by John Barth
This is perhaps a clue to our universe that the novelist offers in his immodest and subversive resemblance to God. Consider all art for a moment as upaya: an enormous burp in the face. Consider that if the novelist is like God and a novel like the universe, then the converse ought to have at least some metaphorical truth: The universe is a novel; God is a novelist! (I have observed elsewhere that the trouble with God is not that He’s a bad novelist; only that He’s a realistic one, and that dates Him.)†
We’ve all heard the commonplace, from atheists as well as believers, that the universe is a work of art. But look what happens to some of the “agonizing questions of our time,” of all times—the Freshman Anthology questions—if that proposition is regarded rigorously instead of sentimentally. Take the great Search for Meaning and Purpose in Life, for instance—the ostensible theme of so much modern literature. On this view, those who seek an idea in the universe are like those who demand ideas in a work of art, and the fact is (I’m paraphrasing the aesthetician George Boas), while you can’t really keep ideas out of a poem, say, as Amy Lowell wanted to do, nevertheless the ideas are never the main thing. The idea of many of Shakespeare’s sonnets is “When I am blue, I think of you.” Archibald MacLeish declares that a poem must not mean, but be; we may now declare that the universe must not mean, but be.
And we may bid good-bye to the problem of value, for if the values of the universe are like the values of a novel, the truest thing about them is that they’re by no means necessarily shared by the characters, or even comprehensible to them. There is a grand dramatic irony in the world. Our search for meaning, even our dialogues with God, are like those interactions between characters and author in the novels of Unamuno and Gide, or Pirandello’s famous play; the author is in charge even when challenged by his creatures, and the Author who thus participates as a character isn’t the real author at all. The real author lives and works in a dimension quite other than that of his creatures (but reminiscent of theirs—he has made them in his image). By what equipment can Tom Jones perceive Henry Fielding? His reason, his technology if he has any, are absurd, as ours are absurd. Even a dogged faith on his part that there is a Henry Fielding would be absurd. Did Alexey Karamazov’s universe “begin” at a point in time, or has it existed infinitely? The fact that Dostoevsky wrote the novel in 1880 seems clearly irrelevant; the whole question is unintelligible.
Even the problem of God’s “intention” in creating the universe becomes rather beside the point. An artist may quite fail to reach his goal, for one thing—Faulkner tells us that all novels are failed poems. Or he may not even know what his deepest intentions are until some critic (or theologian) tells him. The novelist’s intention may escape us altogether—at least the characters can’t guess it!—and anyhow we’re all aware of the “intentional fallacy” the critics speak of: If we see a meaning in the universe different from the author’s intended one, ours may be quite as valid as his, other things being equal. The fact is, a work of art has a life of its own, and so in this sense does the universe. Different people, including the author, see different things in it, and all may be right in a way and wrong in a way, for the universe “means” many things and nothing, like a great novel (though it may not mean just any old thing a freshman reader wants it to mean).
I conclude that the nihilism of the kind of artist I have been describing is not the nihilism of Lucretius or John Dewey or Jean-Paul Sartre; it is God’s nihilism. Artists are ethical nihilists in that, however passionate their commitments as people and citizens, as artists they are indifferent to values exterior to their work, which is in this respect morally neutral. But they are anti-nihilists in that, like God, they make pieces of art, universes which are, and (relatively speaking) nothing can be absoluter than that. Art ends up being for art’s sake no matter what the artist had in mind; reality is for its own sake regardless of God; and so finally even the question of God’s existence and nature, like the question of Homer’s or Shakespeare’s existence and nature, becomes academic.
This criticism of the universe sounds a little like the old New Criticism of literature, and may lie open to some of the same objections. But literary critics, both New and Old, are after all seeking to explain works of literature by means of analysis, and I’m not. The critic operates as a more or less skillful anatomist of literature; I’m regarding the universe here as a novelist reading another fellow’s novel. There are some Godawful boners in it—yet, as Horace reminds us, even good Homer sometimes slept. There are master strokes as well, to make any other novelist envious: The first law of embryology, for instance—that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—is as poetic a fancy as anything in literature. I wish I’d thought of it. And the second law of thermodynamics, the principle of universal entropy, informs the whole show with a splendid dying fall. My point is that this grand and complex entity after all is, as Huckleberry Finn finally is, beyond philosophy, theology, literary criticism, and the sometimes torturing attempts of its inhabitants to understand it and their place in it.
Now, it goes without saying that this view of God and His fellow fabricators implies nothing whatever about the way you should run your life. It aims at no direct bearing on the problems and desires that harass you, whatever they may be, any more than art does—and yet, of course, like art, it has every relevance to those problems. The hero of my first novel begins by believing that “nothing makes any ultimate difference,” and decides to end his life; he ends by realizing that if nothing makes any difference, that truth makes no ultimate difference either, and so rather than committing suicide he predicts that he’ll go on living in much the same manner as before. Yet obviously there will be a kind of difference from then on. It’s the same difference experienced by Kierkegaard’s man-who-has-come-through: He goes about his daily round as always, but he is “every moment leaping perfectly and surely into the infinite, the absurd, and every moment falling smoothly and surely back into the finite.” Similarly, that which is attained by the final enlightenment of certain Buddhists is called wu-shih, a term that means “nothing special”: Alan Watts, the student of Zen, quotes Professor Suzuki, the Zen master, on the subject of how it feels to have attained satori, or awakening: “Just like ordinary everyday experience,” Suzuki declares, “except about two inches off the ground.”
So. If you ask a novelist to explain his novels, don’t be surprised if he merely cries “Boo!” If I were God, that’s how I’d answer my theologians.
* Hero and sidekick, respectively, of the popular 1950s television series Gunsmoke.
† But also keeps bringing Him back into fashion.
More on the Same Subject
ON THE AFTERNOON before or the morning after one’s public lecture comes the Informal Open Seminar With Interested Students of Writing or Literature. In the course of that aforementioned maiden lecture-trip to Hiram College, I opened my maiden IOSWISOWOL thus:
How many of you are familiar with W. H. Auden’s sonnet “The Novelist”?
[Show of hand.]
Let me refresh your memories:
THE NOVELIST
Encased in talent like a uniform,
The rank of every poet is well known;
They can amaze us like a thunderstorm,
Or die so young, or live for years alone.
They can dash forward like hussars: but he
Must struggle out of his boyish gift and learn
How to be plain and awkward, how to be
One after whom none think it worth to turn.
For, to achieve his lightest wish, he must
Become the whole of boredom, subject to
Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just
Be just, among the Filthy filthy too,
And in his own weak person, if he can,
Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.
This poem helps account for the famous fact that young people’s fiction—I mean fiction written by, not for, young people—is seldom very good. At least not
as often as good as their poetry is. A look through almost any undergraduate literary magazine will bear out this painful truth, as will a review of literary biography: The actuarial profile of fiction-writers, especially of novelists, shows a slower maturation curve than that of lyric poets, theoretical physicists, mathematicians, and chess players.
The last two lines of Auden’s poem also imply one famous view of what the novelist’s function is: a view echoed before the fact in Stephen Dedalus’s celebrated vow (in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, last chapter) “to forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race.”
Well. I have come from State College P A to Hiram O in order to wonder aloud in your presence what a novel is and what it’s for—an activity suspicious at best and pernicious at worst. Pernicious because in the artist’s worst case, talking about his art may become a substitute for making it; suspicious—let’s say suspect—because what artists say about their art must often be taken with a grain of salt. They may speak vaguely of “inspiration,” for example, when the fact is that their assiduously practiced discipline has become such second nature that they’re no longer conscious of its complex operation. They may truly not understand their own work, in the critical-analytical way in which a professional talker-about-art understands it. Or they may be pulling the public leg: I think of Robert Frost’s insistence that his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which has to do with a muted and deferred death wish, has nothing to do with a muted and deferred death wish, as John Ciardi and others insist it does, but is merely and literally about stopping by woods on a snowy evening. I think of William Faulkner’s reportedly replying—to an interviewer who asked him whether The Sound and the Fury is not “on one level” a debate among the Id, the Ego, and the Superego—“Wouldn’t s’prise me atall.”
This foot-shuffling, shit-kicking, finger-in-the-collar, I’m-just-a-pore-country-cracker pose is Mister Mark Twain’s legacy to American writers. I can’t imagine Hawthorne, Emerson, Poe, Melville, or even Thoreau indulging in it. I myself find it unbecoming, though I understand the impulse. I am no friend of anti-intellectuality; anti-intellectuality, even anti-intelligence, has enough friends already, and does not need me. Yesterday I remarked that it’s no doubt better to be able to make wonderful things that you can’t explain than to be able to explain wonderful things that you can’t make. I affirm that opinion today; but as a writer who also tries to teach literature (I mean teach students; I’m not likely to teach literature anything), and who happens to admire and respect good scholarship, I here go on record as believing that neither talent—the talent for making or the talent for explaining—is to be sneezed at. The gift of explaining wonderful things that you can’t yourself make—novels, paintings, trees, animal courtship rituals, planetary movements—is also a wonderful thing. Better, certainly, than being able neither to make nor to explain.
So: The question before us this December 1960 morning is What are novels for? And the answer is Any damn thing you want to use them for. For their readers, collectively, they may be public psychotherapy, as Aristotle seems to say Greek tragedy was: I take that to be the general sense of Auden’s poem. For their readers individually, novels may function as extensions of or alternatives to their single mortality: Even the Bonapartes evidently found it tiresome to be just Bonapartes; they all read novels, and most of them wrote novels, too. Novels may function as criticisms of life, as criticisms of society, as ideological or moral propaganda. They may function as aphrodisiacs, soporifics, items of interior decoration, doorstops. The Doubleday hardcover first edition of my novel The Sot- Weed Factor happens to weigh almost exactly two pounds and has a dust jacket drawn by the wonderful artist Edward Gorey; you might frame that dust jacket for your Edward Gorey collection and use the text as a kitchen-scale counterweight to tell whether your roast of beef weighs more or less than two pounds. You might also read the book.
As for the novelist himself, his motives may be as multifarious as his readers’. To be sure, he may be out to forge racial conscience in the smithy of his soul or to suffer dully in his own weak person all the wrongs of man. On the other hand, he may aim for nothing more nor less than aesthetic bliss—that’s what Vladimir Nabokov says his pure and total aim is. But the journals and biographies of the great novelists teach us that their novels also served for them such important functions as sources of income, of prestige, of social or sexual or career advancement; as outlets for their smart or cranky ideas or their mere spleen; as escape from their spouses, their kids, their chores. In short, as just about anything imaginable.
This being the case, we must allow that what a novel is may be more than or different from what it’s for. I propose we drop the for and address the is.
My contention, as some of you heard yesterday, is that a novel is not essentially a view of this universe (though it may reflect one), but a universe itself; that the novelist is not finally a spectator, an imitator, or a purger of the public psyche, but a maker of universes: a demiurge. At least a semidemiurge. I don’t mean this frivolously or sentimentally. I don’t mean it even as a figure of speech (as Joyce does, elsewhere in the Portrait, when he speaks of the artist as God, standing in the wings of his creation, paring his fingernails). I mean it literally and rigorously: The heavy universe we sit in here in Hiram, Ohio, and the two-pound universe of The Sot-Weed Factor, say, are cousins, because the maker of this one and the maker of that one are siblings.
This contention will strike you as immodest. It is.
Questions?
An Afterword to Roderick Random
I AM NO SCHOLAR. Because my 1960 novel The Sot-Weed Factor betrays some familiarity with Colonial America and the eighteenth-century English novel, some readers have reasonably but mistakenly inferred that I must know a good deal about those subjects. For the purposes of fiction, however, a novelist can become sufficiently knowledgeable about almost anything in a hurry. To authenticate a mere passing metaphor—one drawn from sailing, say, or medieval siege warfare—the writer may read a whole book on the subject; on the other hand, two chapters on testamentary law may enable him to do a courtroom scene upon which his whole plot turns.
To be sure, many novels are written out of long and deep acquaintance with their materials, and all great novels, one supposes, out of deep acquaintance with their subject. The distinction is useful: more upon it in the Friday-piece “About Aboutness,” farther on. With the subject of The Sot-Weed Factor—innocence—I was guilty of much experience, but its eighteenth-century materials I worked up ad hoc and promptly afterwards forgot. In this respect a novelist may be the opposite of an iceberg: Nine-tenths (Or is it four-fifths? Six-sevenths? It is eight-ninths: I have just looked it up for the purposes of this metaphor) of what he knows—about icebergs, say—may be right there on the surface of the page for which he learned it.
Thus when the editors of the Signet Classics invited me in 1963 to write an introductory essay (published as an afterword in the format for that series) to their edition of Tobias Smollett’s 1748 novel Roderick Random*, they innocently assumed me to be something of an eighteenth-century specialist. I responded that I had in fact neither read anything at all of Smollett’s nor ever written a literary essay. They responded, in effect, Why not try both? I did.
Rereading the result twenty years later, I hear what we call the 1960s beginning to rumble in its latter pages. And I confess to being tantalized by how nearly I uttered, at the end, the now talismanic word postmodern. Oh, well.
Among the pleasures of Smollett is that one swift reading does him. He wrote quickly and not too carefully, and might as well be read that way; close and repeated goings-over of Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and the rest will add little to what one gathered the first time through, and are likely to prove somewhat tiresome, like a second ride on the same roller coaster.
No use looking in Roderick Random for “deeper meanings,” for example, or any significances beyond the ob
vious. After its brilliant opening, in which Roderick’s mother dreams herself delivered of a tennis ball by the devil, the story is as literal and explicit as its hero-narrator, who reports his extremes of mood as glibly as if they were external events, like his shifting fortunes: I am seized with a deep melancholy and become a sloven —I am more and more happy —I am treacherously knocked down —I am married. Even the remarkable dream is explained at once, lest we dally over it, and however teasingly inadequate the Highland seer’s analysis, it is characteristic that the dream turns out to mean exactly and unironically what he says it means: that Roderick will travel a great deal, suffer adversity, return, and nourish. We later readers may wonder why that tennis ball buried itself at Mrs. Random’s feet, say, and why it was the perfume of the blossoms, exactly (of the shrub the ball then turned into), that woke her up, and whether the “strong operations” of that perfume were pleasant or disturbing. Readers in a good many earlier centuries might have shared our curiosity. But Smollett does not, nor apparently did most of his contemporaries. To give a name like “Captain Weazel” to a loud-mouthed little coward is about as far as he ventures in the extra-meaning way—blithely forgetting even so that two sentences earlier he’d likened the captain to “a spider or grasshopper erect,” called him “a… coxcomb,” and dressed him in “a frock of what is called bearskin.” Some weasel! For the rest, the action of this “first and greatest of all sea stories,” as Roderick has been misbilled (ignoring not only the Odyssey, for instance, but the fact that little more than a third of the book has anything to do with seafaring), is played out strictly on the surface.
And a bawdy, glistering surface it is, eighteenth-century England! The Scyllas and Grendels whom earlier heroes dealt with have been evicted by the Age of Reason, to be replaced by Crampleys and Mackshanes; only a more-or-less mad intelligence like Blake’s saw clearly that the dragons weren’t exterminated at all but had merely retired, into caves and deeps inaccessible to the Enlightenment, there to change costume and await the next act. Formerly the monsters came after us, or met us at the threshold of their realm, and we did our best with magic weapons and magic words. Latterly, armored in bathyscaphes and the formulas of depth psychology, we go down after them. In either case, and as foe or quarry, the adversary is acknowledged and the issue joined. But the world of Fielding and Smollett, if treacherous enough, is nowise mysterious; their heroes’ way is stormy but never dark; Roderick voyages out to Paraguay and Guinea, but not to that place where, Homer tells us, “East and West mean nothing”—where form and time, reason and identity, all go by the board. When Aeneas hears the wingbeats of a bird, it turns out to be Celaeno the Harpy; when Roderick and Strap are beset by a demon, it turns out to be somebody’s pet raven—Ralpho by name. Nice ladies aforetime not infrequently proved to be witches; Mrs. Sagely, who shelters Roderick after the shipwreck, is suspected of witchcraft but turns out to be a nice lady. Although in both instances the appearance differs from the reality, to the eighteenth-century storyteller it was the reality for a change that appeared less awesome and more interesting, however rough in some features. Divine, for better or worse, no longer meant goddish, merely sexy (e.g., “that divine creature” Narcissa, a “gift of Providence” whose “angelic charms” include an “Elysian” décolletage). Devilish no longer meant diabolical, either literally or figuratively, but devil-may-care: The fellow mistaken for Old Nick in Chapter XXXVII is Roderick himself. To the rough-and-ready rationalism of the time, the devil is only a scapegrace, and the deep blue sea is only wide. A kind of outer darkness, so to speak, which formerly had shadowed the surface of things, was dispersed for good and all; their inner darkness had yet to be reappreciated. Dante’s Beatrice and the ghost of Hamlet’s father lay behind; Moby-Dick and Kafka’s bug-man lay ahead; in the meanwhile, fetching or foul, hurrah for the literal skin of things! Homer’s Penelope is more than a wife: She’s Destination. Joyce’s Molly Bloom is among other things a Female Principle. But Fielding’s Sophie Western is only a woman, and Smollett’s Narcissa is scarce even that: Not truly a body, much less an embodiment, she’s a mere bright-skinned reflection of the hero’s self-esteem: a comely face, a fetching bosom, and an utterly non-cosmic womb.
