by John Barth
Ah, isomorphy! Ah, Scheherazade!
On with the story.
* “Dunyazadiad,” in Chimera (N.Y.: Random House, 1972).
† “Muse Spare Me,” in Book Week, Sept. 26, 1965; reprinted in The Sense of the 60s, ed. Quinn (N.Y.: Free Press, 1968).
‡ e.g., Lohmann, Otto: Die Rahmenerzählung des Decameron (Halle/Salle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1935), and the more specialized Goldstein, Moritz: Die Technik der zyklischen Rahmenerzählungen Deutschlands. Von Goethe bis Hoffmann. (Berlin, 1906?)
§ e.g., Bryan & Dempster’s Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1941); H.B. Hinckley’s “The Framing-Tale” (Modern Language Notes, Vol. XLIX no. 2, Feb. 1934), etc.
|| See my essay “The Ocean of Story,” in Directions in Literary Criticism, eds. Weintraub & Young (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1973).
¶ Chimera, pp. 23-24.
** e.g., in the essay “Partial Enchantment in the Quixote,” in Other Inquisitions (Austin, TX: U. of Texas Press, 1965).
†† In the essay “Narrative-men,” in The Poetics of Prose, tr. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977).
The Prose and Poetry of It All,
or,
Dippy Verses
THIS Friday-piece needs no introduction.
Some seasons ago I published a novel called Sabbatical: A Romance. It is about love and spies and sailing on Chesapeake Bay and deciding not to have children at this late hour of the world. I myself think well of the story, and so did numerous of its reviewers, but a number of others decidedly did not.
Now, it happens that for nearly thirty years I have been pleased to be a professional teacher as well as a professional writer. Since it behooves a teacher to be an ongoing learner, still at my age I try to learn from sympathetic critics how to practice my storytelling art better. If it’s somebody else’s art they want me to practice—even the art of other writers I admire, and those are many and various—I shrug my shoulders: The leopard may polish up his spots, but he can’t change them; he may well not wish to. Moreover, like any battle-wise veteran, I’ve learned to dismiss criticism which itself is merely dismissive: hired hatchet-jobs, literary kneecapping, exercises in the venting of spleen, for which the work under review is merely the trigger. Such attacks are worth one exasperated sigh and no more: The world is the world; one is who one is.
Even so, an occasional sand-grain gets under my shell and irritates my imagination into pearling it over. The novel Sabbatical: A Romance opens with 3½ lines of verse, the last of which modulates into the prose of the story like this:
There was a story that began,
Said Fenwick Turner: Susie and Fenn—
Oh, tell that story! Tell it again!
Wept Susan Seckler…
Graybeard Fenn would be happy to give it another go; we have fiddled with our tale through this whole sabbatical voyage: down the Intracoastal in the fall in our cruising sailboat, Pokey, Wye I., from Chesapeake Bay to the Gulf of Mexico and across to Yucatan; all about the Caribbean, island-hopping through the mild winter of 1980; and in May through our first long open-ocean passage, from St. John in the U.S. Virgins direct for the Virginia Capes, Chesapeake Bay, Wye Island, the closing of the circle, sabbatical’s end.
One unfriendly reviewer—I have forgotten which; that’s my revenge—called these verses “dippy.” What he or she said was, “Barth’s new novel begins with some dippy verses…”
Dippy verses!
Well, of course they’re dippy. If the reviewer-person had used that adjective as neutral description, I wouldn’t have minded. Those couplets, both of them, are spoken by the hero of the novel, the male of the couple, Fenwick Scott Key Turner: a 50-year-old ex-CIA officer currently between careers; ardent sailor and husband; lineal descendant of the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner”; and himself the author of a troublemaking book about his former employer. Fenwick Turner is now an aspiring novelist who hates spy novels as much as he loves his wife of seven years, his Black-Eyed Susan. The verses are a kind of standing joke between him and that same wife, Susan Rachel Allan Seckler: a sharp young associate professor of classical American literature—part Jewish, part Gypsy, and possibly descended from Edgar Allan Poe. Fenwick is, in fact, as he repeats this versified standing joke, standing—at the tiller of the couple’s 33 1/3 foot cruising sailboat Pokey, Wye I., in which they are just completing that aforementioned nine-month sabbatical voyage, beset by a number of large problems and small adventures. The verses are dippy.
But they are not simply dippy. For one thing, they are understood by speaker, listener, author, and reader (if not by that nameless book-reviewer) to be… ironic. Fenwick Turner says “There was a story that began,” etc., but in fact he has not yet begun the story he knows is there to be told. For another, one of the few things that Fenwick and the author of Sabbatical: A Romance have in common is that neither of us is a poet—not that professional poets are incapable of perpetrating dippy verses. Fenwick and I don’t even aspire to poetry, much as I, at least, value much of it. William Faulkner’s infamous remark that all novels are failed poems strikes me and Fenwick as far from the truth: Leaving aside all the poems that are failed poems, there are surely a great many novelists who never aspired to serious verse. I am of that number, and so is Fenwick Scott Key Turner. Indeed, much later in the novel, having shared with Susan a flashback-dream that flashes all the way back to the Big Bang that began the story of our universe, the couple experience separate but equal flashforward dreams, different in content but similarly apocalyptic, and Fenwick’s includes an acknowledgment of his poetical incapacity. Here’s Susan’s dream first:
Her night’s mare has flashed forward from the night before’s, and is for the most part impersonal. Our marriage having failed along with the Democratic coalition, the NATO alliance, the U.S. dollar, and Fenwick’s heart, to the strains of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Susan witnesses the physical collapse in turn of the continental United States (which splits anticlimactically at the San Andreas fault), then of the solar system, the galaxy, the universe—for some reason all because she and Fenn will have no children. From Fort McHenry’s ramparts, which are also Pokey’s cockpit, Susan sees the West sink into the sun, the sun into the galactic vortex like Odysseus’s ship-timbers into Charybdis, or whatever-it-was into Poe’s Maelstrom. Pokey himself is now become our galaxy, now our universe, rushing headlong into one of its own Black Holes like that legendary bird that flies in ever-diminishing circles until it vanishes into its own fundament; like [Arthur Gordon] Pym’s canoe rushing into the chasm at the foot of the cataract at the southern Pole: a black hole aspirating, with a cosmic shlup, us, U.S., all.
And here’s Fenwick’s flashforward dream:
His was about failure: professional, personal, physical. Sitting next to him yesterday in the Amtrak coach to Baltimore had been a paunchy self-important late-sixtyish man in soiled summer worsteds—string bow tie, loose dentures, florid face, dandruff on his shoulders like shaken salt from his ill-kempt salt-and-pepper hair—who turned out to be a leading figure in the Virginia Poetry Society, a compulsive self-promoter even unto strangers on a short train ride, and the very odor of failure. In Fenn’s dream, Fenn was that man, losing obscure battles with the right-wing Poet Laureate of Maryland. Susan was long since gone, god knows where: She’d left him, and with good reason. Every dollar counted. He had no friends. [His ex-wife] Marilyn Marsh, thriving, prospering, was thick as thieves with [Daughter-in-law] Julie and Grandson Marshall Marsh Turner, named in her honor. But [his son] Orrin’s career was going ill, and even Marshall Marsh was doing poorly in school. [Fenn’s parents] Chief and Virgie were dead; Fenn himself was sick and sore; every movement was painful; Key Farm was falling down; there was no money to maintain it. Even Wye Island was disappearing, and that circumstance was somehow Fenn’s fault. An aide to the President-elect was on the telephone, but Fenwick could find no other rh
yme for inaugural than doggerel. He smelled death: It smelled like the breath of that Virginia Poetry Society man.
Now, that is not a dream that I have ever had—and anyhow, Fenwick Scott Key Turner n’est pas moi. He is a better sailor than I am, for one thing, with a bigger boat. Charles Darwin once praised Charles Dickens for “[giving] us heroes we can admire and heroines we can love.” Another function of art, surely, is to provide us with larger sailboats than we can in fact afford. But I am a better novelist than Fenwick is; if he has a longer boat, I have a longer bibliography, and enough experience in the medium he aspires to to know that doggerel and other varieties of dippy verse have an ancient and honorable place in that medium. Two wonderful things about the capital-N Novel are that of all the genres of literature—maybe even of all the forms of art—it is 1) the most hospitable to amateurs and 2) the most accommodating to contamination of every sort.
Let us consider the first of these: It would strain plausibility, if not possibility, to imagine a 50-year-old with no previous real experience in the medium making a successful debut as a Wagnerian Heldentenor, I think, or a director of Chekhov’s plays, or a sculptor of bronzes. A character in a novel who aspired to such a debut would almost have to be drawn with dramatic irony: He may think he’ll make it, but we know that probably nobody ever picked up a violin, say, or a stonecutter’s chisel and did it right the first time. Yet it is a famous blessing of the Novel, to the chagrin of many professional novelists and the despair of agents and editors buried under over-the-transom manuscripts, as they’re called in the trade, that numerous amateurs have done it more or less right the first time, and numerous professionals have never equalled their first published effort. The list is long, and it runs the length of the genre’s history, from those middle-aged beginners (as novelists) Cervantes and Defoe and Richardson, through the great flood of nineteenth-century amateurs like Lewis Carroll (but everybody in the nineteenth century wrote novels), down to such modern late starters and out-of-practically nowherers as Joseph Conrad and Amos Tutuola, let’s say—not to mention such mainly popular successes as William F. Buckley, Jr., John Erlichman of Watergate fame, and the Margarets—from Margaret Truman back through Margaret Mitchell to Marguerite the Queen of Navarre.*
Well, okay: Margaret of Navarre’s Heptameron of 1558 isn’t really a novel; it’s a frametale cycle on the order of Boccaccio’s and Chaucer’s and Giambattista Basile’s and Scheherazade’s. That brings us to the other characteristic of the form which I mentioned admiringly a while ago: its almost anarchical flexibility and its capacity not only for absorbing but for thriving upon all sorts of extrinsic input, as it were, like immigrant America once upon a time, or the folkloristic recipe for stone soup. If I don’t go along with Faulkner on the matter of novelists as failed poets, I very much sympathize with his stated wish to be reborn as a turkey-buzzard; I even take his remarks on that subject to be descriptive of the art he practiced. Faulkner said he’d like to come back as a turkey-buzzard because the animal has no natural enemies and can feed on anything. I say that the novel is your great turkey-buzzard of art.
What’s more, it is a protean turkey-buzzard, which can pass itself off as everything from a hummingbird to an ostrich. What do the following objects have in common: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; Capote’s and Mailer’s “nonfiction novels”; Alex Haley’s whatyoucallit novel Roots; Dino Buzzati’s comic-strip novel of the late 1960s; Marc Saporta’s unbound, unpaginated, randomly packaged novel-in-a-box of about the same vintage; Nikos Kazantzakis’s long verse-novel, as some have called it, The Odyssey: a modern sequel; the latest pornographic photonovel from Hamburg, Paris, or Rome; Marcel Proust’s zillion-word roman fleuve, The Remembrance of Things Past; and Robert Coover’s very short new novel Spanking the Maid, which could have been published as a long short story?†
Damned if I know. Even Randall Jarrell’s wonderful definition of the novel—a prose narrative fiction of a certain length that has something wrong with it—has several things wrong with it, as can be seen by applying it to the list above: Some of those items aren’t prose, some can scarcely be called narrative, some aren’t fiction, and their length is wildly uncertain. It doesn’t even quite fit Madame Bovary, which Nabokov among others declares has nothing wrong with it. The novel is an essentially existentialistic form whose existence not only precedes its essence, but keeps redefining its essence right out of existence. It is a (usually, mainly) verbal Watts Towers, a backyard cathedral made sometimes out of whatever wretched refuse lies to the builder’s hand. It is a literary osprey’s nest, which may look thrown together like a pile of pick-up-sticks, but which in the best cases will withstand storms of criticism and the shifting winds of fashion.
I shall now digress at length upon the subject of ospreys’ nests: Faulkner had his favorite bird; I have mine. The osprey, or fish-hawk, a cousin of the eagle, builds its big ramshackle rickety-looking nest in the crotch of a dead tree in or near tidewater when it has to rely upon nature for a homesite. However, it much prefers the osprey platforms built for it by conservationists: a $10 square of marine-grade plywood mounted well above the high water line on a $125 piling driven into a river bottom not far from shore. And even more than an official osprey platform, it likes a U.S. Coast Guard navigational day beacon as a building site: Since their purpose is to mark shoals, day beacons satisfy all the osprey’s basic requirements—a sturdy platform on a sturdy post well above the highwater mark in shallow water not far from shore—plus the bonus of the beacon’s dayboards, which serve as windbreaks and side braces for the nest. Having a very bright light flash every 2½ seconds or so all night long a few inches from his head doesn’t seem to bother your osprey: So ideal is a Coast Guard day beacon as a nesting site that you are unlikely ever to see one without a grand osprey-house upon it, and so enthusiastically do the ospreys build there that very frequently their nests come to obscure the lights which mariners depend upon to identify day beacons by night. The notice Light obscured (osprey) is a refrain even today in the list of “Discrepancies in Aids to Navigation” in the Coast Guard’s weekly bulletin Local Notices to Mariners, and it used to be even more so.
For decades and decades, what the Coast Guard did, assisted by local mariners, was routinely to destroy such ospreys’ nests; and the ospreys, being ospreys, routinely rebuilt them. Everybody was unhappy. The Coast Guard was unhappy because destroying osprey nests is expensive, disagreeable, time-consuming nuisance work that could never really be kept up with even in the make-work 1930s. The mariners were unhappy because day-beacon lights were still very often obscured, and when you’re sailing at night and can’t find a day-beacon light that is supposed to be there, you’re likely to pile up on a shoal, either because you’ve made a serious navigational error or because you haven’t but erroneously conclude that you have. The ospreys were unhappy for obvious reasons. And the conservationists, in their increasing number, were unhappy because the ospreys in their decreasing number were unhappy. Everybody’s claim was legitimate, but the claims seemed irreconcilable.
We are not done with this digression.
Attempts to design a day beacon uninviting to ospreys failed: You need a platform on that pile to support those day boards and that battery box with its light. Attempts to lure the ospreys away from the day beacons with those special platforms built exclusively for ospreys failed: The osprey population quickly correlates exactly with the nesting sites available to it. The number of ospreys went up, but the number of obscured day-beacon lights did not go down. Surprisingly late in the day—just a few years ago, I believe—some anonymous genius was inspired to a simple, cheap, permanent solution to this dilemma that made all parties happy: Instead of them obscuring our lights and us destroying their nests, why not leave the day beacons and the osprey nests exactly as they are and raise the light? Raise the light a meter or so above the battery box on a simple, sturdy, skinny length of pipe, and all problems vanish; all claims are reconciled. The ospreys are as happy as it is gi
ven to ospreys to be. The conservationists are as happy (on this one subject) as it is given to conservationists to be. The mariner knows that if the light that ought to be visible by now in fact is not, the fault is very probably his; we cannot call that condition happiness, but at least it’s a less equivocal and less frequent misery. And the Coast Guard—that most beneficent, most useful, most pacific, most deserving, least well funded of our more or less armed services‡—its resources diminishing even as the ospreys’ resources increase, can now turn its strained attention to higher priorities. If we still see the notice Light obscured (osprey} in the Local Notices to Mariners, that is because the USCG can’t afford to make even so cheap and easy a modification right across the board. They fix a few every year.
