingam. In sundry isles of the western ocean ’tis common for the salvages to throw coffee beans at the walls of a house where twins are born; they believe that otherwise one must die, inasmuch as twins break the laws of chastity while still embraced in their mother’s womb! In divers lands no living twins can be found, for the reason that one is always slain at birth; but murthered or not, they are worshipped in every place, and have been since time out of mind. The old Egyptians had their Taues and Taouis, the twins of Serapeum at Memphis, as well as the sisters Tathautis and Taebis, the ibis-wardens of Thebes; in India reigned Yama and Yami, and the holy Asvins I spoke of earlier, that drew the Heavenly Chariot; the Persians worshipped Ahriman and Ormuz; the ancient myths of the Hebrews tell of Huz and Buz, Huppim and Muppim, Gog and Magog, and Bne and Baroq, to say naught of Esau and Jacob, Cain and Abel—or as the Mohammedans have it, Cain and Alcimand Abel and Jumella—”

  “Ah!” Ebenezer exclaimed.

  “Some held,” Burlingame went on, “that Lucifer and Michael were twins, as are most gods of Light and Darkness; and for the selfsame cause the old Edessans of Mesopotamia, who erst had worshipped Monim and Aziz, were wont to regard e’en Jesus and Judas as hatched from a single egg!”

  “Incredible!”

  “No more than that God and Satan themselves—”

  “I don’t believe it!” Ebenezer protested.

  “ ’Tis not a question of your belief,” laughed Burlingame, “but of the fact that other wights think it true; ’tis but a retelling of the tale of Set and Horus, or Typhon and Osiris, whom some Egyptians took for twins and others merely for rivals. But I was coming to the Greeks…”

  “You may pass o’er them,” sighed the poet. “I know of Castor and Pollux, the sons of light and thunder, and as well of Helen and Clytemnestra, that were hatched with ’em from Leda’s eggs.”

  “Then you must know too of Lynceus and Idas, that slew the Dioscuri; of Amphion and Zethus, that sacked and rebuilt Troy; of Heracles and Iphikles, that are twins in this tale and half-brothers in that, and of Hesper and Phosphor, the morning and evening stars.”

  “And now you’ll go to Rome, I’ll wager, and speak of Romulus and Remus?”

  “Aye,” said Burlingame, “to say naught of Picumnus and Pilumnus, or Mutumnus and Tutumnus. ’Twas the great respect accorded these classic twins that carried them into the Christian Church, which had the good sense to canonize ’em. Hence the Greek and Roman Catholics pray to Saints Romolo and Remo, Saints Kastoulos and Polyeuctes, and e’en St. Dioscoros; the fonder amongst them go yet farther and regard as twins Saints Crispin and Crispian, Florus and Laurus, Marcus and Marcellianus, Protasius and Gervasius—”

  “A surfeit!” cried the poet. “There is a surfeit!”

  “You have not heard the best,” Burlingame insisted. “They will hold Saints John and James to be twins as well, and e’en Saints Jude and Thomas, inasmuch as Thomas means ‘a twin’. I’ll not trouble you with Tryphona and Tryphosa, that Paul salutes in’s Epistle to the Romans, but turn instead to the Aryan heroes Baltram and Sintram, or Cautes and Cautopates, and the northern tales of Sieglinde and Siegmunde, the incestuous parents of Siegfried, or Baldur, the Norseman’s spirit of Light, and his enemy, dark Loki, that slew him with a branch of mistletoe!”

  “ ’Tis a hemisphere o’erridden with godly twins!” Ebenezer marveled.

  Burlingame smiled. “Yet it wants twin hemispheres to make a whole: when Anna and I turned our eyes to westward, we found in the relations of the Spanish and English adventurers no less a profusion of Heavenly Twins, revered by sundry salvages; and the logs of divers voyages to the Pacific and Indian Oceans were no different. Old Cortez, when he raped the glorious Aztecs, found them worshipping Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, as their neighbors reverenced Hun-hun-ahpu and Vukub-hun-ahpu. Pizarro and his cohorts, had they been curious enough to ask, would have found in the southern pantheon such twins as Pachakamak and Wichoma, Apocatequil and Piquerao, Tamendonare and Arikute, Karu and Rairu, Tiri and Karu, Keri and Kame. Why, I myself, enquiring here and there among the Indians of these parts, have learnt from the Algonkians that they reverence Menabozho and Chokanipok, and from the Naked Indians of the north that they pray to Juskeha and Tawiskara. From the Jesuit missionaries I have learnt of a nation called the Zuñi, that worship Ahaiyuta and Matsailema; of another called Navaho, that worship Tobadizini and Nayenezkani; of another called Maidu, that worship Pemsanto and Onkoito; of another called Kwakiutl, that worship Kanigyilak and Nemokois; of another called Awikeno, that worship Mamasalanik and Noakaua—all of them twins. Moreover, there is in far Japan a band of hairy dwarfs that pray to the twins Shi-acha and Mo-acha, and amongst the gods of the southern ocean reign the great Si Adji Donda Hatahutan and his twin sister, Si Topi Radja Na Uasan…”

  “ ’Tis your scheme to drive me mad!”

  “That is their name, I swear’t.”

  “No matter! No matter!” Ebenezer shook his head as though to jar his senses into order. “You have proved to the very rocks and clouds that twin-worship is no great rarity in this earth!”

  Burlingame nodded. “Sundry pairs of these twins are opposites and sworn enemies—such as Satan and God, Ahriman and Ormuz, or Baldur and Loki—and their fight portrays the struggle of Light with Darkness, the murther of Love by Knowledge, or what have you. Sundry others represent the equivocal state of man, that is half angel and half beast: the first of such pairs is mortal and the second divine. Still others are the gods of fornication, like Mutumnus and Tutumnus, or Picumnus and Pilumnus; if less than gods, they yet may be remembered for incestous lust, like Cain and his Alcima, and even be honored for swiving up a hero, as were Sieglinde and Siegmunde. How Anna loved the Siegfried tales!”

  So heavy with revelations was the poet, he could only wave his hand against this remark.

  “Yet whether their bond be love or hate or death,” Burlingame concluded, “almost always their union is brilliance, totality, apocalypse—a thing to yearn and tremble for! ’Tis this union Anna desires with all her heart, howe’er her mind disguise it; ’tis this hath brought her halfway round the globe to seek you out, and your father to fetch her home if he can find her. ’Tis this your own heart bends to, will-ye, nill-ye, as a flower to the light, to make you one and whole and nourished as ne’er since birth; or as a needle to the lode, to direct you to the harbor of your destiny! And ’tis this I yearn for too, and naught besides: I am Suitor of Totality, Embracer of Contradictories, Husband to all Creation,
the Cosmic Lover! Henry More and Isaac Newton are my pimps and aides-de-chambre; I have known my great Bride part by splendrous part, and have made love to her disjecta membra, her sundry brilliant pieces; but I crave the Whole—the tenon in the mortise, the jointure of polarities, the seamless universe—whereof you twain are token, in coito! I have no parentage to give me place and aim in Nature’s order: very well—I am outside Her, and shall be Her lord and spouse!”

  Burlingame was so aroused by his own rhetoric that at the end of his speech he was pacing and gesturing about the cabin, his voice raised to the pitch and volume of an Enthusiast’s; even had Ebenezer not been too dismayed for skepticism, he could scarcely have questioned his former tutor’s sincerity. But he was stunned, as well with recognition as with appall: he clutched his head and moaned.

  Burlingame stopped before him. “Surely you’ll not deny your share of guilt?”

  The poet shook his head. “I’ll not deny that the soul of man is deep and various as the reach of Heav’n,” he replied, “or that he hath in germ the sum of poles and possibilities. But I am stricken by what you say of me and Anna!”

  “What have I said, but that thou’rt human?”

  Ebenezer sighed. “ ’Tis quite enough.”

  By this time the sun was bright in the eastern sky, and the Pilgrim stood well down the Bay for Point Lookout and St. Mary’s City. The other passengers were awake and stirring about their quarters. At Burlingame’s suggestion they fastened their scarves and coats and went on deck, the better to speak in private.

  “How is’t you know Anna to be in St. Mary’s? Why did she not come straight to Malden?”