by John Barth
Fictitious history is something that my LETTERS novel is more or less about: false documents, falsified documents, forged and doctored letters, mislaid and misdirected letters and the like, in the history of History. But I would rather you read the novel than listen to me talk about it.
The next thing that these remarks will emphatically not be about is Mr. James A. Michener’s recent best-selling novel about the Chesapeake Bay/Choptank River area: my native turf, or bog. Mr. Michener and I are respectful acquaintances, but I won’t comment about his novel about the Chesapeake for the excellent reason that I haven’t read it; and I haven’t read it, as I’ve explained to the author, mainly because I’ve been too busy thinking about the subject myself.
But my fiction, I’ve declared, is not finally about tidewater Maryland and its history. There are obvious differences in the way history and fiction are about what they’re about; there are differences just as important, but maybe less obvious, in the way different kinds of fiction are about what they’re about. These different kinds of “aboutness” will be my topic here: I want to speak to you about aboutness.
Now, storytellers and Chesapeake Bay blue crabs have something in common: They usually approach what they’re after sideways. With your indulgence I shall say what I have to say about aboutness by way of five different Chesapeake Bay blue crabs—or rather, five pictures or other representations of crabs. Never mind if you can’t see them from where you’re sitting: I’ll describe them to our purpose. Anyhow, the first of the five crab-representations I don’t have with me, and the last one doesn’t exist. We shall use our imaginations, as both novelists and historians have to do, in their different ways.
The first rendition of a blue crab that I want you to imagine is one of those large preserved ones mounted on a plaque on the wall of any seafood restaurant in the tidewater area. I wasn’t able to lay hands on such a specimen: The best I could come up with is this horseshoe-crab shell that my wife and I picked up off a beach on the Choptank River a couple of years ago when we dinghied in from our sailboat for lunch. Please pretend that it’s a blue crab instead, mounted on the wall of the Crab Claw Restaurant over in St. Michaels, say, and then let’s notice certain things about it.
First and obviously, it isn’t “fiction”: It’s made from the mortal remains of an actual, “historical” animal, preserved by a taxidermist in the case of our restaurant crab; held together with sea-tape in the case of this one. The degree of realism in the representation is therefore considerable, though it’s relative and, so to speak, “historical”: We have only the skeleton; the living, breathing beast is gone, and with it the feel, taste, and smell of the real thing. Its sensory aspects have been reduced to just one, really: the visual aspect. It looks a lot like a crab, even though the colors are a sort of mortician’s approximation of life; there can be no question about its general external accuracy. If we consider what the purposes of such a representation are—which is another way of asking what this crab is about —I think we’ll agree that it has at least five: (1) to help decorate the restaurant; (2) in doing so, to evoke the tidewater atmosphere by means of a bit of natural-historical realism, and thereby (3) to whet our appetites for what we’ve come there for; in other words, and on the bottom line, (4) to sell seafood dinners at an acceptable profit to the owners of the crab and of the restaurant, while incidentally (5) standing as a historical record of an actual crab caught somewhere in the surrounding waters. We shall return to these purposes presently.
Our second and third blue crabs were both rendered by staff artists of the National Geographic Magazine as illustrations for accompanying texts. Number Two is this detail from a color foldout entitled “Marsh Fauna.” It has a lot of other fauna in it besides the blue crab; he or she is tucked down here in the lower right-hand corner, about to grab an anchovy for lunch. Number Three, an ad for the magazine itself, is this pen-and-ink drawing entitled “Blue crab: main cog in an ‘immense protein factory.’ ” (The metaphor is H. L. Mencken’s.) In both of these representations, as in the first one, there is considerable realism in the way of anatomical or biological accuracy. The colors aren’t quite right, of course, even in the foldout, and the drawing is in black and white, as no actual blue crab ever was. Both of them translate the three dimensions of historical blue crabs into two dimensions. And both, unlike the first one, represent no individual, “historical” crab, but rather a generalized, typical, you might say “fictitious” crab. The foldout painting adds an improbable amount of other simultaneous ecological action—all sorts of marsh fauna engaged in eating one another up; more such action than anybody ever saw at once, even in Indian times—and it presumes further to show us in cross-section what’s going on under the water and inside the mudflats. But we don’t object to this exaggeration of the “historical” facts, because we understand the instructional-scientific purpose of the foldout: namely, to illustrate the actual ecology of a Chesapeake marsh by distorting the time-frame, by cutting away certain factual barriers to normal human vision, and by moving the whole scene from the inconvenient reality of three physical dimensions (plus scale, motion, smell, feel, taste, and sound) to the convenience of two visual dimensions, scaled down, frozen in action, and approximated in color. We don’t mistake it for reality, though it is inspired by reality. We don’t mistake it for science, though it grows out of science. We don’t mistake it for fine art, either, though the artist (Mr. Ned Seidler) is properly called a staff artist and is good at his trade. We would not likely frame and hang the original on our walls as art, much less expect to see it in the National Gallery or the Louvre or the Metropolitan—though I confess that my particular copy was carried around with Shelly and me for some seven years, from Buffalo to Boston to Baltimore, to remind me, while I was writing the LETTERS novel, of all the life and death besides historical human life and death that goes on all the time in the place I was writing about.
The pen drawing, Crab Number Three, is even more striking, and our reaction to it is interesting to think about. It is a meticulously realistic drawing; we’re likely to admire it even more than the color foldout, not only because the detail is finer, but because, paradoxically, it is at the same time more realistic and farther removed from reality than those other crab images. Not only are feel, taste, sound, smell, scale, depth, motion, and environment removed (not to mention literal life), but also any attempt to approximate the actual color of the subject. The very black-and-whiteness of the drawing, and the absence of any background, make us sharply aware that this is an ink drawing, not the real thing; and that awareness enhances rather than diminishes our pleasure in it. In fact, this drawing (by Mr. Paul Breeden) might be said to be not only about the Chesapeake Bay Blue Crab, but about pen and ink as well, and shading and foreshortening and such. In other words, it’s partly about the art of drawing; and we admire it, if we do, precisely because the artist is able to evoke the reality of blue crabs with material so far removed from that reality as a pen and black ink and white paper. Number Three here we might actually hang with pleasure on the wall of our office, or our kitchen, if we had the original well matted and framed, even though its bottom-line purpose, like that of the mounted crab earlier, is to sell us something: in this case, not restaurant meals for profit, but subscriptions to the organ of a nonprofit scientific and educational society. And even though we realize, consciously or intuitively, that Crab Number Three is “about” line and shape and shading as well as “about” the blue crab and, by extension, about the life and culture of the Chesapeake Bay estuarine system, we don’t expect to see this drawing in a museum of fine art, for the simple but important reason (which I’ll come back to) that it’s more about the crab than about the medium of drawing, and while it’s professionally excellent draftsmanship, something tells us that there’s a difference between competent, accurate draftsmanship and fine art.
Our fourth crab image is the one crawling up my necktie: a gold-plated tie-tack in the semblance of a crab, purchased and wo
rn as a souvenir. It is not Callinectes sapidus, the Chesapeake blue crab. Its carapace more resembles something in the dungeness or purple marsh crab family—but of course it isn’t purple, and there’s no detail to speak of beyond the correct number and location of the legs. It is a stylized version of a crab, designed for inexpensive manufacture and retail sale at a high profit margin to people like myself who may like to be reminded, when they put their neckties on, or remind others whom they then see, that the world contains objects somewhat like this called crabs, fun to catch and good to eat, and maybe, by extension, that the world contains the Chesapeake Bay, and the Eastern Shore thereof: interesting and even beautiful places to work and play and live in, with more or less colorful human inhabitants as well as blue crabs, and a more or less interesting cultural, political, and geological history; and, by further extension yet, that the wearer of the tie-tack, while he knows the difference not only between it and a real crab, but also between it and a realistic representation of a crab, nevertheless enjoys being reminded, even crudely, of the real thing and its associations, and reminding others likewise. He might even be reminding you that he’s part of the real thing, or once was, or wishes he were: a member of the tidewater culture, or a familiar of it.
In this case, the purpose of the designer is to make some money by trading on these innocent wishes and pleasures of ours. My tie-tack is not about crabs in any remarkable, thoughtful, interesting, or even careful way. Nor is it about the art of costume jewelry in any remarkable, thoughtful, interesting, or careful way—as a gold brooch by Benvenuto Cellini cast by the lost-wax method from an actual fly or scarab beetle might be, for example. What my tie-tack is about, from the designer’s point of view, is low-budget commercialized nostalgia; from the wearer’s point of view, it’s about the gratification or advertisement of that nostalgia. The wearer’s motives, we might notice in passing, are relatively innocent; the manufacturer’s are relatively mercenary. To this point, too, we shall return.
There is a curious phenomenon involved here that can make artists tear their hair, though it’s perfectly understandable and, up to a point, forgivable. Any of you who happen to have traveled through the Netherlands will have found that Dutch gift shops are as full of toy wooden shoes and cheap china windmills as Chesapeake Bay gift shops are full of junk-art mallard duck prints and fake goose decoys and so much stuff with cattails and oyster-boats on it, often so clumsily or cheaply rendered, that one feels like setting out at once for Honolulu or Montreal or even Ohio, where folks have scarcely heard of such things; or else for the Eastern Shore marshes, where there’s nothing between oneself and the real McCoy. But the curious thing is that the main purchasers of this sentimental-picturesque junk, after the tourists, are the natives. The Dutch happen to love very much their dikes and canals and windmills and wooden shoes and tulips; so much so that even when the outside of a Dutch farmhouse is surrounded by the genuine article, the inside is likely to be decorated with plastic tulips stuck in simulated Klompen made out of imitation Delftware imported from Hong Kong. The same goes for Eastern Shore of Marylanders, I’ve noticed, and I daresay it goes for any other people who happen to enjoy their culture and/or its history.
What may drive an artist bananas is certainly not this innocent pleasure in their culture by its natives, even where that culture has been trivialized, vulgarized, and commercially exploited by outsiders or by insiders (often the worst offenders). When the artist tears his hair, or at least rolls his eyes, is when people mistake the junk for the quality stuff: when they lose sight of the difference between a true and honest crabcake, for example, and some third-rate restaurant’s version of the same thing, whether that restaurant is a low-overhead fast-food joint or a pretentious, high-overhead rip-off. Third rate is third rate, no matter how impressive the packaging and promotion. Not many Eastern Shore folk can be taken in by a third-rate crabcake masquerading as gourmet food—and gourmet food is what a first-rate crabcake is. I wish I could be as confident of native judgment in the other matter, to which we now return.
The fifth and last rendition of a blue crab in this series, like the first, I don’t have with me, but for a different reason: I don’t believe it exists yet. It’s the one which, if it did exist, might very well hang in the Louvre, or the National Gallery, or the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum, even though the people who came to see it might never have seen a blue crab, live or steamed, or know where Chesapeake Bay is, unless they looked it up or came around the world to visit because they loved the drawing so. I wish there were a Rembrandt drawing of a crab, blue or otherwise, to illustrate my point; but they don’t have Callinectes sapidus in the North Sea, and Rembrandt didn’t go in much for still lifes anyhow, though he was very big on windmills and canal boats. The best I could find is this reproduction of a Rembrandt pen-and-wash drawing of a different animal: two birds of paradise, done in whites and gray-yellows about 1637, three years after Lord Baltimore’s people stepped ashore in Maryland and committed the first recorded murder in the Old Line State. The original of this drawing does in fact hang in the Louvre. I invite you to notice two things about it, and then we’ll get to our own bottom line.
The first thing is that there’s much less information about birds of paradise in Rembrandt’s drawing than there is about the Common Egret or the Long-Billed Marsh Wren in the “Marsh Fauna” foldout. The Rembrandt would not be of much use to a birdwatcher for field identification, whereas the foldout even shows us what the birds eat and where they find it. The second thing to notice is the caption commentary by the critic who put together the volume from which I took this plate, a professor of fine arts at Harvard’s Fogg Museum. “The way these exotic birds fill the page,” Professor Seymour Slive remarks, “is as admirable as Rembrandt’s depiction of the different weights and textures of the feathers on their heads, necks, bodies, and great tails.”
This is an extension of what we noted about the blue-crab drawing in pen and ink: A lot of the reality of birds of paradise is in Rembrandt’s drawing, no doubt; maybe even more than of crab-reality in the National Geographic staff artist’s. But it isn’t there by meticulous copying of detail (not to mention color, size, depth, feel, sound, smell, motion, and lice under the wings). The Rembrandt is certainly about birds of paradise, but, as Professor Slive’s commentary makes clear, it is at least as much about the composition of forms on the page, the arrangements of darks and lights, the suggestion of weights and textures by quick and masterful strokes of the pen and the brush. In other words, it’s about as much about the art of drawing as it is about what it’s a drawing of, and since it’s about both of these things in a masterful way, it hangs in the Louvre instead of in a highway emporium for the ocean resort trade.
We could go farther and imagine a version by some twentieth-century Rembrandt in which that former kind of aboutness, the bird of paradise itself, might fly the coop altogether. If the second kind of aboutness were still powerful and fine enough, the work mightn’t be in the Louvre, but it might well be in the Museum of Modern Art or the National Gallery’s new East Wing, with the other abstractionists: art that is entirely, or almost entirely, about itself and its materials; in which the “subject,” if any, is just a point of departure, like the melody line among good jazz musicians.
The aim of these remarks is plain: the analogy between these several categories of crab-art and some different ways in which a piece of writing can be about a place, such as the Chesapeake Bay region, and/or about a historical moment, such as the invasion of Washington, D.C., by British forces during the War of 1812, or the Cambridge race riots of the 1960s. The mounted prize crabs on the walls of the seafood restaurant, let’s say, are like the documents of history: those antebellum wills in the Dorchester County courthouse, for example, in which black human beings and bedroom furniture are given away in the same sentence. From such documentary shucks and sheds, the historiographer tries to infer what happened in a human place and time: He reconstructs the political, social-economic, and cultur
al past; how things hung together and were done, their causes and effects. If he’s knowledgeable and scrupulous, he keeps speculation and conscious bias to a minimum and tries to beware the unconscious biases and cultural assumptions that he can doubtless never entirely avoid. The result will be the verbal equivalent of that National Geographic foldout: a good deal of information efficiently, attractively, and authoritatively presented, which we might even read for pleasure as well as for reference. It usually isn’t Literature, in the capital-L sense of the term, but it’s honest and useful work, done mainly for the love of knowledge, like pure science.
The historical novelist, too, might make use of those documentary crabshells and dramatize not only what happened, but what it might have felt like to be a live human being experiencing that history in that place. There’s a much greater likelihood here that the author will project his/her contemporary sensibility back onto our ancestors—that’s one large reason why most historical fiction is a pretty fishy rendition of a crab—but we’re talking about fiction now, and since our bottom line in reading fiction is to illuminate our own experience of life, a case can be made for that kind of distortion. Anyhow, if the novelist happens to be a fine literary artist like Charles Dickens (I’m thinking now of his novel “about” the French Revolution), what he turns out won’t be a proper historical novel at all, but a work of literature. A Tale of Two Cities is not about the French Revolution in the way that Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution is, not to mention the actual documents of the Reign of Terror: It is about love, loyalty, and self-sacrifice among human beings pungently observed, not among puppets sent down from Central Casting. The same goes for Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma: They’re about the Napoleonic wars, for sure—but so is Puccini’s opera Tosca —and for most of us that fact is the least interesting thing about those works of art, even though their authors happen to have done their homework.
