by John Barth
With respect to literature’s impact upon contemporary society, W. H. Auden said it right: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Neither does fiction, as a rule, even engagée fiction. The sort of fiction that does affect the world of affairs is likely not to be first-rate art, even when, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, it is first-rate moral propaganda. Many of us would put Uncle Tom’s Cabin in this category: it is not War and Peace, but Abraham Lincoln is said to have remarked, upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe during the American Civil War: “So you’re the little lady who caused all this.” The best fiction of Vladimir Nabokov is in my opinion incomparably better stuff than Solzhenitsyn’s; yet Nabokov’s declared objective—so far from changing the world or “impacting” contemporary society, as they say nowadays—is “mere aesthetic bliss.”
So. I have asked and been granted permission to turn the topic around, since contemporary society indisputably has an impact upon contemporary literature. Here is what I have to say:
First of all, as any bulletin from Amnesty International or the literary organization P.E.N. will attest, when Contemporary Society is not actively suppressing, coercing, censoring, or otherwise bullying and silencing the authors of our contemporary literature, as happens in more nations of the world than not, it is likely to assist them in their self-destruction or self-corruption—a circumstance not entirely society’s fault, to be sure. The fate of numerous American best-selling novelists moved Leslie Fiedler to observe, “Nothing fails like success.” Second, when doing neither of the above to its writers, it may yet corrupt, distract, miseducate, or otherwise deprive them of their audiences, and a writer without readers is a tree falling without hearers: It is a moot question whether he has made any noise at all. But I have no idea what if anything is to be done about that.
Finally, of course, contemporary society is what all writers write about, and its history affects the way we write about it. The experience of being human beings, alive in this world now, is what even solipsists, historical novelists, science-fiction writers, concrete poets, and art-for-art’s-sakers write about—if only as the suicide makes his little comment upon life by declining to live it.
Having said this, which no doubt went without saying, I have said my total say upon the matter. If the Barth line on The Impact of Literature Upon Contemporary Society is the extent of your interest in me, I here excuse you from the remainder of the hour.
Well. Being unable to dissertate, I have further asked and received permission to illustrate The Impact of Et Cetera upon at least one writer—this one—and so I now turn with some relief to my second problem, which is as follows:
For several years in the 1960s I was interested in oral narrative, both with the live authorial voice and with electronic tape: fiction for the ear, the spring from which written literature sprang. And being a musician-gone-wrong, I like to choose for occasions like this a piece of my fiction that performs well, whatever its other merits and shortcomings, and then perform it enough times to get fairly good at it. For a year or so I did the tape-and-live-voice pieces out of the series called Lost in the Funhouse; more recently I’ve been reading from the novellas in a book of mine called Chimera: novellas about the mythical Greek heroes Perseus and Bellerophon and about Scheherazade’s kid sister.
Unfortunately, my fiction in progress has nothing whatever to do with oral narrative. It is meant absolutely for the printed page. But I want to try a little bit of it anyhow, because I’ve been working on it for several years now in that peculiar vacuum that a novelist has to sustain in order to get his work done.
Here are some things I don’t mind telling you about the project: It is a book-length fiction, more a novel than not. In fact, muse help me, it’s in the most venerable and vulnerable of English novel-forms, the epistolary novel —made so popular by Samuel Richardson in the second third of the eighteenth century that it was already worked to death by the third third of the eighteenth century. The jury may still be out on the famous and unimportant question of the death of the novel, but that the novel-in-letters has long since run its course, even Samuel Richardson was declaring by 1759, in a pair of remarkable letters which may well be the first mention of the Novel’s demise.
The title of my novel-in-letters is LETTERS. It consists of letters between several correspondents, and it is preoccupied with the role of epistles—real letters, forged letters, doctored letters, mislaid and misdirected letters—in the history of history. It is also concerned with, and of course constituted of, alphabetical letters, the atoms of which the universe of print is made. (There is a charming Cabalistical tradition that the primordial Torah was a jumble of letters, just as the primordial universe was a chaos of atoms, and that the Hebrew letters arranged themselves into words and sentences as the events they describe came to pass.) Finally, to some extent the book is addressed to the phenomenon of literature itself, the third main sense of our English word letters.
Letters is a seven-letter word. LETTERS is my seventh book of fiction. The letters in LETTERS are from seven correspondents, some of them recruited from my earlier books, and they’re dated over the seven months from March through September of 1969 (for some exquisite reason that I have forgotten), though they also involve the 1976 U.S. Bicentennial, the War of 1812, the American Revolution, revolutions and recyclings in general, and other things. There are to be 88 letters in all, and since I have as of this hour drafted 54 of them, I am about four-sevenths of the way through, serenely confident that the first four-sevenths of any project are the hardest.
By 1968 I knew at least one other detail about the enterprise: that at a point six-sevenths of the way through there should occur two stories within the main story: one about Perseus and Medusa, to be written by Ambrose Mensch, a character from Lost in the Funhouse who is also one of our correspondents; and a story about Bellerophon and the original Chimera to be written by one Jerome Bonaparte Bray, another of our correspondents and the putative editor of Giles Goat-Boy. I decided to write those little off-central texts first, and they grew into the Chimera book aforementioned, which is thus to some extent contaminated from the future by the project that was meant to give it birth.
Ah, the artist’s life.
My reading tonight will be an illustration of that contamination, followed by a sample of the contaminant-in-progress.
In the opening of the novella “Perseid,” the centerpiece of Chimera, the hero Perseus, now a constellation in the sky, recalls the day he tried to repeat his youthful exploits and crashed into the Libyan desert. As I read it, you are to nudge your neighbor and say “Get it? Letters.”
Good evening.
Stories last longer than men, stones than stories, stars than stones. But even our stars’ nights are numbered, and with them will pass this patterned tale to a long-deceased earth.
Nightly, when I wake to think myself beworlded and find myself in heaven, I review the night I woke to think and find myself vice-versa. I’d been long lost, deserted, down and out in Libya; two decades past I’d overflown that country with the bloody Gorgon’s head, and every drop that hit the dunes had turned to snake—so I learned later. At twenty years and twenty kilometers high, how could I have known? Now there I was, sea-leveled, forty, parched and plucked, every grain in my molted sandals raising blisters, and beleaguered by the serpents of my past. It must have been that of all the gods in heaven, the two I’d never got along with put it to me: sandy Ammon, my mother-in-law’s pet deity, who’d first sent Andromeda over the edge, and Sabazius the beer-god, who’d raised the roof in Argos till I raised him a temple. Just then I’d’ve swapped Mycenae for a cold draught and a spot of shade to sip it in; I even prayed to the rascals. Nothing doing. Couldn’t think where I’d been or where was headed, lost track of me entirely, commenced hallucinating, wow. Somewhere back in my flying youth I’d read how to advertise help wanted when you’re brought down: I stamped a whopping PERSEUS in the sand, forgot what I was about, writing sets your mind a-tramp; next thin
g I knew I’d printed PERSEUS LOVES ANDROMED half a kilometer across the dunes. Wound up in a depression with the three last letters; everything before them slipped my mind; not till I added USA was I high enough again to get the message, how I’d confused what I’d set out to clarify. I fried awhile longer on the dune-top, trying to care; I was a dying man: so what if my Mayday had grown through self-advertisement to an amphisbane graffito? But O I was a born reviser, and would die one: as I looked back on what I’d written, a fresh East breeze sprang from the right margin, behind, where I’d been aiming, and drifted the A I’d come to rest on. I took its cue, erased the whole name, got lost in the vipered space between object and verb, went on erasing, erasing all, talking to myself, crazy man: no more LOVES, no more LOVE, clean the slate altogether—me too, take it off, all of it. But I’d forgot by that time who I was, relost in the second space, my first draft’s first; I snaked as far as the subject’s final S and, frothing, swooned, made myself after that seventh letter a mad dash—
Very well. And in the novella called “Bellerophoniad,” Bellerophon’s account of his childhood tutor, Polyeidus, echoes this same preoccupation with letters:
“Our tutor he became, Polyeidus, Polyeidus, after being prophet laureate to the court of Corinth. Though featured in several other myths, on the strength of which Dad had hired him, he declared to us he had no memory of his pre-Corinthian past, or any youth. Some said he’d been Proteus’s apprentice, others that he was some stranded version of The Old Man of the Sea himself. At such stories Polyeidus shrugged, saying only that all shape-shifters are revisions of tricky Proteus. But he dismissed the conventional Protean transformations—into animals, plants, and such—as mere vaudeville entertainment, and would never oblige us with a gryphon or a unicorn, say, howevermuch we pled, or stoop to such homely predictions as next day’s weather. For this reason, among others, he was demoted to tutor; and he urged upon us, even as boys, a severer view of magic. By no means, he used to insist, did magicians necessarily understand their art, though experience had led him to a couple of general observations on it. For example, that each time he learned something new about his powers, those powers diminished, anyhow altered. Also, that what he “turned into” on those occasions when he transformed was not altogether within his governance. Under certain circumstances he would frown, give a kind of grunt, and turn into something, which might or might not resemble what if anything he’d had in mind. Sometimes his magic failed him when he called upon it; other times it seized him when he had no use for it; and the same was true of his prophesying. ‘It will be alleged that Napoleon died on St. Helena in 1821,’ he would announce, with no more notion than we of the man and place and date he meant, or the significance of the news; ‘in fact he escaped to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, to establish his base for the Second Revolution.’ Most disappointingly to Deliades and me, his transformations were generally into what he came to call ‘historical personages from the future’: this same Napoleon, for example, or Captain John Smith of the American plantation of Virginia: useless to our education. But no sooner did he see this pattern than he lost the capacity, and changed thenceforward only into documents, mainly epistolary: Napoleon’s imaginary letter from King Theodore to Sir Robert Walpole, composed after the Emperor’s surrender; Plato’s Seventh Letter; the letter from Denmark to England which Hamlet transferred to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; the Isidorian Decretals; the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; Madame de Staël’s Lettres sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau; the ‘Henry Letters’ purchased for $50,000 by President Madison’s administration from the impostor Compte de Crillon in 1811 to promote the War of 1812; the letter from Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, commander of the British fleet at Halifax, to that same president, warning that unless reparations were made for the Americans’ destruction of Newark and St. Davids in Canada, the British would retaliate by burning Washington—a letter said to be either antedated or intentionally delayed, as it reached its address when the capital was in ashes; the false letter describing mass movements of Indian and Canadian forces against Detroit, planted by the Canadian General Brock so that the U.S. General Hull would discover it, panic, and surrender the city; a similar letter dated September 11, 1813, which purported to be from Colonel Fossett of Vermont to General MacComb, advising him of massive reinforcements on the way to aid him against the Canadian General Prévost in the Battle of Plattsburg: it was entrusted to an Irishwoman of Cumberland Head whom the U.S. Secret Service, its actual author, knew to be loyal to the British; Prevost, when she dutifully turned it over to him, took it to be authentic and retreated into Canada, though no such reinforcements existed. Et cetera. Doctored letters. My brother and I were not very interested.”
Later in that same novella, Bellerophon, wandering in the marshes, “far from the paths of men,” Homer tells us, “devouring his own soul,” actually receives a sort of letter from the author, washed up in an empty bottle, in which letter the author reviews the myth of Bellerophon and then remarks:
… the two central images—Pegasus and the Chimera—appealed to me profoundly. I envisioned a comic novella based on the myth; a companion-piece to “Perseid,” perhaps. To compose it I set aside a much larger and more complicated project, a novel called LETTERS: It seemed anyway to have become a vast morass of plans, notes, false starts, in which I grew more mired with every attempt to extricate myself.
Are writers supposed to put stuff like that into their fiction? Don’t ask me. In any case, that was 1968: Things are slogging along nicely now, thank you—though I’m not sure what I’ll do when I reach that spot six-sevenths of the way through LETTERS where these two stories were designed to go.
The artist’s life; the artist’s life.
My Two Problems: 3
COULD I still have been doing the Two Problems bit in 1977? Evidently so, though as with all literary formulas, repetition had rendered it by then more than a touch perfunctory. At the University of Louisville, Kentucky, in February 1 977, for example, the general topic of the university’s annual Conference on Twentiety-Century Literature was “Speed, Time, and Change”…
I have two problems this evening.
The first, of which I gave our hosts fair warning, is that I haven’t much to say directly upon the subject of our conference: Speed, Time, and Change in Twentieth-Century Literature. The reason for this is that although I read impertinent critics now and then who suggest that John Barth has fallen silent, a victim of the Literature of Exhaustion, I have in fact been hard at work for a number of years at top speed, on a literary project that has turned out to demand more time than I’d expected, and which, Proteus-like, has changed its nature under my hands while I, like Menelaus on the beach at Pharos, wrestle to hold onto it—and, in the wrestling, grow wiser but no younger.
Among the hazards of composing long works is the Heraclitean one: The Proust who finished The Past Recaptured was not the Proust who began Swann’s Way. My novel-so-long-in-progress bids to take seven years to complete: long enough for every cell in the author’s body to replace itself. Long enough for a young person to matriculate as a college freshman and complete a Ph.D. And just long enough, Horace tells us, for the composition of a proper epic.
So much for my first problem. Our hosts have kindly given me leave to illustrate the subject that I cannot dissertate upon, by excerpting from this protean project and growing older before your very eyes. As for the second problem…
My Two Uncles
HERE’S A switch on the old routine that I rather like, delivered in Walt Whitman’s house in Camden, New Jersey, on Walt Whitman Day—May 5—1976, at the annual homage to the good gray poet sponsored by the Camden branch campus of Rutgers University.
My first problem this afternoon is that your guest speakers on Walt Whitman Day, normally and properly, should be either eminent American poets or scholars of classical American literature, both of whom will have had to come to some sort of professional terms with their great gray literary ancestor. Thus for
example Professor Donald Davie, in a recent review of John Berryman’s posthumously collected papers, says, “It cannot be denied that at some point in mid-career Berryman momentously shifted his stance toward his art and the experience his art fed upon… And the shift seems to have to do, not surprisingly, with that inescapable figure in every American poet’s heritage, Walt Whitman.”
Professor Davie’s own forthcoming book is a new critical study of Ezra Pound; as he wrote that sentence about John Berryman, he was perhaps remembering Pound’s explicit reconciliation with his ancestor: the early poem called “A Pact”:
A PACT
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman—
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root—
Let there be commerce between us.
But me, I’m neither a poet nor a scholar of American literature. I have had no particular quarrel with Walt Whitman; therefore I feel no particular urge for atonement with him. The spiritual fathers I’ve had to make my own pacts with are mainly European. Indeed, Leslie Fiedler, in an early essay on my “historical” novel The Sot-Weed Factor, in the course of commending me for staying as it were in the Maryland marshes, made this remark: “Only such a European-oriented writer as Walt Whitman at his worst believes that to portray America one must encompass its imaginary vastness, its blurred totality.” I agreed with Fiedler then; I still agree with him.
