by John Barth
“Now may we talk?”
My heart: all night.
“The night’s half done.”
So was my life. I.e.:
“Okay. We’ve half a night ahead.” And ditto the next and next and next, till even our stars burn out. Half of each I’ll unwind my tale to where it’s ours, and half of every we’ll talk. There’s much to say.
“But much goes without saying.”
And half of forever is forever. How long do you suppose we’ve been up here, love? Three nights? Three thousand years? Why do you imagine—
“You’re asking all the questions. Shan’t we take turns? I’ve seven.’’
I too. One:
“Least first. I love our story and the way it’s told, but I wonder about one or two things. The alliteration, for example?”
No help for that; I’m high on letters. Look at II-F-2, my Saharan scribble, or the Perseid epistles posted between II-A and -B…
“Basta. One?”
We’re not alone. Who else is here?
“Everyone who matters. No help for that, either. My eyes, you see… Athene’s conditions… everyone I looked at in that last sentence turned to stars—except stone Phineus, who returned to flesh and blood. Don’t ask me why.”
I think I know, and thank you.
“Cepheus is overhead; he comes up first, talking to himself. Cassiopeia’s with him; I put her a bit lower down…”
Good show. You needn’t really have included my ex-in-laws, but I did like old Cepheus. I wonder whether he’s repeating his monologue.
“Perhaps we all are. I thought you’d want the whole cast out. Even Cassiopeia has her bright spots, if you look for them. Pegasus is flying off upper-leftward—”
It’s good you have custody.
“Perseus…”
I wonder what ours would have looked like. Not a question.
“I know. So. Andromeda’s at his flank, just over my head, looking either at her father or at her mother’s hair.”
Above us…
“In chains again, too, but don’t mistake my motives. She’s on top only in the night’s first half, and her chains are jewels—temples, nipples, loins, and shanks, if you want to know, where she did wear jewels when you first met her.”
Ah.
“Don’t be cross: those bonds she hated are what define her, from your story’s point of view. I mean her immortal part, which can’t be offended, whatever her mortal part might feel.”
I’m not nettled; I thank you for the shining image, Medusa. What’s her mortal part doing these days?
“You’re out of turn. Cetus, finally, is below your left foot. Even she has a story, if one cared to tell it: it’s a monstrous fate to be born beastly.”
Now who’s hung up on letters? Not a question.
“It’s you I’m hung on. Shall I say how bright your stars are? N.Q.”
Just Delta Persei, please. Its magnitude?
“That doesn’t count.”
Do answer, then. I haven’t forgotten Calyxa’s mistake in I-F-1. Who did the Chemmis stonework, by the way?
“If you want to make me happy, please forget both picture and artist. Her subject matter, anyhow, I remind you, came from me. As for the star you vulgarly inquire of: its magnitude is sufficient and fairly constant, you may take my word, as it stands directly in my line of sight all night long till the end of time. More than that you’d be in sorry taste to ask, since for all you know I may be with you from the neck up only.”
Not even to be able to see you! Just from the corner of my eye I glimpse a twinkle now and then… You’re not winking at someone out there?
“Really, Perseus, it is my turn! For your information—but I’m counting this, so I get to ask two in a row—my right eye, unlike your precious Delta P., has a variable magnitude. If I’m winking at anyone, it’s the whole wretched world down there, which I’m glad to be out of. Back to your story-telling now: much as I et cetera, isn’t it just possible the style is too mannered?”
Excellent Medusa, sweet salvatrix: leave such questions. I don’t mind sleeping with a critic now and then, but I wouldn’t spend eternity with one. That’s two. Three?
“You’re the monster in this ménage! Do reflect, darling, that if the Perseid weren’t my favorite fable I’d have starred us in a different one, with a more nattering role for me and a less for you. Now I will ask another literary question: that business just before the climax, where Andromeda flings herself between you and Danaus… You’ll agree it’s melodramatic?”
Heavens yes. In fact, from this perspective, a clumping klitsch. As is the whole story nowadays, I daresay. But that’s how it was, and at the time we were archetypes, not stereotypes; reality, not myth. Your own stonework, so realistic in its day; I’ll bet it’s legendary now. So it goes.
“I yield.”
And I pass, until you’ve done questioning my narrative technique.
“I do have one more tiny one. The auricle-ventricle business at the story’s climax? I’m not sure of that metaphor, quite.”
No more was I then of my heart.
“And now?”
Now it’s my turn. Let’s see. Why does Cassiopeia spend half the night with her head in the ocean?
“If you could ask her, she’d say she’s washing her hair. Athene made me put her where she’d have to soak her head now and then, to mollify the Nereids. Your heart’s not in that question.”
Well. What ever happened to Cousin Bellerophon?
“That’s another story. Look, I’m counting two halfhearted questions as one whole. Do ask a real one; you’ve only four left.”
Calyxa?
“Must you, Perseus? No question.”
Calyxa.
“It was brutal of you, darling! Brutal to jump from my arms into hers, when I’d rescued you; brutal again to compare us in bed, as if my awkwardness were anything but innocence, loving innocence, which you should have treasured! Don’t reply. And brutal finally to dwell on her the way you did and do. Don’t you think I have feelings?”
No question. I’m more or less contrite. But look here: in the first instance, don’t forget I thought I’d lost you…
“Your own fault.”
Quite. In the second, although my friend Calyxa isn’t at the heart of the story, it’s her fate—her immortal part’s fate—to spend eternity at its navel, where it and I both came to light. Have you done something dreadful with her?
“Sweetheart, you are a perfect prick!”
R.S.V.P.
“Only if you promise you’ll never ask this question again for all eternity. One of the jewels, if you must know, in one of the manacles on one of Andromeda’s wrists—make it her navel, you’re such a fetishist—happens to be a spiral nebula, and that nebula happens to be your little friend. It also happens to be quite striking, I’m sorry to report, like fossil ammonite done in gold: in fact, a smasher. On the other hand, you may be sure I’ve seen to it she’s simply oodles of light-years from us; out of our galaxy altogether.”
Thank you, Medusa.
“Don’t mention it. Now tell me, P.P.—”
“Prince Perseus?”
“A pretty presumption. How comes it to pass, sweet—what all this lit-crit’s been building up to—that in a drama whose climax and dénouement consists ostensibly of your choice however belated and three-quarter-hearted, of Yours Truly for eternity’s second half, the two female leads are Andromeda and What’s-Her-Name, that bit of fluff in your Egyptian omphalos? That strikes me as a weakness in your plotting, to say the least.”
The less said the better: they’re the ones I speak of; you’re the one I chose.
“I withdraw all restrictions. Ask me anything.”
How long have we been here, Medusa?
“Can’t tell. What you’re really asking me is—”
Yes. All this about mortal and immortal parts. Out there, in the world, are Andromeda and Phineus…
“Truly, Perseus, I don’t know. And trul
y, do excuse me, that isn’t our affair.”
I withdraw the question.
“Sorry: you touched the piece. And my intuitions tell me you’d better ask your Number Seven before I my Six.”
Beloved voice; sweet Medusa whom I cannot hold and couldn’t see even when I could: not long since, you exhorted me to forget panel I-F-1 in a certain mural in some temple along the Nile, together with its first-draughtsman; but our arrangement here, whereof yourself are sole designer, suggests that that same scene may be still graved in your own imagination. What have you done to us? In what condition are we? Have you indulged yourself in a monstrous martyrdom to gratify what would be in me a perverse, unspeakable vanity? I retch, I gag at that idea! To see nothing; to feel nothing of you but your hair in my left hand! Why is it I look at empty space forever, a blank page, and not at the woman I love?
“Let me assume you mean myself…”
I’m not being clever, Medusa.
“No more am I. At that last moment in the banquet hall—it’s not easy for me to say these words, Perseus—when you discovered me and kissed me open-eyed… what I saw reflected in your pupils was a Gorgon.” I
In the name of Athene, love, don’t forget her conditions! Eyes are mirrors!
“I’ve forgotten nothing. Quite possibly it was a false reflection. Just as possibly your tricky sister never un-Gorgoned me at all…”
What an idea!
“I entertain it with deadly calm, let me assure you. But even assuming you’d abandoned your childish wish for rejuvenation—”
You know I had!
“—and granting a measure of vanity in my own wish—that you’d love me enough to throw everything overboard to have me…”
Please, please, please, please, please, please, please.
“… it nonetheless remains a distinct and distinctly unpleasant third possibility that your kiss was in complete bad faith: an act not of love but of suicide, or a desperate impulse to immortality-by-petrification. In that event, I revealed my ‘beauty’ to the wrong man and became a Gorgon forever.”
Pause. Hear how quietly, how calmly I reply. To give that unmentionable hypothesis one moment out of eternity, which is one more than it deserves: suppose it true. How would you feel?
“Sorry: your questions are all used up, and I haven’t come to mine. When you opened your eyes, Perseus; when you saw me… what exactly did you see?”
My Medusa: I’ve thanked you for the pretty memory of Andromeda; for my own estellation; for all the selfless, supererogatory gifts you’ve showered on me, from bright Calyxa to a four-star likeness of my crescent blade. I even thank you for unstoning Phineus, and wish him and his companion well. Now listen and believe me, if there’s any truth in words: it wasn’t you who discovered your beauty to me, but I who finally unveiled it to myself. And what I saw, exactly, when I opened my eyes, were two things in instantaneous succession, reflected in yours: the first was a reasonably healthy, no-longer-heroic mortal with more than half his life behind him, less potent and less proud than he was at twenty but still vigorous after all, don’t interrupt me, and grown too wise to wish his time turned back. The second, one second after, was the stars in your own eyes, reflected from mine and rereflected to infinity—stars of a quite miraculous, yes blinding love, which transfigured everything in view. Perhaps you find the image trite; I beg of you not to say so.
“Pause. Long pause. I can’t say anything.”
You’ve one last question.
“It’ll have to wait… I’m raining on half the zodiac… poor Cetus, swim again while you can…”
If I had one, I’d ask about your and my mortal parts.
“No use: those parts are private, like Andromeda’s and Phineus’s; not for publication. We didn’t die down there at the climax, I can tell you that; simply we commenced our immortality here, where we talk together. Down there our mortal lives are living themselves out, or’ve long since done—together or apart, comic tragic, beautiful ugly. That’s another story, another story; it can’t be told to the characters in this.”
So be it. Last question?
“Are you happy, Perseus, with the way this story ends?”
Infinite pause. My love, it’s an epilogue, always ending, never ended, like (I don’t apologize) II-G, which winds through universal space and time. My fate is to be able only to imagine boundless beauty from my experience of boundless love—but I have a fair imagination to work with, and, to work from, one priceless piece of unimagined evidence: what I hold above Beta Persei, Medusa: not serpents, but lovely woman’s hair. I’m content. So with this issue, our net estate: to have become, like the noted music of our tongue, these silent, visible signs; to be the tale I tell to those with eyes to see and understanding to interpret; to raise you up forever and know that our story will never be cut off, but nightly rehearsed as long as men and women read the stars… I’m content. Till tomorrow evening, love.
“Good night.”
Good night. Good night.
Bellerophoniad
1
“Good night.”
“Good night.”
Some stories last longer than others. Now my wife’s feelings were hurt, Philonoë’s, and no wonder: for the occasion she’s made ambrosia with her own hands, dismissed the servants early, donned her best nightie; it should have been one dessert after another. But Bellerophon, King of Lycia, at sundown on the eve of his birthday found floating in the marsh near his palace a Greek novella called Perseid, story of his model hero; by the time he got to its last words he was forty and too tired.
Thus begins, so help me Muse, the tidewater tale of twin Bellerophon, mythic hero, cousin to constellated Perseus: how he flew and reflew Pegasus the winged horse; dealt double death to the three-part freak Chimera; twice loved, twice lost; twice aspired to, reached, and died to immortality—in short, how he rode the heroic cycle and was recycled. Loosed at last from mortal speech, he turned into written words: Bellerophonic letters afloat between two worlds, forever betraying, in combinations and recombinations, the man they forever represent.
“You never criticize,” I go on to carp shortly at the bedroom ceiling, dark. “There’s something wrong with a woman who never criticizes.”
After a moment, pensive Philonoë beside me said: “Sometimes I criticize.”
“No you don’t. You’re perfect; that’s your trouble.”
“My feelings are hurt, yes,” Philonoë is represented here as having explained. “But there’s no point in criticizing a person when he’s obviously upset. Though why you’re upset, I can’t imagine.”
“Upset upset. My life’s a failure. I’m not a mythic hero. I never will be.”
“You are!” Their dialogue conveys the general sense of our conversation, but neither establishes Philonoë’s indomitable gentleness of spirit and body and her husband’s punishing self-concern, nor achieves in proportion to its length enough simple exposition. Had I understood, when I consented at the end of this novella to be transformed by the seer Polyeidus into a version of Bellerophon’s life, that I might be imperfectly, even ineptly narrated, I’d have cleaved to my original program: to fall from heaven into a thornbush, become a blind lame vatic figure, and float upon the marshy tide, reciting my history aloud, in my own voice, to Melanippe the Amazon—my moon, my muse, my final mortal love—as she ebbed and flooded me. And if Polyeidus the Seer had realized that this final and trickiest effort in the literary-metamorphosis way would be freckled and soiled with as it were self-criticism, he’d’ve let Bellerophon smack into the muck and bubble there forever, like Dante’s Wrathful in the marshes of the Styx. Fenny father, old shape-shifter: here you are, then; even here. On with the story.
“It’s perfectly obvious,” Philonoë went on, her voice as gentle as her gentle body, whose beauty five-and-thirty years had scarcely scarred, “that Athene’s still on your side. The Kingdom of Lycia is reasonably prosperous and politically stable despite our vexing military involvement with the Ca
rians and their new alliance with the Solymians and Amazons. Our children are growing up satisfactorily, take it all in all—not like Proetus and Anteia’s wayward daughters. Your fame as a Chimeromach seems secure, judging by your fan mail; even the Perseid, I gather from the excerpts you chose to read me, mentions you favorably a couple of times. Finally, our marriage (which, remember, is to me what your career as mythic hero is to you: my cardinal value and vindication, my raison d’être) is, if no longer fiery as Chimera’s breath, affectionate, comfortable, and sexually steady, in the main. Certainly we’ve been spared the resentments that poisoned Perseus and Andromeda’s relationship as they reached our age, and while we cannot be called innocent, surely we are rather experienced than guilty.
“Now, it may very well be that your most spectacular work is behind you—I’ve yet to read the Perseid, but what mythic hero isn’t over the hill, as it were, by the time he’s forty? However, it strikes me as at least likely that your best work may not be your most spectacular, and that it may lie ahead, if not be actually in progress: I mean the orderly administration of your country, your family, and yourself over the long haul; the patient cultivation of understanding into wisdom; the accumulation of rich experience and its recycling in the form of enlightened policy, foreign, domestic, and personal—all those things, in brief, which make a man not merely celebrated, but great; not merely admired, but loved; et cetera.”
