by John Barth
The difficulty, of course—as you probably knew before you enrolled at St John’s but were no doubt reminded of during your freshman orientation here and every semester thereafter—is succinctly put in the title of Isaac Babel’s earliest known work of fiction: You Must Know Everything. What a title: You Must Know Everything! That imperative implies, among much else, that you must read everything; must indeed have read everything, which of course you cannot; which you could not even if history refrained from growing both longer (as recorded time accumulates) and wider (as cultures evolve and intercultural connections multiply), thus ever enlarging the mass of what Umberto Eco calls “the already said.” You cannot read everything; could not even if you were a certain fellow Hopkins graduate student who seemed to me and his other seminar-mates to have read nearly everything already; whom we suspected of staying up all night reading the corpus’s few remaining unread volumes (in their original languages) while we lesser beings slept; and who I later learned was, in fact, doing just that, more or less, he being not only a polymath but a tireless insomniac: a charming and generous fellow of such cripplingly vast erudition that to this day he is scarcely able to complete a sentence or publish an essay, because every word he utters sets off so many synaptic hot-links in his mind that he has difficulty getting from subject to verb to object, astray in the hypertextuality of his splendid erudition.
Yet even he, as he’d be the first to insist, is far indeed from having read all the books worth reading, much less from having re-read them (we recall Vladimir Nabokov’s insistence that “all great reading is rereading”—a dismaying idea when one has finally reached the end of Dr. Eliot’s shelf or of the ten folio volumes of Somadeva’s Katha Sarit Sagara, or The Ocean of the Streams of Story). No: We cannot read all the books, not to mention spectating all the important stage-plays, films, and graphic and plastic arts; auditing all the music; acquiring a working knowledge of all the languages and arts and sciences (a fascinating section of our Hopkins commencement program is the pages and pages of doctoral-dissertation titles in the several sciences: titles of which, more often than not, I cannot understand a single word; can only shake my head in awe at the staggering multifariousness of human intellectual curiosity).... We “must know everything,” but we cannot, and inasmuch as we cannot, our pursuit of Higher Education both during and after our college years involves us in an exemplary paradox: Since time, attention, energy, and opportunity are all finite, we must radically exclude and delimit if we are to learn anything at all well; yet in so doing we may very possibly leave out things that, had we discovered them or they us, might have been keys to the treasure that we were scarcely aware we were seeking; or if not the keys, at least elements of the combination.
The Tragic View of life, and/or of history, is that there are no ultimate victories, just different ways to lose, the only “victory” being to go down heroically, or anyhow as nobly as we can. The Tragic View of liberal education is that even at its best, as at St. John’s, it is so necessarily, unavoidably limited that all it can attempt is to afford us some experience of, for example, informed close reading and critical thinking, and to make us aware that there remain continents of knowledge out there that one lifetime could scarcely scratch the surface of, even were we to devote it all to reading and studying—which we must not, since education comes so much from hands-on doing and experiencing as well as from reading and study. Our Hopkins mini-version of your Great Books curriculum was commendable; but how fortunate for me that to make ends meet I worked as a book-filer in the university library, where I lost myself back in the stacks sampling what I was supposed to be reshelving, and thus discovered such extracurricular storytellers as Petronius and Boccaccio and Scheherazade, important to my eventual vocation. But who knows what-all I didn’t happen to discover, or do or meet, that might have made me into a very different, not impossibly a quite better, writer, not to mention a better human being?
BUT THAT WAY lies fruitless discontent, and I do not at all intend the Tragic View of Liberal Education as a despairing or even a pessimistic view, only an unblinkered one. I remember wishing, as a green undergraduate and apprentice writer, that I could at least know the names of everything, if not the things themselves: “all trades,” as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it, “their gear, tackle, and trim”: every rock, bug, plant, star, body-bone, lingo, culture. I remember feeling like a newcomer to a party that had been going on for millennia, and worrying that maybe all the best jokes and stories had been told already. 25 centuriesworth of poets getting off good metaphors for the ocean and the sunrise, for example, since Homer’s “wine-dark sea” and “rosy-fingered dawn”: Could I or anybody hope to come up with yet another? And how would I know that I had, unless I reconnoitered the entire existing inventory? Which of course I could not; only comfort myself with the speculation that my tens of thousands of predecessors, so far from exhausting the stock of good dawn- and sea-images, might for all we know have scarcely made a dent in it. No doubt the number of possible zingers is finite, but then so is the number of stars in the galaxy, not to mention in the universe: finite, but astronomically large.
Therefore take heart, adviseth the Tragic View: One’s education is at best fragmentary, and will never be anything like complete; but at least it can know itself to be so, and can achieve some compass and coherence. It has to start somewhere, and inasmuch as we happen to dwell in this historical/cultural latitude and longitude rather than some other, it seems not unreasonable to begin (although we will not end) with some judiciously chosen reading-list therefrom—recognizing it to be neither more nor less than our point of departure (or 88 or 418 points of departure), not our journey’s end.
Will there be objections to the list? Of course there’ll be, and welcome to the Great Conversation! Are there arguable alternatives to the Tragic View of Liberal Education? No doubt there are—including the Tragic View of the Tragic View. But that’s a sermon for some other occasion than this: For now, my warm congratulations indeed on your Education Thus Far. Welcome to the party! Gaudeamus igitur! On with your stories!
The Relevance of Irrelevance: Writing American
This article—commissioned by the State Department in 2002 for inclusion in a book of essays to be distributed in U.S. embassies and consulates throughout the world “to illustrate American values through having various authors consider what makes them an American writer,” but subsequently rejected for its “explicit commentary on the events of September 11”—first appeared in Italian translation1 in the anthology Undici settembre (Torino: Einaudi, 2003).
SPEAKING AT JOHNS Hopkins University back when his country was riven by Apartheid, the eminent South African novelist J. M. Coetzee remarked that under such sorry historical circumstances, for him to publish a novel that made no political statement would be tantamount to his making a very conspicuous—and egregious—political statement. From my seat in the audience I nodded sympathetic assent, although Coetzee’s observation was by no means a pitch for sympathy. And, not for the first time, I silently thanked Apollo and all the Muses for affording me the luxury of political irrelevance.
More exactly, I felt grateful to chance and history for affording me the option of writing fiction that intends no political/ideological statement; for the good fortune of living in a place and time that can regard as equally honorable the literary credos of, on the one hand, my fellow American fictionist Grace Paley, for example—a heroic protester of U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s, among her other good causes, who once declared to my students that “Art isn’t important: People are important. Politics is important”—and on the other hand that of the late Vladimir Nabokov, himself a political refugee, who nevertheless maintained that his sole literary aim was “aesthetic bliss.” It should be noted that one can savor a Grace Paley short story on its literary merits alone (I myself do not find her excellent fiction especially “political”), and that Nabokov’s virtuoso novels are by no means oblivious to the politic
al upheavals that drove him from his native Russia. But both authors felt free—as Coetzee by his own acknowledgment did not, and as artists in any politically convulsed or oppressed place and time may well not—either to engage their art in the service of some political/moral cause or to regard that art itself as their cause: Art for Art’s sake, or more specifically, in the case of fiction, art for the sake of language, form, action, character, plot, setting, narration, and theme; Story (mainly though not exclusively) for Story’s sake. For the freedom to be, in my writing, politically engaged or politically irrelevant, I feel as fortunate as for the happy accident of my having been born in just the right narrow historical “window” (the year was 1930) to miss direct involvement in all the U.S.-involved wars of the Terrible Twentieth Century: not here yet for World War I, in which my father served and my uncle died; too young for World War II, in which my older brother served; exempted by student- and then marital/parental deferments from service in Korea, where many of my age-group served; too old to be conscripted for the war in Vietnam (for which my male children, luckily, missed having their draft-lottery numbers called). May that cycle of good fortune be repeated for my children’s children! Would that it could extend to all the world’s children!
Which is not at all to say that I regard every one of those terrible wars as unjustified, any more than (as a citizen of my country and the world) I feel “above” engagement with political/social issues. Not at all. Although I happen to incline to the Skeptical-Pacifist persuasion, had I been born a few years earlier I would no doubt have enlisted patriotically in the 1940s, along with my brother, to oppose Nazism and its Japanese counterpart. I will even grant that if such had been the case, I might very well feel the experience to have been centrally important or at least significant to me as a writer: Most artists’ work is affected in some measure by major experiences of their youth. But I do not regret having missed that particular category of convulsion. Indeed, Ernest Hemingway is the only American writer I can think of who professed a condescending pity for those of his countrymen who happened not to experience the trauma of warfare: I recollect his declaring somewhere or other that World War I was “the defining event of their generation, and they simply missed it.” Hemingway, however, was by notorious disposition a macho adventure-seeker. If his admirable fiction happened to depend upon that appetite, so be it; the no less admirable fiction of William Faulkner, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—to name only a few of his illustrious peers—did not.
My argument is simply that for an artist to be politically concerned and even politically active as a citizen does not—anyhow should not, ideally—mandate politically concerned art. I quite understand J. M. Coetzee’s position as aforestated, which in his case has produced writing as commendable on its literary as on its moral/ political merits. But I admire at least equally the art of the late great Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, for example, who, though embarrassed and harassed by the Perón regime (at whose hands he was “promoted” from his post in the Buenos Aires municipal library to the rank of chicken-and-rabbit inspector in the public markets), was not moved thereby to write political allegories and anti-Perónista fables, as he quite justifiably might have been.2 Borges admits (in “An Autobiographical Essay”) to having danced in the streets of Buenos Aires when Perón was ousted in September 1955, and also to writing a couple of pro-Israel poems at the time of the Arab-Israeli war of 1967; more typically, however, when his fiction addresses contemporary political/historical matters—as in his short story “The Secret Miracle,” for example, about a Czech playwright executed by the Nazis for the crime of being Jewish—the story is at least as much about art and metaphysics as about the Holocaust.
MY OWN MUSE happens to be the one with the grin rather than the one with the grimace. One of our recent collaborations, a comic-apocalyptic “Y2K” novel called Coming Soon!!!, coincidentally appeared just a few weeks after the Islamic terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and in subsequent book-tour interviews and public appearances I was more than once asked whether I thought irony, even comedy in general, was perhaps inappropriate , to put it mildly, in the wake of that atrocity and the subsequent national emergency. Less in my own defense than in defense of artistic liberty and therapeutic laughter, I found myself invoking two of my longtime literary stars, The Thousand and One Nights and Boccaccio’s Decameron. In the former, the King’s anger at his wife’s adultery turns into murderous misogyny, ruinous to the state as well as lethal to many of its female citizens: After killing his unfaithful wife and her paramour, King Shahryar “marries” a young virgin every night and has her executed the next morning lest she prove unfaithful, and after three bloodthirsty yearsworth of such misguided revenge, families with maiden daughters are fleeing the country in droves. To save her homeland, her remaining “sisters,” and the King himself from his madness, Scheherazade volunteers herself (she has a Plan), and the 1001 suspenseful nights of her literally marvelous storytelling ensue. The Decameron opens with a scarifying description of the Black Death of 1348: the cataclysmic bubonic plague that in only a few years killed a third of Europe’s population, just as the influenza pandemic of 1918 would claim millions more victims than the Great War itself—including that aforementioned uncle of mine, who died of it in France while serving with the American Expeditionary Force. Boccaccio’s ten young Florentine lords and ladies retreat from the lawless horror of the dying city to their country estates, where they amuse themselves by swapping a hundred stories: one tale per person per day for ten days (fourteen days, actually, but they take Fridays and Saturdays off), until they deem it safe to return to Florence.
The point of my invoking these classics was that in both distinguished cases, the stories—told in horrific, indeed apocalyptic circumstances—so far from directly addressing those circumstances, are all but programmatically irrelevant to them. Scheherazade may slip in a tale or two about people unjustly threatened with death who are mercifully spared (e.g., Nights 1 and 2), but more typically she goes in for whiz-bang Special Effects like magic lanterns and bottled genies, along with erotica and even scatology: one of Goethe’s favorite Arabian Nights was #410: “How Abu Hasan Farted.”3 After Boccaccio’s detailed description of the plague in Florence, his privileged gentry never speak of it again until their idyll’s conclusion: Their tales have to do with libidinous husbands and wives (and nuns and friars), narrow escapes, flirtations, witty retorts; not a word about how their less privileged compaesani are dying miserably by the thousands back in town. Indeed, Romantic Interest grows among several of the taletellers, and when they return to Florence and part company at the book’s close, it is not to aid the victims (who anyhow could not be helped, since neither cause nor cure for bubonic plague was known at the time), but to avoid the appearance of having fallen into Vice and to go their separate ways, having judged the epidemic to have passed its peak. A proper Marxist would be appalled, I suppose; even we mere liberal Democrats may be given pause by such blithely oblivious elitism, and Boccaccio himself repudiated the book in his elder years—but on moral, not ideological grounds. His merry, ribald tales, however, along with the schedules, rules, and agendas that their tellers improvise for ordering their pleasures, have served as a therapeutic diversion for the lucky company, even as an ad hoc social order until the larger world recovers. Their very irrelevance to that world’s crisis, like the general irrelevance of Scheherazade’s tales to her being in bed with the Guinness World Record Serial Killer, may be said to be their relevance. Centuries after the horror that inspired and frames them, we read them for pleasure still.
NOW: AS A matter of biographical fact, I happen to be no fan of the present administration in Washington, or of U.S. unilateralism in foreign affairs: No anti-ABM or anti-landmine treaties or Kyoto protocols or International Court of Justice for us Yanks, thanks! Drill the Arctic, cut the parkland timber, bomb Saddam and Roe v. Wade, torture the war-prisoners, an
d step on the gas! And while I quite understand the post-9/11 fever of patriotic display (as opposed to unostentatious patriotism) among my countrymen, it makes me uncomfortable, as does my government’s ever more lavish military expenditure at whatever sacrifice of other deserving priorities. In my personal political opinion, the charges against Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorists include, along with their more serious crimes, their having rescued an insecure and, to a great many of us, lamentable American presidency by permitting it to wrap itself in the Stars and Stripes and imply that criticisms of its right-wing heavy-handedness are unpatriotic. One worries that if the terrorists should strike again, some version of our infamous House UnAmerican Activities Committee of the 1950s could rise from its well-deserved grave and resume its deplorable witch-hunting. Already, one imagines, complaints like these of mine do not go unnoticed by the nation’s reinvigorated agencies of domestic surveillance. . . .4
