by John Barth
† And in fact was, in The Iowa Review, before the Grove Press version appeared.
‡ The U.S. Coast Guard is not, strictly speaking, a branch of the military, though its cutters are lightly armed.
§ Susan. Fenn.
The American New Novel
IN OCTOBER 1982, New York University and the French Embassy co-sponsored a celebration of the Nouveau roman and a reunion of several of the French New Novelists themselves, who dominated the French literary scene not so long ago and are still vigorously productive: Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Robert Pinget, and the younger writer Monique Wittig. As a diplomatic afterthought, the university invited a few U.S. novelists to discuss the influence of the Nouveau roman upon American fiction or, alternatively, the question whether there is an American literary phenomenon comparable to that French one: an American New Novel. The French writers—every one of whom I admire—politely attended the American discussion, which opened with statements and brief readings by Jonathan Baumbach, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, and myself.
I have come ail the way from Baltimore to New York to report to you that to the best of my understanding there is no such animal as the American New Novel: not in anything like the sense that we speak of the French Nouveau roman of the 19-late-50s and 60s.
Certainly among new American novels there is no sign of the American New Novel. I myself have published a new American novel in this calendar year, and as is my custom when that occurs, I keep a little list of who else has done likewise among those of my countrymen upon whom I maintain a watchful eye. That little list includes all three of my fellow panelists: Mr. Baumbach (My Father, More or Less), Mr. Coover (Spanking the Maid), and Mr. Hawkes (Virginie: Her Two Lives). It includes, in chronological order, Saul Bellow, Paul Theroux, John Cheever, Jerzy Kosinski, Thomas McGuane, Anne Tyler, John Gardner, Bernard Malamud, and Joyce Carol Oates, as well as story collections by I. B. Singer and Ann Beattie. This has been a bountiful American literary year, and there is still a big quarter of it to go: new novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo, Alice Walker, and a good many more. But I do not detect among these books, several of which are no doubt both good and important, anything resembling a noteworthy new general direction in the U.S. novel.
Nor do I when I think about what we U.S. novelists have been up to over the last dozen years or so. I suppose that the term Black Humorists described something reasonably real and reasonably significant back in the American 1950s. Such later labels as Fabulators and Metafictionists have a certain descriptive power, but what they describe strikes me as comparatively special and minor, rather than a general energizing spirit—though some individual works tagged with those labels are good works.
Then there is the adjective postmodern, the meaning of which I have done my best to help confuse. I continue to believe that that adjective describes a very approximately shared inclination among numerous writers and other artists in the second half of our Western twentieth century: an inclination to work out in their individual ways, as I have put it elsewhere, not the next best thing after modernism, but the best next thing after modernism. However, that inclination cuts across national lines; what’s more, smarter people than myself have let me know that what I mean by postmodern fiction isn’t what the term really means at all. So forget it.
What else is there? In a conversation recently with a newly notable younger U.S. realist/minimalist short-story writer, who happens also to be an ex-alcoholic, I spoke of another younger U.S. newly notable minimalist/realist short-story writer, whom I learned was also a former alcoholic; our conversation then turned to a third writer, a sometime student of mine, now also a younger ex-alcoholic minimalist et cetera. Since I had been seeing their names lumped together now and then in the Times book supplement, I was moved to coin the term Post-Alcoholic Blue-Collar Minimalist Hyperrealism to describe this potentially significant new literary phenomenon. I suppose Gore Vidal would be pleased; he has frequently sneered at what he calls the Alcoholic American Republic of Letters. But it is not my mission in life to please Gore Vidal. In any case, one of those three authors-on-the-wagon, or on the bandwagon, has unfortunately since relapsed, and anyhow they’re all mainly short-story writers, not novelists. (In fact—setting aside the alcohol, the “hyper,” and the hype—I believe the new flowering of the American realist short story, as represented by the likes of Frederick Barthelme, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Stephen Dixon, Barry Hannah, Mark Helprin [a hyperromantic, that one], Bobbie Ann Mason, and Mary Robison, to be the most noteworthy recent development in American fiction. But so rapidly does the literary weather change, I feel impelled to date this observation 3 P.M., October 2, 1982, and fix the latitude and longitude as well.)
My friends, what I believe is this: That when it comes to movements, coherent ideologies, and the issuing of articulate position papers, the French arrange these things better. That now and then an authentic phenomenon appears, even in non-Gallic literatures, interesting and homogenous enough to make a few nonridiculous generalizations about; and that the appearance of such phenomena makes life easier for teachers, art historians, and culture watchers—for anybody interested in understanding and registering what’s going on around us, since we can think and talk only with the aid of categories. But I take the tragic view of categories (that they are, though indispensable, more or less arbitrary); and I believe further that inhomogenous, nondescript ideological interregnums, such as novelistic North America may be enjoying presently, may also be fecund for the production of great individual works of art, which are at least as valuable as general aesthetic movements. Since the novel is, of all the genres of literature, perhaps the least categorizable, I believe that it is as likely to thrive in an incoherent period as in a coherent one.
Therefore I advise the culture not to worry if there is no American New Novel. The culture has more important things to worry about. More to the personal point, I believe that the odds against my writing an excellent new American novel myself, which I aspire to do, are not worsened in such an interregnum, if we are in fact in one. Those odds may even be improved.
And so I wish the old French New Novel good luck and good health, as I wish the newer Latino literary boom good luck and good health—with an admiration uncontaminated by envy.
Don’t Count on It
A NOTE ON THE NUMBER OF THE 1001 NIGHTS
THIS latest Friday-piece was written after my fiction currently in progress was firmly under way—a book called The Tidewater Tales: A Novel —and just before I decided to spend a year’s Fridays reviewing and assembling these pieces.
Scheherazade again, examined intimately indeed. It seems a fit note to end the book upon.
I delivered this as a lecture on a warm evening in June 1983 on an outdoor basketball court at the American School in Tangier, Morocco—the city which inspired Rimsky-Korsakov to write his Scheherazade Suite and Matisse to paint his odalisques—while over us hung the new crescent moon which signaled the end of the holy month of Ramadan. There was even a bright planet in the moon’s embrace: the very sign of Islam. At one point I was obliged to pause in my reading while from the lighted minarets of nearby mosques the muezzins cried the faithful to evening prayer. It was a moving and a cautionary moment: Here as elsewhere, I have checked my amateur scholarship with experts where I could, but I am no Arabist. On the other hand, my long infatuation with Scheherazade has little to do with the egregious Western “orientalism” deplored by Edward Said and other Arabists: It is simply one storyteller’s professional (in this instance, all but inexhaustible) interest in another. I may well, some future Friday at Langford Creek, come back to her yet again—but I don’t count on it.
After centuries, we still haven’t settled on an English name for the thing. Its Arabic title, Kitab Alf Laylah Wah Laylah, means literally The Thousand-Night-One-Night Book. Usually it’s Englished into The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, or just The Thousand and One Nights. About as often it’s called The Arabia
n Nights’ Entertainment; popularly it has always been The Arabian Nights.
What’s more, few of us have actually read it, in anything like its entirety, though the image of Scheherazade, spinning out tales for 1001 nights to amuse the king and save her life, is surely among the top ten or a dozen on anybody’s great-literary-image list. The Arabian Nights, among other reasons because it belongs to Islamic rather than to Western literature, is not to be found on American high school and college reading lists. Unless we have sought it out on our own, we are likely to know it if at all from a children’s version, radically expurgated as well as heroically abridged, and probably illustrated by N. C. Wyeth. Most moderately cultured Americans are more familiar with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade Suite and Marc Chagall’s illustrations than with the actual text that inspired them. All, however, have heard of Aladdin and of Ali Baba (both of whose stories, by the way, are rejected by Richard Burton as latecomers and excluded from his authoritative ten-volume 1885 version of the Nights); all remember that the nights numbered 1001; and nearly all remember that telling those stories over all those nights was a life-or-death matter for Scheherazade, though fewer recall just why.
Not much has been written in English about this wonderful book, either, and so I propose to review the framing-situation of the Nights in some detail and make a few general remarks upon the work as a whole before addressing the particular question why there are 1001 nights’ entertainment—rather than, say, 101, 999, or 2002—and speculating a bit upon Scheherazade’s narrative-sexual strategy as it is implied (but never made explicit) in the text.
According to Burton’s famous Terminal Essay (X:93), the frame-story of the Nights is “purely Persian, perfunctorily Arabised,” and in its present form dates from about the thirteenth century, though its archetypes are older (the tales themselves are from all over the oriental map and date from as early as the eighth century—the beast fables—to as late as the sixteenth—Ali Baba, Aladdin, & Co.). It is a much more elaborately developed frame-story than the frames of the Divine Comedy, the Decameron, or the Canterbury Tales. It is also, like many of the stories Scheherazade herself tells, at once funny and terrifying, fantastic and realistic, delicate and scabrous—Goethe, like the rest of us, was particularly taken by this mixture of qualities in the Nights, which he registers in a journal entry on the tale “How Abu Hasan Farted,” Night 410—and the mainspring of this frame-story is frankly sexual.
Once upon a time there were two kings, brothers, each of whom thought himself happily married. One day the younger brother, Shah Zaman of Samarkand, inadvertently discovers that his wife is having a vigorous affair with a filthy kitchen-slave. Shocked, the young king kills the lovers in flagrante delicto, deputizes his vizier to administer the kingdom, and takes psychological refuge in the court of his older brother, Shahryar, King of “the Islands of India and China.”
Shahryar recognizes that Shah Zaman is traumatized, but cannot induce him to say what his trouble is. Presently, by another accident, Shah Zaman discovers that Shahryar’s wife is cuckolding her husband even more massively and revoltingly than his own wife cuckolded him—with a gibbering, slavering, hideous giant of a blackamoor named Sa’ad al-din Saood, who swings down from the trees like an ape at her signal and humps her ferociously in the palace courtyard while all her maidservants and mamelukes go to it as well. This spectacle cheers the young king right up; he tells his own misfortune now to Shahryar—who swears ominously by Allah that if his wife ever did that to him, he’d kill a thousand women in revenge, despite the fact that “that way madness lies.” Shah Zaman obligingly arranges for Shahryar to witness what he himself has just witnessed (it happens every time the king leaves the palace), and Shahryar, interestingly, is too shocked at first to take any revenge at all. Like Shah Zaman, he turns the affairs of government over to his grand vizier, and the brothers withdraw together to wander the world in chaste and appalled incognito.
Thus might their story have ended, but for a grimly funny sexual adventure just a few days later in which they are the unwilling participants. In effect, a young woman rapes them both, under threat of death if they don’t service her, in order to revenge herself upon an evil Ifrit who keeps her under septuple lock and key—seven chests within chests, each padlocked—for his exclusive sexual pleasure. She adds the brothers’ seal-rings to those of 570 other men with whom she has cuckolded her terrible captor (the Ifrit, who stole her from her betrothed on her bridal eve, habitually falls asleep after unlocking the seven chests and raping his prisoner; though she dare not flee, she obliges any passing male to mount her, on pain of waking the demon up). The episode demonstrates to the brothers that their wives were no exceptions to the general rule: a rule which they interpret misogynistically, in the spirit of John Donne’s “Go and catch a falling star,”* but which may certainly be interpreted otherwise. Each resolves to go back to his kingdom, resume direction of the government, take a virgin to bed every night, and have her executed in the morning, before she can cuckold him.
Of Shah Zaman we hear no more until the end of the story, ten volumes later, by when, presumably—the text gives no numbers, but internal evidence permits certain estimates, as shall be seen—he will have deflowered and decapitated some 2002 Samarkandian virgins. As for Shahryar, he first executes his wife and her twenty wanton maidservants, half of whom were those male mamelukes in harem drag. It is not stated whether he gets the blackamoor Sa’ad al-Din Saood down out of the trees. He then commands his vizier to procure for his pleasure a fresh virgin every night and to decapitate her in the morning.
In this wise he continues, the text tells us, “for the space of three years,” thus more than making good, we may note in passing, his casual earlier oath. Here too the text gives no specific number, nor does it remind us explicitly of that vow to Allah; but it is tempting to round down the body count from approximately 1062—three Islamic yearsworth of victims—to the aforethreatened thousand. Whether or not “that way madness lies,” the result is political and social chaos in the Islands of India and China: The whole populace prays to Allah to destroy Shahryar and his regime; by the three years’ or thousand-plus nights’ end, so many parents have fled the country with their daughters that there remains in the city, we are specifically told, “not… one young person… fit for carnal copulation.”
Except, notably, the daughters of the vizier himself, and here the plot thickens. The younger daughter, Dunyazade (Burton spells her name Dunyázád: in Persian, “World-freer”), is safely not yet nubile, though she will be by the end of the story. The elder, however, Scheherazade (Burton: Shahrázád = “City-freer”), is nubile, beautiful, extraordinarily accomplished in all the polite and liberal arts and massively so in some (she has collected “a thousand books of histories,” we’re told, and she knows “the works of the poets… by heart”); she is also, as her name implies,† resolved to deliver the city from the slaughter of its women and the king from his own madness—Scheherazade uses that term herself. Shahryar, we learn, has deliberately spared this eminently eligible young woman out of respect for his chief counselor; on the other hand, that counselor must produce the virgin-du-soir on pain of his own life, and after three years he is out of virgins.
At this critical moment, Scheherazade volunteers herself. She has a stratagem, she says, which she won’t disclose to her father, to end the carnage. There is just a hint that if it fails she is prepared, in Burton’s footnoted phrase, “to ‘Judith’ the King.” (“These learned and clever young ladies,” Burton’s straightfaced note adds, “are very dangerous in the East.”) The vizier attempts to dissuade his daughter by telling her a story: the cautionary Tale of the Bull and the Ass, the only “second level” tale in the Nights besides the ones which Scheherazade will tell to the king. It is clear to us that the young woman comes by her particular stratagem honestly—she’s her father’s daughter—but here as elsewhere the nameless authors of the Nights leave the connection implicit, the foreshadowing unremarked.
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The vizier’s story doesn’t work (“I shall never desist, O my father, nor shall this tale change my purpose”): an ill omen in itself, one would think, but the fact goes unnoticed. And to her plea for self-sacrifice, Scheherazade now adds a canny threat: If her father says no, she’ll go straight to Shahryar and report that she wants to go to bed with him, but his vizier won’t allow it.
It is an offer that her father can’t refuse; nor can Shahryar, though he is astounded when his “most faithful of Counsellors” now tells him the whole story of Scheherazade’s mad resolve. Is the vizier aware of what must happen tomorrow morning? He is; can’t do a thing with the willful girl. One senses a moment of real male sympathy between the king and his prime minister (Scheherazade seems conveniently to have no mother to complicate the emotional situation). One may imagine also that the king is given pause: Here is a role for which none of Scheherazade’s one thousand predecessors can be supposed to have volunteered. Be that as may, when he has satisfied himself that both the young woman and her father understand the consequences of her proposal, Shahryar “rejoices greatly” and orders the show to go on.
Here is the place to notice, though Burton doesn’t notice it, that the thousand and one nights of Scheherazade’s upcoming liaison have been foreshadowed by the thousand-odd nights of Shahryar’s deadly policy, and those in turn by his earlier vow by Allah to take his revenge on “a thousand women” if his wife ever cuckolded him. They are even foreshadowed by Scheherazade’s “thousand books of histories.” Perhaps such symmetries go without noticing. But we notice also that the vizier’s daughter, unsurprisingly, has been fully aware of the plight of her country, of her sister virgins, and of her father; that she is insightful or sympathetic enough to diagnose the king’s misogyny as a madness that he must and can—perhaps that by now he even wishes?—to be freed from; that she is shrewd enough to exploit others’ vulnerabilities to her ends, as in her dealings with her father. She has had three years to formulate and prepare her strategy; she will surely have been aware, and may suppose the king aware, that a number of factors, none explicitly stated, make the moment propitious for action and reduce somewhat her nonetheless terrifying personal risk.