Letters

by John Barth

  6. His honeymoon return with Andromeda to Seriphos, where he rescues Danaë by petrifying Polydectes. I.e., the termination of his tasks by the extermination of his taskmaster.

  7. His triumphal further return to Argos with wife and mother, his accession to the throne, and his accidental slaying of Grandfather Acrisius (his prenatal and postpartum adversary) with a mispitched discus.

  G. His 8-year reign and establishment of the Perseid dynasty.

  2. And if this mural exfoliated upon a wall not flat like Dido’s Carthaginian frescoes (in which Aeneas sees his own story thus far, even his own face), nor circular like Campbell’s diagram, but logarithmically spiraling out as in a snail-shaped temple, then the Second-Cycle scenes, each positioned behind the original it echoes, might well depict

  II. My projected fiction etc.

  A. Perseus’s fall from favor with the gods, the decline of his marriage, and the general stagnation or petrifaction of his career; his hope to be “reborn,” at least rejuvenated, by a revisit to the scenes of his initial triumphs.

  B. His quarrelsome voyage with Andromeda, who scoffs at his project; their shipwreck and rescue by a descendant of old King Polydectes: handsome Prince Danaus of Seriphos, who flirts with Andromeda.

  C. His resolve to continue the reenactment alone, leaving Andromeda to her affair with Danaus. His reconsultation of veiled “Athena” for advice and equipment. She lends him the winged horse Pegasus but is otherwise equivocal, even skeptical of his project. The truth is, she is not Athena but Medusa in disguise! Moreover, she loves Perseus; has loved him all along! Athena, her original punisher, has recapitated her and restored her maiden beauty, but with certain hard conditions, to be disclosed in IIF1.

  D. His reencounter with the Graeae, who want their eye back. But P. has dropped it accidentally into Lake Triton in the 1st Cycle (ID). He promises to retrieve it.

  E. His deep dive into that lake for that eye; his near drowning and rescue by Medusa, disguised as a Styx-Nymph.

  F. 1. His lakeshore idyll with this veiled and odorless nymph, who reveals herself to be Medusa, but won’t lift her veil. For Athena has told her that if her true lover unveils her, they will be immortalized together like Keats’s lovers on the Grecian Urn; but if anyone else does, she will be re-Gorgonized and he a fortiori petrified. She’s willing to risk it, but is he?

  2. His decision that he is not, yet. He slips off, attempts to fly over the desert as in his youth, loses his way, crash-lands, loses his consciousness, awakes in a spiral temple muraled with all the foregoing scenes and ministered over, as is he, by a pretty young priestess, who becomes his lover. He believes himself dead and in heaven, learns that he’s alive and in Egypt (where he’d paused for refreshment in the 1st Cycle) and that his new hero-worshiping lover, a student of mythology, is the artist responsible for the story of his life thus far, complete to IIF2.

  3. His gratefully kissing her… good-bye. He departs from the temple, returns down the Nile, and secretly enters Joppa, where he learns that Andromeda is established in the palace with her new lover.

  4. His confrontation with her there, among the petrified host from IF4, their original wedding guests. Danaus’s live warriors step armed from behind the “statues”; it is a trap.

  5. The second Banquet-Hall Battle, a reenactment of the first, but without Medusa’s aid. Perseus’s slaying of young Danaus, arduous general victory, and sparing of Andromeda. Their final rejection of each other.

  6. His unveiling and open-eyed embrace of ambiguous Medusa, let come what may.

  7. Their transfiguration (along with Andromeda, her mother Cassiopeia, her father Cepheus, the monster Cetus, the horse Pegasus, and the remarkable artist-priestess of IIF2, who will by now have added these scenes to the unwinding mural) into constellations.

  G. Their “posthumous” dialogue in the sky, in which, as every night, certain questions are raised (e.g., Has Medusa been truly restored, and is Perseus her true lover? Or was his kiss a mere desperate hope, and she thus a Gorgon after all?) and at least equivocally answered; the stars set until the next nightly reenactment of their story.

  3. If my story were so partitioned, and further arranged in its telling so that the First Cycle is rehearsed retrospectively in course of the Second—which itself begins in medias res, in the Egyptian temple of IIF2—then the “panel” IIF6, Perseus’s open-eyed embrace of his new Medusa, would be the climax of the climax, intimated in IE (not IE) above.

  4. Such a pattern might even be discovered in one’s own, unheroical life. In the stages of one’s professional career, for example, or the succession of one’s love affairs.

  5. If one imagines an artist less enamored of the world than of the language we signify it with, yet less enamored of the language than of the signifying narration, and yet less enamored of the narration than of its formal arrangement, one need not necessarily imagine that artist therefore forsaking the world for language, language for the processes of narration, and those processes for the abstract possibilities of form.

  6. Might he/she not as readily, at least as possibly, be imagined as thereby (if only thereby) enabled to love the narrative through the form, the language through the narrative, even the world through the language? Which, like narratives and their forms, is after all among the contents of the world.

  7. And, thus imagined, might not such an artist, such an amateur of the world, aspire at least to expert amateurship? To an honorary degree of humanity?

  G. And if—by a curriculum of dispensations, advisements, armings, trials, losses, and gains, isomorphic with a Perseus’s or a Bellerophon’s—this artist contrived somehow to attain that degree, might he not then find himself liberated to be (as he has after all always been, but is enabled now more truly, freely, efficaciously to be) in the world? Just as the Hero (at IF6) finally terminates his tasks by exterminating his taskmaster and (IIF6) discovers in what had been his chiefest adversary his truest ally, so such an “artist,” at the Axis Mundi or Navel of the World, might find himself liberated—Old self! Old Other! Yours Truly!—from such painful, essential correspondences as ours. Which I now end, and with it the career of “Arthur Morton King.” In order to begin

  II. My life’s Second Cycle

  * See Lord Raglan, The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama, ch. 16 (N.Y., Vintage Books, 1956).

  † In ch. 4, “The Keys,” of The Hero with a Thousand Faces (N.Y., Bollingen, 1949).

  I: Ambrose Mensch to the Author. A left-handed letter following up a telephone call. Alphabetical instructions from one writer to another.

  “Barataria”

  Bloodsworth Island, Maryland

  Monday A.M., 8/25/69

  Imagine your writing hand put hors de combat by a blow from the palm of Fame! In my case, a 3-lb. bronze job—either a replica or the original snitched by the redcoats from the U.S. Navy Monument during the burning of Washington in 1814—wielded here last night during the Burning of Washington sequence by R. Prinz, who I’m happy to say got as good as he gave: I smithereened his eyeglasses, and very nearly his head, with the pen of History, ditto. More to come.

  So I’m following up my Saturday night’s phone call with a left-handed letter typed in A. B. Cook’s caretaker’s cottage, kindly lent Milady A. and me till noon today. Cook and caretaker, together with the navy aforementioned, are searching the Prohibited Area of Bloodsworth Island for Jerome Bonaparte Bray, possibly blown last night to Kingdom Come by a combination of lightning and thitherto unexploded naval ordnance. Choppers, air sleds, marsh buggies, patrol boats! Round about us the filmists film themselves cleaning up the ruins of Washington. Their Director has abandoned his messed-up mistress, one Merope Bernstein, and withdrawn alone to NYC, where no doubt he’ll respectacle himself for next month’s Battle of Baltimore. Germaine and I shall withdraw likewise, after lunch today, to Cambridge, to check out my dexter carpals (presently Ace-Bandaged) and my oncophiliac ménage.

  My friend History (formerly Britannia, a.
k.a. Literature) will pen you the details some Saturday.

  Now: re your letter of August 3, and my call. Enclosed is my ground plan for that Perseus-Medusa story I told you of, together with more notes on golden ratio, Fibonacci series, and logarithmic spirals than any sane writer will be interested in. My compliments. All that remains is for you to work out a metaphorical physics to turn stones into stars, as heat + pressure + time turn dead leaves into diamonds. I have in mind Medusa’s petrifying gaze, reflected and re-reflected at the climax, not from Athena’s mirror-shield, but from her lover Perseus’s eyes: the transcension of paralyzing self-consciousness to productive self-awareness. And (it goes without saying) I have in mind too the transformation of dead notes into living fiction—for it also remains for you to write the story!

  Me, I’m done with it, as with another fictive enterprise I’d begun to fancy, which I shan’t lay on you. What occurred to me as we spoke was that a project as sevenish as the one you describe in your letter ought to be your seventh book rather than your sixth: sixes are my thing. What’s more, your busiest reader hereabouts—my good Dame History—has caught up with your production and needs a quickie to tide her over while you do that long one. So, friend, here are your alphabetized instructions:

  1. Author my Perseus/Medusa story and the Bellerophon/Chimera one you mentioned, both concerning midlife crises and Second Cycles that echo First. (I see these as novellas.)

  2. Bring to light a third story, from entirely different material, but with enough echoes and connections so that you can graft the three together and

  3. Call the chimerical result a novel, since everyone knows that the novella is that form of prose fiction too long to sell as a short story and too short to sell as a book. Good luck.

  4. Draft then that epistolary Opus #7 you speak of (including or excluding any version of Yours Truly, in or out of the Funhouse he could almost wish he’d never left, it was so peaceful being lost in there), whose theme seems to me to want to be not “revolution”—what do you and I know about such things?—but (per our telephone talk) reenactment.

  5. Epistle yourself to the penultimate seventh of that septpartite opus (Yrs. T. would make it the 6th 7th of that sixth seventh, but he excuses you from such programmaticism), where you’d thought to insert a classical-mythical text-within-the-text. Leave it out (you’ll already have published it as Opus #6)! And for that crucial, climactic, sexissimal keyhole…

  6. Find or fashion a (skeleton) key that will unlock at once the seven several plot-doors of your story!

  Q.E.D.

  As for me: if and when my good right hand is back in service (typing with my left brings me closer than ever in his lifetime to my poor dead father, who wrestled one-armed with that marble all those years) and this movie done (we’ve but two more scenes to shoot), perhaps I’ll commence my Second Cycle—with a novel based on the movie that was meant to be based on your novels but went off in directions of its own. Or perhaps with a crab-and-oyster epic: a Marylandiad? In any case, I advise us both, as we shall not likely be being brief, at least to be bright. May your progression from letter to letter be consistently so; as for Y.T., he will be content if his regression be but brightly consistent: if, like Odysseus striving home from Troy, he can

  7. Go from energetic dénouement [to] climactic beginning.

  A.

  T: The Author to Ambrose Mensch. Soliciting his advice and assistance in the LETTERS project.

  Chautauqua, New York

  August 3, 1969

  Ambrose Mensch

  The Lighthouse

  Erdmann’s Cornlot

  “Dorset,” Maryland

  Dear Ambrose,

  Time was when you and I were so close in our growings-up and literary apprenticeships, so alike in some particulars and antithetical in others, that we served each as the other’s alter ego and aesthetic conscience; eventually even as the other’s fiction. By any measure it has been an unequal relation: my life, mercifully, has been so colorless in its modest success, yours so comparatively colorful in what you once called its exemplary failure, that I’ve had more literary mileage by far than you from our old and long since distanced connection.

  Neither of us, I presume, regrets either that closeness or this distance. My guess is that you, too, ultimately shrug your shoulders at “the pinch of our personal destinies as they spin themselves out upon Fate’s wheel”—your pet line from William James in graduate-school days. This letter is not meant to alter that spinning; only to solicit a bit more of that unequal mileage and to wave cordially from Chautauqua Lake to Chesapeake Bay.

  I have in mind a book-length fiction, friend, more of a novel than not, perhaps even a sizable one. Having spent the mid-1960’s fiddling happily with stories for electronic tape and live voice—a little reorchestration of the oral narrative tradition—I’m inclined now to make the great leap forward again to Print: more particularly, to reorchestrate some early conventions of the Novel. Indeed (I blush to report) I am smitten with that earliest-exhausted of English novel-forms, the epistolary novel, already worked to death by the end of the 18th Century. Like yourself an official honorary Doctor of Letters, I take it as among my functions to administer artificial resuscitation to the apparently dead.

  Here’s what I know about the book so far. Its working title is LETTERS. It will consist of letters (like this, but with a plot) between several correspondents, the capital-A Author perhaps included, and preoccupy itself with, among other things, the role of epistles—real letters, forged and doctored letters—in the history of History. It will also be concerned with, and of course constituted of, alphabetical letters: the atoms of which the written universe is made. Finally, to a small extent the book is addressed to the phenomenon of literature itself, the third main sense of our word letters: Literature, which a certain film nut is quoted as calling “that moderately interesting historical phenomenon, of no present importance.”

  What else. LETTERS is a seven-letter word; the letters in LETTERS are to be from seven correspondents, some recruited from my earlier stories (a sure sign, such recycling, that an author approaches 40). They’ll be dated over the seven months from March through September 1969, though they may also involve the upcoming U.S. Bicentennial (a certain number of years hence), the War of 1812, the American Revolution, revolutions and recyclings generally. I’ve even determined how many letters will be required (88, arranged and distributed in a certain way: a modest total by contrast with the 175 of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, for example, not to mention the 537 of Clarissa)—but I’m not yet ready to declare what the book’s about!

  However, experience teaches us not to worry overmuch about that problem. We learn, as Roethke says, by going where we have to go; and among the things we may learn, like Aeneas, is where all along we have been headed.

  Two further formal or procedural considerations. (A) At a point 6/7ths of the way through the book—that is, in the neighborhood of its climaxes—I want there dutifully to be echoed the venerable convention of the text-within-the-text: something classical-mythological, I think, to link this project with its predecessor and to evoke the origins of fiction in the oral narrative tradition. I have in mind to draft this little off-central text first and let the novel accrete around it like a snail shell. The myth of Bellerophon, Pegasus, and Chimera has been much in my imagination lately (In the myth, you remember, just at or past the midpoint of his heroical career, Bellerophon grows restless, dissatisfied that he has not after all got to heaven by slaying the Chimera; he wonders what he might manage by way of encore to that equivocal feat. There towers Mount Olympus, still beyond his reach; there grazes the winged horse, turned out to pasture and, like his master, going to fat…), but I can’t seem to get old Pegasus off the ground! Any suggestions?

  Which question fetches us to (B) It appeals to me to fancy that each of the several LETTERS correspondents, explicitly or otherwise, and whatever his/her response to the Author’s solicitations (like the foregoing), will cont
ribute something essential to the project’s plan or theme. So far, this has worked out pretty well. Never mind what your predecessors have come up with, and never mind that in a sense this “dialogue” is a monologue; that we capital-A Authors are ultimately, ineluctably, and forever talking to ourselves. If our correspondence is after all a fiction, we like, we need that fiction: it makes our job less lonely.

  So, old fellow toiler up the slopes of Parnassus: Have I your permission to recycle “Ambrose Mensch” out of the Funhouse and into LETTERS? And how does all this strike you? R.S.V.P.!

  As ever,

  —And, friend, how do you fare? I have in the body of this letter stuck deliberately to business. But as you know, I know (by letters only) your admirable Lady Amherst; and via that correspondence—which I initiated but have not done right by—I know a great deal that isn’t my business, as well as one or two things (e.g., your adventures with Mr. Prinz) that sort of are. I won’t presume to remark on either, though I have my opinions. Except of course to say I’m sorry to hear that your mother’s dying and your brother’s ill. And look here, Ambrose: your Ex (excuse me, but I recollect her amiably from college days, when she typed all our fledgling manuscripts)—has that chap Jerome Bray really got her in his clutches?

  U: The Author to Ambrose Mensch. Replying to the latter’s telephone call of the previous night.

  Chautauqua, New York

  August 24, 1969

  Old ally,

  Understood. My letter to you of 8/3 awaited your return from Canada to the house I once helped you build, and the distressful urgencies chez toi kept you from replying till last night. My sympathy, old altered ego: to you, to Peter, to your sister-in-law.