by John Barth
Personally, I like Tonio Kröger’s remark in Thomas Mann’s story (“Tonio Kröger,” 1903):
Do you want me to go about in a ragged velveteen jacket and a red waistcoat? Every artist is as bohemian as the deuce, inside! Let him at least wear proper clothes and behave outwardly like a respectable being.
But I’ve never been able to get very interested in the question of what sort of person an artist should be and what sort of life he ought to lead. For one thing, a glance around shows us that magnificent work can come from just about any kind of person and circumstance, however much we might prefer to believe that the great artist is also a great human being. Publicly nasty fellows like Richard Wagner, privately nasty ones like Robert Frost; coarse ones like Francois Rabelais, delicate ones like Marcel Proust; worldly ones like Honoré de Balzac, naïve ones like Lewis Carroll; demi-lunatics like Ezra Pound, businessmen like Wallace Stevens; fascists, perverts, politicians, customshouse clerks, Jew baiters, humanitarians, athletes, pediatricians, private secretaries, habitual criminals—the art we admire seems to spring from anywhere.
It is curious and touching that whenever people speak of the association between artists and universities, their concern is always for the artist, that the university might corrupt him. It seems to me they might worry whether the universities won’t be the ones that get corrupted. The motto of Johns Hopkins University, for example, is St. Paul’s notion that the truth will make you free; but five centuries before St. Paul, Sophocles was already showing us in Oedipus the King that truth is morally ambivalent at its best, and at its worst catastrophic. Socrates bids us know ourselves, but Shakespeare shows that at the end of the road of self-examination and insight may very well lie paralysis of the will like Hamlet’s, and abdication of one’s personality. Plato regards poets as enemies of the republic. Mann declares that in the artist there’s something of the sinister mountebank, something hostile to life and health and virtue. Think of Samuel Beckett’s schizoid-geriatric narrators, Franz Kafka’s artist-as-an-orexic, or as bug. Leslie Fiedler declares (in his essay “No! in Thunder”) that all good writers say no to life, no to order, no to right and wrong, justice and injustice, and all the pious categories that constitute the world.
Is it right to support such monsters at the public charge? Is it prudent to expose honest scholars to them, to say nothing of young women and men? The prospect of allowing card-carrying Communists on our faculties seems wholesome by contrast: They want no more than to overthrow our government and our capitalist way of life, as Senator McCarthy tells us, but the artist on this view is a cosmic subversive, an overthrower of Knowable Reality, an altogether dangerous fellow—the more so because he may look and act like an English teacher or anybody’s next-door neighbor. He may actually believe himself a responsible citizen.
But don’t be fooled, just because he or she might be. At Penn State, for instance, where I work, I teach three things—“humanities,” literature, and fiction-writing. Of these three, my only real specialty is fiction-writing, and I’m not altogether persuaded yet that that can be taught; or, if it can, that it ought to be; or, if it ought, that I know how to teach it. So before I offer any views of mine on the construction of universes, I’ll make to you the same disclaimer I make to my students: that I’m not an expert either in literature or in philosophy, but a mere storyteller. Which is to say, a professional liar.
Having established that, I don’t mind pointing out that many of the makers of literature and philosophy might be regarded as professional liars, too. Perhaps it takes one to know one. What’s more, you may hope with me, as not with some, that my lies, at least, will be of professional caliber; there’s something to be said for that. I look at the history of western culture the way Kafka looked at “Amerika”: His statue of Liberty, with her sword held high, may not resemble exactly the lady we’ve seen on Bedloe’s Island, but she’s arresting and piquant in her own right. Similarly, the Leibnitz or William James or Buddha I refer to this hour may not resemble the ones you know, but I can hope they’ll be clever enough chaps to serve my purpose.
The question before us is, How does one make a universe?
I can’t explain how. The storytellers’ trade is the manufacture of universes, which we do with great or little skill regardless of explanations and interpretations. Rightly or wrongly, we had rather make things that we can’t explain than explain things that we can’t make. You hear it said that the novelist offers you an attitude toward life and the world. Not so, except incidentally or by inference. What he offers you is not a Weltanschauung but a Welt; not a view of the cosmos, but a cosmos itself.
Consider the great immodesty of art, compared to science and philosophy. Ortega y Gasset deplores the arrogance of the middle-class man of science, that Boeotian who has mastered one subcompartment of knowledge and therefore feels qualified to pass judgment on politics, morals, and art. Ortega is right, no doubt, and rightly extends his criticism to specialists of every ilk and stamp. But forgetting the scientists themselves, I don’t know which I admire more about science, its poetry (which I’ll speak of later) or its modesty. All the scientists hope to do is describe the universe mathematically, predict it, and maybe control it. The philosopher, by contrast, seems unbecomingly ambitious: He wants to understand the universe; to get behind phenomena and operation and solve the logically prior riddles of being, knowledge, and value. But the artist, and in particular the novelist, in his essence wishes neither to explain nor to control nor to understand the universe: He wants to make one of his own, and may even aspire to make it more orderly, meaningful, beautiful, and interesting than the one God turned out. What’s more, in the opinion of many readers of literature, he sometimes succeeds.
What a botch Nature is. It’s true that for some people its splendors have been testimony of God’s existence. “How can anyone be agnostic?” they ask down the ages, at least since the invention of windows: “Just look out the window!” But it’s equally true that Nature’s indifferent cruelty and monstrous waste have led others for ages to quite different conclusions. For Lucretius the very sloppiness of the cosmos argued that the gods had had no hand in it. Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov cannot accept a divine program which allows for the torture and death of even one sinless little child, let alone the millions and millions who have gone that route. Robert Louis Stevenson stands aghast at what he calls “our rotatory island loaded with predatory life, and more drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship…” To these observers, at least—who cannot be charged with insensitivity or lack of fellow feeling—our lives have neither order nor purpose; our values are cruel illusions; our conversations are tedious beyond appraisal; our bodies are preposterous, our minds a bad joke. On their view, the kindest judgment we can make upon the universe is that of the nihilists, that it is absurd. Or that of a friend of mine, a believer, who assures me that God did make the universe, but only by way of a heavenly graduate-school project, which may well fail to earn Him His Master’s degree. Or that of Stendhal: “God’s only excuse is that He doesn’t exist.”
By comparison, the universes of our good novelists might be said to come off well indeed. In the worlds of Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce, there is nothing but has its place in an order luminously knowable to the beholder, however difficult to explain. The lives of the characters have shape and point and relationship; their conversations and actions are purposive, significant—or if , dull and clumsy, they are artfully dull and clumsy. Objects and landscapes glow in their rendered essences like side-lit trees in late afternoon; through it all there breathes a beautiful economy, such as certain old philosophers dreamt of in their cosmologies.
Metaphysicians no longer subscribe, I imagine, to Aristotle’s doctrine of the entelechies: the notion that everything is striving to realize its essence, the acorn to be an oak, the oak to reach absolute oakhood, the fool to be a perfect fool, and so forth. Even less popular today, I should th
ink, would be Leibnitz’s elaboration of this doctrine: his notion of the pre-established harmony of the cosmos. Leibnitz—my Leibnitz—asserts that in order for me to be absolutely and perfectly me in my quintessential me-hood, I may very well require you in your very youness, and this hall in its perfect hallity; at the moment of my biography when the heavenly script calls for me to punch you in the nose, your nose, says Leibnitz, takes an ardent yearning to be punched, and the floor where you fall—or I—has a yen to be covered up by one of us, and the air we shout into was itching to be vibrated, and so on, and so on: the music of the spheres. We may not accept Leibnitz these days as a serious describer of the universal process, but I point out to you (as Kenneth Burke has observed) that the doctrine of pre-established harmony exactly describes how Trollope’s universe works, or Conrad’s, or Dickens’s. We speak of the “inevitability” of an excellent plot, by which we mean far more than a bleak determinism. Would Don Quixote be so quixotic if Sancho Panza were not so pragmatic? For Matt Dillon to be his Matt-Dillonest requires that Chester be absolutely Chestrian, and conversely.* Moreover, the protagonist’s mere essence virtually calls into existence his antagonist, as in Hegelian dialectic: Marshal Dillon’s very expertise at slinging gun creates the envy that will summon up adversaries to try his strength, and the ritual Western commences. If Oedipus did not make his vow to discover who he is, he wouldn’t be who he is; given the vow and the circumstances, everything follows.
Does life ever work so perfectly? The Buddhists sometimes picture the universe as a cobweb strung with beads of dew, each drop reflecting all the others. In the novelist’s world, not only does every thing imply every other thing and each event every other event, as Leda’s egg hatched the history of Troy; but the egg itself, the dew-strung web, is an artistic whole—distinct, harmonious, and radiant—as the actual real world is not.
We now reflect on a further fact: There are no problems in the universe of a well-executed novel, however much it may raise problems in our own, or dramatize them, or even attempt incidentally to solve them. Consider Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Certainly it raises moral and metaphysical questions about the phenomenon of passion in our lives, in our society; it raised them acutely enough in Goethe’s own time to bring numerous would-be Werthers to commit suicide like their hero. But in the novel itself, the problem is no problem: It’s part of the plan, so much so that the story (that is to say, the universe of the novel) would be meaningless and incomplete without it. Werther’s suicide is the climax and “inevitable” conclusion of a completely meaningful series of events; it is the focus of an imaginary and entirely relevant eighteenth-century German universe. The suicide of one of Goethe’s readers is more likely to have been the messy termination of an incoherent string of mostly accidental causes and effects: a meaningless phenomenon in a blind universe that existed perhaps infinitely before the fellow’s birth and continues irrelevantly to exist even yet. That thought alone has driven men to suicide; in an existentialist play like Hamlet, their death would have a point, if merely the point of pointlessness like Hamlet’s own, or like the death of the nihilist Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. In real life, as far as many of us can see, it has none whatever.
Consider even the fundamental problem of being, that starting-place of ontology and religion, and no doubt the profoundest brain-teaser in human thought. It is a problem which takes us, I think, to the very gizzard of art, and it shall bring us to the point of this lecture.
The problem is twofold: Why does the universe exist at all, when, as Schopenhauer says, we can not only conceive of its nonexistence but perhaps even wish it? Such is the sentiment of Paul Valery when he calls the universe “a blot on the perfection of nonexistence.” And second, granting the existence of being, why is anything in the universe the way it is instead of some other way, which we can readily imagine? Why must every action have an equal and opposite reaction, instead of, say, a proportionate one, or in every tenth instance none at all? Why must falling bodies accelerate at just thirty-two feet per second per second, and not thirty-one or thirty-three? Why must Jupiter have twelve moons and Italy be shaped like a boot and the date of the Norman Conquest be A.D. 1066 and all Gaul be divided into three parts and one’s wife have a freckle on her elbow? Except to True Believers, all the “reasons” are proximate, contingent on earlier and equally arbitrary facts; but the question is ultimate. Look at ourselves—“the disease of the agglutinated dust,” Stevenson calls us—
… lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of ourselves; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in the face; a thing to set children screaming…
How arbitrary it all is! Even if one sees much beauty in it, as I do, how arbitrary! I have never liked the idea that art is the product of neurosis, of a spiritual wound—the pearl-oyster theory of imaginative creation. It may be true—in fact, it probably is—but I don’t like it, and anyhow it isn’t the whole truth, or the most prior truth. It seems to me that it is insight into the blind arbitrariness of physical fact, together with the gross finality of it, that upsets the thoughtful young person and sometimes makes him or her an artist. Look at it: that there is this man speaking at this time to these people (all with ear-bones shaped like stirrups and anvils)! One doesn’t mind, really, but why must that be the only way it is?
Grübelsucht, the Germans call this wonder: the sickness of brooding curiosity. But if it is decadent, I maintain that it is a decay which feeds the root of artistry. Perhaps the artist’s reaction to this unreasonable “thinginess” of things will indeed take the form of a nausea, as in Sartre’s novel of that name; or perhaps of sober awe, as in Stevenson’s essays. Or perhaps—and this seems more often the case with the great ones—if our chap is of hardier nervous stuff and artist to the bone, he may not even discuss the philosophical question as such, but intuitively embrace it and set to making universes of his own, transforming the apparently blank givens of existence “in the smithy of his soul” to something ordered and fine and pregnant with human significance.
There is on the coast of California, or used to be, or I wish there had been, a big camera obscura, of the sort that once fascinated Leonardo da Vinci. A long-focus lens on the roof of the building receives the image of the ocean and projects it by means of mirrors onto a large ground-glass plate inside the darkened room. You can stand outside and see the ocean firsthand for free, but people pay money to step inside and see it on the screen. I quite understand them: It’s not the same thing at all. There is something about the dark chamber and the luminous plate that makes the commonplace enchanting. Things that may scarcely merit notice when seen directly—a tree, a rock, a seagull—these things are magically displaced, recomposed, and represented. Like the drowned man Ariel sings of in The Tempest, the scene is familiar and yet transfigured; things shine serene by their inner lights and are intensely interesting.
A novel works like the camera obscura. The arbitrary facts that make the world—devoid of ultimate meaning and so familiar to us that we can’t really see them any longer, like the furniture of our living room—these facts are passed through the dark chamber of the novelist’s imagination, and we see them, perhaps for the first time. More, we hang upon them, often with a passion—characters and events that in real life might bore us or simply escape our notice. We stand before them rapt, entranced, like the spectators at the panther’s cage in Kafka’s “Hunger Artist” story; we do not want ever to go away… And then, because as ordinary men and women we dwell after all in this universe, not that one, we leave the chamber, blinking as the pupils of our eyes contract to normal. After a bit we light a cigarette, speak of something else, and proceed through a cosmos invisible to us because we’re in it.
There’s the point: The problem of being, so difficult in our own universe, resolves itself as if by magic in the luminescent universes of fiction, because as we read an excellent novel
we are all endowed temporarily with a sort of oriental insight. I’ve heard it said that the Zen master who has had his satori, or mystic awakening, refuses to analyze his insight into Truth. If you ask him what ultimate reality is like, he may holler “Boo!” or throw his fan at you. He will not say, like Kierkegaard, that the self is a relation which relates itself to itself, and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another. Not at all. If he says anything, it will be perhaps that the crops need a good rain; on the other hand, he may burp in your face. This response is called upaya, or “direct pointing”; the sense of it is that as soon as Being is conceived of —that is, as soon as it’s represented as a concept (opposed to not-Being) and therefore made problematical—the problem can’t be solved. Even to say “Being simply is” is to impose upon Reality the human conceptions of noun, verb, and adverb, the human logic of grammar and syntax, and thus to falsify it, since there are no categories in Nature’s warpless, woofless web. Therefore the Buddhist burps: He does not describe reality; he points to it. He gives you a little piece of it.
But this is just about what the artist does; this is the high philosophy of novels and statues and poems. Standing like God and the author outside the cosmos of a fine novel or play, we don’t finally wonder why things happen as they do or why the characters are as they are. Hamlet may analyze himself (and the critics may analyze his analysis, and the critic’s psychoanalyst may analyze the critic’s analysis of Hamlet’s analysis of Hamlet, until everything starts to sound like Kierkegaard’s definition of the self), but you and I, from outside, we sense that within the story everything’s existence is its own justification; we feel the harmony, the necessity, the truth of it all, noumenal and glowing like the camera obscura.