Chimera

by John Barth

  Which was the truth?

  “I quite understand,” Philonoë used to say, “that the very concept of objective truth, especially as regards the historical past, is problematical; also that narrative art, particularly of the mythopoeic or at least mythographic variety, has structures and rhythms, values and demands, not the same as those of reportage or historiography. Finally, as between variants among the myths themselves, it’s in their contradictions that one may seek their sense. All the same—not to say therefore—I’d be interested to know whether in fact you made love to my sister and wish you hadn’t, or didn’t and wish you had.”

  “What a horse!” I invariably replied. “I spent the whole night learning how to fly him and unstarving myself with moussaka at all-night restaurants. By morning I was able to make a perfect four-point landing atop the statue of Abas, Proetus’s father, which stood in the breakfast-terrace of the palace. The children were delighted; Proetus blushed; Anteia flushed, hushed the kids, and hmped off with them from the table, giving her husband a last sharp look.

  “ ‘We’re at your service, sir,’ I said. He bade me park my brother elsewhere, the pigeons were bad enough, then told me frankly that his wife, per program, was holding to her accusations and agitating for my life, motivated no doubt in part by some final urge, such as comes sometimes on ladies at her age and stage, to inspire jealous anger in her husband and prompt him to dramatic if not heroic action in her behalf. For himself, Q.E.D., if he believed her accusation and gave a damn, he’d arrange to have me done in quietly, with minimal fuss. But he was indifferent, except for the sake of public appearances. He therefore requested simply that I disappear. ‘At the same time she’s hollering for your head,’ he said with a sigh, ‘she’s giving out already that she’s eight hours pregnant with a semidemigod.’ Doubly impossible, I told him. He raised his hand wearily: if I would not do him the service of assassinating Perseus, at least I might leave the Queen her delusions: fact was, she did show signs of being a couple months gone again, by himself or whomever, and that condition, which given her age et cetera might as possibly be menopause, perhaps accounted for her late irrationality. His p.r. people would do their best to minimize the gossip, but as Anteia was insisting that she’d been divinely raped (half-ravished, anyhow, by a demi-deity), the best thing I could do for him was not deny the child’s paternity should she bring it to term, and in the meanwhile go and be a mythic hero—somewhere else.

  “I shrugged. ‘Set me a task.’ ‘Kill Perseus!’ he whispered. ‘Nope.’ So he gave me a sealed letter to Iobates—diplomatic business, he declared—and asked me to deliver it to Lycia, air mail special, no peeking, no reply or return necessary, okay? ‘Okay.’ I took off, came back: ‘Which way is Lycia?’ He covered his eyes, pointed east-southeast-by-east; here I am; there it is. Philonoë’d say “Thanks for the story; you tell it better all the time.” Those were the days. And “When can we visit my sister, Bellerophon? It’s a pity the kids have never met their own cousins. Better get off to your lecture now; here’s your notes. Kiss goodbye?” I’d tear my hair then, do now, one digression still to go, Zeus Almighty, half a hundred pages in and only launched. How does one write a novella? How find the channel, bewildered in these creeks and crannies? Storytelling isn’t my cup of wine; isn’t somebody’s; my plot doesn’t rise and fall in meaningful stages but winds upon itself like a whelk-shell or the snakes on Hermes’s caduceus: digresses, retreats, hesitates, groans from its utter et cetera, collapses, dies.

  Q: “What about the purification of your blood-guilt, sir?”

  A: “Granted Pegasus, I inferred I was clear with Athene, who, Deliades having been her particular votary, I presumed to be the only god concerned.”

  Q: “How far up did Pegasus get this morning, sir?”

  A: “Not above a meter. Our investigation of this problem, to which my administration gives the highest priority, continues, and you may expect a full report after the present digression.”

  Q: “In one of the earlier meetings of this course of lectures on the First Flood of the Distinguished History of Bellerophon the Mythic Hero, required of all members of the court of Bellerophon the King in hopes of alienating them from him in partial fulfillment of the fourth quadrant (Reign and Death) of the mythobiographic Pattern, describing your recent systematic abuse of Queen Philonoë, the Princes Hippolochus and Isander, and Princess Laodamia by prolix and tactless rehearsals of your childhood, you mentioned that writing—as a means of ordinary communication as opposed to a mode of magic—will not be introduced into Hellenic culture for some centuries yet except as borrowed in isolated instances from the future by seers like Polyeidus. Yet the ‘labor’ imposed on you by King Proetus was the delivery to your late father-in-law of a diplomatic message in epistolary form. Moreover, the lecture in which you made the aforementioned mention was itself, we recall with excitement, read from a written text, at least delivered from written notes, as have been all the lectures in this thrilling course—the very word lecture, I believe, comes from a barbaric root-verb meaning ‘to read,’ and reading, a priori, implies writing. Finally, our presence here in the University of Lycia’s newly established Department of Classical Mythology, your stimulating requirement from us of term papers on The Story of Your Life Thus Far, et cetera, all suggest that we are, if not a literate society, at least a society to which reading and writing are not unknown. Is there not some discrepancy here?”

  A: “Yes.”

  Q: “Several other things also perplex us, sir, researchers after truth that we are and in no way disaffected from our country, our king, or our university by, respectively, your prolongation of the Carian-Solymian war, your mistreatment of good King Iobates’s gentle younger daughter, and your unseemly perversion of professorial privilege to the ends of self-aggrandizement and/or -abasement—all which we readily accept as the self-imposed rigors of the above-alluded-to Pattern. Are you not inclined, as we are, to see a seerly hand, perhaps Polyeidus’s, in such apparent lapses of authorial control, even narrative coherence, as the presentation, before we’ve even heard today’s lecture, of these Q’s and A’s, which in fact follow that lecture? Or the mysterious, to us very nearly unintelligible, text of the lecture itself, which reads:

  “Good evening. On behalf of the mythic hero Bellerophon of Corinth, I would like to thank [supply name of university, publisher, sponsor of reading, et cetera] for this opportunity to put straight a number of discrepancies and problematical details in the standard accounts of his life and work; to lay to rest certain items of disagreeable gossip concerning both his public and his private life; and to respond to any questions you may wish to put concerning his fabulous career.

  “My general interest in the wandering-hero myth dates from my thirtieth year, when reviewers of my novel The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) remarked that the vicissitudes of its hero—Ebenezer Cooke, Gentleman, Poet and Laureate of Maryland—follow in some detail the pattern of mythical heroic adventure as described by Lord Raglan, Joseph Campbell, and other comparative mythologists. The suggestion was that I had used this pattern as the basis for the novel’s plot. In fact I’d been till then unaware of the pattern’s existence; once apprised of it, I was struck enough by the coincidence (which I later came to regard as more inevitable than remarkable) to examine those works by which I’d allegedly been influenced, and my next novel, Giles Goat-Boy (1966), was for better or worse the conscious and ironic orchestration of the Ur-Myth which its predecessor had been represented as being. Several of my subsequent fictions—the long short-story Menelaiad and the novella Perseid, for example—deal directly with particular manifestations of the myth of the wandering hero and address as well a number of their author’s more current thematic concerns: the mortal desire for immortality, for instance, and its ironically qualified fulfillment—especially by the mythic hero’s transformation, in the latter stages of his career, into the sound of his own voice, or the story of his life, or both. I am forty.

  “Since myths thems
elves are among other things poetic distillations of our ordinary psychic experience and therefore point always to daily reality, to write realistic fictions which point always to mythic archetypes is in my opinion to take the wrong end of the mythopoeic stick, however meritorious such fiction may be in other respects. Better to address the archetypes directly. To the objection that classical mythology, like the Bible, is no longer a staple of the average reader’s education, and that, consequently, the old agonies of Oedipus or Antigone are without effect on contemporary sensibility, I reply, hum, I forget what, something about comedy and self-explanatory context. Anyhow, when I had completed the Perseid novella, my research after further classical examples of the aforementioned themes led me to the minor mythic hero Bellerophon of Corinth.

  “As it was among other things the very unfamiliarity of Bellerophon’s story, even to those acquainted with the myths of Menelaus and Helen or Perseus and Andromeda, that I found appropriate to my purposes, a brief summary might be helpful. Here is Robert Grave’s excellent account in The Greek Myths, itself a collation of the texts of Antoninus Liberalis, Apollodorus, Eustathius, Hesiod, Homer, Hyginus, Ovid, Pindar, Plutarch, the Scholiast on the Iliad, and Tzetzes:

  “a. Bellerophon, son of Glaucus… left Corinth under a cloud, having first killed one Bellerus—which earned him his nickname Bellerophontes, shortened to Bellerophon—and then his own brother, whose name is usually given as Deliades. He fled as a suppliant to Proetus, King of Tiryns; but… Anteia, Proetus’s wife… fell in love with him at sight. When he rejected her advances, she accused him of having tried to seduce her, and Proetus, who believed the story, grew incensed. Yet he dared not risk the Furies’ vengeance by the direct murder of a suppliant, and therefore sent him to Anteia’s father Iobates, King of Lycia, carrying a sealed letter, which read: ‘Pray remove the bearer from this world; he has tried to violate my wife, your daughter.’

  “b. Iobates, equally loth to ill-treat a royal guest, asked Bellerophon to do him the service of destroying the Chimaera, a fire-breathing she-monster with lion’s head, goat’s body, and serpent’s tail… Before setting about the task, Bellerophon consulted the seer Polyeidus, and was advised to catch and tame the winged horse Pegasus, beloved by the Muses of Mount Helicon, for whom he had created the well Hippocrene by stamping his moon-shaped hoof.

  “c… . Bellerophon found [Pegasus] drinking at Peirene… another of his wells, and threw over his head a golden bridle, Athene’s timely present. But some say that Athene gave Pegasus already bridled to Bellerophon; and others that Poseidon, who was really Bellerophon’s father, did so. Be that as it may, Bellerophon overcame the Chimaera by flying above her on Pegasus’s back, riddling her with arrows, and then thrusting between her jaws a lump of lead which he had fixed to the point of his spear. The Chimaera’s fiery breath melted the lead, which trickled down her throat, searing her vitals.

  “d. Iobates, however, far from rewarding Bellerophon for this daring feat, sent him at once against the warlike Solymians and their allies, the Amazons; both of whom he conquered by soaring above them, well out of bowshot, and dropping large boulders on their heads. Next, in the Lycian plain of Xanthus, he beat off a band of Carian pirates led by one Cheimarrhus, a fiery and boastful warrior, who sailed in a ship adorned with a lion figurehead and a serpent stern. When Iobates showed no gratitude even then but, on the contrary, sent the palace guards to ambush him on his return, Bellerophon dismounted and prayed that while he advanced on foot, Poseidon would flood the Xanthian Plain behind him. Poseidon heard his prayer, and sent great waves rolling slowly forward as Bellerophon approached Iobates’s palace; and, because no man could persuade him to retire, the Xanthian women hoisted their skirts to the waist and came rushing towards him full butt, offering themselves to him one and all, if only he would relent. Bellerophon’s modesty was such that he turned tail and ran; and the waves retreated with him.

  “e. Convinced now that Proetus must have been mistaken about the attempt on Anteia’s virtue, Iobates produced the letter, and demanded an exact account of the affair. On learning the truth, he implored Bellerophon’s forgiveness, gave him his daughter Philonoë in marriage, and made him heir to the Lycian throne. He also praised the Xanthian women for their resourcefulness and ordered that, in future, all Xanthians should reckon descent from the mother, not the father…

  “Those familiar with my fiction will recognize in this account several pet motifs of mine: the sibling rivalry, the hero’s naïveté, the accomplishment of labors by their transcension (here literal), and the final termination of all tasks by the extermination (here figurative) of the taskmaster; the Protean counselor (Polyeidus means ‘many forms’); the romantic triangle; et cetera. But it was the two central images—Pegasus and the Chimera—which appealed to me most profoundly. I envisioned a comic novella based on the myth; a companion-piece to Perseid, perhaps. To compose it I set aside a much larger and more complicated project, a novel called Letters—It seemed anyway to have become a vast morass of plans, notes, false starts, in which I grew more mired with every attempt to extricate myself. Hopefully I turned to the lesser project, labored at it unremittingly for a full year and a half—alas, it, too, metamorphosed into quicksand, not before much good spiritual money had been thrown after the bad. Followed my first real affliction by the celebrated ailment Writer’s Block, a malady from which, in the hubris of my twenties and thirties, I had fancied myself immune; I examined it as one might a malignant growth, with sharp interest and dull fright. For a long time I could not understand it—though I did come to understand, to the heart, the lamentations of those mystics to whom Grace had been once vouchsafed and then withdrawn. To the world it is a small matter, rightly, whether any particular artist finds his powers sustained or drained from one year to the next; to the artist himself, however minor his talent, imaginative potency is as critical to the daily life of his spirit as sexual potency—to which, in the male at least, it is an analogue as irresistible as that of Grace, and as dangerous.

  “Eventually I did come to understand what was ailing me, so I believe; in any case the ailment passed—for little better or worse from the world’s point of view, but much to my own relief—and I found myself composing as busily as ever. What I composed is another story, of no concern to us here; I recount this little personal episode by way of introducing the subject of this afternoon’s lecture: an altogether impersonal principle of literary aesthetics, the understanding of the nature of which illuminated for me my difficulty with Bellerophon’s story and, so I must presume, set me free of both the mire and the myth.

  “The general principle, I believe, has no name in our ordinary critical vocabulary; I think of it as the Principle of Metaphoric Means, by which I intend the investiture by the writer of as many of the elements and aspects of his fiction as possible with emblematic as well as dramatic value: not only the ‘form’ of the story, the narrative viewpoint, the tone, and such, but, where manageable, the particular genre, the mode and medium, the very process of narration—even the fact of the artifact itself. Let me illustrate:?”

  A: “I am.”

  Q: “Sir?”

  A: “I am inclined, with you, to sniff in this a certain particular seer, the full history and scope of whose treachery, however, I am still in no position to appreciate at this point in this rendition of this Bellerophoniad. The writer’s language is not Greek; the literary works referred to do not exist—wouldn’t I, of all people, know that Perseid if there were one? As for that farrago of misstatements purporting to be the story of my life, the kindest thing to be said about its first three paragraphs is that they’re fiction: the brothers are too many and miscast; my name is mishistoried (though ‘Bellerus the Killer’ is not its only meaning); my acquisition of Pegasus is mislocated as to both time and place; the Bellerophonic missive read simply ‘Pray remove the bearer of these letters from this world’; et cetera, d and e, perhaps, are slightly less inaccurate, if no less incomplete, and their events are out o
f order. I call your attention, earnestly, to the suspension-points following the fifth paragraph: that’s where we are, have been, have languished since the first good night. There’s the sink; there’s the quag; there’s the slough of my despond. Drive me out.”

  Q: “No, sir.”

  A: “That’s a question?” The document disappointed me as much as my students’ unwillingness to follow the Pattern. We’re to the day before my fortieth birthday now, page before Page 1: this particular lecture-scroll I’d pinned great fresh hope upon; sealed with an impression of the Chimera, it was inscribed For B from P: Begin in the Middle of the Road of Our Life; I’d first come across it twenty years previously, in circumstances about to be set forth at length; newlywed Philonoë had taken it to be a posthumous wedding gift from newly dead Polyeidus, who’d expired in circumstances about to be et cetera, and interpreted its legend to mean either Open at the Midpoint of My Life or Open Halfway Through Our Married Life. Either way, reckoning from the Polyeidic calendar, it meant age thirty-six—four years too late already! I’d put the thing aside many years ago; forgot it existed; then it turned up accountably in my scroll-case this morning in place of my text for this final lecture in the First-Flood series. Crushing, to find it such a mishmash! “Drive me out, sirs, as you love me; exile me from the city; make me wander far from the paths of men, devouring my own soul, et cetera, till I meet my apotheosis in some counterpart of the Axis Mundi or World Navel: in a riven grove, say, where one oak stands in a rock cleft by the first spring of the last freshet on the highest rise of some hill or other.” This is your best, Polyeidus?