Chimera

by John Barth

  I compare to this the rich prose of the Perseid and despair. Sleep with its author, then, if Melanippe’s style won’t do! No, no, my love, it’s not your style; you merely set the words down as they come, or long since came: once-living creatures caught and fossiled in the clay; bones displaced by alien mineral, grown with crystals, hued with the oxides of old corrosion, heaved and worn and rearranged by the eons’ ebb; shards; disjecta membra, from which the sleeping dragon is ever harder to infer. You said it. Anyhow I slept, and woke unhappy as before. As always, Philonoë ungrudgingly forgave—Melanippe is no Philonoë. I didn’t mean to imply that she is—aroused and made love to me, then permitted me a post-coital nap while she prepared with her own hands a birthday breakfast: spinach pie and feta cheese. With this woman, Polyeidus wonders, the man was unhappy? He shouldn’t wonder, Bellerophon believes (echoing for a moment, if lamely, the prancing rhythms and alliterations of the Perseid), as it was he showed Bellerus as a boy the Pattern of Mythic Heroism, fourth quadrant of which calls for the mature hero’s sudden and mysterious fall from the favor of gods and men; his departure, voluntary or otherwise, from the city of his own establishment; his mysterious apotheosis on a hilltop, symbolic counterpart of the place of his divine conception; et cetera.

  Bellerophon is telling Polyeidus this? Whomever the buskin fits: Melanippe, too, perky priestess of his passions, shouldn’t need reminding how the undauntable docility of the lady here featured as Philonoë, her absolute solicitude, her angelic, her invulnerable devotion—this is nauseating two-thirds of us—had long since made Bellerophon half-desperate, most particularly for the reason least appreciated by Philonoë herself in her reference to Andromeda, above. In a word, I was inescapably content—in my marriage, my children, my royal career—and because mythic heroes at that age and stage should become the opposite of content, my contentment made me wretched.

  Pause. Melanippe the Amazon, let’s say, is not at all sure she comprehends this sophistry. You were unhappy because you were happy?

  The sophistry may be insufferable: the suffering was real. There was Perseus, risen from his misery and shining in the sky; here was Bellerophon, miserably content, holding his story in his hand.

  For this you left your wife and family?

  And my kingdom. And my empire. That’s where my story starts, when I go wandering in the Aleïan marsh, “far from the paths of men, devouring my own soul,” et cetera.

  Wait while I write that plain: wretched because nothing was wrong.

  Right.

  Pause. It has been remarked that this state of spiritual affairs—the general malaise, I mean, not the specific etiology—is figured commonly in the myths by an objective correlative: one thinks of the miasma that hangs over Oedipus’s Thebes, or Perseus’s imagined petrifaction. Was there anything similar in Bellerophon’s case?

  I wonder how many voices are telling my tale. It seems to me that upon my first being transformed into the story of my life, at best a sorely qualified immortality, the narrative voice was clear and objective: in simple, disciplined prose it recounted my middle-aged distress, figured conveniently by Pegasus’s inability to fly, voila. Briefly it rehearsed my vain attempts to foment rebellion in my children over the question of which should succeed me to the Lycian throne; exasperation in my wife by endless repetitions of the tale of my youthful exploits, including my affair with her older sister Anteia; sedition in my subjects by continuing and escalating the unpopular Solymian war—my children were filially pious, my wife adored me, the silent majority of Lycians supported my administration. Beginning in the middle, on the eve of my fortieth birthday, this original or best Bellerophoniad proceeded with unostentatious skill to carry forward the present-time drama (my quest for literal immortality) while completing the plenteous exposition of my earlier adventures—a narrative difficulty resolved by the simple but inspired device of making the second half of my life recapitulate ironically the first, after the manner of the Perseid, but with the number five (i.e., threes and twos) rather than seven as the numerical basis of the structure, and a circle rather than a logarithmic spiral as its geometric motif. It commenced, moreover, with an echo not only of Perseid’s opening lines but of its dramatic construction as well: that is, not at the beginning of the hero’s second series of adventures (Perseus’s departure with cross Andromeda to revisit the scenes of his youthful triumphs in search of rejuvenation; cross Bellerophon’s ditto with patient Philonoë in search of the magic herb hippomanes), but at their mid-point: Perseus, while always ultimately addressing the reader from heaven, tells most of his story immediately to his mistress Calyxa in Egypt; Bellerophon, it seems to me, while always ultimately addressing the reader from pages floating in the marshes of what has become Dorchester County, Maryland, U.S.A., used to begin by rehearsing his prior history to pretty Melanippe in the marshes of the river Thermodon, near Scythian Themiscyra. The narration was repeated daily and lasted all day: two tideslengths, to be exact, corresponding to the halves of my life and work. The First Flood, so to speak, covered my adventures from the death of my father and my brother, through the killing of the Chimera, to my marriage to Princess Philonoë—roughly from my nineteenth through my twenty-seventh year; the First Ebb discovered my reign in Lycia and the establishment of my family, through my growing discontentment with my contentment, to Pegasus’s inability to get off the ground, twenty-eighth through thirty-sixth year; the Second Flood covered my adventures from the time of my leaving Lycia to consult the Old Man of the Marsh (actually the prophet Polyeidus), through my travels in search of the horsenip herb hippomanes, to my idyll with Amazonian Melanippe, thirty-seventh through forty-fifth year; the Second Ebb discovered my attempted flight to Olympus, through my long free-fall from Pegasus, to the end of my chronological life, forty-sixth through fifty-fourth year. The thirty-six-year period, divided into eighteen-year cycles and nine-year quarters, was a compromise as I remember between the Polyeidic “solar” life-calendar, a seventy-two-year span based on a three-hundred-sixty-day year of twelve thirty-day months, and the Melanippic or Amazonian “lunar” life-calendar, based on four quarters of approximately fourteen years each (though Amazons do not acknowledge annual units), metaphorically correspondent to the phases of the moon and the four stages of female sexuality (birth to puberty, puberty to sexual maturity, sexual maturity to menopause, menopause to death—the life expectancy of Amazons, reckoned in Polyeidic terms, is fifty-six “years”; they begin menstruating at age “fourteen,” on the average, and cease about age “forty-two”). It was, finally, a distinguishing feature of this ideal Bellerophoniad that while the length and periodicity of the narration were constant, the amplitude of the narrative varied like the range of the tides with the narrator’s energy, itself a function of his concentration or distraction. Yes, yes, the tale was told to its fullest heights and depths twice per lunar month, when the pulls so to speak of Polyeidus and Melanippe were perfectly aligned; at the summer-solstitial full moon in particular, I recollect, my tale achieved a pitch of eloquence—a phenomenon no doubt to be accounted for by the latitude and longitude of tidewater Maryland. Contrariwise, twice each month the narration was unusually flat and shallow, especially in the neighborhood of the equinoxes—and distracted, as though the pure Bellerophonic voice were tugged and co-opted now by Polyeidus this way, now Melanippe that; not to the end of dramatic harmony and tension, but discordantly, to stalemate and stagnation.

  In posing the question, I now observe, I or someone has answered if. Full knowledge of the five tidal “constants” (geographic location, mean water-depth, configuration of shoreline, speed of Earth-rotation, friction of sea-bottom), the four periodic variables (relative positions of Sun and Moon to each other and to Earth, their respective distances from Earth, inclination of the lunar orbit to the Equator), and the three non-periodic variables (wind force, wind direction, barometric pressure) would doubtless afford a complete understanding of Bellerophoniad’s narrative processes—but such comprehension,
difficult to acquire, is impossible to crave. All I sense is the current neapness! If Bellerophon might rebegin, unclogged, unsilted! Time and tide, however, et cetera.

  For God’s sake, Melanippe, put this down: The winged horse won’t fly! Would not, wouldn’t! Vehicle of my glory, from whose high back I bombed Solymian and Amazon alike, in better days, from Bronze Age back to Stone, sank the Carian pirates, did to death the unimaginable Chimera—Pegasus can’t get off the ground! Could not, couldn’t! Turned out to pasture since his master’s marriage, fat and tame now, my sweet half-brother in time grew loath even to lift his moonshaped hooves, much less strike well-springs with them for the Muses. Twenty years it had been my custom every morning, after breakfast, to take down from its place of honor over my throne the golden Bridle of Restraint, Athene’s gift (Perseid reliefs, Series II, Panel 3), without which none can mount the steed sired by Poseidon on Medusa and foaled when Perseus beheaded her. My wife I’d perch athwart my pommel, and we’d make a high circuit of the empire, cheered by all we overlooked. Now, the Perseid under my belt, I burped to the paddock and was by the lackeys boosted into place; applied the heel, laid on the crop; clucked and chucked and urged and whistled: the beast no longer giddyapped, much less went vaulting starward; only grazed in circles, trailing horsefeathers where his wings like doused sails dragged by the board.

  This Perseid is that heavy? No, no, love, it’s I was heavy, drag-hoofed as this telling of my tale. Perseid takes off like its hero. Hum. Did Bellerophon’s grounding happen all at once or gradually, over the years of his marriage? You know the story. I wish I were dead.

  Melanippe, as she is here called, being an Amazon, is not conversant with the niceties either of marriage or of narrative construction. In her position as Bellerophon’s lover and alleged chronicler, however, she makes the following suggestion: the “present” action of this part of the story (you used the term “First Ebb,” I believe), must cover your attempts to deteriorate three separate relations—with your late children, your late wife, and your late subjects—and at the same time accomplish, at least in a preliminary way, as much as possible of the earlier, “First Flood” exposition: the story of your former life. Then why not attempt to alienate your children with anecdotes of your own childhood, your wife with the Anteia episode, the citizenry with boring accounts of your later adventures? Isn’t that the way you said it’s done in the mythical “ideal” Bellerophoniad? Correlate these internal narratives and Pegasus’s descending altitude, with an eye to ending the First Flood at the “climax” of the First Ebb: i.e., the morning you couldn’t get Peg up at all and struck out for the swamp. At the same time, since First Flood, First Ebb, and Second Flood themselves comprise an internal narrative framed by our affair here on the Thermodon, punctuate them wherever convenient with conversation between Bellerophon and Melanippe, “giving if possible a degree of dramatic development to our tidewater idyll. That is, unless drama and development on the one hand, idyll and immortality on the other, are not irreconcilable sets of notions. What do you think?

  I think I’m dead. I think I’m spooked. I’m full of voices, all mine, none me; I can’t keep straight who’s speaking, as I used to. It’s not my wish to be obscure or difficult; I’d hoped at least to entertain, if not inspire. But put it that one has had visions of an order complex unto madness: Now and again, like mazy marshways glimpsed from Pegasus at top-flight, the design is clear: one sees how the waters flow and why; what freight they bear and whither. Between, one’s swamped; the craft goes on, but its way seems arbitrary, seems insane.

  There, love: you flew. With Philonoë and the children?

  Yes, yes. Yes, yes, yes. From the time our first was born he flew too, nestled in his mother’s breast as she in mine, and so loved the ride that to my discomfort she named him Hippolochus: “dropped from a mare.” Soon little Isander took his place; sturdy Hippolochus hung on astern. Came Laodamia, gentle as her mom: the ladies rode before, the boys behind, never once squabbling which should sit next after me, and the royal family daily went sky-high.

  But not.

  But not so high as formerly, or far, or fast. For this Philonoë thanked me on the children’s behalf and hers, thinking I reined us in on their account; at the same time she grounded herself thenceforward, lest the late infrequency of our flights beyond the Lycian border be a cause of the rumored new alliance between the Carians and Solymians, our ancient enemies. But even without her, though his range and altitude increased, Pegasus never quite regained his former heights; as the children grew, we found ourselves down again to the olive-tops. Not to buzz and turd my subjects into disaffection, I bumped in turn Hippolochus, Isander, and Laodamia, each time reclimbing to a lower peak, like waves on a foreshore as the tide runs out. I watched the new constellations wheel far over my head—Perseus, Medusa, Andromeda, Cepheus, Cassiopeia—and turned sour.

  “It is remarkable,” I’d remark to Philonoë in the royal boudoir, as she kindly tried to rouse me, “what a toll pregnancy takes on teeth and muscle tone.” Her hand would pause—Melanippe’s does, too—for just a moment. Then she’d agree, cheerfully adding varicosity, slacked breast and vaginal sphincter, striation of buttock and thigh, and loss of hair-sheen to the list of her biological expenses in the childbearing way—all which she counted as nothing, since for three such princelets she’d’ve died thrice over. But as I was at it I should add, she’d add, the psychological cost of parentage, to ourselves individually and to the marital relationship: fatigue, loss of spontaneity, diminishment of ardor, general heaviness—a kind of accelerated aging, the joint effect of passing years, increased responsibility, and accumulated familiarity—never altogether compensated for by deeper intimacy. For her part (she would go on—what a wife this was!), she took what she was pleased to term the Tragic View of Marriage and Parenthood: reckoning together their joys and griefs must inevitably show a net loss, if only because like life itself their attrition was constant and their term mortal. But one had only different ways of losing, and to eschew matrimony and childbearing for the delights of less serious relations was in her judgment to sustain a net loss even more considerable. Nor, mind, did she regard this perspective (which she applied as well to everything from vacation trips to historical movements) as spiritually negative or bleak: to affirm it was to affirm the antinomy of the cosmos, which antimony she took to be not absurd contradiction but rich paradox, the pity and terror of the affirmation whereof effected in the human soul an ennobling catharsis. I can do it. Assuredly I can do it. That I can do it, I cannot doubt. That I cannot do it; that I can begin to imagine that I cannot do it; that I can begin to wonder whether perhaps after all I cannot do it; that I can begin to begin firmly to believe that I cannot do it; I cannot begin to imagine, I cannot begin to wonder, I cannot begin to begin. Beyond question I can do it. Can I do it? I cannot do it.

  Do it.

  Pegasus and I flew lower. “You are descended,” I told the children on Hippolochus’s thirteenth birthday, “from a line of half-breed horse traders reaching back through Sisyphus and Autolycus to the shifty centaurs.”

  They sat round-eyed; tutors and governesses fled to summon Philonoë, who entered with her knitting and watched their faces as I spoke, but neither protested nor interrupted.

  “Your Grandmother Eurymede was a leading member of the Corinthian wild-mare cult,” I declared to them. “She claimed that Poseidon the sea-horse-god had humped her stallionwise one night as she was skinnydipping in the surf during her organization’s annual harvest-moon orgy. But Dad—your Grandpa Glaucus?—accused her of adultery with the stable-master, if not with one of the stallions themselves, and after dragging the former to death behind his racing chariot, he banished male grooms and stonehorses from our spread.”

  Hippolochus cried “Hooray!” Isander asked to be given, on his thirteenth birthday, a pony. Laodamia climbed into my lap and sucked her thumb. Out in the paddock Pegasus whinnied. Philonoë purled.

  “Horses remain a conspicu
ous motif in my biography,” I guess I said, “beginning with the circumstances of my birth. Assuming Poseidon to be my father, I’ve a deal of actual horse-blood in my veins, and you in yours. Insofar as we’re human, the equine traits may be regarded as recessive, but the chance that one of you may foal a centaur or sire a literal colt, while admittedly small, had as well be acknowledged. My interest in the subject of heredity, which needs no further explanation, has led me to sponsor research in this area, certain findings of which I’ll impart to each of you on your wedding day.”

  Laodamia asked where babies came from. Isander decided to have two each of sons, daughters, trotters, pacers. Hippolochus, displeased with his adolescent appearance, hoped he could make use of my research to give his own offspring black manes and tails instead of bay. Philonoë smiled and said, “Bay is beautiful.” What I’m experiencing cannot be called an identity-crisis. In order to experience an identity-crisis, one must first have enjoyed some sense of identity. The tradition of the mad genius in literature. The tradition of the double in literature. The tradition of the story within the story, the tradition of the mad editor of the text, the tradition of the unreliable narrator. “I come now,” how beautifully all this is managed in the Perseid, “to the twin-business, how I more or less killed my father and my brother.” Polyeidus, old charlatan, is that your best? No answer. But I know you’re here between the lines, among the letters’ curls and crooks, spreading through me like the water through this marsh. Thank heaven I get to swat you at my peak!