by John Barth
4. But this terrifying relation is also a fertilizing one; Scheherazade bears the king three children over those 1001 nights, as well as telling all those stories. Much could be said about those parallel productions…
5. Which, however, cease—at least her production of stories ceases—as soon as the king grants her the “tenure” of formal marriage. So it goes.
My version of the story, told by Scheherazade’s kid sister, Dunyazade, echoes some of these preoccupations. Dunyazade reviews their history for her young bridegroom, the king’s brother, Shah Zaman of Samarkand:
“Three and a third years ago, when King Shahryar was raping a virgin every night and killing her in the morning, and the people were praying that Allah would dump the whole dynasty, and so many parents had fled the country with their daughters that in all the Islands of India and China there was hardly a young girl fit to fuck, my sister was an undergraduate arts-and-sciences major at Banu Sasan University. Besides being Homecoming Queen, valedictorian-elect, and a four-letter varsity athlete, she had a private library of a thousand volumes and the highest average in the history of the campus. Every graduate department in the East was after her with fellowships—but she was so appalled at the state of the nation that she dropped out of school in her last semester to do full-time research on a way to stop Shahryar from killing all our sisters and wrecking the country.
“Political science, which she looked at first, got her nowhere. Shahryar’s power was absolute, and by sparing the daughters of his army officers and chief ministers (like our own father) and picking his victims mainly from the families of liberal intellectuals and other minorities, he kept the military and the cabinet loyal enough to rule out a coup d’état. Revolution seemed out of the question, because his woman-hating, spectacular as it was, was reinforced more or less by all our traditions and institutions, and as long as the girls he was murdering were generally upper-caste, there was no popular base for guerrilla war. Finally, since he could count on your help from Samarkand, invasion from outside or plain assassination were bad bets too: Sherry figured your retaliation would be worse than Shahryar’s virgin-a-night policy.
“So we gave up poly sci (I fetched her books and sharpened her quills and made tea and alphabetized her index cards) and tried psychology—another blind alley. Once she’d noted that your reaction to being cuckolded by your wife was homicidal rage followed by despair and abandonment of your kingdom, and that Shahryar’s was the reverse; and established that that was owing to the difference in your ages and the order of revelations; and decided that whatever pathology was involved was a function of the culture and your position as absolute monarchs rather than particular hang-ups in your psyches, et cetera—what was there to say?
“She grew daily more desperate; the body-count of deflowered and decapitated Moslem girls was past nine hundred, and Daddy was just about out of candidates. Sherry didn’t especially care about herself, you understand—wouldn’t have even if she hadn’t guessed that the King was sparing her out of respect for his vizier and her own accomplishments. But beyond the general awfulness of the situation, she was particularly concerned for my sake. From the day I was born, when Sherry was about nine, she treasured me as if I were hers; I might as well not have had parents; she and I ate from the same plate, slept in the same bed; no one could separate us; I’ll bet we weren’t apart for an hour in the first dozen years of my life. But I never had her good looks or her way with the world—and I was the youngest in the family besides. My breasts were growing; already I’d begun to menstruate: any day Daddy might have to sacrifice me to save Sherry.
“So when nothing else worked, as a last resort she turned to her first love, unlikely as it seemed, mythology and folklore, and studied all the riddle/puzzle/secret motifs she could dig up. ‘We need a miracle, Doony,’ she said (I was braiding her hair and massaging her neck as she went through her notes for the thousandth time), ‘and the only genies I’ve ever met were in stories, not in Moormen’s-rings and Jews’-lamps. It’s in words that the magic is—Abracadabra, Open Sesame, and the rest—but the magic words in one story aren’t magical in the next. The real magic is to understand which words work, and when, and for what; the trick is to learn the trick.’ ”
In other words—as Dunyazade and Scheherazade and the Author come to learn in the pages that follow—the key to the treasure may be the treasure.
The tuition for that sort of lesson can be very high. Retracing one’s steps—“becoming as a kindergartener again,” as the goat-boy puts it—may be necessary to a fruitful reorientation, but one runs the risk of losing oneself in the past instead of returning to the present equipped to move forward into the future. Perseus (in the second Chimera novella, called “Perseid”) understands this, though he’s not sure for a while what to do with his understanding. He too has retraced his heroical route, recapitulated his mythic exploits, and not for vanity’s sake, but for reorientation. As he says one night to the nymph Calyxa, as she and he are making love:
“Well, now, perhaps it was a bit vain of me to want to retrace my good young days; but it wasn’t just vanity; no more were my nightly narratives: Somewhere along that way I’d lost something, took a wrong turn, forgot some knack, I don’t know; it seemed to me that if I kept going over it carefully enough I might see the pattern, find the key.”
“A little up and to your left,” Calyxa whispered.
And a bit farther on:
“Thus this endless repetition of my story: As both protagonist and author, so to speak, I thought to overtake with understanding my present paragraph as it were by examining my paged past, and, thus pointed, proceed serene to the future’s sentence.”
Perseus’s research is successful: He finds the Key and moves on to his proper destiny, which is to become a constellation in the sky, endlessly reenacting his story in his risings and settings. Perseus “makes it” because his vocation is legitimate: He doesn’t major in Mythic Heroism; he happens to be a mythic hero, whose only problem is what to do for an encore. And if his ultimate stardom is ambivalent (he can’t embrace the constellation he loves, which hangs right next to him forever), it is the ambivalence of immortality, as Keats tells us in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
More cautionary is the lesson of Bellerophon, the hero of the final Chimera novella. Like Giles the goat-boy, Bellerophon aspires to be a mythic hero; it is his only study. When Perseus reaches middle age, he researches his own history and the careers of other mythic heroes in order to understand what brought him to where he is, so that he can go on. Young Bellerophon’s orientation, on the other hand, is that by following perfectly the ritual pattern of mythic heroism—by getting all A’s and four letters of recommendation, as it were—he will become a bona fide mythic hero like his cousin Perseus. What he learns, and it is an expensive lesson, is that by perfectly imitating the pattern of mythic heroism, one becomes a perfect imitation of a mythic hero, which is not quite the same thing as being Perseus the Golden Destroyer. Hence the novella’s title, “Bellerophoniad.” Something similar may befall the writer too fixated upon his/her distinguished predecessors; it is a disoriented navigator indeed who mistakes the stars he steers by for his destination.
He is not, however, my Bellerophon, entirely phony: He is too earnest for that, too authentically dedicated to his profession, whatever the limits of his gift. What’s more, he really does kill the Chimera—that fictive monster or monstrous fiction—to the extent that it ever really existed in the first place. Bellerophon’s immortality is of a more radically qualified sort: What he becomes is not the story of his own exploits, as Perseus does up there among the other stars, but the text of the story “Bellerophoniad.” Pegasus, the winged horse of inspiration on which Bellerophon has flown, gets to heaven (in fact, he’s one of the constellations in the Perseus group); his rider is thrown at the threshold of the gate, falls for a long time (long enough to tell his long tale), and is transformed just in the nick of time into the pages, the sentences, the let
ters of the book Chimera. To turn into the sound of one’s own voice is an occupational hazard of professional storytellers; even more so, I imagine, of professional lecturers.
That brings us to the present, appropriately, just at the end of my allotted hour. All these retracements, recapitulations, rehearsals, and reenactments really would be simply regressive if they didn’t issue in reorientation, from which new work can proceed. But that, as Scheherazade says, is another story, for another night.
I wish you good luck in your own orientation. East is over that way.
POSTSCRIPT 1984, FOR THE CLASS OF 1988
The novel LETTERS, alluded to above and published some while after that orientation lecture, centers upon an enormous (and hypothetical) third-rate American university, Marshyhope State, constructed for my purposes on the freshly filled saltmarsh of my native Dorchester County, in Maryland. The year is 1969, the heyday of U.S. academic imperialism and gigantism. Marshyhope’s architectural symbol and intended beacon to the world, The Tower of Truth, on the eve of its dedication already shows signs of subsiding into the fenlands whence it sprang, like the Hancock Tower into Back Bay Boston.
As R. D. Laing rationalizes schizophrenia, at least in certain cases, as a sane response to a deranged but inescapable set of circumstances, so the cautionary example of Marshyhope State suggests that—in certain cases, at least—the fault of disorientation may lie not in ourselves, Horatio, but in our alma maters and paters. To disoriented undergraduates (and to readers bogged down in LETTERS) I say: By all means allow for that possibility—but do not jump to that conclusion, as it is most likely mistaken.
My little novel Sabbatical: A Romance (1982) carries the Laingian scenario farther. Todd Andrews in The Floating Opera (and again in LETTERS) wonders sentence by sentence whether his heart will carry him from subject to predicate; in Sabbatical, set on Chesapeake Bay in 1980, the background question is whether the world will end before the novel does.
More specifically, the question is whether one can responsibly bring children into the disoriented powder-keg wherein we dwell. The prospective parents in Sabbatical are literal navigators, of a seaworthy cruising sailboat (she is a proper young academic, on sabbatical leave; he is a decent, middle-aged ex-CIA officer, between careers). They are oriented; the course they steer is accurate, if not always straightforward. What’s more, after years of marriage and trials large and small they remain happily in love with each other. In an oriented world, their landfall—and progeny—would be assured. In the troubled and dangerous waters through which they, like the rest of us, necessarily sail, however, no degree of skill in navigation or of seaworthiness in the vessel guarantees that the destination will still be there at our Estimated Time of Arrival.
This being the more or less apocalyptical case—the Sot-Weed Factor supplanted as it were by the Doomsday Factor—why set a course at all, whether toward graduation or procreation or distinguished career or further fiction? This is the approximate subject of my next effort at self-orientation: my novel presently in the works.
But that, as Scheherazade says, is etc.
My Two Problems: 1
THROUGH the rest of the academic year 1975/76, my once-a-month fiction readings were a program of excerpts from and around the LETTERS novel, still under construction. Reading “live” from that book presented a small problem, set forth below; but at one of the first tryouts of the program, that small problem was overshadowed by another more considerable.
In October 1975, Michigan State University staged an elaborate homage to Jorge Luis Borges. The elderly writer was flown up to East Lansing from Buenos Aires, together with his secretary-guide-companion-nurse, and established in a year’s residency, from which he would make frequent excursions about the country. Borges translators and Borges critics were assembled to read papers and tributes.
By reason of my “Literature of Exhaustion” essay, I was invited to the feast, but given permission to read from my fiction instead of preparing yet another essay in praise of Borges. I accepted, pleased to pay my respects again to the great man, whom I hadn’t crossed paths with for seven years, and confidently assuming that my reading from LETTERS would be but one more of the preliminaries to Sr. Borges’s own public presentation, the culmination of the festivities.
However, in an exquisite lapse of good judgment, the orchestrators of the homage climaxed the several-day celebration by scheduling Borges’s main appearance in the afternoon of the final day, to be followed by a testimonial banquet, to be followed in turn and presumably wrapped up by… my reading. I was appalled at that impossible programming, and said so. No help for it, my hosts explained: The old chap is 77; he tires easily and therefore prefers to do his number in the afternoon.
He did, impressively indeed, stringing together anecdotes and comments upon his work in an informal but practiced spiel to a large, reverent audience which he could not see. Well, I said to myself: Hard as this act will be to follow, at least Borges himself will tire early as promised and not attend my anticlimactic coda to the main event. Alas, dinner gave the man new energy; he insisted not only upon coming to my reading, but upon sitting front row center, flanked by his companion and his American translator, where I could see his reaction to every line. For that hour I could almost have wished myself blind; but the show had to go on.
Good evening.
Our situation tonight is of course impossible.
In 1966, in an effort to come to terms with the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, which I admired more than my own, I wrote an essay called “The Literature of Exhaustion.” Among other remarks which have risen from that essay to haunt or embarrass me since—whether because they were marvelously misunderstood or because they were understood correctly—was this one: “Our century is more than two-thirds done; it is dismaying to see so many of our writers still following Dostoevsky or Flaubert, when the real problem seems to me to be how to follow not even Joyce and Kafka, but those who’ve followed Joyce and Kafka and are now in the evenings of their own careers.” How does one follow Nabokov, Beckett, Borges?
I did not imagine in 1966 that I would have to confront the problem in this literal a fashion. It delights me that the writer I was praising nine years ago “in the evening of his career” has spoken to us today in the vigorous afternoon and left the evening to us poor epigones. I am in the position of the heroine of my novella about Scheherazade’s younger sister, Dunyazade, who sat at the foot of the king’s bed for 1001 nights, watching Scheherazade and him make love and listening to all those stories. The Genie in my story exclaims at one point:
“All those nights at the foot of the bed, Dunyazade!… You’ve had the whole literary tradition transmitted to you—and the whole erotic tradition, too! There’s no story you haven’t heard; there’s no way of making love that you haven’t seen again and again. I think of you, little sister, a virgin in both respects: All that innocence! All that sophistication! And now it’s your turn: Shahryar has told [his younger brother] Shah Zaman about his wonderful mistress, how he loves her as much for herself as for her stories—which he also passes on; the two brothers marry the two sisters; it’s your wedding night, Dunyazade… But wait! Look here! Shahryar deflowered and killed a virgin a night for a thousand and one nights before he met Scheherazade; Shah Zaman has been doing the same thing, but it’s only now, a thousand nights and a night later, that he learns about Scheherazade—that means he’s had two thousand and two young women at the least since he killed his wife, and not one has pleased him enough to move him to spend a second night with her, much less spare her life! What are you going to do to entertain him, little sister? Make love in exciting new ways? There are none! Tell him stories, like Scheherazade? He’s heard them all! Dunyazade, Dunyazade! Who can tell your story?”
Well, one must try. Like the mountebank in Anatole France’s story “The Juggler of Our Lady,” I can pay tribute only by doing my tricks, and must pray that you—and Señor Borges—will accept them in that spirit.
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br /> My second problem is less serious by comparison. I want to read to you from work in progress, since you can read my works in print for yourself. But alas, after spending several years writing fiction for the ear, out of my interest in the oral narrative tradition, I have—as André Gide used to say—walked to the opposite corner of my imagination: The work in hand really is for print, not for reading aloud. Therefore I shall talk about it a bit and read around it some: hors d’oeuvres served up too late, after the chef d’oeuvre of this afternoon.
My Two Problems: 2
THAT little introductory gambit soon turned into a formula. When, as happened several times that season, I was asked to address some particular topic, I would explain that as I hadn’t five minutesworth to say just then on anything except my novel in progress, and as that novel was not really meant for reading aloud from, my inviters had better find another guest lecturer. Sometimes they did; more often, for one reason or another, they said Come say your five minutesworth and then read whatever you please. By October 1976, when I revisited Penn State in a lecture series called “The Impact of Contemporary Literature on Contemporary Society,” the formula was full-fledged.
I have two problems this evening, each less serious than the other.
The first is that I was invited back to Penn State to address the subject “The Impact of Literature Upon Contemporary Society,” your general visiting-lecture-series topic this season. You have set aside your usual and normal evening pursuits to hear what this particular novelist has to say upon that particular subject. But (a) after twenty-five years of professing literature and presiding over apprentice writers—twelve of those years here at University Park, PA—I’ve yet to master the art of formally lecturing on anything, or for that matter of talking and writing on a blackboard simultaneously. Furthermore, (b) I suspect that literature has no impact, or even any measurable effect, on contemporary society. I am reminded of a colleague from my Penn State days who went to India on a Fulbright grant to study the influence of communism on outlying villages in northern India. Having investigated the matter on location for a full year, he urgently applied for and was awarded a renewal of his research grant in order to continue his field investigations. At the end of two years, he returned to this university and published a report which declared, in essence, that there was no significant influence of communism on outlying villages in northern India.
