by John Barth
• Moreover, two decades of reading, writing, and teaching literature had bemused me with the three main senses of our English word letters, to wit:1. Alphabetical characters, those 26 atoms that in their infinite supply and innumerable but finite recombinations comprise the written universe.
2. Epistolary missives, that homely but splendid technology of human telecommunication in the 18th and 19th centuries especially—the golden era of general bourgeois literacy and, not coincidentally, of the novel as a popular medium of art and entertainment. The English novel, in particular, had from the first an almost proto-Postmodern awareness of itself as words on paper, a document imitating other sorts of documents, especially letters; even where its form was not epistolary, its plot often turned on letters mislaid, misdelivered, misread or miswritten, intercepted or purloined. By 1973, telephony had all but supplanted the writing of personal letters, as film- and television-watching had all but supplanted novel-reading—Adieu, dear media! Such later technologies as e-mail lack the distinctive element of individual penmanship (I kiss your handwriting, love, in lieu of your dear hand); even telefaxed longhand isn’t her ink, on her personal stationery, a souvenir of herself.... And
3. the third sense of “letters,” Literature: dear dwindling diversion, sometimes made of letters made of letters by men and women of letters, its measureless inventory of passions, situations, speculations, flights of fancy, heartbreaks/ha-ha’s/ho-hums all ultimately reducible to a couple-dozen squiggles of ink on paper.
“Work all of this in,” I instructed my muse, “in a certain arrangement of eighty-eight epistles from seven correspondents over seven months of the seventh year before Seventeen Seventy-Six’s two hundredth anniversary—and have the thing ready for publication by that date, okay?”
She obliged, except in that final particular. “I’m not a demand feeder,” she reminded me, and took her own sweet time lactating LETTERS: seven years, appropriately, from the first work-notes to the novel’s first publication in 1979, by when the Bicentennial was yesterday’s newspaper and an even meaner decade waited in the wings. Six books later, as in 1994 I write this foreword letter by letter (never since unaware, at least subliminally, of every l, e, t, t, e, r, & s I scrawl), LETTERS is the fit midpoint of my bibliography, perhaps of the road of my life as well.
I like that, and am gratified to see the old girl here second-cycled into print.
SABBATICAL
Sabbatical: A Romance, written between 1978 and 1981 after my seven-year involvement with the novel LETTERS, was indeed a sabbatical from that extended, intricated labor. The project’s original working title was Sex Education and Sabbatical; I had in mind an odd Siamese twin of a book comprising a fantastical playscript (about a postmodern romance between a skeptical spermatozoon and a comparably wary ovum) followed by a realistical novel involving a middle-aged male Homo sapiens, recently retired from the CIA, and his somewhat younger professorial wife, newly pregnant with, perhaps, the consummation of that playscript romance—which she may decide to abort. For better or worse, as happens with a fair percentage of twin pregnancies, the weaker sibling expired in utero (to be resurrected, more or less, in The Tidewater Tales: A Novel [1987]). The survivor is the work in hand, narrated from a viewpoint that I believe myself to have invented: the first-person-duple voice of a well-coupled couple.
The story was suggested by the curious death in Chesapeake Bay, my home waters, of one Mr. John Arthur Paisley, an early-retired high-ranking operative of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency who, in late September 1978, disappeared from his sloop Brillig during an overnight solo cruise in fair weather on this normally tranquil estuary. The unmanned sloop was found aground soon after, all sails set, lunch half prepared in the galley, no sign of foul play, et cetera; the body of its owner/skipper, levitated by the gases of decomposition, surfaced a week later, 40-odd pounds of scuba-weights belted to the waist, a 9mm bullet hole behind the left ear. In those halcyon Cold War years of CIA/KGB huggermugger, when such more or less deranged intelligence chiefs as the Soviet Union’s Lavrenti Beria and the USA’s James Jesus Angleton saw or suspected moles within moles within moles, “the Paisley case” received much local and some national and international attention, duly echoed in the novel. Had the fellow been done in by the KGB because he had discovered their Mole in our agency? By the CIA because he was the Mole? By one or the other because he was only apparently retired from counterintelligence work in order to scan covertly from his sailboat the high-tech snooping gear suspected to be concealed by the Soviets in their U.S. embassy vacation compound, just across the wide and placid Chester River from where I write these words? Et cetera. A few less intrigue-driven souls, myself among them, imagined that the chap had simply done himself in, for whatever complex of personal reasons and despite certain odd details and spookish unresolved questions (see novel)—but by the end of the American 1970s one had learned that paranoia concerning the counterintelligence establishments was often outstripped both by paranoia within those establishments and by the facts, when and if they emerged.
INDEED, MY U.S.-HISTORY homework through that decade for the LETTERS novel, together with our war in Vietnam, cost me considerable innocence concerning the morality of our national past and present, especially with respect to foreign policy and to such agencies as J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and Allen Dulles’s CIA, whose clandestine, not infrequently illegal operations I found to be rich in precedent all the way back to George Washington’s administration. Given our political geography, a fair amount of that activity turns out to have taken place in and around my tidal birthwaters (see novels).
During the long course of writing LETTERS, I happened to move with my new bride back to those birthwaters after a 20-year absence, to teach at Johns Hopkins, my alma mater, and to begin for the first time ardently exploring, in our cruising sailboat, the great estuarine system that I had grown up on, in, and around. It was sobering, in those high-tension times, to see the red hammer-and-sickle banner flying above the aforementioned Soviet embassy retreat across the river, and to note on our charts (abounding in Danger Zones and Prohibited Areas) the 80-plus Pentagon facilities scattered about this fragile tidewaterland—including the Pentagon itself, the U.S. Naval Academy, and the Edgewood Arsenal’s chemical and biological weapons development facilities, not to mention several CIA “safe houses” and the headquarters of the Agency proper. Sobering too to sail past the odd nuclear missile submarine off Annapolis, packing firepower enough to wreck a continent, and to know that among one’s fellow pleasure-sailors and anchorage-mates would be a certain number of federal employees including the occasional admiral, active or retired, taking a busman’s holiday, and the occasional Agency spook, ditto, perhaps ditto. And sobering finally to be cruising the pleasant waters that a British task force had invaded during the War of 1812, burning Washington, bombarding Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor, and inspiring our national anthem—waters increasingly stressed by agricultural run-off ever since the first European settlers cleared the forests to farm “sot-weed” in the 17th century; by military dumping and residential development through the 20th; and by history, more or less, over that whole span.
Sabbatical glances at all that, perhaps even attempts here and there to stare it down, but it’s really only marginally about the Wonderlandish machinations of the CIA/KGB and the American heritages represented (in the novel) by Francis Scott Key and Edgar Allan Poe. First and finally, the story is what its subtitle declares it to be: a romance, in the several senses of that term.
—Postscript, possibly evidencing that truth is more Postmodern than fiction:
After Sabbatical’s first publication in 1982, I learned from certain ex-colleagues of his and readers of mine that the unhappy Mr. Paisley had toward the end grown fond of declaring that “in life, as on the highway, fifty-five is enough” (his age at death). Moreover—and more poignantly, sober-ingly, vertiginously—I was informed by his son that the late Agency operative had been a fan of my novels,
especially The Floating Opera and The Sot-Weed Factor—which it pleases me to imagine his having enjoyed in happier times as he and Brillig sailed the Chesapeake.
R.I.P., sir: Having surfaced in Sabbatical as in the Bay (and resurfaced in this novel’s successor, The Tidewater Tales), you shall not float through my fiction again.
“In the Beginning”: The Big Bang, the Anthropic Principle, and the Jesus Paradox
Turning now to a bit of proto-Postmodernism: Though far from being a Biblical scholar myself, I was successfully tempted by the bona fide Biblicist David Rosenberg to contribute the following essay on Genesis and Matthew to his anthology Communion1—having perused which, the distinguished journalist Bill Moyers persuaded me in 1996 to take part in one episode of his 10-part PBS series Genesis:2 a lively round-table conversation with Moyers; the novelists Rebecca Goldstein, Mary Gordon, Oscar Hijuelos, Charles Johnson, and Faye Kellerman; and the theologian Burton Visotzky, on the subject of “The First Murder,” Cain’s offing of his brother Abel in Genesis 4. Whereafter I happily retired from amateur scriptural exegesis.
1.
Bereshith—in Hebrew, the first word of the first verse of the first chapter of the first book of the Bible—says it more aptly than does the usual English translation, “In the beginning.” Both expressions are adverbial, and their sense is inarguably the same: Bereshith means, indeed, “in the beginning,”3 its first syllable corresponding to the English preposition. But if, as John’s subsequent gospel affirms (1:1), “In the beginning was the word,” then any form-conscious writer of a creation-story will prefer that beginning word to be the word Beginning. The text of Genesis (called, in Hebrew, Bereshith), especially its opening chapters, is virtually proto-Postmodernist in its deployment of what art critics call “significant form”—the form a metaphor for the content, or form and content reciprocally emblematical—and the original Hebrew begins the story best: beginningly.4
In the “Near Eastern” stacks of my university’s library, once the distinguished haunt of William Foxwell Albright’s Oriental Seminary, there is half an alcove of scholarly commentary, in a babel of languages, on the text of Genesis; enough to frighten any self-respecting fictionist back to his/her trade. Of all this (except for Sacks’s excellent treatise aforenoted) I remain programmatically innocent. No professional storyteller, however, especially of the Postmodernist or Romantic-Formalist persuasion, can fail on rereading this seminal narrative to be struck by two circumstances, no doubt commonplaces among Bible scholars: 1) that the structure of Genesis, particularly of its opening chapter, is self-reflexive, self-similar, even self-demonstrative; and 2) that its narrative procedure echoes, prefigures, or metaphorizes some aspects of current cosmogonical theory.
• Taking, like an artless translator, second things first: As everybody knows, according to the generally accepted Big Bang hypothesis (as opposed to various currently-disfavored “steady state” hypotheses), our physical universe in one sense came into existence “all at once”—at the moment dubbed by astrophysicists “Planck Time” (10-43 seconds after T-Zero), prior to which the concept time is virtually as unintelligible as are physical processes at the infinitely high temperature of the original “naked singularity.” Exquisite scientific reasoning from known physical laws and processes has made possible a remarkably precise scenario/timetable for the universe’s subsequent expansion and differentiation, through its radical metamorphoses in later fractions of that first second,5 to the formation of galaxies and solar systems over subsequent billions of years and the evolution of life on Earth—including, if not culminating, in the day-before-yesterday development of human consciousness and intelligences capable of such rigorous formulations as the Big Bang hypothesis in all its scientific/mathematical splendor. In two other senses, however, the astrophysical creation-story ongoes still:
• The observable universe continues the “creative” expansion and exfoliation more or less implicit in its first instant (in the language of complexity physics, or chaos theory, its processes are “sensitively dependent on initial conditions,” more particularly on certain aboriginal inhomogeneities crucial to the uneven distribution of matter into galactic clusters, superclusters, and superclusteral “superstrings”)—a continuation whose own continuation apparently depends on the as-yet-imprecisely-known amount and distribution of “dark matter” out there. Moreover,
• The intelligence capable of observing, experimenting, reasoning, theorizing, and reporting on these astrophysical matters likewise continues to evolve, refine itself, and build upon its accumulated knowledge, toward the point where the question of the universe’s ultimate denouement (infinite expansion, apocalyptic Big Crunch, whatever) will in all likelihood prove answerable, perhaps also the question whether the extraordinary intelligence that can conceive and successfully address such questions is confined to a few Homo sapiens on planet Earth or is after all less parochial than that.
In the astrophysical beginning, in short, were the seeds of several beginnings-within-beginnings: the beginning of spacetime, the beginning of matter, of radiant energy, and of galaxy formation, down (or up) to the beginnings of life, of human consciousness, of rational inquiry, of scientific reasoning and experiment, and of contemporary cosmological speculation capable even of some empirical verification of these several beginnings.
Analogously, Genesis 1:1—“In the beginning, God created heaven and earth”6—in one sense says it all. And then the next four verses (i.e., Day One: the creation of light, its division from darkness, their naming as Day and Night, and, coincidentally, the initiation of time) sort of say it all again; and then the remaining 26 verses of Chapter One (the ensuing five days of creation, echoing on a larger scale and with more particulars the first five verses, themselves an expansion of 1:1) sort of say it all again. Whereafter, Chapter Two (following God’s three-verse rest on Day Seven) proceeds to say it all yet again—“This is the generations of the sky and the earth in their creation on the day in which God made the earth and the sky,” et cetera—replaying the same creation-riffs in so different a key that some scholars take it to be another tune altogether (Sacks, pp. 18 ff.). In either case, what’s undeniable is that each successive expansion is an expansion, both in textual space, like the universe’s expansion of physical space (not, strictly speaking, in physical space, since at any moment its expanding space is all the space there is), and also in particularity, differentiation, multiplicity. From mere sky and earth in 1:1, we have evolved by 2:23 a cosmos replete with heavenly bodies in motion, speciated life on Earth, and sexually differentiated human beings endowed with language and intelligence, though not yet with upper-case Knowledge and its attendant hazards.
The rest, as they say, is history:7 the rest of Genesis (creation + fall, flood, and bondage); the rest of the Pentateuch (Genesis + Exodus through Deuteronomy); the rest of the Hebrew bible (Pentateuch + prophets and “writings”); the rest of the canonical Christian Bible (Hebrew Bible + New Testament)—all implicit in the beginning, bereshith. Indeed, one might call the opening verse of Genesis the macrobang from which evolve not only the Jewish and Christian sacred texts but the centuries of commentary thereupon: an evolution no more “finished” than that of the physical universe, as biblical scholarship and archaeology expand our knowledge and understanding of the texts. Witness, for example, the recent scholarly catfights over publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the expectable deluge of associated books and papers now that the text is readily available.
As a creator myself, of word-worlds, I’m admiringly envious—not so much of the universe’s genesis, which is beyond my agnostic ken, as of Genesis’s genesis; less of divine Creation than of this artfully created creation-story.
DID I EVER actually believe any of it? The six-day cosmogony, Adam and Eve and the serpent, and for that matter the text as God’s word and the a priori existence of its divine author? In the sluggishly Christian but essentially secular household of my small-town boyhood, one dutifully attende
d the neighborhood Methodist Sunday school as a child and then, as an adolescent, the Friday-evening Junior Christian Endeavor, as well as “joining church” round about puberty-time. I did all that in the same mainly unprotesting spirit in which I attended Cambridge (Maryland) public schools: It was what one did. But the air of our house, while not openly skeptical, was in no way suffused with religious belief: God, the afterlife, the authority of biblical texts—such matters never entered our table talk. The first time I heard the Genesis story questioned on scientific grounds (God knows where, in that venue), whatever notional assent I’d given it as a literal account slipped lightly away forever, as did by high-school days any notion of its divine authorship. Later, in university years and the beginnings of my own authorhood, I would come to appreciate metaphor and to respect the power and profundity of great myths, the biblical creation-myth included—but that’s another story.
As for the one told in the book of Genesis: Bravo! What a splendid beginning!
2.
For believing Christians, Act Two of the creation-drama is mankind’s vicarious redemption by the Messiah from man’s original sin and fall from grace in Act One.8 I shall now audaciously rush in where no angel would presume to tread and draw another analogy with contemporary theoretical physics, as I understand that vertiginous discipline.