by John Barth
Adventure and adversity—hazarding forth and overcoming—are what the enduring attractiveness of Roderick Random comes to. Those ancient, most profoundly lifelike human sports, the obstacle race and the scavenger hunt, are also the oldest, appealingest matter for the storyteller. Of painful searching and futile running around, our literature is unavoidably full, as of despair in all its Kierkegaardian varieties, including the comic; but not of proper adversity, for the obstacle race implies obstacles not regarded as insurmountable, and the scavenger hunt presumes an ultimately findable treasure. They also imply a racer, a hunter—that is, a hero, scapegrace or otherwise, not an antihero; and heroes, for good and obvious reasons, are hard come by in the age of antimatter and the anti-novel. Finally, both adversity and adventure imply a certain attitude toward the obstacles and settings-out, and this attitude, the spirit of adventurousness, has also been regrettably absent in modern fiction, for the same good reasons. I say “has been” because there is evidence, in some really recent novels, of a renaissance of this same spirit: hints of the possibility of a post-naturalistic, post-existentialist, post-psychological, post-antinovel novel in which the astonishing, the extravagant (“out-wandering”), the heroical—in sum, the adventurous—will come again and welcomely into its own. For those among us who have sustained our own idea of Roderick Random (never mind Smollet’s idea of him!) not for months but for years at a stretch, it can’t happen too soon.
* New York: Signet Books, 1964.
† A sentiment altogether consonant with the one Weighty Observation of which Smollett delivers himself in the novel: “I have found by experience that, though small favours may be acknowledged and slight injuries atoned, there is no wretch so ungrateful as he whom you have most generously obliged, and no enemy so implacable as those who have done you the greatest wrong.” Strap’s virtues have been overrated anyhow. He has none of the ingratiating attributes of other notable sidekicks: the hard-knock cynicism of Sancho Panza, the man-to-man devotion of Roland’s Oliver, the ebullient roguery of Falstaff, the nick-of-time helpfulness of Tarzan’s Cheetah. His bumbling is dangerous, his cowardice not especially amusing, his fidelity self-interested and feckless. A poor foil and a worse advisor, unresourceful and indifferently diverting, he more than merits Roderick’s occasional abuse—though not always at just the time it’s laid on him.
‡ “Earl Sheerwit,” in Melopoyn’s chronicle, corresponds to Lord Chesterfield, whose patronage Smollett sought unsuccessfully; “Supple” to Charles Fleetwood, manager of the Drury Lane Theatre; “Bellower” to John Rich of Covent Garden; “Brayer” to Willoughby Lacy, Garrick’s manager; and “Marmozet” to Garrick himself.
§ Richardson’s Pamela and Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Jonathan Wild, are its only English predecessors, by eight, five, and four years respectively. Their authors—Fielding at least—are more talented than Smollett, everyone agrees, but not necessarily in these earliest productions. When Roderick Random appeared, anonymously, in 1748, a number of people took it to be Fielding’s work—including Lady Mary Montagu, Fielding’s cousin. But Smollett’s gratuitous, malicious, half-hysterical lampoons of Fielding seem to have been inspired more by resentment of Fielding’s patron Lyttelton (who had committed the unpardonable sin of neglecting to read The Regicide when Smollett sent it to him years earlier) than by envy of Fielding’s talent or popularity. Fielding’s counter-lampoons are better-humored.
Mystery and Tragedy
THE TWIN MOTIONS OF RITUAL HEROISM
LITERARY public lecture-writing is not my cup of tea; it is an occasional temptation, like changing jobs or writing literary essays, to which occasionally I succumb. After “How To Make a Universe” at Hiram College, I fell into that once-a-month habit of reading publicly from my fiction, but I didn’t venture another public essay-lecture until this one, four Decembers later.
By then I was in the home stretch of the novel Giles Goat-Boy and about to decide to change jobs, though not professions, after a dozen agreeable years at Penn State. This lecture was first delivered on December 10, 1964, at the State University of New York at Geneseo, in handsome Finger Lakes country, from where I went over to Buffalo to be interviewed for a professorship at the state university center there. It makes plain, for better or worse, some preoccupations of the Goat-Boy novel: preoccupations carried over from The Sot-Weed Factor and on into the goat-boy’s successor, Lost in the Funhouse. It was to have been one of a series of guest lectures at Geneseo by writers on writers; for the reason explained in its opening sentence, I prayed for and was granted absolution from the series theme.
The difficulty of this visiting-lecture series for your present visitor is that although I enjoy reading pieces of my own and others’ work aloud in public places, I don’t know anybody else’s works well enough to hold forth upon them except in the privacy of my classroom, and I don’t much enjoy analyzing my own. It’s sobering enough to see what curious things my novels say to other people; never mind what they say to me.
So I’ve decided to speak about a topic instead of a particular writer: the ritual of mythic heroism as I understand it, and some relevance of this ritual to two famous general ways of thinking about life and the world. It is a topic I would never essay if I knew very much about it; but fools rush in, and I’ve banked my soul anyhow on the reality of the Limbus Fatuorum, that apartment in Hell reserved by medieval eschatologists for chaps too invincibly crankish to fit the usual categories. The fact is that the novelist, whose trade is the manufacture of universes, needs ideally to know everything, or he’s liable to do an even odder job than God did. On the other hand, he doesn’t need to know anything until he needs to know it, and at times it can be important for him to preserve a saving ignorance if he’s to get his work done. I shall advert to this matter.
My interest in the pattern of mythical heroic adventure dates from a weekend in 1961, after my novel The Sot-Weed Factor had been published. That weekend, in preparation for a lecture on Virgil’s Aenead in an undergraduate course in the humanities, I happened to read Lord Raglan’s famous treatise called The Hero (1936). The truth or falsehood of Raglan’s thesis—that myths are not derived from historical facts, but from the dramatic features of traditional rites—doesn’t particularly interest me; but I was interested indeed in the remarkable generalizations he makes, at one point in the book, about the pattern of mythic heroism as it seems to occur in virtually every culture on the planet: a list of twenty-two prerequisites, as it were, for admission into the heroic fraternity. Some of you may be familiar with Raglan’s curriculum (if you think there’s a connection between this Lord Raglan and the Raglan sleeve, you’re right):
1. The hero’s mother is a royal virgin;
2. His father is a king and
3. Often a near relative of his mother, but
4. The circumstances of his conception are unusual, and
5. He is also reputed to be the son of a god.
6. At birth an attempt is made on his life, usually by his father or his maternal grandfather, but
7. He is spirited away, and
8. Reared by foster parents in a far country.
9. We are told nothing of his childhood, but
10. On reaching manhood he returns or goes to his future kingdom.
11. After a victory over the king and/or a giant, dragon, or wild beast,
12. He marries a princess, often the daughter of his predecessor, and (at about age 34 or 35)
13. Becomes king.
14. For a time he reigns uneventfully, and
15. Prescribes laws, but
16. He later loses favor with the gods and/or his subjects and
17. Is driven from the throne or city, after which
18. He meets with a mysterious death,
19. Often at the top of a hill.
20. His children, if any, do not succeed him.
21. His body is not buried, but nevertheless
22. He has one or more holy sepulchres.
; Raglan proceeds to apply these criteria to mythical heroes, Eastern and Western, and rank them by scores, a fascinating procedure: Oedipus gets an A, with 21 out of 22 (he wasn’t a famous legislator, though he did run Thebes); Moses an A- , with 20; Watu Gunung, of Java, checks in with a solid B (18 points); Nyikang of the Upper-Nile Shiluks manages a C- (14 points), and so forth. The temptation to play the game yourself is irresistible; if we allow the criteria to be read more or less metaphorically, Jesus and General MacArthur both come off respectably well, for example. But what struck me was that without my even having registered them for the course, my Sot-Weed Factor hero Ebenezer Cooke and his tutor Henry Burlingame each made fair scores, and taken together (as properly they might be, opposite sides of the same coin) they did almost as well as Oedipus—there’s always one smart fellow in the class who ups the curve. Ironically, the real Ebenezer Cooke might have done even better: No one knows where he’s buried, though the Cook’s Point estate, his Holy Sepulchre on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, is presently owned and tended by a respectful New Jersey dentist. I made up a grave for my Ebenezer because I wanted to compose his epitaph, and thus inadvertently did him out of a point.
Needless to say, my curiosity was provoked, the more so when a critic remarked that my novel had been influenced by Otto Rank’s Myth of the Birth of the Hero. I borrowed that book from the Penn State Library; I peeked into it; sure enough, the critic was right. Well now, I thought, one of two things is true: Either it’s very hard to invent any extravagant hero who won’t at least metaphorically fit that pattern, or else, without quite knowing it, I had “got aholt of something big,” as John Steinbeck’s parson says. Too late to go back with Raglan’s crib and set Ebenezer up for an A+, but I decided to poke a little further into this hero business while I was making notes for a new story, and perhaps learn a bit more about where I’d been before going on to the next place.
I hadn’t poked far before I ran across an even more remarkable actuarial model of heroic adventure, this one the fruit of the synthesizing imagination of Professor Joseph Campbell of Sarah Lawrence College, a mythologist and comparative-religionist who also knows his way around Freud and Jung, the history of philosophy, and philosophies of history. Campbell even draws us a diagram, and when I knitted into it a little Raglan, a little Jung, and a few odds and ends I had up my own sleeve, it came out a fascinating pattern indeed:
Try running Odysseus or Aeneas around this track, or the aforementioned son of Mary and Joseph, or for that matter Lewis Carroll’s Alice or D. H. Lawrence’s Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers, and you’ll appreciate how ubiquitous the pattern is. Much more might be said in the way of detailing and illustrating it; but I commend you to the more learned hands of Raglan, Rank, Jung, Campbell, and company if you’re interested (the basic diagram itself comes from Campbell’s book The Hero With a Thousand Faces; New York: Bollingen Series XVII, 1949).
Two distinctions ought to be made at this point. The first is between whatever meanings one might attribute to the pattern itself and the significance of its uses, conscious or unconscious, by particular artists in particular works of literature. The myth of Aeneas’s descent into Hades may be said to have allegorical correspondences—a number of them—but its rendering in Book VI of Virgil’s poem is largely religious and political propaganda. The author of “Bre’r Rabbit and the Tarbaby” probably wasn’t much interested in mysticism, and while a Zen Buddhist’s interest in him would be entirely legitimate, we needn’t make an adept out of Joel Chandler Harris. Substantial elements of the Master Plan appear in Dante, Lewis Carroll, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Steinbeck, Joyce, and heaven knows how many other writers, ancient and modern, some of whom can be supposed to have been aware of using it, some not, and it goes without saying that its particular literary point is likely to be different in every case, perhaps sometimes absent altogether.
As to the significance of the pattern itself, apart from its literary adaptations, a good thing about Campbell is that he seems to keep clear a second distinction, between the kind of meaning conscious symbols have and the kind that myths have. To explain a symbol—cultural, literary, whatever—you look for its referent; but you don’t explain a myth these days at all, my mythological colleagues tell me: What you do is look for correspondences, merely, between it and other things, and correspondences of course may be manifold, coexistent, and equally “legitimate,” though of unequal interest and heuristic value. My point about the general ritual of adventure will be that it doesn’t “mean” anything; but it has been held to correspond notably to at least seven things—a nice mythic number—six of which I’ll merely note in passing and the seventh enter into, like that last door at the end of the passageway which you aren’t supposed to open.
The first two correspondences exemplify what could be called the class of “natural” hypotheses, and I gather that they don’t cut as much ice with students of myth as they used to: the “solar” hypothesis and the “seasonal” hypothesis. Obviously the westward movement of the hero, his contest with the forces of darkness, and his descent into and resurrection from subterranean realms, as well as the generally cyclic path of his biography, correspond both to the daily apparent motion of the sun and to the succession of the seasons in temperate zones of the earth; this correspondence led some nineteenth-century investigators to maintain that the myths were fanciful primitive accounts of such natural phenomena. It is an extremely complicated way to explain the astronomical facts of life—a way perhaps more suggestive of nineteenth-century German scholarship than of “primitive” science—and nowadays, I understand, we’re more inclined to go at it the other way around, regarding the daily motion of the sun and the annual sequence of the seasons as metaphors for the myth instead of vice versa. This is a much likelier state of affairs, it seems to me. No one who makes up stories can be much perplexed by the relative paucity of equatorial and polar literature, for example: Aside from the fact that there aren’t many readers and writers at the poles and the equator, where on earth will you find your basic metaphors for life and death if the seasons don’t change? The myth and the natural facts are surely analogous (isomorphic is the fashionable term) and throw reciprocal metaphorical light on each other; no need to see one as symbol and the other as referent.
A second class of correspondences can be called experiential. I’ll mention three; very likely there are others, and very likely too each has been argued to be the “explanation” of the ritual of adventure. But let’s ignore from now on the empirical question of what the originators of the myths may in fact have consciously intended them to express; except as a historical datum, that question doesn’t seem especially important, and to take it too seriously may be a large-scale equivalent of the Intentional Fallacy in art criticism. The fact is that the Diurnal, Maturational, and Psychoanalytic “hypotheses” aren’t mutually exclusive, once we stop regarding them as hypotheses and think of them as correspondences—isomorphies—instead. They have in common their view of the heroic pattern as a dramatic emblem of ordinary human experience.
Thus, to take the first of them, what happens to the hero in his lifetime figures the daily adventure of all our psychic lives. Our rational consciousness cognizes, in common with other people’s rational consciousnesses, the sunlit, rigid, discrete forms of waking experience. In the individual subconscious these forms become, as in dreaming, self-luminous and fluid: We “wake” from the “unreality” of our conscious perceptions to dream through the twilit imagings of subconsciousness toward the province of deep, dreamless sleep—the place of dark, formless, unconscious, immediate knowledge. Day, twilight, night; consciousness, subconsciousness, unconsciousness; waking, dreaming, sleeping deeply; cognition, assimilation, immediate knowledge; being, becoming, not-being; life, half-life, death; discrete form, fluid form, formlessness—there are lots of ways to slice it. In each case, the geography is the geography of the psyche, and the adventure is our daily round.
The maturational and the psychoana
lytic or individuational hypotheses compare to the diurnal somewhat as the seasonal hypothesis to the solar. Whether or not, as Raglan claims, the myths literally originate from the dramatic ceremonies of the rites of passage—circumcision, Bar Mitzvah, marriage, funeral, what have you—the pattern certainly does exemplify in heroic scale the passage itself, from any number of viewpoints. We’re all God’s children, speaking literally or figuratively. Our mommies and daddies are all kings and queens whom we shall have to displace, and our conceptions were extraordinary because they engendered the uniqueness of each of us. We all bear the scars of infant traumas. What kid hasn’t suspected, or hoped, that his parents might be really the President and First Lady instead of that impossible couple downstairs minding the store? And of course, whether in professional psychoanalysis or the normal process of maturation and self-discovery, we all must come to terms with sibling, “shadow,” alter ego; undergo the ordeals and humiliations of adolescence, lose our innocence, prove our manhood or womanhood, slough off the vestments of our former or egoistic selves; rebel, question, despair, and drive to the best of our capacity down to the bottom of the womb of things; discover there our deepest identity, perhaps by losing it in another. We make final terms with father, self, past time, and the world: the alignment that must carry us through the years of our maturity. We found our little dynasties, do our little work, pass our climacterics, and become ourselves the ogres whom our children must depose. Then naked we return whence naked we came, to the bosom of God or of nothingness—and what can any man tell his children, finally, or leave behind for them? Et cetera—you get the idea, and can work out your own details with appropriate rhetoric: Christian, Freudian, Jungian, what you will. It may be questionable practice in literature classes, but in civilian life a very great many of us find the most intense relevance of Homer’s Odyssey, for example, in our own prolonged endeavor to get Back Home.