by John Barth
It should be added, before we leave the crabshells and the foldouts, that the forged and doctored and suppressed documents of history—from the ninth-century Donation of Constantine, which “justified” the Holy Roman Empire, to the twentieth-century faked reports that “justified” the Tonkin Gulf Resolution—share the same bottom line with faked restaurant atmosphere: to sell us a bill of goods. Even the honest historian, to be sure, wants to sell us his point of view, though not particularly for gain, and not by distorting the evidence systematically to fit a thesis. And good historical novelists such as Marguerite Yourcenar or Mary Renault are like good restaurateurs: They’re not in business simply for their health, but they enjoy what they’re doing and do it well, at a small or large profit, and they don’t stuff their crab imperial full of breadcrumbs and cheap mayonnaise. Their books might be compared to that pen-and-ink drawing in the National Geographic advertisement. So might that lovely nonfiction work of William Warner’s, Beautiful Swimmers: full of honest information about Callinectes sapidus and its environment, skillfully presented, rich in detail, ably written, and attractively illustrated. Great literature it may not be, in the Louvre/National Gallery sense, but like Gilbert Klingel’s fine book on the Bay of twenty-eight years ago,* or Hulbert Footner’s of thirty-five years ago,** it surely ranks with the best writing about the Chesapeake area.
Now: About the literary equivalent of my tie-tack, the less said the better: Its perpetrators are overpublicized already. These are your flat-out, big-time, big-money book-of-the-monthers, who move in on a culture or a subject and “work it up” like a real-estate developer, with high-rise megabucks under a low profile. It’s tempting to say “under a low-brow profile,” but your tie-tack writers are often smart cookies indeed, even civilized and likeable, though the size of their egos can be breathtaking. Their belief that what they manufacture is literature is as remarkable as if Mr. Levitt were to mistake his Levittowns for Athens and Rome; rather, it would be remarkable, if not that so many innocent readers (but almost no critics or other writers) make the same mistake. I daresay Mr. Levitt never confused himself with Pericles of Athens; but to hear Mr. Leon Uris talk about his novel Exodus, for example, is to wonder whether he’s not confusing his version with Moses’s. It ought to be astonishing that the same people who can’t be fooled when it comes to overcooked rockfish or adulterated crabmeat—that these same sturdy and expert native citizens can read a trite commercial novel and believe that they’ve taken in a genuine work of art about their place and its history, even about themselves, when in fact they’ve been taken in by a superficial—though not necessarily cynical—piece of giftshop merchandise.
I say it ought to be astonishing. Of course, it isn’t, for the innocent reason I mentioned before. If we enjoy our territory, we’re apt to enjoy being reminded of it. We ought to be indignant at a stock rendition of it into novels or films or TV miniserieses—but alas, most of us know more about our local seafood, and about whatever our regular daily business is, than we know about the human language in which the human heart, the human spirit, the human passions of our fellow women and men can be expressed. So instead of making something honest out of a tie-tack novel—like a doorstop—we’re apt to think, “Now, by golly, he’s got that part right: Your skipjack has one mast and your bugeye has two,” and feel sort of proud to see it said in best-selling print. God forgive and assist us.
I mentioned the human passions and human language: We have arrived at the Louvre and those Rembrandt birds. But instead of describing the literary equivalent of our imaginary Rembrandt blue crab, I shall close with what seem to me to be three reasonable rules of thumb for culling beautiful literary swimmers from the other kind. I hope three rules of thumb won’t make us all thumbs; this culling is important to our literary ecology.
Rule #1: Fiction about history almost never becomes part of the history of fiction. To put it another way: Novels that are mainly and directly about a particular culture and its heritage seldom become part of that culture’s cultural heritage. There are exceptions—we think of Faulkner’s fiction about the American South, or Isaac Bashevis Singer’s fiction about Polish-Jewish life before the Holocaust—but I believe that such apparent exceptions prove the rule: namely, that the more a novel’s main interest is in the time and place it’s about, the less likely it is to be a significant work of literature in its own right—though it might certainly be good light entertainment of the costume-drama sort. Aristotle, the first writer in history to describe the difference between historians and poets, says in the Poetics that the historian tells us how things were, while the poet tells us how they might have been, or ought ideally to have been. The trouble with much official history, by this famous and useful distinction, is that it is poetry: It tells us how its sponsor wishes things had been. “History is the propaganda of the winners,” etc. And the trouble with much historical fiction is that it’s so concerned with getting the “facts” straight—as given in the documents of history—that the artistic truth gets lost. The data might be correct, but the hearts and minds and souls of the characters come from Hollywood, not from human history. On the other hand, high-school students reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar like to point out the anachronism of the clock’s striking in Act II: There were no clocks in Caesar’s Rome. But of course Shakespeare’s play isn’t about Caesar’s Rome: It’s about Caesar and Brutus, and the poet has them right. Even if he didn’t, in detail, it wouldn’t matter, since the real subjects are pride and conflicting loyalties, not Caesar and Brutus, and the play is one of the treasures of English literature, not of Roman history.
Rule #2 is Rule #1 turned inside out: The literature that finally matters in any culture is almost never principally about that culture. The eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon remarks that in the Koran there is no mention of camels. The contemporary Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once quoted this remark of Gibbon’s when he himself was being criticized for not being Argentinian enough, because he never wrote about tangos and about gauchos riding over the pampas. Borges went on to say that if the Koran had been written by Arab nationalists, there would no doubt be caravans of camels on every page; but the actual authors of the Koran were so unselfconsciously Arabian that they took camels for granted, and didn’t feel pressed to turn the holy book of Islam into a regional zoo. The same might go for blue crabs and Canada geese in the Great Chesapeake Bay Novel, if one ever gets written, and the reason for this Aristotle also tells us plainly: It is that the true subject of literature is not the events of history or the features of a particular place, but “the experience of human life, its happiness and its misery.” That is what Faulkner’s and Singer’s stories are truly about: not Southern life or Jewish life, but human life, which they get at by making use of their intimate knowledge of Southerners and of Jews, respectively, and then by writing fiction that rises above its Southernness or its Jewishness.
This is what another Nobel Prizewinner, Thomas Mann, meant when he wrote in 1903: “What an artist talks about is never the main point; it is the raw material, in and for itself indifferent, out of which, with bland and serene mastery, he creates his work of art.” The contemporary French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet goes even farther: “… the genuine writer,” he declares, “has nothing to say… He has only a way of speaking.” And Homer, the daddy of us all, is equally radical on the subject of poetry and history: He makes the famous remark in the Odyssey that “wars are fought so that poets will have something to sing about”—with the clear implication that the songs are finally more important than the wars which are their ostensible subject. Most fiction about a place and time never rises above that place and time. When real artists such as Faulkner or Singer or Mark Twain or Nathaniel Hawthorne or Homer happen to find inspiration in a particular region or period, it is likely to be because they find in that region or period a symbol of their real concerns, which will be the passions of the human breast and the possibilities of human language.
That
fetches us to Rule #3, illustrated both by Crab Number Three (that National Geographic graphic) and by the Rembrandt drawing: Whatever else it is about, great literature is almost always also about itself. On rare occasions it may even be mainly about itself, though it is almost never exclusively about itself, even when it seems to be. And the same may go for such remarks as these, even when they claim to be about “aboutness.”
* The Bay (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1951).
** Rivers of the Eastern Shore (New York: Rinehart, 1944).
The Literature of Replenishment
POSTMODERNIST FICTION
Another Friday-piece from 1979, meant as a companion and corrective to my 1967 essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” and published in The Atlantic in January, 1980. In 1982 the Lord John Press of Northridge, California, brought out the twin essays in a slim, handsome volume for which I wrote the following headnote:
Not every storyteller is afflicted with the itch to understand and explain, to himself and others, why he tells the stories he tells the way he tells them, rather than some other sort of stories some other way. It is well that this is so. The gifts of doing and explaining are notoriously not the same: An eloquent artist may sound like a mumbler, a crank, a soulless pedant—may be those unadmirable things—when he sets about accounting for what he has perhaps brilliantly done. And first-rate critics may write fifth-rate fiction.
But there are those who are thus afflicted; who for better or worse want every dozen years or so not only to get a working perspective on what they and their contemporaries are up to, but to publish their ruminations. I am of that number. The two essays which constitute this book were written in that spirit and published less to share my convictions than to share my speculations, so that others more expert in the matters dealt with could improve my working perspective. In this respect they have succeeded quite.
“The Literature of Exhaustion” was written in 1967 in Buffalo, New York, during the troubles at the state university there and in our land. (See my headnote to it earlier in this Friday Book.) “The Literature of Replenishment” was written twelve years later in a calmer place and time—Johns Hopkins, Jimmy Carter—and has a more tenured, middle-aged air about it. My purpose was to define to my satisfaction the term postmodernism, which in 1979 was everywhere in the air. Almost no one agrees with my definition, but I remain satisfied with it.
Both essays appeared originally in The Atlantic; each has been several times reprinted and translated. Readers in countries like Romania and mainland China find such pieces fascinating less for their arguments, which may strike them as unintelligible or hopelessly luxurious, than for the particular artists and artworks mentioned in passing, unavailable to them but possibly touchstones among us—just as their interest in American films may be less in the stars and stories than in details of dress, furniture, the passing scene. It is sad, for a storyteller, to see his opinions read where his stories cannot be. But it is pleasing to have these essays, separated since birth, here for the first time reunited. May their two-part harmony make clear their song: that what matters is not the exhaustion or the replenishment, both of which may be illusory, but the literature, which is not.
The word is not yet in our standard dictionaries and encyclopedias, but since the end of World War II, and especially in the United States in the latter 1960s and the 1970s, “postmodernism” has enjoyed a very considerable currency, particularly with regard to our contemporary fiction. There are university courses in the American postmodernist novel; at least one quarterly journal is devoted exclusively to the discussion of postmodernist literature; at the University of Tübingen last June (1979), the annual meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien took as its theme “America in the 1970s,” with particular emphasis on American postmodernist writing. Three alleged practitioners of that mode—William Gass, John Hawkes, and myself—were even there as live exhibits. The December annual convention of the Modern Language Association, just held in San Francisco, likewise scheduled a symposium on “the self in postmodernist fiction,” a subtopic that takes the larger topic for granted.
From all this, one might innocently suppose that such a creature as postmodernism, with defined characteristics, is truly at large in our land. So I myself imagined when, in preparation for the Tübingen conference, and in response to being frequently labeled a postmodernist writer, I set about to learn what postmodernism is. I had a sense of déjà vu: About my very first published fiction, a 1950 undergraduate effort published in my university’s quarterly magazine, a graduate-student critic wrote: “Mr. Barth alters that modernist dictum, ‘the plain reader be damned’: He removes the adjective.” Could that, I wondered now, be postmodernism?
What I quickly discovered is that while some of the writers labeled as postmodernists, myself included, may happen to take the label with some seriousness, a principal activity of postmodernist critics (also called “metacritics” and “paracritics”), writing in postmodernist journals or speaking at postmodernist symposia, consists in disagreeing about what postmodernism is or ought to be, and thus about who should be admitted to the club—or clubbed into admission, depending upon the critic’s view of the phenomenon and of particular writers.
Who are the postmodernists? By my count, the American fictionists most commonly included in the canon, besides the three of us at Tubingen, are Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Several of the critics I read widen the net to include Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer, different as those two writers would appear to be. Others look beyond the United States to Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, and the late Vladimir Nabokov as engendering spirits of the “movement”; others yet insist upon including the late Raymond Queneau, the French “new novelists” Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget, Claude Simon, and Claude Mauriac, the even newer French writers of the Tel Quel group, the Englishman John Fowles, and the expatriate Argentine Julio Cortázar. Some assert that such filmmakers as Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Alain Resnais are postmodernists. I myself will not join any literary club that doesn’t include the expatriate Colombian Gabriel García Márquez and the semi-expatriate Italian Italo Calvino, of both of whom more presently. Anticipations of the “postmodernist literary aesthetic” have duly been traced through the great modernists of the first half of the twentieth century—T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, André Gide, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Miguel de Unamuno, Virginia Woolf—through their nineteenth-century predecessors—Alfred Jarry, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallamd, and E. T. A. Hoffmann—back to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767) and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1615).
On the other hand, among certain commentators the sifting gets exceedingly fine. Professor Jerome Klinkowitz of Northern Iowa, for example, hails Barthelme and Vonnegut as the exemplary “postcontemporaries” of the American 1970s and consigns Pynchon and myself to some 1960ish outer darkness. I regard the novels of John Hawkes as examples of fine late modernism rather than of postmodernism (and I admire them no less for that). Others might regard most of Bellow, and Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, as comparatively premodernist, along with the works of such more consistently traditionalist American writers as John Cheever, Wallace Stegner, William Styron, or John Updike, for example (the last of whom, however, Ihab Hassan calls a modernist), or those of most of the leading British writers of this century (as contrasted with the Irish), or those of many of our contemporary American women writers of fiction, whose main literary concern, for better or worse, remains the eloquent issuance of what the critic Richard Locke has called “secular news reports.” Even among the productions of a given writer, distinctions can be and often are invoked. Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the aesthetical map. John Gardner’s first two published novels I would call distinctly modernist works; his short stories dabble in postmodernism; hi
s polemical nonfiction is aggressively reactionary. Italo Calvino, on the other hand, began as an Italian new-realist (in The Path to the Nest of Spiders, 1947) and matured into an exemplary postmodernist (with e.g., Cosmicomics, 1965, and The Castle of Crossed Destinies, 1969) who on occasion rises, sinks, or merely shifts to modernism (e.g., Invisible Cities, 1972). My own novels and stories seem to me to have both modernist and postmodernist attributes, even occasional premodernist attributes.
One certainly does have a sense of having been through this before. Indeed, some of us who have been publishing fiction since the 1950s have had the interesting experience of being praised or damned in that decade as existentialists and in the early 1960s as black humorists. Had our professional careers antedated the Second World War, we would no doubt have been praised or damned as modernists, in the distinguished company listed above. Now we are praised or damned as postmodernists.
