by John Barth
I like to think that that night was not Night 1001. I like to imagine that on that night, of whose fateful number Scheherazade will certainly have been aware and no doubt the king as well, she was not even momentarily blocked; that up her sleeve, or wherever, Scheherazade still had in reserve at least the seven volumes of Burton’s Supplemental Nights with which to follow the tale of Ma’aruf the Cobbler, if she wanted to. But that first repeated message of her blood, like a word to the wise, told her it was time for a change in the circumstances of her production.
“In the morning, study,” Goethe advises; “in the afternoon, work.” In the morning of Scheherazade’s apprenticeship, we’re explicitly told, this model storyteller did indeed study, taking unto herself massively the corpus of her literary predecessors: those “thousand books of histories”; all those poets committed to heart. In the afternoon—the 1001 “afternoons” of a night-shift worker—she has massively worked, in that terrifying but inspiring relation that all artists work in, with an audience whom at any time they may fatally cease to entertain; for whom it is never enough to have told one good story, or a hundred and one good stories. (The audience I refer to is of course Scheherazade’s deflorator, impregnator, and absolute critic, the king. The role of Dunyazade—always applauding, praising, and begging for more from the foot of that bed—is another story.)
But there comes a time when this state of affairs mustn’t be the case forever; when the threat of perishing if one does not publish, and publish pleasingly, no longer inspires and fertilizes but positively contraceives, detumesces, anaphrodizes. “In the evening, enjoy,” Goethe’s obiter dictum concludes. Enjoyment, for a woman like Scheherazade, is not likely to mean idly resting on the laurels of her past production: those three young sons and the deluxe uniform hardcover edition of her works which the king orders after the double-marriage ceremony. (Indeed, there’s a wry implication here that her next massive narrative labor will have to be telling all those stories over again, to the scribes, plus the one about herself and Shahryar, unless she or Dunyazade has been writing them all down between nights. It is a bit like your interviewer’s discovery—at the end of a long, difficult, but successful interview, in which you have managed to articulate your entire Weltanschauung—that his tape machine wasn’t working. Would you mind awfully running through that again?) But enjoyment ought to mean the right to rest there if she wants to, bearing no more children, telling no more stories ever. After a certain amount and level of accomplishment—an impressive amount and level; nay, an awe-inspiring amount and level—removing the ax from over the narrative neck is not only a fit reward but probably the best guarantee of further good production. Not endless, mind, but further, at the producer’s rate and discretion.
For a natural like Scheherazade, that is almost certainly what “enjoying the evening” will include, if not consist of: going on with the story. We are permitted to hope that it will. But after that first second menstruation, we may not—and Scheherazade herself must absolutely need not—count on it.
Enjoy your evening.
* “And swear / No where / Lives a woman true and fair,” etc.
† In Burton’s Persian, at least. Another expert tells me that the names translate into “World-born” and “City-born.”
‡ The Arabic word means “forbidden” and refers simply to the women’s quarters, off-limits to outsiders, not necessarily to a collection of wives and concubines.
§ Nursing may delay this resumption. But those nurses summoned by the king’s favorite on Night 1001 may be presumed to have been wet nurses.
|| I have checked all three of these schedules against the content of Scheherazade’s stories on the nights involved, in search of conspicuous correspondences, discrepancies, and irrelevancies. There are all three: A little jiggling here and there with Schedule Three, in particular, can produce some remarkable happy echoes—but not remarkably more than the others, jiggled, can be made to produce. And the whole arrangement of the tales and division of the nights is too inconsistent among manuscripts to permit us to adduce as evidence anything between Night 2 and Night 1001.
¶ According to the 1981 Guinness Book of World Records, the most fecund woman in the world was the first Mrs. Feodor Vassilyev of Shuya, near Moscow. In 27 confinements, between c.1725 and 1765, Mrs. Vassilyev bore 69 children, at least 67 of whom survived infancy: sixteen sets of twins, seven sets of triplets, and four sets of quadruplets.
Afterword: Friday, 1997
“Yes. Well,” I see that I’ve said here and there in the headnotes to this maiden collection of my nonfiction. Some 700 Fridays after its first publication, the author is currently
—older by five further books, including this volume’s sort-of-sequel (Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction, 1984-1994);
—recently retired from professoring in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars—than which I can imagine no more agreeable venue for a writer who also enjoys swapping ideas about the craft and medium with gifted apprentices and first-rate colleagues—and still feeling acutely both the absence of the presence and the presence of the absence of that excellent university from my working life (But really, now: Can writing be taught? And if so, ought it to be, in the university? See “Can It Be Taught?” in Further Fridays and, in the present volume, the Friday-pieces “Praying for Everybody” and “Doing the Numbers”);
—pleased as punch—since that working life has undoubtedly reached its Thursday late-afternoon if not quite yet its Friday (with hopes of an agreeable weekend therebeyond)—to see The Friday Book back in print, under the distinguished aegis of The Johns Hopkins University Press.
My agreement themwith was to supply for this new edition a foreword of “about 500 words”: a dollop of new wine in the old bottle, proverbial advice to the contrary notwithstanding. Something of that sort is par for the course with reissues, if the author is still breathing air and penning sentences, and I had no objection: “I learn by going where I have to go,” sings Theodore Roethke, and one often learns where one has to go by dead-reckoning where one is by reviewing where one has been, musewise and otherwise. The programmatically self-conscious gimmick of this book in its first edition, however, was to front-load it with semi-satirical “front matter”—subtitles, sub-subtitles, commentaries on titling and subtitling, author’s introduction and table of contents and epigraphs, all replete with footnotes—in order to make and demonstrate some critical points about such festoonery. At the time (1984), it seemed a good idea; but to add now yet another foreword to these several mock-prefaces would surely be de-tropping the already deliberately de trop. Thus this afterword, or “postface,” as heavy-humored Postmodernist literary theorizers sometimes say.
I should talk.
And I shall, for another paragraph, to give good measure on that contractual half-thousand words. Among my Friday opinions is that for all its loose use, the adjective “Postmodernist” really does name, approximately, a category of aesthetic sensibility as distinct to the second half of the twentieth century as was Modernism to its first. My basic position-papers on the subject are “The Literature of Exhaustion” and “The Literature of Replenishment,” herein; for chapter and verse on such mattersome hairsplits as “Postmodern” versus “Postmodernist,” uppercase versus lowercase postmodernity, and the readerly reactions “So what?” versus “Ah, so!,” see “4½ Lectures: The Stuttgart Seminars on Postmodernism, Chaos Theory, and the Romantic Arabesque,” in Further Fridays. Enough here to note, vis-à-vis those elaborate mock-prefaces, that among the field-identification marks of PMhood is a sportive but impassioned self-consciousness and medium-consciousness (by which I do not mean half-consciousness) that enables one successfully to tie one’s necktie, say, in a perfect full-Windsor in the presence of one’s beloved while nattering knowledgeably about both the technique of necktie-tying and the history of male neckwear, and in so doing to make sleighthandedly, as it were between the lines, a declaration of love more serious, graceful, and
responsible to the already-said than any mere hackneyed blurt “I love you.”
Yes?
Well.
J. B.
Back Cover
“[The] pieces that make up The Friday Book… have a consistent tone of warm personal enthusiasm that is often beguiling.”—Walter Kendrick
“Whether discussing modernism, postmodernism, semiotics, Homer, Cervantes, Borges, blue crabs or osprey nests, Barth demonstrates an enthusiasm for the life of the mind, a joy in thinking (and in expressing those thoughts) that becomes contagious… A reader leaves The Friday Book feeling intellectually fuller, verbally more adept, mentally stimulated, with algebra and fire of his own.”—Washington Post
Barth’s first work of nonfiction is what he calls “an arrangement of essays and occasional lectures, some previously published, most not, most on matters literary, some not, accumulated over thirty years or so of writing, teaching, and teaching writing.” With the full measure of playfulness and erudition that he brings to his novels, Barth glances into his crystal ball to speculate on the future of literature and the literature of the future. He also looks back upon historical fiction and fictitious history and discusses prose, poetry, and all manner of letters: “Real letters, forged letters, doctored letters… and of course alphabetical letters, the atoms of which the universe of print is made.”
“The pieces brought together in The Friday Book reflect Mr. Barth’s witty, playful, and engaging personality… They are lively, sometimes casual, and often whimsical—a delight to the reader, to whom Mr. Barth seems to be writing or speaking as a learned friend.”—Kansas City Star
“No less than Barth’s fiction these pieces are performances, agile, dexterous, robust, offering the cerebral delights of playful lucidity.”—Richmond News Leader
JOHN BARTH, Professor Emeritus in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, is the author of twelve works of fiction—The Floating Opera, The End of the Road, The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy, Lost in the Funhouse, Chimera (winner of the 1973 National Book Award), LETTERS, Sabbatical, The Tidewater Tales (also available in paperback from Johns Hopkins), The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, Once upon a Time: A Floating Opera, and On with the Story —as well as another collection of essays, Further Fridays. He lives on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Scan Notes, v3.0: Proofed carefully, italics and special characters intact. Regular text is Times New Roman 12pt, footnotes appear under the paragraph that references them in Times New Roman 10pt, Barth’s introductions to the pieces appear in Arial 12pt, and quoted passages within the text appear in Arial 10pt.
converted to .ePUB by antimist on 20/11/2016