by Gore Vidal
The Floating Opera (1956) and The End of the Road (1958) are two novels of a kind and that kind is strictly R and R, and fairly superior R and R at that. The author tells us that they were written in his twenty-fourth year, and a good year it was for him. Publishers meddled with the ending of the first novel. He has since revised the book and that is the version I read. It is written in first-person demotic (Eastern Shore of Maryland, Barth’s place of origin). The style is garrulous but not unattractive. “I was just thirty-seven then, and as was my practice, I greeted the new day with a slug of Sherbrook from the quart on my window sill. I’ve a quart sitting there now, but it’s not the same one….”
There is a tendency to put too much in, recalling Barthes’s “The Prattle of Meaning” (S/Z): certain storytellers
impose a dense plenitude of meaning or, if one prefers, a certain redundancy, a kind of semantic prattle typical of the archaic—or infantile—era of modern discourse, marked by the excessive fear of failing to communicate meaning (its basis); while, in reaction, in our latest—or “new” novels,
the action or event is set forth “without accompanying it with its signification.”
Certainly Barth began as an old-fashioned writer who wanted us to know all about the adulteries, money-hassling, and boozing on what sounded like a very real Eastern Shore of a very real Maryland, as lacking in bears as the seacoast of Illyria: “Charley was Charley Parks, an attorney whose office was next door to ours. He was an old friend and poker partner of mine, and currently we were on opposite sides in a complicated litigation….”
In 1960 Barth published The Sot-Weed Factor. The paperback edition is adorned with the following quotation from The New York Times Book Review: “Outrageously funny, villainously slanderous…. The book is a brass-knuckled satire of humanity at large….” I am usually quick, even eager, to respond to the outrageously funny, the villainously slanderous…in short, to The New York Times itself. But as I read on and on, I could not so much as summon up a smile at the lazy jokes and the horrendous pastiche of what Barth takes to be eighteenth-century English (“‘ ’Tis not that which distresses me; ’tis Andrew’s notion that I had vicious designs on the girl. ’Sheart, if anything be improbable, ’tis…’”). I stopped at page 412 with 407 pages yet to go. The sentences would not stop unfurling; as Peter Handke puts it in Kaspar: “Every sentence helps you along: you get over every object with a sentence: a sentence helps you get over an object when you can’t really get over it, so that you really get over it,” etc.
To read Barth on the subject of his own work and then to read the work itself is a puzzling business. He talks a good deal of sense. He is obviously intelligent. Yet he tells us that when he turned from the R and R of his first two novels to the megalo-R and R of The Sot-Weed Factor, he moved from “a merely comic mode to a variety of farce, which frees your hands even more than comedy does.” Certainly there are comic aspects to the first two books. But the ponderous jocosity of the third book is neither farce nor satire nor much of anything except English-teacher-writing at a pretty low level. I can only assume that the book’s admirers are as ignorant of the eighteenth century as the author (or, to be fair, the author’s imagination) and that neither author nor admiring reader has a sense of humor, a fact duly noted about Americans in general—and their serious ponderous novelists in particular—by many peoples in other lands. It still takes a lot of civilization gone slightly high to make a wit.
Giles Goat-Boy arrived on the scene in 1966. Another 800 pages of ambitious schoolteacher-writing: a book to be taught rather than read. I shall not try to encapsulate it here, other than to say that the central metaphor is the universe is the university is the universe. I suspect that this will prove to be one of the essential American university novels and to dismiss it is to dismiss those departments of English that have made such a book possible. The writing is more than usually clumsy. A verse play has been included. “Agnora: for Pete’s sake, simmer down, boys. Don’t you think / I’ve been a dean’s wife long enough to stink / my public image up?”
Barth thinks that the word “human” is a noun; he also thinks that Giles is pronounced with a hard “g” as in “guile” instead of a soft “g” as in “giant.” But then the unlearned learned teachers of English are the new barbarians, serenely restoring the Dark Ages.
By 1968 Barth was responding to the French New Novel. Lost in the Funhouse is the result. A collection (or, as he calls it, a “series”) of “Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice.” Barth is not about to miss a trick now that he has moved into R and D country. The first of the series, “Night-Sea Journey,” should—or could—be on tape. This is the first-person narrative of a sperm heading, it would appear, toward an ovum, though some of its eschatological musings suggest that a blow-job may be in progress. Woody Allen has dealt more rigorously with this theme.
The “story” “Lost in the Funhouse” is most writerly and self-conscious; it chats with the author who chats with it and with us. “Description of physical appearance and mannerisms is one of several standard methods of characterization used by writers of fiction.” Thus Barth distances the reader from the text. A boy goes to the funhouse and…“The more closely an author identifies with the narrator, literally or metaphorically, the less advisable it is, as a rule, to use the first-person narrative viewpoint.” Some of this schoolteacherly commentary is amusing. But the ultimate effect is one of an ambitious but somewhat uneasy writer out to do something brand-new in a territory already inhabited by, among other texts that can read and write, the sinister Locus Solus, the immor(t)al Tlooth and the dexterous A Nest of Ninnies.
It is seldom wise for a born R and R writer to make himself over into an R and D writer unless he has something truly formidable and new to show us. Barth just has books. And sentences. And a fairly clear idea of just how far up the creek he is without a paddle. “I believe literature’s not likely ever to manage abstraction successfully, like sculpture for example, is that a fact, what a time to bring up that subject….” What a time! And what is the subject, Alice? Incidentally, Barth always uses quotation marks and “he saids.”
In 1972 Barth published three long stories in a volume called Chimera. Two of the stories are based on Greek myths, for are they not, as admirers of Jung declare, part of the racial memory, the common stock of all our dreams and narratives? Well, no, they are not. The Greek myths are just barely relevant to those Mediterranean people who still live in a landscape where the anima of a lost world has not yet been entirely covered with cement. The myths are useful but not essential to those brought up on the classics, the generation to which Dr. Jung (and T. S. Eliot) belonged; and of course they are necessary to anyone who would like to understand those works of literature in which myth plays a part. Otherwise they are of no real use to Americans born in this century. For us Oedipus is not the doomed king of Thebes but Dr. Freud’s depressing protagonist, who bears no relation at all to the numinous figure that Sophocles and Euripides portrayed. Thebes is another country, where we may not dwell.
Joyce’s Ulysses is often regarded as a successful attempt to use Greek myth to shore up a contemporary narrative. But it is plain to most non-creative readers that the myth does not work at all in Joyce’s creation and were it not for his glorious blarney and fine naturalistic gifts, the book’s classical structure alone could not have supported the novel. Since Joyce, alas, the incorporation of Greek myth into modern narrative has been irresistible to those who have difficulty composing narrative, and no Greek. These ambitious writers simply want to give unearned resonance to their tales of adultery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, of misbehavior in faculty rooms, of massive occlusions in the heart of the country. But the results are deeply irritating to those who have some sense of the classical world and puzzling, I would think, to those taking English courses where the novel is supposed to have started with Richardson.
Barth has browsed through Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths (and gives due acknowledgment to tha
t brilliantly eccentric custodian of the old world). At random, I would guess, Barth selected the story of Bellerophon (tamer of Pegasus) for modernizing; also, more to his point, Perseus, the slayer of Medusa. The first story is taken from Arabian mythology, a narrative called “Dunyazadiad,” as told by the “kid sister of Scheherazade.” It should also be noted that two of the stories in Lost in the Funhouse were wacky versions of certain well-known high jinks in old Mycenae.
The kid sister of Scheherazade is a gabby co-ed who mentions with awe the academic gifts of her sister “Sherry,” “an undergraduate arts-and-sciences major at Banu Sasan University. Besides being Homecoming Queen, valedictorian-elect, and a four-letter varsity athlete…. Every graduate department in the East was after her with fellowships.” This unbearable cuteness has a sinister side. Since Barth’s experience of literature and the world is entirely that of a schoolteacher, he appears to take it for granted that the prevailing metaphor for his own life (and why not all life itself?) is the university. There is also an underlying acceptance of the fact that since no one is ever going to read him except undergraduates in American universities, he had better take into account that their reading skills are somewhat underdeveloped, their knowledge of the way society works vague, and their culture thin.
Barth’s Hamlet would no doubt begin, “Well, I guess flunking out of Rutgers is no big deal when I got this family up in Wilmington where we make these plastics that, like, kill people but I’m changing all that or I was going to up until my mother went and married this asshole uncle of mine….” Perhaps this is the only way to get the classics into young television-shrunk minds. But the exercise debases both classics and young minds. Of course Barth is no fool. He is often quick to jump in and forestall criticism. Sherry’s kid sister remarks: “currently, however, the only readers of artful fiction were critics, other writers, and unwilling students who, left to themselves, preferred music and pictures to words.”
Sherry is helped in her literary efforts to think up 1001 stories by a genie who is, like so many of Barth’s male protagonists, a thoroughly good person: his policy “was to share beds with no woman who did not reciprocate his feelings.” For a United Statesman (posing as an Arabian genie), this is true heterosexual maturity. In case we missed Barth’s first testimonial to the genie’s niceness, we are later told that “he was no more tempted to infidelity than to incest or pederasty.” I guess this makes him about the best genie on campus. Between Genie and Sherry there is a lot of talk about the nature of fiction, which is of course the only reason for writing university fiction. There is not a glimmer of intelligence in this jaunty tale.
Barth was born and grew up a traditional cracker-barrelly sort of American writer, very much in the mainstream—a stream by no means polluted or at an end. But he chose not to continue in the vein that was most natural to him. Obviously he has read a good deal about Novel Theory. He has the standard American passion not only to be original but to be great, and this means creating one of Richard Poirier’s “worlds elsewhere”: an alternative imaginative structure to the mess that we have made of our portion of the Western Hemisphere. Aware of French theories about literature (but ignorant of the culture that has produced those theories), superficially acquainted with Greek myth, deeply involved in the academic life of the American university, Barth is exactly the sort of writer our departments of English were bound, sooner or later, to produce. Since he is a writer with no great gift for language either demotic or mandarin, Barth’s narratives tend to lack energy; and the currently fashionable technique of stopping to take a look at the story as it is being told simply draws attention to the meagerness of what is there.
I am obliged to remark upon the sense of suffocation one experiences reading so much bad writing. As the weary eyes flick from sentence to sentence, one starts willing the author to be good. Either I have become shell-shocked by overexposure to the rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air or Barth has managed a decent narrative in “Perseid.” As usual, the language is jangling everyday speech: “Just then I’d’ve swapped Mycenae for a cold draught and a spot of shade to dip it in….” The gods and demigods are straight from Thorne Smith, who ought to be regarded, in Harry T. Moore’s galère, as the American Dante. But the story of the middle-aged Perseus and his problems of erection (and love) with a young girl seems at times authentic, even true…despite Barth’s unremitting jocosity: “‘Were you always psychosexually weak, or is that Andromeda’s doing?’”
In some ways, the writers’ interviews are more revealing about the state of fiction than the books they write. The twelve writers interviewed for Joe David Bellamy’s book often sound truculent; also, uneasy. For instance, John Gardner (whose Grendel I much admired) is very truculent, but then Mr. Barthelme is on record as not admiring him; this cannot help but hurt. Gardner is as much his own man as anyone can be who teaches school and wants to get good reviews from his fellow teachers in The New York Times Book Review. Yet he dares to say of The Sot-Weed Factor: “nothing but a big joke. It’s a philosophical joke; it might even be argued that it’s a philosophical advance. But it ain’t like Victor Hugo.” It also ain’t an advance of any kind. Although Gardner is myth-minded, he is much more intuitive and authentic than the usual academic browser in Robert Graves’s compendium. Gardner also knows where proto-myths are to be found: Walt Disney’s work, for one.
Gardner tells us that “most writers today are academicians: they have writing or teaching jobs with universities. In the last ten years the tone of university life and of intellectuals’ responses to the world have changed. During the Cold War there was a great deal of fear and cynicism on account of the Bomb.” Gardner then makes the astonishing suggestion that when the other Americans (those somewhat unreal millions condemned to live off-campus) turned against the Vietnam war (after eight years of defeat), the mood changed in the universities as the academicians realized that “the people around you are all working hard to make the world better.” A startling observation. In any case, the writers of University or U-novels will now become more life-affirming than they were in the sad Sixties; “notable exceptions are writers who very carefully stay out of the mainstream and therefore can’t be influenced by the general feeling of people around them.”
At first I thought Gardner was joking. But I was wrong. He really believes that the mainstream of the world is the American university and that a writer outside this warm and social-meliorizing ambience will fall prey to old-fashioned cynicism and hardness of heart. For instance, “Pynchon stays out of universities. He doesn’t know what chemists and physicists are doing; he knows only the pedantry of chemistry and physics. When good chemists and physicists talk about, say, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, they agree that for life to be evolved beyond our stage, creators on other planets must have reached decisions we now face.” Removed from the academic mainstream and its extraterrestrial connections, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is just an apocalyptic “whine.”
Fortunately, Gardner’s imagination is fabulous; otherwise, he would be fully exposed in his work as being not only not in the mainstream of American society but perfectly irrelevant in his academic cul de sac. Yet if he is right that most contemporary writers are also teaching school and listening in on warm-hearted life-enhancing physicists and chemists as they talk of their peers on other planets, then literature has indeed had its day and there will be no more books except those that teachers write to teach.
Although Barthelme has mentioned Pynchon as one of the writers he admires, neither Gass nor Barth refers to him and Gardner thinks him a “whiner” because he no longer spawns in the mainstream of Academe. I daresay that it will come as news to these relatively young writers that American literature, such as it is, has never been the work of schoolteachers. Admittedly, each year it is harder and harder for a writer to make a living from writing, and many writers must find the temptation to teach overwhelming. Nevertheless, those of us who emerged in the Forties (Roosevelt’s chil
dren) regarded the university (as did our predecessors) as a kind of skid row far worse than a seven-year writer’s contract at Columbia (the studio, not the university). Except for Saul Bellow, I can think of no important novelist who has taught on a regular basis throughout a career.
I find it admirable that of the nonacademics Pynchon did not follow the usual lazy course of going for tenure as did so many writers—no, “writers”—of his generation. He is thirty-nine years old and attended Cornell (took a class from former Professor V. Nabokov); he is eminently academebile. The fact that he has got out into the world (somewhere) is to his credit. Certainly he has not, it would seem, missed a trick; and he never whines.
Pynchon’s first novel, V., was published in 1963. There is some similarity to other R and D works. Cute names abound. Benny Profane, Dewey Gland, Rachel Owlglass. Booze flows through scene after scene involving members of a gang known as The Whole Sick Crew. The writing is standard American. “Kilroy was possibly the only objective onlooker in Valletta that night. Common legend had it he’d been born in the U.S. right before the war, on a fence or latrine wall.” Above this passage is a reproduction of the classic Kilroy sketch; below this passage there is a broken-line Kilroy. These are the only graphics in a long book that also contains the usual quotation marks and “he saids.” All in all, a naturalistic rendering of an essentially surrealist or perhaps irrealist subject, depending on one’s apprehension of the work.
Benny Profane is described as “a schlemihl and human yo-yo.” He is a former sailor. On Christmas Eve 1955 he is in Norfolk, Virginia. He goes into a bar, “his old tin can’s tavern on East Main Street.” People with funny names sing songs at each other (lyrics provided in full by the author) and everyone drinks a lot. There is vomiting. Scene with a girl: “What sort of Catholic was she? Profane, who was only half Catholic (mother Jewish), whose morality was fragmentary (being derived from experience and not much of it)….” Profane is “girl-shy” and fat. “‘If I was God…’” begins a fantasy. Definitely a clue to the state of mind of the creator of the three books I have been reading.