Chimera

by John Barth

  “Sherry kissed me. ‘That other either goes without saying,’ she said, ‘or it doesn’t go at all. Making love and telling stories both take more than good technique—but it’s only the technique that we can talk about.’

  “The Genie agreed: ‘Heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal, Dunyazade; so does heartless skill. But what you want is passionate virtuosity.’ They speculated endlessly on such questions as whether a story might imaginably be framed from inside, as it were, so that the usual relation between container and contained would be reversed and paradoxically reversible—and (for my benefit, I suppose) what human state of affairs such an odd construction might usefully figure. Or whether one might go beyond the usual tale-within-a-tale, beyond even the tales-within-tales-within-tales-within-tales which our Genie had found a few instances of in that literary treasure-house he hoped one day to add to, and conceive a series of, say, seven concentric stories-within-stories, so arranged that the climax of the innermost would precipitate that of the next tale out, and that of the next, et cetera, like a string of firecrackers or the chains of orgasms that Shahryar could sometimes set my sister catenating.

  “This last comparison—a favorite of theirs—would lead them to a dozen others between narrative and sexual art, whether in spirited disagreement or equally spirited concord. The Genie declared that in his time and place there were scientists of the passions who maintained that language itself, on the one hand, originated in ‘infantile pregenital erotic exuberance, polymorphously perverse,’ and that conscious attention, on the other, was a ‘libidinal hypercathexis’—by which magic phrases they seemed to mean that writing and reading, or telling and listening, were literally ways of making love. Whether this was in fact the case, neither he nor Sherry cared at all; yet they liked to speak as if it were (their favorite words), and accounted thereby for the similarity between conventional dramatic structure—its exposition, rising action, climax, and dénouement—and the rhythm of sexual intercourse from foreplay through coitus to orgasm and release. Therefore also, they believed, the popularity of love (and combat, the darker side of the same rupee) as a theme for narrative, the lovers’ embrace as its culmination, and post-coital lassitude as its natural ground: what better time for tales than at day’s end, in bed after making love (or around the campfire after battle or adventure, or in the chimney corner after work), to express and heighten the community between the lovers, comrades, co-workers?

  “ ‘The longest story in the world—’ Sherry observed, ‘The Ocean of Story, seven hundred thousand distichs—was told by the god Siva to his consort Parvati as a gift for the way she made love to him one night. It would take a minstrel five hundred evenings to recite it all, but she sat in his lap and listened contentedly till he was done.’

  “To this example, which delighted him, the Genie added several unfamiliar to us: a great epic called Odyssey, for instance, whose hero returns home after twenty years of war and wandering, makes love to his faithful wife, and recounts all his adventures to her in bed while the gods prolong the night in his behalf; another work called Decameron, in which ten courtly lords and ladies, taking refuge in their country houses from an urban pestilence, amuse one another at the end of each day with stories (some borrowed from Sherry herself) as a kind of substitute for making love—an artifice in keeping with the artificial nature of their little society. And, of course, that book about Sherry herself which he claimed to be reading from, in his opinion the best illustration of all that the very relation between teller and told was by nature erotic. The teller’s role, he felt, regardless of his actual gender, was essentially masculine, the listener’s or reader’s feminine, and the tale was the medium of their intercourse.

  “ ‘That makes me unnatural,’ Sherry objected. ‘Are you one of those vulgar men who think that women writers are homosexuals?’

  “ ‘Not at all,’ the Genie assured her. ‘You and Shahryar usually make love in Position One before you tell your story, and lovers like to switch positions the second time.’ More seriously, he had not meant to suggest that the ‘femininity’ of readership was a docile or inferior condition: a lighthouse, for example, passively sent out signals that mariners labored actively to receive and interpret; an ardent woman like his mistress was as least as energetic in his embrace as he in embracing her; a good reader of cunning tales worked in her way as busily as their author; et cetera. Narrative, in short—and here they were again in full agreement—was a love-relation, not a rape: its success depended upon the reader’s consent and cooperation, which she could withhold or at any moment withdraw; also upon her own combination of experience and talent for enterprise, and the author’s ability to arouse, sustain, and satisfy her interest—an ability on which his figurative life hung as surely as Scheherazade’s literal.

  “ ‘And like all love-relations,’ he added one afternoon, ‘it’s potentially fertile for both partners, in a way you should approve, for it goes beyond male and female. The reader is likely to find herself pregnant with new images, as you hope Shahryar will become with respect to women; but the storyteller may find himself pregnant too…’

  “Much of their talk was over my head, but on hearing this last I hugged Sherry tight and prayed to Allah it was not another of their as if’s. Sure enough, on the three hundred eighth night her tale was interrupted not by me but by the birth of Ali Shar, whom despite his resemblance to Shahryar I clasped to my bosom from that hour as if I had borne instead of merely helping to deliver him. Likewise on the six hundred twenty-fourth night, when little Gharíb came lustily into the world, and the nine hundred fifty-ninth, birthday of beautiful Jamilah-Melissa. Her second name, which means ‘honey-sweet’ in the exotic tongues of Genieland, we chose in honor of our friend’s still-beloved mistress, whom he had announced his intention to marry despite Sherry’s opinion that while women and men might in some instances come together as human beings, wives and husbands could never. The Genie argued, for his part, that no matter how total, exclusive, and permanent the commitment between two lovers might turn out to be, it lacked the dimensions of spiritual seriousness and public responsibility which only marriage, with its ancient vows and symbols, rites and risks, provided.

  “ ‘It can’t last,’ Sherry said crossly. The Genie put on her finger a gift from his fiancée to her namesake’s mother—a gold ring patterned with rams’-horns and conches, replicas of which she and the Genie meant to exchange on their wedding day—and replied, ‘Neither did Athens. Neither did Rome. Neither did all of Jamshid’s glories. But we must live as if it can and will.’

  “ ‘Hmp,’ said Sherry, who over the years had picked up a number of your brother’s ways, as he had hers. But she gave them her blessing—to which I added mine without reservations or as if’s—and turned the ring much in the lamplight when he was gone, trying its look on different hands and fingers and musing as if upon its design.

  “Thus we came to the thousandth night, the thousandth morning and afternoon, the thousandth dipping of Sherry’s quill and invocation of the magic key. And for the thousand and first time, still smiling, our Genie appeared to us, his own ring on his finger as it had been for some forty evenings now—an altogether brighter-looking spirit than had materialized in the book-stacks so long past. We three embraced as always; he asked after the children’s health and the King’s, and my sister, as always, after his progress toward that treasury from which he claimed her stories were drawn. Less reticent on this subject than he had been since our first meeting, he declared with pleasure that thanks to the inspiration of Scheherazade and to the thousand comforts of his loving wife, he believed he had found his way out of that slough of the imagination in which he’d felt himself bogged: whatever the merits of the new work, like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, he had gone forward by going back, to the very roots and springs of story. Using, like Scheherazade herself, for entirely present ends, materials received from narrative antiquity and methods older than the alphabet, in th
e time since Sherry’s defloration he had set down two-thirds of a projected series of three novellas, longish tales which would take their sense from one another in several of the ways he and Sherry had discussed, and, if they were successful (here he smiled at me), manage to be seriously, even passionately, about some things as well.

  “ ‘The two I’ve finished have to do with mythic heroes, true and false,’ he concluded. ‘The third I’m just in the middle of. How good or bad they are I can’t say yet, but I’m sure they’re right. You know what I mean, Scheherazade.’

  “She did; I felt as if I did also, and we happily re-embraced. Then Sherry remarked, apropos of middles, that she’d be winding up the story of Ma’aruf the Cobbler that night and needed at least the beginning of whatever tale was to follow it.

  “The Genie shook his head. ‘My dear, there are no more. You’ve told them all.’ He seemed cruelly undisturbed by a prospect that made the harem spin before my eyes and brought me near to swooning.

  “ ‘No more!’ I cried. ‘What will she do?’

  “ ‘If she doesn’t want to risk Shahryar’s killing her and turning on you,’ he said calmly, ‘I guess she’ll have to invent something that’s not in the book.’

  “ ‘I don’t invent,’ Sherry reminded him. Her voice was no less steady than his, but her expression—when I got hold of my senses enough to see it—was grave. ‘I only recount.’

  “ ‘Borrow something from the treasury!’ I implored him. ‘What will the children do without their mother?’ The harem began to spin again; I gathered all my courage and said: ‘Don’t desert us, friend; give Sherry the story you’re working on now, and you may do anything you like with me. I’ll raise your children if you have any; I’ll wash your Melissa’s feet. Anything.’

  “The Genie smiled and said to Sherry, ‘Our little Dunyazade is a woman.’ Thanking me then for my offer as courteously as he had once Scheherazade, he declined it, not only for the same reasons that had moved him before, but also because he was confident that the only tales left in the treasury of the sort King Shahryar was likely to be entertained by were the hundred mimicries and retellings of Sherry’s own.

  “ ‘Then my thousand nights and a night are ended,’ Sherry said. ‘Don’t be ungrateful to our friend, Doony; everything ends.’

  “I agreed, but tearfully wished myself—and Ali Shar, Gharíb, and little Melissa, whom all I loved as dearly as I loved my sister—out of a world where the only happy endings were in stories.

  “The Genie touched my shoulder. ‘Let’s not forget,’ he said, ‘that from my point of view—a tiresome technical one, I’ll admit—it is a story that we’re coming to the end of. All these tales your sister has told the King are simply the middle of her own story—hers and yours, I mean, and Shahryar’s, and his young brother Shah Zaman’s.’

  “I didn’t understand—but Sherry did, and squeezing my other shoulder, asked him quietly whether, that being the tiresome technical case, it followed that a happy ending might be invented for the framing-story.

  “ ‘The author of The Thousand and One Nights doesn’t invent,’ the Genie reminded her; ‘he only recounts how, after she finished the tale of Ma’aruf the Cobbler, Scheherazade rose from the King’s bed, kissed ground before him, and made bold to ask a favor in return for the thousand and one nights’ entertainment. “Ask, Scheherazade,” the King answers in the story—whereupon you send Dunyazade to fetch the children in, and plead for your life on their behalf, so that they won’t grow up motherless.’

  “My heart sprang up; Sherry sat silent. ‘I notice you don’t ask on behalf of the stories themselves,’ the Genie remarked, ‘or on behalf of your love for Shahryar and his for you. That’s a pretty touch: it leaves him free to grant your wish, if he chooses to, on those other grounds. I also admire your tact in asking only for your life; that gives him the moral initiative to repent his policy and marry you. I don’t think I’d have thought of that.’

  “ ‘Hmp,’ said Sherry.

  “ ‘Then there’s the nice formal symmetry—’

  “ ‘Never mind the symmetry!’ I cried. ‘Does it work or not?’ I saw in his expression then that it did, and in Sherry’s that this plan was not news to her. I hugged them both, weeping enough for joy to make our ink run, so the Genie said, and begged Sherry to promise me that I could stay with her and the children after their wedding as I had before, and sit at the foot of her bed forever.

  “ ‘Not so fast, Doony,’ she said. ‘I haven’t decided yet whether or not I care to end the story that way.’

  “ ‘Not care to?’ I looked with fresh terror to the Genie. ‘Doesn’t she have to, if it’s in the book?’

  “He too appeared troubled now, and searched Sherry’s face, and admitted that not everything he’d seen of our situation in these visions or dreams of his corresponded exactly to the story as it came to him through the centuries, lands, and languages that separated us in waking hours. In his translation, for example, all three children were male and nameless; and while there was no mention of Scheherazade’s loving Shahryar by the end of the book, there was surely none of her despising him, or cuckolding him, more or less, with me and the rest. Most significantly, it went without saying that he himself was altogether absent from the plot—which, however, he prayed my sister to end as it ended in his version: with the double marriage of herself to your brother and me to you, and our living happily together until overtaken by the Destroyer of Delights and Severer of Societies, et cetera.

  “While I tried to assimilate this astonishing news about myself, Sherry asked with a smile whether by ‘his version’ the Genie meant that copy of the Nights from which he’d been assisting us or the story he himself was in midst of inventing; for she liked to imagine, and profoundly hoped it so, that our connection had not been to her advantage only: that one way or another, she and I and our situation were among those ‘ancient narrative materials’ which he had found useful for his present purposes. How did his version end?

  “The Genie closed his eyes for a moment, pushed back his glasses with his thumb, and repeated that he was still in the middle of that third novella in the series, and so far from drafting the climax and dénouement, had yet even to plot them in outline. Turning then to me, to my great surprise he announced that the title of the story was Dunyazadiad; that its central character was not my sister but myself, the image of whose circumstances, on my ‘wedding-night-to-come,’ he found as arresting for taletellers of his particular place and time as was my sister’s for the estate of narrative artists in general.

  “ ‘All those nights at the foot of the bed, Dunyazade!’ he exclaimed. ‘You’ve had the whole literary tradition transmitted to you—and the whole erotic tradition, too! There’s no story you haven’t heard; there’s no way of making love that you haven’t seen again and again. I think of you, little sister, a virgin in both respects: All that innocence! All that sophistication! And now it’s your turn: Shahryar has told young Shah Zaman about his wonderful mistress, how he loves her as much for herself as for her stories—which he also passes on; the two brothers marry the two sisters; it’s your wedding night, Dunyazade… But wait! Look here! Shahryar deflowered and killed a virgin a night for a thousand and one nights before he met Scheherazade; Shah Zaman has been doing the same thing, but it’s only now, a thousand nights and a night later, that he learns about Scheherazade—that means he’s had two thousand and two young women at the least since he killed his wife, and not one has pleased him enough to move him to spend a second night with her, much less spare her life! What are you going to do to entertain him, little sister? Make love in exciting new ways? There are none! Tell him stories, like Scheherazade? He’s heard them all! Dunyazade, Dunyazade! Who can tell your story?’

  “More dead than alive with fright, I clung to my sister, who begged the Genie please to stop alarming me. All apologies, he assured us that what he was describing was not The Thousand and One Nights frame-story (which ended happily without mention
of these terrors), but his own novella, a pure fiction—to which also he would endeavor with all his heart to find some conclusion in keeping with his affection for me. Sherry further eased my anxiety by adding that she too had given long thought to my position as the Genie described it, and was not without certain plans with respect to our wedding night; these, as a final favor to our friend, she had made written note of in the hope that whether or not they succeeded, he might find them useful for his story; but she would prefer to withhold them from me for the present.

  “ ‘You sense as I do, then,’ the Genie said thoughtfully, ‘that we won’t be seeing each other again.’

  “Sherry nodded. ‘You have other stories to tell. I’ve told mine.’

  “Already he’d begun to fade. ‘My best,’ he said, ‘will be less than your least. And I’ll always love you, Scheherazade! Dunyazade, I’m your brother! Good night, sisters! Fare well!’

  “We kissed; he disappeared with Sherry’s letter; Shahryar sent for us; still shaken, I sat at the bed-foot while he and Sherry did a combination from the latter pages of Ananga Ranga and Kama Sutra and she finished the tale of Ma’aruf the Cobbler. Then she rose as the Genie had instructed her, kissed ground, begged boon; I fetched in Ali Shar, walking by himself now, Gharib crawling, Jamilah-Melissa suckling at my milkless breast as if it were her mother’s. Sherry made her plea; Shahryar wept, hugged the children, told her he’d pardoned her long since, having found in her the refutation of all his disenchantment, and praised Allah for having appointed her the savior of her sex. Then he sent for Daddy to draft the marriage contract and for you to hear the news of Scheherazade and her stories; when you proposed to marry me, Sherry countered with Part Two of our plan (of whose Part Three I was still ignorant): that in order for her and me never to be parted, you must abandon Samarkand and live with us, sharing your brother’s throne and passing yours to our father in reparation for his three-years’ anguish. I found you handsomer than Shahryar and more terrifying, and begged my sister to say what lay ahead for me.