by John Barth
Ah well, now I have caught Knowledge like a love-pox, I understand, not that my former power was a delusion, but that delusions may be full of power: Lady Fancy did become my mistress after all; did mother offspring that my innocent lust got on her—orphans now, but whose hard neglect may be the saving of them in the long run. Think it if you will a further innocence on my part; I stand convinced that she did by George love me while she loved me, and that what she loved was the very thing that ruined us in the end: I mean my epic unsophistication. And this because, contrary to appearance and common belief, she shares it herself; it is if not the essence of her spirit at least one among its chiefer qualities, and has much to do with that goldenness of hers. How else explain the peculiar radiance she maintains despite her past, a freshness as well of spirit as of complexion, which leads each new suitor to take her for a maiden girl? My ambition to husband her, exclusively and forever, as who should aspire to make a Hausfrau out of a love-goddess—do you think she indulged it as a joke, or tickled a jaded appetite by playing at homeliness? Very well: I choose to think the experiment pleased her as simply and ingenuously as it pleased me; we were equally distressed to see it fail, and whatever the fate of our progeny I believe she will remember as sweetly as I the joy of their getting …
No matter. I’m celibate now: a priest of Truth that was a monger after Beauty; no longer a Seeker but a humble Finder—all thanks to the extraordinary document here enclosed. I submit it to you neither as its author nor as agent for another in the usual sense, but as a disinterested servant of Our Culture, if you please: that recentest fair fungus in Time’s watchglass. I know in advance what reservations you will have about the length of the thing, the controversial aspects of occasional passages, and even its accuracy here and there; yet whether regarded as “fact” or “fiction” the book’s urgent pertinence should be as apparent as its considerable (if inconsistent and finally irrelevant) literary merit, and I’m confident of your final enthusiasm. “A wart on Miss University,” as the Grand Tutor somewhere declares, “were nonetheless a wart, and if I will not call it a beauty-mark, neither would I turn her out of bed on its account.” There are warts enough on this Revised New Syllabus, artistic and it may be historical; but they are so to speak only skin-deep, and I think no publisher will turn it off his list on their account.
Indulge me now, as a useful introduction to the opus proper, the story of its origin and my coming by it. As you may know, like most of our authors these days I support myself by preaching what I practice. One grows used, in fiction-writing seminaries, to three chief categories of students: elder ladies and climacteric gentlemen who seek in writing an avocation which too might supplement their pensions; well-groomed and intelligent young literature-majors of various sexes who have a flair; and those intensely marginal souls—underdisciplined, oversensitive, disordered in both appearance and reality—whose huge craving for the state of artist-hood may drive them so far in rare instances as actually to work at making pieces of art. It was one of this third sort, I assumed, who came into my office on a gusty fall evening several terms ago with a box of typescript under his arm and a gleam in his face.
I’d not seen him before—but then, these bohemians appear and vanish like spooks, change their aspect at the merest whim (quite as does the creature called Harold Bray hereinafter), and have often the most tenuous connection with their Departments. Imagine a lean young man of twenty, dark-eyed and olive-skinned, almost a mulatto, but with a shag of bronze curls, unbarbered, on head and chin; even his eyebrows were like turnings of that metal. He wore battered workshoes laced with rawhide, nondescript trousers tucked at the ankles into boot-socks, and an outlandish fleecy jacket that in retrospect I’d guess he fashioned for himself—one may presently suppose of what material. Though he had no apparent limp, he affected a walkingstick as odd as the rest of his get-up: a three-foot post of white ash, somewhat stouter than a pick-shaft, it had what appeared to be folding lenses and other gadgetry attached here and there along its length, which was adorned with rude carvings (both intaglio and low-relief) of winged lingams, shelah-na-gigs, buckhorns, and domestic bunch-grapes.
Near the tip of this unprecedented tool was a small blunt hook wherewith my visitor first unstopped and closed the door, then smartly drew himself a chair out and sat him down at the desk next to mine. All this I remarked in two glances, and then to collect myself returned to that manuscript of my own at which I’d been tinkering when he entered. The fellow’s dress, if extreme, was not unique—one may see as strange at any gathering of student artists, and I myself in disorderly moods will wear mungos and shoddies, though my preference is for the conventional. But your average bohemian’s manner is shy as a kindergartener’s with those he respects, and overweening with everyone else, while my caller’s was neither: brisk, forthright, cordial, he plunked his paper-box onto my desk, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and both hands at the cane-top, and rested his chin upon all, so that his striking beard hung over. Disconcerting as the grin he then waited my pleasure with was the cast of his features, not just like any I had seen. Such of his kind as had strayed into my office thitherto were either dark of beard, coal-eyed, and intense, after the model of a poet they admired, or else had hair the shade of wheatstraw, forget-me-not eyes, and the aspect and deportment of gelded fawns. Not so this chap: his bronze beard; his eyes not pale nor tormented but simply a-dance; his wiry musculature, the curl of his smile, even a positive small odor about his person that was neither of dirt nor cologne—in a word, he was caprine: I vow the term came to mind before I’d ever spoken to him, much less read what he’d brought me. And that walking-stick, that instrument without parallel …
“Don’t fear,” he said directly—in a clear, almost a ringing voice, somewhat clickish in the stops. “I’m not a writer, and it’s not a novel.”
I was disarmed as much by the insouciance and timbre of his voice as by the words themselves. It sounded as though he actually meant what he said, sincerely and indifferently, as who should announce: “I’m not left-handed,” or “I’m no clarinetist.” And this I felt with the ruefuller twinge for its expressing, glibly as the verdict of a child, that fear no fictionist is proof against, and which had dwelt a-haunt in my fancy’s garret for the twelve months past. I had just turned thirty; it was my seventh year of toil in the prevaricating art, and scant-rewarded for my labors I was weary as the Maker of us all on the seventh morning. Monday, I still trusted, would roll round; in the meanwhile I was writing so to speak a sabbatical-piece—that book you’ll never see. I knew what novels were: The Seeker wasn’t one. To move folks about, to give them locales and dispositions, past histories and crossed paths—it bored me, I hadn’t taste or gumption for it. Especially was I surfeited with movement, the without-which-not of story. One novel ago I’d hatched a plot as mattersome as any in the books, and drove a hundred characters through eight times that many pages of it; now the merest sophomore apprentice, how callow soever his art, outdid me in that particular. His inspirations? Crippled: but I sat awed before the bravery of their unfolding. His personae? Raw motors cursed with speech, ill-wrought as any neighbors of mine—but they blustered along like them as if alive, and I shook my head. Stories I’d set down before were children gone their ways; everything argued they’d amount to nothing; I scarcely recognized their faces. I was in short disengaged, not chocked or out of fuel but fretfully idling; the pages of my work accumulated to no end, all noise and no progress, like a racing motor. What comfort that in every other way my lot improved? House and gardens prospering, rank and income newly raised, my small fame spreading among the colleges—to a man whose Fancy is missing in action, all boons feel posthumous. The work before me (that I now put by with a show of interruption): Where was its clutch, its purchase? Something was desperately wanting: a thing that mightn’t be striven for, but must come giftlike and unsought; a windfall from orchards of the spirit, a voice from nowhere, a visitation. Indeed it was no novel … My heart tu
rned sinking from the rest.
All I said was, “Oh?”
“My name is Stoker Giles,” the young man announced. His head still was propped on the singular stick, and he continued to regard me with an uncalled-for look of delight. Perhaps I was intended to recognize the name, but my hold on such things was never firm. Especially of late, though I lectured with animation, indeed almost fervidly, I had sensed myself losing command of memory and attention. Information escaped me; I could not recall my telephone number, and missed my way on the most familiar campus paths. My family waited only for the day I should come home to some stranger’s house; their teasing had given way to concern, concern to impatience, and impatience to a silent rancor, which though I perceived it I could not seem to engage.
I asked him whether he was a graduate student.
“Well, at least I’m a Graduate.” His apparent amusement now positively irritated me, the more as it was not my place to draw his business out of him but his to state it. And then he mildly added, “I wonder if you are.”
I think no one may accuse me of hauteur or superciliousness. In truth I reproach myself for being if anything over-timid, acquiescing too easily, suffering presumption to the point of unmanliness, and provoking contempt in my eagerness not to displease. But the man was impudent! I supposed he was referring to the doctoral degree; very well, I’d abandoned my efforts in that line years since, when I eloped with the muse. Moreover, I’d never pretended I had the memory and temper for scholarship, or even the intelligence: time and again I’ve followed some truly profound one to my limits and been obliged then to stand and watch, chin-high in the shallows, while he forged on past my depth. I was properly humble—and properly indifferent. To make is not the same as to think; there are more roads than one to the bottom of things.
“You’d better take that box and get out,” I said. “I’ve got work to do.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes indeed you do!” As though at last we understood each other! Then he spoke my name in the gentlest tone (he had, I should say, a curious accent that I couldn’t place, but which sounded not native), and indicating my work-in-progress added, “But you know, this isn’t it. There’s much to be done; you mustn’t waste any more time.” In the face of my anger his voice became businesslike and brisk, though still cheerful. “Nor must I,” he declared. “Please listen now: I’ve read your books and understand them perfectly, and I’ve come a long way to see you. May I ask what you’re calling this one?”
I was taken aback by a number of things. Not simply his presumption—I rather admired that, it recalled an assurance I once had myself and could wish for again; indeed he was so like a certain old memory of myself, and yet so foreign, even wild, I was put in mind of three dozen old stories wherein the hero meets his own reflection or is negotiated with by a personage from nether realms. Yet there was little of the Evil One about this chap, however much of the faun; it wouldn’t have surprised me to see he had cloven hooves, but the reed-pipe, rather than the pitchfork, would be his instrument. I found myself so caught up in such reflections as these, and contrariwise arrested by the tiresomeness of succumbing to an image the fellow obviously strove to affect, that annoyance and perspective got lost in my confusion. I couldn’t think how he should be dealt with; the situation was slipping my hold, disengaging from me as much else had lately seemed to do. For example, I’d forgotten my pills again, which I’d come to need regularly not to fall asleep over my work: that accounted for my present somnolence, no doubt. I told him that the book was to be called The Seeker—or perhaps The Amateur, I could not decide …
“Certainly.” The pleasure with which he stroked his beard was plainly not at the excellence of my titles. “A seeker; an amateur: one who is a lover, so to speak, but not a knower; a passionate naïf—am I right?”
Well, he was. Do you know, the great mistake we make in these encounters comes not at their end but here, at the very outset. The moment our mysterious caller comes to the door, or we recognize we’ve made a wrong turn somewhere and are in alien realms—then is when we should take instant, vigorous action: protest at once against the queerness of it, shut the door, close eyes and ears, and not for one second admit him. Another step down his road and there’ll be no returning—let us stop where we are! Alas: Curiosity whispers to Better Judgment, “It’s too late anyway,” and we always go on.
“He’s about thirty,” my visitor supposed.
“Thirty-three, I guess.”
“Thirty-three and four months? And I’m sure he has some affliction-something physical, that he was probably born with—is he a cripple?”
I hadn’t thought of making my man a cripple, though it was true that he seldom left his quarters (in the top of a certain tower), preferring the company of his books and amateur scientific apparatus to that of his fellow men. “He’s just nearsighted, is all,” I said, “but he does have a port-wine birthmark on his temple—”
“Cancerous!” the stranger cried. “You’ll make it turn out to be cancerous! Oh, that’s very good. But shouldn’t he have some sort of astigmatism instead of myopia?”
Ah, it was so right, so righter that the seeker’s vision be twisted instead of merely blurred—and to make the birthmark incipiently cancerous, what a stroke that would be! For the first time in half a year I grew truly interested in my book. Putting reticence by, I outlined the plot to this remarkable visitor of mine, who displayed a keener grasp of my concerns than any critic or reviewer I’d read—keener, I smiled to suppose, than myself, who in recent months had come nearly to forgetting what was my vision of things.
“It’s about love, as you say; but a very special kind. People talk about two sorts of love, you know, the kind that tries to escape the self and the kind that affirms the self. But it seems to me there’s a third kind of love, that doesn’t seek either union or communion with its object, but merely admires it from a position of utter detachment—what I call the Innocent Imagination.” My hero, I explained, was to be a Cosmic Amateur; a man enchanted with history, geography, nature, the people around him—everything that is the case—because he saw its arbitrariness but couldn’t understand or accept its finality. He would deal with reality like a book, a novel that he didn’t write and wasn’t a character in, but only an appreciative reader of; naturally he would assume that there were other novels, better ones and worse … But in truth, of course, he wasn’t finally a spectator at all; he couldn’t stay “out of it”; and the fiascos of his involvements with men and women—in particular the revelation of his single mortal fate—these things would make him at the end, if not an authentic person, at least an expert amateur, so to speak, who might aspire to a kind of honorary membership in the human fraternity.
“I think there’s some heroism in that, don’t you?” I was, in truth, never more enthusiastic about my story. It was a great conception after all, and little inspirations came as I spoke: the seeker must be not only astigmatic but addicted to lenses, telescopic and microscopic; the tower he lived in I would convert to a sort of huge camera obscura into which images of life outside were projected, ten times more luminous and interesting than the real thing—perfect, perfect! And my amateur of life would welcome and treasure his cancer, his admission-ticket to brotherhood …
But even as my enthusiasm grew, Stoker Giles shook his head.
“It’s wrong, classmate.” He even laid a hand on my arm—I can only say lovingly. And for all I saw pretty well he was playing to the hilt his role of clairvoyant, the touch moved me. And the laughing candor in those eyes, that exalted-imp’s face (doubtless practiced in a mirror)—the wretch had a way with him! My quick disappointment gave way to lassitude, a sweet fatigue. It was wrong, of course; all I’d ever done was wrong. I had no hold on things. My every purchase on reality—as artist, teacher, lover, citizen, husband, friend—all were bizarre and wrong, a procession of hoaxes perhaps impressive for a time but ultimately ruinous. He couldn’t know how deep his words went, almost to the wellsprings! Wi
thout for a moment accepting him as prophet (I knew all moods are retroactive, so that what he said would apply to anyone ripe for discontentment), I let myself acknowledge the mantic aspects of the situation. Throughout the rest of our interview, you must understand, there was this ambivalence: on the one hand I never lost sight of the likelihood that here was just another odd arts-student, even a lunatic, whose pronouncements were as generally pertinent as weighing-machine fortunes; on the other I was quite aware that it is the prophet who validates the prophecy, and not vice-versa—his authenticity lies not in what he says but in his manner and bearing, his every gesture, the whole embodiment of his personality. And in this salient respect (which I dwell upon because of its relevance to the manuscript he left me) Mr. Stoker Giles was effective indeed.
Calmly now he said, “You’re like the man who gave my father a little lens once, that he claimed would show everything truly. Here it is …”
He flipped up a round concave lens near the head of his walking-stick and invited me to examine my manuscript through it. But the joke was, it was silvered on the back, and returned no image of my words at all, enlarged or reduced, only a magnified reflection of my eye. I felt myself blush, and blushed more to feel it.
He said, “You’re going to fail. You’ve never been really and truly there, have you? And you’ve never finally owned to the fact of things. If I should suddenly pinch you now and you woke and saw that all of it was gone, that none of the things and people you’d known had been actually the case—you wouldn’t be very much surprised.”
Before I could reply he seized my arm and pinched the skin. I came out of the chair with a shout, batting at his hand, but could not shake him loose. “Wake up! Wake up!” he ordered, grinning at me. I found myself blinking and snorting out air. I did, I did with my whole heart yearn to shrug off the Dream and awake to an order of things—quite new and other! And it was not the first time.
