by John Barth
3. Just as the accounts of Hakluyt’s voyagers may be more fascinating than the places they voyaged to, the Burtonesque notes and appendices (by many hands) to Penzer’s edition of Somadeva—disquisitions on such heady matters as the place of collyrium in the history of cosmetic art, or the Bitch-and-Pepper motif in the literature of the world—are frequently more engaging than the texts they illuminate. In the course of an indifferent sub-sub-sub-tale about the founding of the city of Pataliputra, for example, a poker-faced note describes two remarkable ancient customs alleged to prevail there: The first is the ancient custom of the women, annually in the rainy season, to bake cakes in the form of phalluses and offer them to any Brahman whom they judge to be (what the English field-researcher translates as) “a blockhead.” The second is the equally ancient custom of the Brahmans, always to refuse those cakes because they regard the first ancient custom as disgusting. One’s conviction is affirmed that it would be a more splendid destiny to have cooked up Burton’s version of The Thousand and One Nights —footnotes, Terminal Essay, and all—than to have written the original.
4. These reservations notwithstanding, The Ocean of Story contains at least one narrative conception of the very first rank, without real analogues that I know of in any of its contemporaries or predecessors, and more gloriously elaborate by far than any of its several analogues in later fiction: I mean the Kathapitha, or “history of the text” of the Katha Sarit Sagara itself, which history comprises the primary narrative frame of Book I and the M[ain] I[ntroduction] to the entire work, and happens to be among my very favorite stories in the world:
One day the god Siva is so delighted at the way Parvati makes love to him that he offers her anything she wishes in reward. She asks for a story. Perching her on his lap, he tells her a short one on the subject of his own splendid exploits in a former life, including his romance with a beautiful woman whom he tactfully supposes to have been Parvati herself in one of her former incarnations.
The goddess abruptly cuts him off. She has heard that one before; so has everybody else. What she craves is an absolutely original story that no one at all has heard and, it is implied, that no one but herself will ever hear, unless she chooses to repeat it. Siva comes up with the Brihat Katha, or Great Tale—actually seven great tales of 100,000 couplets each. It takes a very long time to tell (if the Odyssey, as has been estimated, was sung in four evenings, the same minstrel at the same pace would by my reckoning need 509 evenings—a little under a year and a half—to do Siva’s piece), but in this instance teller, tale, and told all happen to be immortal; Parvati sits silent and presumably entertained—until she learns that the tale has been overheard after all, by one of their house staff! The Gana (servant deity) Pushpadanta, who has hidden invisible in the divine boudoir (as the monks in Marguerite of Navarre’s Heptameron squat behind the shrubbery of the monastery every evening to overhear the tales Marguerite’s friends exchange), repeats the Great Tale to his wife, who repeats it to Parvati, who is so incensed that she condemns not only Pushpadanta but his friend Malyavan—who had merely pled on his behalf—to be born as mortal men: Pushpadanta will have to live on earth under the name of Vararuchi until he crosses paths in the woods with the hermit Kanabhuti (in fact the demigod Supratika, also currently doing time) and repeats to him the entire Great Tale; Malyavan will be obliged to mortality under the name Gunadhya until he happens to cross paths with this same Kanabhuti/Supratika, hears the Great Tale from him, and writes it down—whereupon, like the others who have been delivered of it, he’ll enter heaven.
Got that?
The first of these redemptions comes to pass with comparative ease in the space of a mere four chapters properly laced with narrative digression; the second with more difficulty and corresponding interest and structural extravagance. Malyavan is reborn as Gunadhya and works his mortal way to a ministership in the court of King Satavahana, an adequate monarch in every particular except that he makes mistakes in his grammar. Satavahana himself could perhaps live with this failing, were it not that one of his favorite harem girls is an intellectual who teases him with his solecisms. Humiliated, he demands that his ministers educate him. Gunadhya volunteers to teach him Sanskrit grammar in six years flat; his rival for the King’s favor, Sarvavarman, rashly declares he’ll do the job in six months or else wear Gunadhya’s shoes on his head for a dozen years. Gunadhya counters that if Sarvavarman makes good his boast, he, Gunadhya, will renounce forever the three languages he knows: Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the vernacular dialect. Inasmuch as Sanskrit grammar could not in fact be taught in six months at that time, Gunadhya is full of confidence. But Sarvavarman, alarmed at his own impulsiveness, petitions the gods for help, and for reasons never disclosed they reveal to him a revolutionary new concise Sanskrit grammar, the Katantra, which wins him the bet and reforms subsequent education.
Reduced to silence, Gunadhya takes to the woods with a pair of his favorite students. After an unspecified wordless interval, he comes across Kanabhuti/Supratika, who has in the meanwhile been told the Great Tale by Vararuchi/Pushpadanta and is anxious to pass it along so that he too can return to heaven. But what to do about the language problem? Kanabhuti solves it by teaching Gunadhya a new tongue—Paisacha, or “goblin-language”—and reciting the Great Tale in that. It takes Gunadhya seven more years in the woods to throw the thing into written couplets, owing to its length; no doubt also to the Nabokovian difficulty of versifying in an adopted goblin-language; and perhaps to the nature of his medium: He writes literally with his own blood. But he finally sets down the 700,000th distich, and his two faithful students rush off with the masterpiece to King Satavahana—who takes one look at it and says, presumably in perfect Sanskrit: “Away with this barbaric Paisacha!”
Back to the woods it goes, where its rejected author, as a last resort, commences reading it aloud to himself. All the animals of the forest gather motionless to listen, moved to tears not only by the beauty of the composition but by the spectacle of Gunadhya’s burning each page of manuscript in a hole in the rock as he finishes reading it, rather like Rodolfo in Act One of La Bohème.
Presently King Satavahana, though eating regally, falls ill of malnutrition. Medical research discloses that the cause of his malaise is a deficiency of nutritive value in the meat fetched in by the palace huntsmen, and still further investigation reveals the cause of this deficiency to be a certain mad poet out in the bush, whose narration so spellbinds the beasts of the country that they forget to ruminate. The king hurries to the forest, recognizes his minister Gunadhya, and snatches from the fire what’s left of the Great Tale: alas, a mere 100,000 distichs, the other six-sevenths of the magnum opus having gone up in smoke. Anyhow vindicated, Gunadhya/Malyavan proceeds to heaven; the students are promoted to administrators; and Satavahana, to redeem himself, prefaces the truncated masterwork with a book called Kathapitha, the History of the Tale or Story of the Story, which I’ve just rehearsed, and publishes the whole (in ordinary ink) under the title Brihat Katha, or Great Tale. Eight centuries later, the Kashmirian court-poet Somadeva, to amuse another royal lady, pares down this Brihat Katha, including Satavahana’s prefatory Kathapitha, to a radically terse 22,000 couplets—the mere ten folio volumes of Penzer’s edition, scarcely twice the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined.
Whether Queen Suryavati was as pleased with this revised and abbreviated version as the goddess Parvati was with the original is not recorded. But we may assume that in order to recite to her from memory such a short short story, Somadeva—Mr. Soma—wouldn’t even have needed to make use of a certain great secret recipe for epical recall, from the chief constituent of which he takes his name. Since it may be that this pharmacological formula, rather than the narrative ones analyzed by Professors Milman Parry and Albert Lord,† is the real key to epical composition, I offer it here from my own memory of the Samavidhana Brahmana as quoted in a footnote from the unfrequented deeps of The Ocean of Story:
1. Fast for three nights.
2. Recite a certain incantation and then eat of the soma plant one thousand times.
3. Or bruise the soma plant in water and drink that water for a year.
4. Or ferment the soma plant and drink that liquor for a month.
5. Or drink it forever.
* Eds. Weintraub and Young. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1973.
† In The Singer of Tales (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971).
A Poet to the Rescue
FOR REASONS of temperament more than of philosophy, during the period of our war in Vietnam I remained apart from, though sympathetic to, the great antiwar demonstrations in our cities. To the less great ones on our campuses I was less sympathetic, especially to the sit-ins, takeovers, trashings, and disruptions: Whatever their dealings with the federal government, American universities are not federal institutions to be treated as symbols of our sometimes wrongheaded foreign policies. Academic freedom is a rare and precious thing; riot police, tear gas, and armed National Guardsmen are to be kept off university campuses at almost any cost except the constraint of that freedom. In confrontations between antiwar marchers and federal officials, my heart was with the marchers; in confrontations between campus demonstrators and beleaguered university administrators, my sympathies were often with the administrators. If I had been of draftable age, perhaps I’d have felt otherwise. I hope not. The war was wrong; the choices it forced upon American men just a touch older than my own sons were abhorrent; its disruption of the proper function of universities was deplorable—but the universities were neither the enemy nor a fit symbol of the enemy.
That said, I hasten to add that my politically activist students and colleagues in Buffalo certainly taught me, and many another, more than we’d known before about the political ramifications of the academic enterprise. My general innocence is perhaps invincible, but I remain grateful for their disabusing me of some of its particulars.
Three scenes are particularly fixed in my memory as talismans of the political-academic High Sixties. The first is eerily tranquil. We have invited Ralph Ellison to preside over an informal writing seminar and to deliver a public lecture. His fee is high, but our speakers’ budget is fat. When he arrives in Buffalo, however, the campus is in a volatile mood, on the verge of another political rumble. Mr. Ellison chats amiably with a contingent of my apprentice writers that afternoon, but it is decided (not by him) that his evening appearance had better be canceled. A veteran of the Old Left who has little admiration for the New, our visitor is understood to be hawkish on Vietnam; it is feared, not without reason, that his celebrated presence in a well-filled auditorium will be a red flag, so to speak, to militant black students in particular, who might seize the occasion for a demonstration that will once more bring armed force upon the university. Four or five of us, therefore, at great expense to the State of New York, spend a quiet evening with our visitor at the nearby apartment of Lionel Abel, another Old Leftist and friend of Ellison’s from early Partisan Review days. The dinner conversation, as the campus rumbles, is of Jean-Paul Sartre, of Herman Melville, of old times on the Partisan Review. I have been warned that one is not supposed to ask our guest of honor how his very-long-awaited successor to The Invisible Man is coming along, but I forget and ask. “Okay,” I believe he answers. And he does in fact, if I am not mistaken, speak favorably of preventive bombing—I cannot recall exactly of whom, or apropos of what. Literary critics, maybe.
In Scene Two, at the turn of the decade, the campus is semi-struck again; 400 riot police and National Guardsmen surround it on a pleasant spring morning with tear-gas grenades at the ready. But we are all seasoned hands at this sort of thing now, and as in a city long under siege we carry on as normally as possible. I am sitting with Leslie Fiedler and others on a Ph.D. oral examination committee and have arranged for my youngest child, then about sixteen, to meet me for lunch afterward. The examination goes badly: The candidate, himself a product of the times, has written a programmatically ahistorical dissertation we’ve come to call Groovy American Fiction From Last Semester; its perspective sweeps as far back as the day Bob Dylan introduced the Beatles to dope. We all like the young man personally, but none of us is quite responsible for him; his original doctoral committee have dispersed to other universities or are on leave. He has no particular wish to be an academic anyhow; what he really wants to do is make movies. He cannot answer many of our routine literary-historical questions satisfactorily. To encourage him, I invite him to discourse upon the history of the idea that history is unimportant. Alas, he has no idea that that idea has a history.
At examination’s end, he waits in the corridor while we confer. Only half joking, we propose a new degree, the Terminal Ph.D.: We will give him the doctorate if he will swear a solemn oath never to profess literature. We adjourn. My then-longhaired son, in the hallway now with the candidate, casually reports that the shit hit the fan just as he was crossing campus: Some demonstratorial last straw has provoked the firing of those gas grenades. Sure enough, the stuff is now all around us; my first whiff of it, and I have no idea what to do. Nor am I alone in my ignorance: Suddenly students and teachers find their roles reversed. While I worry about our maybe getting truncheoned by indiscriminating, fed-up cops, veteran graduate students sniff the air as connoisseurs sniff wine and say things like “Peppergas. Berkeley. Sixty-seven.” The fellow lately floundering under our mild examination is now all knowledgeable assurance: If we get gassed, we are not to rub our eyes, but bathe them in the drinking fountain. If push comes to shove, double up on the floor to protect gut, kidneys, and testicles; clasp head in hands to protect ears and skull. My son knows these things, too, though he hasn’t been through them; he’s cool as a cucumber. As it turns out, we don’t get really gassed, much less kicked and clubbed. Lunch ensues; life, including academic life, goes on. But I do not forget my feeling of helplessness and that dramatic peripeteia.
By Scene Three, the 1960s have worn into the 1970s like a too-long movie. Everybody knows the jig is up in Vietnam, but we are bombing the bejesus out of Cambodia anyhow. I fly in from my monthly off-campus reading to find home base once again astir with a combined antiwar demonstration and literary vaudeville show. Allen Ginsberg is onstage; also Leslie Fiedler, George Plimpton, and many another, including the composer and then-conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic, Lukas Foss. But the poet Walter Lowenfels (“We are all poets, really”) has preceded them, and the idea has caught on that virtuoso performance is a variety of fascism. Ginsberg himself is disrupted, in mid-act, by a tom-tom-beating commune called Up Against the Wall You Motherfuckers. He is denounced as a media sellout and fascist virtuoso. We are all poets, really; what right has any one of us to stand up there being talented and famous while the rest of us sit passively in audience? One pictures Ginsberg aging visibly before the microphones. The Motherfuckers will not stop for him and his Tibetan finger-cymbals; they will not stop for Fiedler, who had been among the first to prophesy that America was changing from a whiskey culture into a drug culture. They will of course not stop for the likes of Lukas Foss, a bona fide virtuoso performer, not to mention the urbane Mr. Plimpton.
Only Archie Shepp—a black jazz saxophonist from New York City lately appointed Professor of Music at SUNY/Buffalo and in residence between gigs—can deal with them. I had reservations about Shepp’s appointment to the faculty, much as I respected his musical prowess. Artists who accept academic appointments should be dedicated to teaching and to the university’s general enterprise as well as being considerable artists; students had complained that Shepp’s professoring was a rip-off: that he was cynically ad-libbing his class meetings and taunting his white students with the hopelessness of their ever understanding the black art of jazz. Whatever the justice or injustice of these complaints (Shepp was not long on the faculty), the man earned his keep that night. A crowd who would have pilloried Ralph Ellison—unless he nailed them with a preemptive strike—did not dare disrupt a lean and st
reet-looking black jazzman: Snapping his fingers and improvising scat vocals over the rhythm of the tom-toms as Lukas Foss worked out a chord progression on the celeste (!), Shepp soon had the Motherfuckers and then the whole hall clapping along.
Freeze frame and fade—to the Yom Kippur War of ’73, the Arab oil embargo, another decade, another world.
Well. We are all poets, really; otherwise we couldn’t understand one another at all, much less enjoy poetry. But if we are all poets really, I’d really rather read or listen to some of us more than to some others of us. While our government was doing its thing in southeast Asia and we teachers and students were doing ours on campus, one poet-friend of mine was doing something different, which I wrote about in 1972 for Norman Cousins’s short-lived World magazine.
In the Odyssey, speaking of the ten-year Greek expedition against Troy by which almost nobody on either side gained more than he lost, and most lost everything, Homer casually remarks that wars are fought so that poets will have something to sing about. The remark is ironic: Homer isn’t saying that his or anyone’s poetry justifies the Trojan War, any more than the flood of antiwar verse turned out by our poets in the past ten years justifies our government’s war against the Vietnamese. It’s just a poet’s way of saying that all the official justifications are likely to be delusions or lies; that there’s no real justification at all for destroying those people and their country, for example, and in the process leading moderate Americans to emotional treason: the positive hope that the Pentagon and the White House will lose their wretched war.
When poets address an abomination almost too enormous to imagine, they’re likely to focus not on the spectacular features of it, but on some relative detail, to bring the larger horror home. So W. S. Merwin, in a poem written a dozen years ago about the threat of thermonuclear war, doesn’t speak of the incineration of millions of people, great libraries and museums of art, cities drenched in history and beauty. He talks instead of innocent things atomized quite by the way: migrating birds, delicate deer, wildflowers. In that same spirit, a major effort is being made by a friend of mine, himself a poet, to save one small and delicate thing from the general destruction of Vietnamese civilization.