by John Barth
Bellerophon senses, not for the first time, that this picture of his late lamented, distorted for accuracy like a caricature, is being drawn with a jealous pen, and wonders by whom. Why should, for example, Polyeidus the Seer be jealous of Philonoë? But the hero of this story is no longer confident that Polyeidus is its author. Polyeidus reminds him that Polyeidus never pretended authorship: Polyeidus is the story, more or less, in any case its marks and spaces: the author could be Antoninus Liberalis, for example, Hesiod, Homer, Hyginus, Ovid, Pindar, Plutarch, the Scholiast on the Iliad, Tzetzes, Robert Graves, Edith Hamilton, Lord Raglan, Joseph Campbell, the author of the Perseid, someone imitating that author—anyone, in short, who has ever written or will write about the myth of Bellerophon and Chimera. That’s not easy to comprehend, or agreeable, and I’m working toward you, viper, toward you, gnat, and will swat you without fail. Could it be Amazonian Melanippe?
Melanippe, who has copied silently and without comment these many, these innumerable pages, imitates no one, except the honorable line whereof she is the namesake, dating back forever. And she is not not not any kind of author, sculptor, painter, nor even a student of classical mythology: please understand that, Bellerophon! In a word she is not Perseus’s Calyxa, not not not, and will not imitate that odd, proud, vulnerable girl. She is at most an Amazon: i.e., she’ll lend herself no further than to that imposture.
Imposture! Cute Melanippe was the only true Amazon in a courtful of falsies! See Second Flood, Second Phase!
When she says imposture, what she means of course is that in fact she is—she doesn’t know exactly how to say it; even the phrase “human being, female” puts her already into two categories from which her self feels more or less distinct; herself itself puts her into one. In any event, while certainly an Amazon and pleased to be, she feels herself to be by no means comprehended by that epithet. A fringe benefit, she believes, of the Amazonian custom of doing without surnames and assigning to each newborn girl one of a dozen-odd given names is that beneath the apparent confusion which results (there are by her estimate six hundred Melanippes of all ages in Themiscyra at any given tune, who regard one another as sisters, and a similar number of Leaping Myrines, Penthesileas, Hippolytas, et cetera), is an actual clarification of identity. For distinct from her “Melanippe-self,”—immortal because impersonal, Melanippe knows a private, uncategorizable self impossible for her ever to confuse with the name Melanippe—as Perseus, she believes, confused himself with the mythical persona Perseus, Bellerophon Bellerophon…
Bellerophon acknowledges this wise, well-taken point, kisses its taker, but begs her pardon: for reasons to be discovered by Phase Three of the Second Ebb, my identification with “Bellerophon” is clear and systematic policy, not confusion—even as is, was, or imaginably could be the apparent chaos of this tale. Look me in the eyes. You know what I mean.
His mistress Melanippe, official recorder of this portion of his history, interrupts it for the last time in this telling to stand tenderly corrected on that point and to declare to whoever reads these words (of hers) that wherever they may lead and however end, she loves her lover to distraction.
He her ditto! And pernicious Polyeidus—not impossibly because we approach his re-entry—seems less obstructive now of the narrative channel. I feel my tale’s tide flowing strong from the ocean of story; the magic feedbag is hung on: my winged half-brother can refly at last!
Aweigh?
Neigh. Slackwatered, back in Lycia, I climbed off foundered Pegasus, looked in the eye my rail-perched wife, said: “Okay, we’ll do all that. You pack. I’m going to take a stroll out in the marsh; devour my own soul a bit, et cetera. If I’m not back in five days, go without me.”
“Entendu, Green-eyes,” Philonoë replied, and kissed my forehead. “Take this along in case you get bored between meals.” She returned my cousin’s history. “When I was into the myths and legends thing,” she went on, “I found a sort of analogue to the shape-shifter motif in our Lycian folklore: the Xanthian muskrat-trappers and mussel-fishermen speak of an Old Man of the Marsh, a tidewater Proteus, more or less, who takes the form of any of the common species of wetland fauna and works mischief with their boats and gear; but if they happen to catch him accidentally in a crayfish-pot or a clam-rake—one chance in a million—he’s at their service till the tide turns, et cetera. For generations this was no more than a pleasant little folk-belief, which the folk themselves pretended to believe in only for the sake of their grandchildren or tourists and eager students like myself. Since our marriage, however, reports of the O.M. of the M. have come in more frequently and seriously from the outlying districts, especially from the Aleïan marshes. Now, given the uncanny reappearance yesterday of that missing lecture-scroll and its apparent transformation last evening into this floating opus, I can’t help making the obvious association with Polyeidus. I believe you quoted him once to the effect that all shape-shifters are versions of the Old Man of the Sea? It seems at least possible to me that Polyeidus foresaw our discovery of his double-cross of you and Daddy and took advantage of the Chimera episode to turn into that image on the rock, thence into the lecture-scroll, and thence into the dormant tradition of the Old Man of the Marsh, to lie relatively low until the next turn of your career. In sum, and not having seen myself this capital-Pi Pattern you always allude to, I read all the events of the last few days as exciting portents: the scroll, the Perseid, Pegasus’s final grounding, the absolute peaking of your obnoxiousness to the children and myself and your tedious, boastfully self-critical harangues to your audiences, all coincident with your passing the midpoint of your life. Everything says it’s time—past time!—for another conference with your Advisor, and that Polyeidus is about to turn up. My private conviction is that you’re holding him in your hand, but inasmuch as his recent form seems to have been that of the Marsh Man, my intuition is that you’re likelier to get through to him if you take the Perseid to the Aleïan swamp and go through the motions of looking through the snails and soft-crabs. Maybe cast the manuscript upon the waters? Remembering further what you’ve said and resaid about his documentary tendencies, especially that intermediate transformation into the kamara-message in his Corinthian prison cell, I hope you’ll be able to persuade him to turn into the Pattern itself, for you to check out, before or after he takes ‘human’ form for you. Finally, when and if you do confer with him, I trust you’ll be at least cognizant of my own skepticism regarding his good faith, whether or not you’ve come to share it. In any event, since the bring-down of Pegasus has been the principal image of what you’re pleased to call your First Ebb, I’m sure we agree that finding out how to get him up again is your first order of business with Polyeidus. In addition, however, I’d be very interested to hear his opinion on the question whether, once the metaphorical tide has turned and you’re airborne again, it’s okay for you to be sweet to me and the children the way you used to be. That would make me happy enough to die, since, despite all, I love you as much now as I did the night we first went to bed together, and you gently deflowered me, and we slept in each other’s arms till sunrise, et… et cetera. Also give him my regards. ‘Bye.”
“ ‘Bye.’ I did all that, went slogging out among the Littorinas and Melampuses, the Medusae drifting in like fallen moons; of mosquito, frog, and fiddler-crab I sought counsel, how to open my life’s closed circuit into an ascending spiral, like the sand-collars on the beach, like the Moon-shells that I put to my ear for answers—keeping one eye always on the document in hand. I bedded down under a pine on a point of high ground between two creeklets; the sun set and rose a time or two; I considered Philonoë and the course of life, wished I were dead a bit. Hippolochus and Isander hiked out with a box-lunch; I shooed them home but chewed meditatively the chicken, deviled eggs, Greek salad. The marsh ticked, bubbled, soughed, cheeped, hummed, twittered: Polyeidus was in the neighborhood, all right. I put Perseid in the little wine-jug that came with lunch and, full of doubt, let the tide take it. Twelv
e hours fifty minutes later its like washed back with an odd but plainly Polyeidic letter:
On board the Gadfly, Lake Chautauqua, New York, 14 July 1971
To His Majesty King George III of England
Tidewater Farms, Redman’s Neck, Maryland 21612
Your Royal Highness,
On June 22, 1815, in order to establish a new and sounder base of empire, I abdicated the throne of France and withdrew to the port of Rochefort, where two of my frigates—new, fast, well-manned and -gunned—lay ready to run Your Majesty’s blockade of the harbour and carry me to America. Captain Ponée of the Méduse planned to engage on the night of July 10 the principal English vessel, H.M.S. Bellerophon, a 74-gunner but old and slow, against which he estimated the Méduse could hold out for two hours while her sister ship, with my party aboard, outran the lesser blockading craft. The plan was audacious but certain of success; reluctant, however, to sacrifice Méduse, I resolved instead like a cunning wrestler to turn my adversary’s strength to my advantage; to reach my goal by means of rather than despite Your Majesty’s navy; and so 1 addressed to your son the Prince Regent the following:
Isle of Aix, 12 July 1815
In view of the factions that divide my country and of the enmity of the greatest powers in Europe I have brought my political career to a close and am going like Themistocles to seat myself on the hearthstone of the British people. I put myself under the protection of English law and request that Protection of Your Royal Highness, as the most powerful, the most trustworthy, and the most generous of my enemies.
Having sent my aide-de-camp before me with this message and instructions to request from the Prince Regent passports to America, on Bastille Day I put myself and my entourage in the hands of Commander Maitland aboard the Bellerophon and left France. Alas, Your Majesty’s own betrayal and confinement on the mischievous charge of insanity should have taught me that my confidence in your son and his ministers was ill-placed, more especially as it is with the Muse of the Past that I have ever gone to school for present direction. When therefore I learned that my destination was to be, not London and Baltimore, but St. Helena, like a derelict student I applied in vain to my old schoolmistress for vindication:
On board the Bellerophon, at Sea
… I appeal to history. History will say that an enemy who waged war for twenty years against the English people came of his own free will, in his misfortune, to seek asylum under her laws. What more striking proof could he give of his esteem and his trust? But what reply was made in England to such magnanimity? There was a pretence of extending a hospitable hand to that enemy, and when he had yielded himself up in good faith, he was sacrificed.
My maroonment on that desolated rock I need not describe to one so long and even more ignobly gaoled. I, at least, had the consolation that my exile was both temporary and as it were voluntary; I needed no Perseus to save me; I could have escaped at any time, and waited seven years only because that period was needed for me to exploit to best advantage my martyrdom, complete the development of that stage of my political philosophy set down in the Memorial of St. Helena, and execute convincingly the fiction of my death in 1821; also for my brother Joseph in Point Breeze, New Jersey, my officers at Champ d’Asile in the Gulf of Mexico, and my agents in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, Bloodsworth Island, and Rio de Janeiro to complete the groundwork for my American operations.
By means I will not here disclose (but which must bear some correspondence to those by which Your Majesty effected his own escape from Windsor), I departed St. Helena in 1822 for my American headquarters—first in a house not far from your own in the Maryland marshes, ultimately in western New York—an area to which my attention had been directed during my First Consulship by Mme de Staël (who owned 23,000 acres of St. Lawrence County) in the days before that person, like Anteia or the wife of Potiphar, turned against me. Here, for the last century-and-a-half, I have directed my operatives in the slow elaboration of my grand strategy, first conceived aboard the Bellerophon, whereof the time has now arrived to commence the execution: a project beside which Jena, Austerlitz, Vim, Marengo, the 18th Brumaire, even the original Revolution, are as our ancient 18-Pounders to an H-bomb, or my old field-glass to the Mount Palomar reflector: I mean the New, the Second Revolution, an utterly novel revolution.
“There will be no innovations in my time,” Your Majesty declared to Chancellor Eldon. But the truly revolutionary nature of my project, as examination of the “Bellerophonic” prospectus (en route to you under separate cover) will show, is that, as the first genuinely scientific model of the genre, it will of necessity contain nothing original whatever, but be the quintessence, the absolute type, as it were the Platonic Form expressed.
The plan is audacious but certain of Reset Nothing now is wanting for the immediate implementation of its first phase save sufficient funding for construction of a more versatile computer facility at my Lilydale base, and while such funding is available to me from several sources, the voice of History directs me to Your Royal Highness, as the most powerful, the most trustworthy, and the most generous of my Reset Adversaries, we shook the world; as allies, who could withstand us? What might we not accomplish?
In 1789 Your Majesty “recovered” from the strait-waistcoat of your first “madness,” put to rout those intriguing with your son to establish his Regency, and until your second and “final” betrayal by those same intriguers in 1811, enjoyed an unparalleled popularity with your subjects—as did I between Elba and St. Helena. Then let us together, from our Second Exiles, make a Second Return, as more glorious than our First as its coming, to a world impatient to be transfigured, has been longer. To the once-King of the Seas, the once-Monarch of the Shore once again extends his hand. Only grasp it and, companions-in-arms such as this planet has not seen, we shall be Emperours of the World.
N.
Of this obscurely touching epistle, its several familiar names glinting from their dark context like those shepherds’ fires I’d seen on my first flight, I asked a few trial questions—Who am I? et cetera—and receiving no reply, sent it out with mixed feelings on the next tide. I hopefully presumed Polyeidus to be following a classic pattern himself, the pattern of graduated approach, as had Athene on my appeals to her (I mean Deliades’s and mine) and Iobates in the matter of opening Proetus’s letter; as three days had elapsed already of the five I’d bid Philonoë wait, I called after the departing amphora to please do its trick if possible in two more steps rather than, say, four, six, or eight. All that night I swatted bugs, studied stars, listened to my heart beat, wondered what a Bellerophonic prospectus was. My name, from endless repetition, lost its sense. Toward dawn a ship sailed by, unless I dreamed it. By and by the pot-red jug bobbed back, barnacled now and sea-grown as if from long voyaging, et cetera. I watched impassive till it fetched up at my feet, fished out its contents, the script in places run, et cetera.
To:
Mr. Todd Andrews, Executive Secretary
Tidewater Foundation, Tower Hall
Marshyhope State University
Redman’s Neck, Maryland, 21612
From:
Jerome B. Bray
Lilydale, New York, 14752
July 4, 1974
Re:
Reapplication for Renewal of Tidewater Foundation Grant for Reconstruction of Lilydale Computer Facility for Second Phase of Composition of Revolutionary Novel NOTES
Sir:
Inasmuch as concepts, including the concepts fiction and necessity, are more or less necessary fictions, fiction is more or less necessary. Butterflies exist in our imaginations, along with existence, imagination, and the rest. Archimedeses, we lever reality by conceiving ourselves apart from its other things, them from one another, the whole from unreality. Thus Art is as natural an artifice as Nature; the truth of fiction is that Fact is fantasy; the made-up story is a model of the world.
Yet the empire of the novel, vaster once than those combined of France and England, is shrunk n
ow to a Luxembourg, a San Marino. Its popular base usurped, fiction has become a pleasure for special tastes, like poetry, archery, churchgoing. What is wanted to restore its ancient dominion is nothing less than a revolution; indeed the Revolution is waiting in the wings, the Second Revolution, and will not stay for the bicentennial of the First, than which it bids to be as more glorious as its coming, to a world impatient to be Reset Now of “science fiction” there is a surfeit; of scientific fiction none…
Another blank. The sheaf of papers was more bulky than Perseid itself, but though my reading skill was by that time fair enough, and I pored and repored through them, I comprehended most imperfectly what they signified, and despite a number of tantalizing references, could make no use of of what I could make sense. Overall, the document seemed to set forth its author’s plan for completing a project that sometimes appeared to be a written work of some heroically unorthodox sort, at other times a political revolution; but interspersed with Bray’s description of the project, the history of its first three years, and his prospectus for its completion, were literary polemics, political diatribes, autobiographical anecdotes and complaints, threats to sue a certain fellow-author for plagiarism, and pages of charts, mathematical calculations, diagrams, and notes of every sort. The hero described himself as descended “originally” from Jerome Bonaparte (brother of that Emperor so recurrent in Polyeidus’s accidents) and a “Maryland” lady named Betsy Patterson to whom Jerome was briefly married; more immediately from a princess by the name of Ky-You-Ha-Ha Bray who claimed marriage “in the eyes of God and the Iroquois” to Charles Joseph Bonaparte, grandson of Jerome and Betsy, during his tenure as “U.S. Indian Commissioner under Theodore Roosevelt in 1902.” There being alive at the time of his writing no “bona-fide Bonapartes” more closely related to the original Napoleon (whose name and honeybee insignia, even whose identity, he seemed sometimes to assume, as in the previous letter), Bray regarded himself as legitimate heir to the throne of “France”—whence his sobriquet “J.B. the Pretender.” But for all his noble lineage, Bray’s fortunes had been adverse as my own: the impostor rulers of the country France ignored his claims; like Polyeidus he was reduced to teaching, in a post far humbler than my honorary one at the U. of L., and to writing out for public sale a kind of myths called novels. His political enemies conspired to prevent publication of at least two of these latter, entitled The Seeker and The Amateur; worse, when he was visited (as was I by Athene) by a kind of deity—a minor goat-god named Stoker Giles or Giles Stoker—and vouchsafed, not a winged horse, but a sacred scripture called Revised New Syllabus, publication of which should have made him immortal, those same enemies contrived to plagiarize it entire, bring it out under a name with the same initials as its true editor’s, and—most insulting of all—not only represent the R.N.S. as “fiction” but allege that Bray’s touching foreword, which they pirated verbatim, was also fictitious, the work of a hypothetical author!
