by John Barth
But I also remember a little book from that period by Ron Sukenick, founding editor of the American Book Review, teasingly titled The Death of the Novel and Other Stories; and I myself used to like to say that inasmuch as I hadn’t been born in time to write the first novel, maybe it would be fun to write the last one. In short, one didn’t have to be a weatherman back then to see which way the wind was blowing.
The point I want to make is that a number of the talented graduate-student apprentice writers in my workshop back in those years seriously wondered whether to abandon the sinking ship of print while they could and get themselves a movie camera instead. It seemed to them quixotic, at best, to be apprentices in a very possibly moribund medium, and although I reminded them that Quixote is just about where we came in, that 1968 workshop turned itself into a seminar on Alternatives to the Line and the Page. The room was alive with pop-up fictions, three-dimensional fictions done on Buckminster Fuller polyhedrons, serial fictions on scraps of paper like fortune-cookie fortunes, shaken up in a cereal box (appropriately), poured out into a cereal bowl, and read serially as the members of the group passed the bowl.6 At one defining moment that year, we received a solicitation from a professional avant-garde anthologist (Richard Kostelanetz) who was assembling a collection to be called Untried Forms in Fiction, and who was offering to pay his contributors by the page. My young pioneers were appalled: “By the page? Where has this guy been?”
BUT—AND HERE IS the moral of this tale—a number of us, myself included, learned from all this experimentation two lessons that I regard as equally important. The first was that the medium of print is, indeed, almost inescapably linear—this word and then this and then this; this line after that, this page after the one before it (what Sven Birkerts has called “the missionary position of reading”)—whereas a very great deal of our experience of life is decidedly not linear: We think and perceive and intuit in buzzes and flashes and gestalts; we act in a context of vertiginous simultaneity; we see and hear and smell and touch and taste often in combination, whereas print, as I’ve mentioned, is a peculiarly anesthetic medium of art, the only one I know of that (except for such aforementioned incidental pleasures as handsome typefaces and bindings) appeals directly to none of the physical senses. Linearity and anestheticity: two tremendous limitations indeed of the medium of print.
However—Lesson Two—what a few of us, at least, came to appreciate is that to be linear is not necessarily to be obsolete, much less wicked. We live and think and perceive and act in time, and time implies sequence, and sequence is what gives rise to narrative. This happened and then that and then that, and if we want to recount what happened, to share it with others and even with ourselves, we have to proceed in narrative sequence: the story of our day, the stories of our lives. Those stories are linear, even when their subject is often not; they remain linear even when the order of narration is dischro-nological. And for those aspects of our experience of life that happen to be of a linear character, the medium of print may be a uniquely appropriate vehicle of rendition.
IN SHORT, THERE are lots of things you can do with a camera that you can’t do on the printed page, but there are also important things that you can do on the printed page that can’t be done with a camera. Most important among these, obviously, is the rendering of sensibility , as apart from sensation itself. Fiction can’t give us the sights, sounds, feels, and smells themselves—language itself cannot, except for occasional onomatopoeic suggestion—but fiction is uniquely privileged to tell us what things look/taste/sound/feel/smell like, to particular human sensibilities in particular situations. Aristotle declares that the subject of literature is “the human experience of life, its happiness and its misery.” I would add that the true subject of printed lit is the human experiencing of that experience: not sensation, but the registering of sensation in language; the typically interior, unphotographable universe of perceiving, feeling, and reflecting, as well as the visible manifestations of those feelings and perceptions. (Compare the sensuousness of Diane Ackerman’s Natural History of the Senses [the book] with the surprising aridity of its PBS-TV version.)
Forget for a moment television, movies, stage plays, and virtual-reality devices. Why can hypertext narrative, for example, not do all that I’ve just been praising print for doing, since its medium remains (mainly) “written” words? Well, it can, to some extent, and the proponents of electronic fiction incline to declare further that their medium “sets us free from the domination of reader by writer, from the traditional concepts of beginning and middle and end, and of fixed, permanent texts”—from, in Coover’s own words, “the tyranny of the line,” not to mention the traditional concepts of copyright versus public domain. But what’s typically missing from e-fiction, precisely, are good old linearity and those traditional job-descriptions of Author and Reader, which at least some of us find to be not oppressive or tyrannical at all. On the contrary.7
It is in this connection that the aforementioned critic Sven Birkerts (in The Gutenberg Elegies, his lament for the passing of the Age of Print) speaks of “meditative space.” Interactivity can be fun; improvisation and collaboration can be fun; freedom is jolly. But there are dominations that one may freely enjoy without being at all masochistic, and among those, for many of us, is the willing, provisional, and temporary surrender of our noisy little egos to great artistry: a surrender which, so far from diminishing, quite enlarges us. As my Hopkins coachees pointed out, reading a splendid writer, or even just a very entertaining writer, is not a particularly passive business. An accomplished artist is giving us his or her best shots, in what she or he regards as their most effective sequence—of words, of actions, of foreshadowings and plot-twists and insights and carefully prepared dramatic moments. It’s up to us to respond to those best shots with our minds and hearts and spirits and our accumulated experience of life and of art—and that’s interaction aplenty, for some of us, without our presuming to grab the steering wheel and diddle the driver’s itinerary. The kind of reading I’ve just described requires not only meditative space but, as Birkerts observes, a sense that the text before us is not a provisional version, up for grabs, the way texts in the cyberspace of a computer memory always are, but rather the author’s very best: what he or she is ready to be judged by for keeps.
THE UBIQUITOUS APOCALYPTICISM of the High Sixties turns out to have marked, in the aesthetic sphere, the wind-up not of printed literature or even of the novel, quite, but of High Modernism, for better or worse, as a “cultural dominant.” Here in America, the writers who perhaps commanded the most critical respect back then were the likes of Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, William Styron, and young John Updike; to some of us literary deckhands, however, those indisputably talented writers seemed of less impressive stature than the preceding generation of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein—not to mention Joyce, Kafka, Mann, and Proust. My own living navigation stars and ship’s officers in those days were Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, and Vladimir Nabokov, joined presently by Italo Calvino and Gabriel García Márquez. Although the vessel didn’t have a name yet—Ihab Hassan’s Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Aesthetic wasn’t published until the early 1970s—a number of us felt that we were working something out that would honor the high artistic standards and radical innovations of our great Modernist predecessors while maintaining a degree of skepticism and modest irony with respect to their heroic ambition. (What self-respecting Postmodernist would presume, like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, to “forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race”?). If they were the century’s Homers and Virgils, we would endeavor to be its Catulluses and Ovids and Petroniuses—an honorable aspiration.
All of that was, by now, a generation ago. Given that the iconoclastic, filiocratic spirit of 19th-century Romanticism has persisted right through our own time, it was to be expected that the second generation of (lower-case) postmodern culture would look to distance itself from its im
mediate forebears; that impulse is as American as . . . Immanuel Kant and Friedrich von Schlegel? I don’t know how much and how consciously it has impelled younger writers in the ever-more-beleaguered medium of American trade p-fiction; I do suspect it to be among the impulses behind the phenomenon of e-fiction.
And that is quite all right: “Let a thousand flowers blossom,” et cetera. If the edifice of printed lit is tottering, long may it totter, like the Pisan campanile, and become all the more appealing in its totterment. If we are in the late-Cretaceous era of print, and if e-fiction turns out to be the asteroid whose impact spells our doom “in lightforms” (which I doubt), let us take comfort in the reflection that the great dinosaurs not only hung in there for another million years or two before realizing that their time was up, but in a few instances attained their most ultrasaurian proportions even as those newly evolving mammalian critters scampered between their tremendous feet—and occasionally got squashed flat. It was the same with cathedrals and square-riggers and zeppelins and ocean liners. Que será será, but not always in a hurry.
Someone might assert that the sentiments I’ve expressed here are an example of what the aforementioned e-fictionist Michael Joyce has wittily called “modality envy.” So be it, if so it be, although I believe “modality curiosity” to be a more accurate characterization: Mine is the ongoing curiosity of a Postmodern Romantic Formalist about the state of the art, as well as about the state of such new and, after all, essentially different arts as I believe e-fiction to be—in case there’s something there that a writer like myself might make use of in my venerable medium.
THIS JUST IN from Scientific American, one of those “wigged-out zines” to which I subscribe: It appears that we late-Cretaceous p-fictionists may have an unappreciated edge in the evolutionary competition down the road. Give us acid-free paper, a source of light, and familiarity with our language, and we are in business for the long haul. Digitalized information, on the other hand (including e-fiction), turns out to be only theoretically invulnerable to the ravages of time; the alarming fact is that the physical media on which it is stored, not to mention the software and hardware required to get at it, are far from eternal, either as items in themselves or as modes of access. Jeff Rothenberg, a senior computer scientist at the RAND Corporation, declares (in print) that “the contents of most digital media evaporate long before words written on high-quality paper. They often become unusably obsolete even sooner, as media are superseded by new, incompatible formats (how many readers remember eight-inch floppy disks?). It is only slightly facetious to say that digital information lasts forever—or five years, whichever comes first.”
Good luck, electronic fictioneers: Golf courses and ski slopes last longer than that; may the products of your lively medium fare as well.
Two More Forewords
“Two more” in two senses: 1) This essay-collection has been foreworded already; and 2) its forerunner, Further Fridays, included a section called “Four Forewords”—to my first five published novels, on the occasion of their later reissue as trade paperbacks by Doubleday’s Anchor Press.1
TIME WAS WHEN the publishers of good-quality books with less than best-seller appeal could hope at least to break even by keeping such works in print and selling a modest number of copies per year over an extended period, meanwhile deducting for tax purposes the cost of warehousing the unsold copies. The U.S. Supreme Court’s unfortunate “Thor Tool Company” ruling in 19792 declared that practice illegal, with the unhappy result that in America nowadays, a book either makes its publisher a profit in a hurry or is fed to the shredder—just as, in commercial television, a high-quality drama series may be canned because its audience, while sizeable, is less so than that of some competing network’s offering: bad news for the culture in both cases. Periodic attempts by such organizations as the Authors Guild and PEN (Poets, Essayists, and Novelists) to overturn that infelicitous court ruling have thus far been unsuccessful; until they succeed, if ever, the slack has been taken up somewhat by university presses and others outside the “trade,” where volumes of poetry, essays, and good-but-non-“commercial” fiction may find sanctuary, and by the larger houses’ “trade paperback” lines: Doubleday’s Anchor Press, Random House’s Vintage Books, Houghton Mifflin’s Mariner Books, et cetera.
A number of my own past productions have had the good fortune to lead second lives in such editions, for which their new publisher often requests a foreword. Hence the “Four Forewords” aforementioned, and hence the two here following: one to the large and complex novel LETTERS, first published by Putnam in 1979; the other to the smaller, more straightforward Sabbatical: A Romance, from the same publisher three years later. Neither novel was a commercial success; happily for their author, both were subsequently reissued (in 1994 and 1996, respectively) by the University of Illinois’ excellent Dalkey Archive Press, to continue their trickle of annual sales. After all, one reminds oneself, long-haul trickles can have large effects: e.g., the Chesapeake Bay and its tidal tributary outside my workroom window, both formed in part by the eons-long trickles of the last Ice Age’s retreating glaciers....
LETTERS
“Another interminable masterpiece,” my comrade-in-arms William H. Gass has called the novel here prefaced. I like that.
“Irritating and magnificent,” says the critic Zack Bowen of the story’s ground-plan and overall conceit.3 I like that, too.
Gore Vidal, on the other hand (Or was it Tom Wolfe? One of those knee-cappers, anyhow, who write so entertainingly on other matters but often get literature all wrong), in a general diatribe against fictive Fabulism, Postmodernism, you name it, has declared that the movement “culminates in John Barth’s novel LETTERS, which even its author admits is unreadable.”
Author admitteth no such thing. Author happeneth to believe the novel enormously readable, as well as enormous in other respects. Complex? Well, yes. Complicated? For sure. Designed and constructed with a certain rigor? You bet: As in pro football and the knitting of argyle socks, rigor in novel-writing is the zest of complexity; the aim is to bring it off with brio, panache, even grace—“passionate virtuosity,” I’ve heard it called—never dropping the ball or a stitch. Not for every taste, no doubt; but in the author’s opinion (15 years now after the novel’s first publication) there is in LETTERS sufficient humor, range of passions, historical seriousness, and bravura theater to make it a rousing read despite its elegant construction, if “despite” is how it need be.
But let’s hope it needn’t.
HERE’S HOW THE thing came to be written:• Although its action takes place through seven months of 1969 (seven years before the U.S. Bicentennial, which some Americans at the decade’s turn, myself included, were beginning to note the approach of), it was in 1973 that the novel itself moved from accumulated project-notes to the front burner of my concerns. That’s the year when the American 1960s really ended: with the Israeli/Egyptian Yom Kippur War and the consequent Arab oil embargo; with the humiliating wind-down of our Vietnamese misadventure, which had fueled and focused countercultural protest; with the leveling off and subsequent erosion of U.S. economic prosperity, which had grown with all but uninterrupted vigor through the generation since Pearl Harbor—an erosion that, for the Baby Boomers at least, continues yet. Not a bad benchmark, in short, ’73, for the beginning of the end of “the American Century,” as under the Nixon/Kissinger administration the nation ground unenthusiastically toward its 200th birthday—an event that I’d had my eye on, novel-wise, for some while already. This for the reason that
• I myself had passed Dante’s mezzo del cammin di nostra vita and begun the second half of my projectible life-span, actuarially and otherwise. A 20-year first marriage had ended in divorce, and at age 40 I had married again (the second union, as of this writing, happily older than its predecessor and going for the distance). In those first 20 years of adulthood I had sired and co-parented three children, and by 1973 was managing them through college. I had contrived
to ascend the American academic ladder from teaching-assistantship to endowed-professorship while at the same time writing and publishing my first half-dozen volumes of fiction, and my literary offspring had earned some degree of critical notice—sometimes hedged, like the quotes above. Indeed, the first and fifth of them had been bridesmaid finalists for the National Book Award in fiction, and the sixth a bigamous bride: A divided jury named Chimera co-winner of the 1973 prize.
• All things considered, a not-inappropriate time to take stock, as the USA was warming up to do—perhaps via a Bicentennial novel that would concern itself with (and be the first fruit of) second halves and “second revolutions,” in my country’s history4 as well as in my personal and professional life. What I aimed to do—when by 1973 those aims had clarified themselves—was write a seventh novel that would address these bicentenary, second-revolutionary themes and at the same time be a sequel to all six of its forerunners, carrying representative characters from each into the second cycles of their several stories—without, however, requiring that its readers be familiar with those earlier works.