by John Barth
As to literature’s linearity —the literal lines of print on the page and the normal one-word-at-a-timeness of language—some of us believe, Dr. McLuhan to the contrary notwithstanding, that to be linear, even continuous, is not necessarily to be wicked. While many important aspects of experience are no doubt “gestaltic,” discontinuous, or otherwise nonlinear, many other aspects are in fact linear and more or less continuous. Other media may deal more effectively than writing with the nonlinear and the discontinuous, but it may be that writing is uniquely suited to deal with the linear and the continuous aspects of human experience. To be less than absolute is not to be obsolete; to be unable to do everything is not to be unable to do anything. And in fact we writers can even suggest, in our linear and continuous way, the experience of nonlinearity and discontinuity. Such suggestion was part of the program of literary modernism. But it is only a suggestion, just as a statement about the sea, or a metaphor for the sea, or for that matter the mere word sea, is a different thing from the sea itself.
Solitary, linear, anesthetic. When I say that literature is anesthetic, I don’t mean that it numbs sensation or puts us to sleep, though either of the two novels I mentioned a while back might have that effect upon readers who enjoyed the other. What I mean is that written literature, remarkably, is the only one of the arts that appeals directly to none of the physical senses, though it may appeal indirectly to all of them. One needs the faculty of sight to read the print, or the faculty of touch if you’re reading in Braille, and there is a very real but incidental pleasure (ever rarer) in reading well designed and well manufactured books. But except for the few poets and fewer fiction-writers who deploy typography, layout, and other graphic effects as an essential part of their sense, the visual and tactile aspects of reading aren’t central to the experience of the literary text. Obviously that’s not the case with oral literature: One would have enjoyed hearing Dylan Thomas read the alphabet (some good declaimers have done it, as a stunt); the man in charge of the Library of Congress program of recordings for the blind tells me that his clients don’t ask “What else do you have written by James Joyce?” but “What else do you have narrated by Alexander Scourby?” Nobody ever asked a bookseller what else he had by Alfred A. Knopf in Janson or Caslon typefaces.
Written literature, most especially prose fiction, is ineluctably anesthetic because it is essentially semiotic. It transpires in the mind. It can’t deal directly with qualities, sensations, emotions, actions, things; it can’t even deal directly, as theater can, with imitations of actions and emotions. It can deal only with their signs, their names: pain, blue, courage, Venezuela, walking around, once upon a time. Writers who are also philosophers, like William H. Gass, have explored the metaphysical implications of this state of affairs. As a professional writer who is only an interested amateur of metaphysics, indeed of reality, I find the chief implication to be that written literature can deal most appropriately—at least more effectively than any other art—with just those aspects of our experience that are at some remove from direct sensation: not only the whole silent life of the mind—cognition, reflection, speculation, recollection, calculation, and the rest—but even the registration of sensation, so to speak: what perception is like.
That’s the famous fact about metaphor, of course, a main property of language and mainly a property of literature (nonverbal metaphors, like the ones film makers sometimes attempt, seem to me to be metaphors for metaphors): to call the sea “wine-dark” and the dawn “rosy-fingered” is to say something about the sea and the dawn (and about wine, roses, and fingers) that can’t really be photographed, just as photographs and paintings show us things that can’t finally be said. As long as the private, verbal registration of experience has a future—and, just as important, the registration of verbal experience, the experience of language, which can take us beyond the possibilities of reality—literature has a future.
“Sun so hot I froze to death; Susanna don’t you cry.” “ ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble on the wabe. / All mimsy were the borogoves, / And the mome raths outgrabe.” Try making a movie out of those.
I have now said more than I had thought I had to say, in the general way, about the future of literature. I have a few other opinions about the short-range future of my particular branch of literature—long and short prose fictions—but they’ll keep till some future conversation.
Algebra and Fire
A CHAT WITH THE DOCTORS
HISTORICALLY, the Johns Hopkins University has been the distinguished tail upon a very large dog: the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, across town. In 1972, Stephen Muller became the first president of the JHU in nearly 100 years also to preside over the JHMI; he initiated a program of rapprochements between the two, which came eventually to include a series of talks at the medical institutions by professors at the university’s Homewood Campus and its Peabody Conservatory of Music. The series, which still continues, was popular from the start, not least because it affords a wine-and-cheese break at afternoon’s end for hosts of weary medical students and staff on duty in the enormous, rambling East Baltimore medical complex.
I did my bit in November 1977.
I have been assured that the speakers in this series need not address themselves to matters medical, and I’ve decided to half-believe that assurance. Only half, because among our premedical undergraduates over at the university, the distinction between the artistic interest of a literary text and its symptomological interest is by no means always clear.
So I learned when I joined the Hopkins faculty in 1973 and gave an undergraduate lecture course in modernist and postmodernist short fiction. Our analysis of Franz Kafka’s beautiful story “A Hunger Artist,” for example, turned into a knowledgeable discussion—knowledgeable on the students’ part—of anorexia nervosa, which clearly appealed to the science majors as much as did the theme of the problematical position of saints and artists in a post-traditional culture: what I take to have been the author’s principal concern. And among their liveliest interests in Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice was the question whether, given the incubation period of the cholera virus, Mann’s hero could really have contracted the disease from eating those overripe strawberries in the piazza, as Visconti’s film version of the story seems to imply.
I confess that both as a teacher and as a writer of fiction I was as interested in these clinical footnotes to literature as the premedical people were. More than once—in fact, twice—I have called upon friends and relatives at the Hopkins Medical Institutions to help me find metaphorically appropriate diseases to inflict upon my characters. Todd Andrews, for example, the hero of my first published novel, The Floating Opera, suffers from subacute bacterial endocarditis with incipient myocardial infarction, along with a low-grade prostatic infection. Get it? And a fellow in my novel in progress is terminally afflicted with osteosarcoma as a complication of Paget’s Disease. If those are the wrong pathologies for what I intend them to represent in the novels, the fault may be that my informants over here were reading fiction or attending cultural lectures when they ought to have been studying medicine.
Well. As I am not obliged to draw connections between the arts of healing and of storytelling, I mean to talk briefly about two other subjects and then illustrate them even more briefly with a passage from my fiction. The first subject will be the multifariousness of literary texts: the way they frequently spring from a multiplicity of motives and constraints on their author’s part, not all of them of a “literary” or “serious” or even a conscious sort. The second subject is the way a literary text meant to be seriously comic or impassioned or at least emotionally energetic may derive a fair part of its energy from strictly formal or technical considerations. And my illustration will be the opening pages of a comic novella from the book Chimera: a novella about the later adventures of the mythical Greek hero Perseus—Perseus the Golden Destroyer—and his girlfriend Medusa, whom he had earlier mistaken to be his
adversary.
I should explain that the title of this talk—“Algebra and Fire”—is borrowed from the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, one of whose stories is about the encyclopedia of an imaginary world, exhaustively described in twenty meticulous volumes. Everything about this nonexistent world is set forth there, Borges imagines, in perfectly cogent terms: everything from its medicine to its mythology, from its algebra to its fire. Let Algebra stand for technique, or the technical and formal aspects of a work of literature; let Fire stand for the writer’s passions, the things he or she is trying to get eloquently said. The simple burden of my sermon is that good literature, for example, involves and requires both the algebra and the fire; in short, passionate virtuosity. If we talk mainly about the algebra, that is because algebra lends itself to discussion. The fire has to speak for itself.
Multifariousness. It is generally agreed that there is some analogy, maybe even some connection, between what we all do when we dream and what poets and fiction-writers do when they’re awake. Freud’s famous description of the Dreamwork, for example, in The Interpretation of Dreams, could apply very well to a television-serial scriptwriter taking orders from his producer: Throw together something old (i.e., memories of early childhood), something new (events of the past twenty-four hours), something borrowed (the disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish), and something blue (the repressed wish is typically of an erotic character); work into the plot that traffic noise from outside your bedroom and the fact that you need to urinate but don’t want to wake up; don’t forget a walk-on part for the sponsor’s mistress; make the whole thing reasonably plausible to a semicomatose viewer—and have it ready for the cameras in two hours, before the alarm goes off.
The fact is that capital-L Literature, no less than dreams and hackwork, comes out of a multiplicity of motives and constraints—with the differences that most of them are self-imposed, many are relatively conscious, and at least a few may have to do with the author’s medium and his sense of himself as a practitioner of it, instead of with things like gratifying ambition, earning more money, meeting deadlines, shooting down the competition, or getting past the censors—all which motives may also play their part. Donald Barthelme winds up one of his stories (“Rebecca”) with the remark: “It was written for several reasons. Nine of them are secrets.” What I propose to do now is catalogue for you at least seven things that I was trying to do all at the same time in that novella about Perseus and Medusa and then read its opening pages so that you can hear them through my eyes, so to speak.
First: For a number of years I’ve been at work upon a fat novel called LETTERS, the title of which has three senses: literature itself (as in belles lettres), post-office-type letters (it is an epistolary novel), and the alphabetical letters of which both epistles and novels are constituted, as combinations of atoms constitute the physical universe. At a point six-sevenths of the way through LETTERS —that is to say, in the neighborhood of section R —my early plans called for two substantial stories-within-the-main-story: one about Perseus, another about his misfortunate cousin Bellerophon. In fact, I wrote those “inside” stories first, and they grew into the book Chimera, which is therefore infected with some of the preoccupations of the LETTERS novel—notably with the three senses of its title, as you will presently observe. At my writing-desk up on North Charles Street I am just now approaching the consequent great pothole in section R of LETTERS, which I must find some way to patch. Do not envy me that labor.
Second, I had never before written a novella —a literary genre that I define as too long to sell as a short story and too short to sell as a book—and I wanted to attempt that interesting space, just for the hell of it. The novella was a popular form once upon a time; but having perpetrated a novella in contemporary America, about the only thing you can do with it is perpetrate a couple more and sell the package to your publisher as a book. This I did.
But (the third item in this catalogue of motives and constraints) volumes of novellas are even more anathematical in the literary marketplace than volumes of short stories. Hence, in part, my decision to compose not merely three novellas, but a series of three novellas: three novellas related both formally and thematically to make what I believe is called a non-summative system and what my editor believed could be called a novel and marketed as one. I sympathized: To sell a novel must unquestionably be easier than to sell a nonsummative system.
Points Four, Five, Six, and Seven comprise these formal and thematic relations among the three novellas.
One of them is phi, the classical “Golden Ratio” expressed in the number-series called Fibonacci Numbers and ubiquitous throughout nature and culture. The façade of the Parthenon, the relation of the three to the five in a three-by-five card, the average height of the navel from the floor in perpendicular Caucasian women as a proportion of their total height, the disposition of seeds around a pine cone and of chambers in a chambered nautilus—all these are manifestations of the Golden Ratio, as is the ratio of increasing length among the Chimera novellas. The third of them (“Bellerophoniad,” a story about Bellerophon and Pegasus) is as proportionately larger than the second (“Perseid”) as the second is larger than the first (“Dunyazadiad,” a story about Scheherazade’s kid sister)—that proportion being such that “Dunyazadiad” and “Perseid,” combined, equal “Bellerophoniad,” pagewise. Expressed formulaically, A:B::B:C such that A+B=C.
Of such is the kingdom of letters now and then made.
Next, the specific Fibonaccian instance of the logarithmic spiral—as embodied in the chambered nautilus, for example, and as contrasted with a closed circle—appealed to me and Perseus metaphorically, because (we’re up to Point Six now) a ground-theme of both Chimera and the LETTERS novel is reenactment versus mere repetition. The spiral reenacts the circle, but opens out—if you’re going in the right direction. The nautilus’s latest chamber echoes its predecessors, but does not merely repeat them, and it is where the animal lives; he carries his history on his back, but as a matter of natural-historical fact, that history is his Personal Flotation Device, not a dead weight carrying him under. Middle-aged Perseus in my novella sets out to revisit the scenes of his earlier mythical adventures, but ends up reenacting and finally transcending them. Some novelists have similar ambitions.
Finally, this transcension-by-reenactment may in human instances correspond to the second half or second cycle of one’s life, after Carl Jung’s and Erik Erikson’s celebrated crisis of individuation (it happens at ages 35, 34, or 33 1/3, depending upon which Jungian you subscribe to). Such is Perseus’s case. I myself was on the cusp of 40 when I wrote the “Perseid” story, and so safely past that particular pothole in the North Charles Street of life.
To this soup of preoccupations (and stew of metaphors) must be added my long-standing one with the ritual pattern of mythic wandering-heroism, itself a closed cycle, and my newer curiosity about non-literary phenomena which have a sort of narrative or quasi-dramaturgical aspect: human coitus, for example, when all goes well, or a wave breaking upon a beach, or my electric coffee-percolator (which builds up through chuckling foreplay to a virtual orgasm of percolation and then settles down to its afterglow), or the nightly passage of constellations in the sky, including those we call Perseus, Andromeda (with her spiral galaxy M33), and—in Perseus’s left hand—the eclipsing binary star Algol, which is Medusa’s winking eye.
The myth of Perseus being classical, I borrowed from classical literature one further formal constraint: beginning Perseus’s story in medias res —in the middle of things, rather than at Square One. In fact, the ancients usually began nearer the end—the ninth year of the Trojan War or of Odysseus’s homeward voyage—and then fed in their exposition of the story thus far, and then proceeded to climax and denouement. In keeping with my own number system, I decided to start Perseus’s story six-sevenths of the way through its plot, and by this decision I set myself a pretty task of what might be called double exposition: My hero is six-s
evenths of the way, not through his original adventures, but through his reenactment of them, and the reader has therefore to be briefed not only upon what has happened this time around, but upon the episodes of the original myth, which no contemporary reader can be presumed to remember from his/her schooldays.
This classical constraint, modernistically compounded, I addressed with a classical device, borrowed in the classical manner from Virgil’s borrowings from Homer. Some of you will remember the set-piece, early in Virgil’s Aeneid, of the Carthaginian frescoes, whose panels depict the Trojan War and in which, reviewing them in Dido’s Carthage, Aeneas is moved to find not only his story thus far but even himself, who has yet to complete that story. It is a neat device for retrospective exposition; Virgil took it from Homer’s description of the low-relief scenes on Achilles’s shield, which serve a similar purpose in the Iliad. To accomplish my duple exposition in “Perseid,” I borrowed Virgil’s Carthaginian frescoes and applied them to the walls of an out-spiraling temple whose first revolution comprises seven panels (each Fibonaccily longer than its predecessor) depicting my hero’s first cycle of adventures, and whose second revolution—not yet completed—depicts his ongoing reenactment of them. Applying the formula rigorously (and it’s no fun if you don’t) gives us a temple in which, if Perseus had Superman’s X-ray vision, he could see behind any given episode of his original adventures the panel depicting its reorchestration in his current story—up to the point where he must leave that temple of hero-worship, address his future, and bring his story to its climax and its close.