Final Fridays

by John Barth

  Werner Heisenberg’s celebrated Uncertainty Principle and Erwin Schrödinger’s quantum-mechanical wave-function equations, taken together, declare in effect that the position of an electron, say, is “merely” a field of probabilities until we observe it, whereupon its “wave function collapses” and it may be said to have a position. Extrapolating from these axioms of quantum physics, some later theoreticians have maintained that in a sense, at least, such observation may be said to be not only uninnocent (i.e., not non-disturbing) but downright causative: We didn’t observe Electron X to be at Point A because that happens to be where it was; that’s where it was because we made the observation, prior to which its position was no one particular point but a probability-field. On the microlevels of particle physics and the macrolevels of astrophysics, such counterintuitive bi-zarries are in rigorous conformity with empirical observation; quantum physics has been an extraordinarily successful scientific theory, with formidable predictive power. The Anthropic Principle, which comes in several flavors,9 carries these extrapolations to startling lengths: Had our universe not happened to develop precisely within a number of very critical parameters (as could just as possibly and much more probably have been the case), there would have been no evolution of planetary systems, of life, and of intelligences capable of measuring (never “innocently”) and theorizing upon those critical parameters. Depending on whether you take your Anthropic Principle in its diluted or its industrial-strength versions, the universe may thus be said to have evolved precisely such that astrophysicists can exist to understand its evolution, or it may be said to exist as we observe it to exist at least in part because we make those (never non-disturbing) observations. As John Wheeler succinctly puts it, “The observer is as essential to the creation of the universe as the universe is to the creation of the observer.”

  Without rigorous amplification, at least, this smacks of teleology, not to say tautology, as even some proponents of the principle agree (Wheeler declares that he wholeheartedly believes in his Participatory Anthropic Principle “every February 29th”). It also echoes, in my ears anyhow, the “Christian-dramatic” view that the universe was created as the theater of mankind’s fall and messianic redemption. On this view, while the Old Testament implies and validates the New, the New reciprocally completes and validates the Old (more to come on this reciprocity). Every playwright and novel-plotter knows that while the events of Act Two will appear to the audience/reader to have been necessitated by the events of Act One, it is reciprocally true that the events of Act One may be said to have been necessitated by the requirements of Act Two. To Chekhov’s aforenoted injunction I would add that many a scriptwriter has been obliged to go back and hang a pistol on the wall in the story’s beginning because it turns out to be needed for firing at or near the story’s end.10 Do physicists observe the universe to be such-and-so because its evolution has narrowly permitted the existence of physicists, or vice-versa? Was the Messiah’s coming necessary because of Original Sin, or was Original Sin (in Catholic tradition, felix culpa, Man’s “happy fault”) necessary for the Messiah’s coming?

  Either way, it all begins in the beginning, dramaturgically speaking, prefigured in Adam and Eve’s tasting the forbidden fruit of knowledge—including self-knowledge, the original causative, uninnocent observation:And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that

  they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made

  themselves girdles....

  And they likewise stitched together, in their subsequent/consequent generations, everything from scripture and scriptural commentary to quantum physics and the Anthropic Principle—all implicit, though not predictable, bereshith.

  NOT PREDICTABLE? SO says chaos theory about the exfoliation of any complex system, such as the weather or the evolution of life on earth, “sensitively dependent on initial conditions”—small differences among which (Eve eats the apple; Eve doesn’t eat the apple; Eve eats, but Adam doesn’t; they both do) rather quickly generate large differences in outcome.11 But such paradoxes of postlapsarian self-consciousness as the Anthropic Principle permit us to muse on some other modes of “reciprocal validation,” which I’ll approach via a brief detour from scriptural into secular literary classics.

  Virgil’s Aenead is more aware of itself as a monumental epic poem than are its great predecessors and models, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Just as the poem’s story-line traces the triumphant Roman empire back to wandering refugees from fallen Troy (and thus settles historical scores with Homer’s Greeks), so the Roman poet programmatically combines in Aeneas’s adventures an Odyssey and an Iliad, respectfully going one-on-one with the master, so to speak, in episode after episode, as if to say “Anything you Greeks did, we Romans can imitate, equal, and perhaps exceed.” Politically and militarily there are winners and losers in such competitions; in art, one does better to speak not of victors and vanquished but of inspiration and reciprocal enrichment. Readers who know both Homer and Virgil find their enjoyment of each enhanced by its prefiguration or reorchestration of the other. Whether or not, as Jorge Luis Borges declares, “Every great writer creates his own precursors” (a sort of literary Anthropic Principle), great artists unquestionably enrich and revalidate their precursors, as well as conversely. 12

  In analogous wise, the Christian New Testament is much aware of itself—or at least its compilers and commentators have been thus aware of it—as following, perhaps as “completing,” the Hebrew Bible. To this lay and respectfully agnostic reader, that awareness is most intriguing in what I think of as the Jesus Paradox. Indeed, at a point some decades past in my novelizing career, this paradox virtually possessed my imagination, although I came to it not from any particular preoccupation with the Bible but via a more general preoccupation with the myth of the wandering hero—Joseph Campbell’s “hero with a thousand faces”—as it appears in virtually all ages and cultures. The résumés of such mythic figures are famously similar: Lord Raglan’s early study The Hero lists 22 items more or less common to their CVs, from “(1) The hero’s mother is a royal virgin,” to “(22) He has one or more holy sepulchres,” and proceeds to measure against this template a fair assortment of candidates, from Oedipus to Robin Hood, giving each a score.

  Fascinated, in the 1960s, with three novels under my authorial belt, I set myself the following thought-experiment: Imagine a candidate for or aspirant to mythic-herohood who happens to know the script, so to speak, as Virgil knew Homer’s epics and as Dante knew both Virgil’s and Homer’s, and who takes it as his project to attain mythic-herohood by following that script to the letter: by repeating or imitating in detail the curriculum vitae or typical career-moves of his eminent predecessors. Those precursors, let us imagine, unselfconsciously did what they did, as we imagine the bardic Homer unselfconsciously composing, evolving, or refining his brace of epics; our man, however, does what he does because he knows that that’s what mythic heroes do. He is, in a word, uninnocent. I then imagined (and got gratifying fictive mileage from) two exemplary, perhaps cautionary, case studies: the minor Greek mythic hero Bellerophon and the tragicomic protagonist of my novel-then-in-progress, Giles Goat-Boy.

  In Case 1, per my reorchestration of the myth, Perseus’s envious cousin Bellerophon conscientiously and meticulously imitates the pattern of mythic-herohood as embodied by his celebrated relative and becomes, not the mythic hero he aspires to be, but a perfect imitation of a mythic hero, which is of course not the same thing at all. He has completed the curricular requirements, as it were, but that circumstance no more makes him a bona fide mythic hero than completing the requirements for an M.A. makes one a true master of the arts. Similarly (to reapproach our subject), one might imagine a David Koresh or Jim Jones who takes himself to be not only divinely inspired but in some sense the son of God, and who also happens to know the Old Testament prophecies; in order to validate himself as the Messiah, he sees to it that whatever that script calls for—“whatever the part requires,” as
proverbial starlets say—he does, perhaps including even death by immolation or poisoned Kool-Aid. He has followed, more or less to the letter, the messianic curriculum, but....

  Case 2 is altogether more problematical and interesting: Suppose our candidate to be not merely an aspiring mythic hero or one more entertainer of messianic delusions, but a bona fide young Aeneas or, in fact, the long-prophesied Messiah. He understands what he must do13—here is the monster to be slain, as aforewarned; here is the prophesied kingdom to be established or reclaimed; here approaches the foretold dark consummation, et cetera—and he does it, not in this case because that is what aspiring mythic heroes or messiahs are expected to do in order to qualify, but because he is in very truth a mythic hero or the Messiah. In short, while the template or the prophecies validate him, he likewise validates them. To get right down to it: Among Jesus’s contemporaries, the fellow’s claim to messiahship might be buttressed by his doing what Isaiah and company predicted that the Messiah will do; to believing Christians, however, it is at least equally Isaiah’s claim to prophethood that is buttressed by Jesus’s fulfillment of the prophecies.

  That reciprocal or coaxial validation—for Christians, the very crux (pardon the metaphor) of that between the Old and New Testaments—is the paradox of the Jesus Paradox, to which I shall return after pointing out that its secular analog applies not only to “later-arriving” mythic figures like Bellerophon and Aeneas but to later authors like Virgil, not to mention us Postmodernists. As afore-suggested, by writing an Aenead that combines an Odyssey with an Iliad, Virgil gives the impression of wanting to outdo the Homer of whom he is the self-conscious heir and to whom his Latin epic is also a homage, just as Augustan Rome is at once the cultural heir and the political master of classical Greece. You want to be a great epic poet? Here are your models. Virgil follows them—programmatically but not slavishly—and because he happens to be a great epic poet, his Aenead turns out to be not a monumental Case-1 imitation of the great model, but a great epic poem. Thirteen centuries later, Dante compounds the stunt, taking as his literal and figurative guide not “unselfconscious” Homer but self-conscious (and Homer-conscious) Virgil, and not only scripts himself into the wandering-hero role but orchestrates his own welcome, as afore-footnoted, into the company of the immortals—in a Limbo, moreover, where they must ineluctably remain, but from which he will proceed through Purgatory to Paradise. Talk about chutzpah! Happening to be a great poet, however, Dante brings the thing off—and we now return to the Jesus Paradox.

  Of the gospeleers, the most “Virgilian” in this respect is Matthew, in whose account of Jesus’s career just about everything goes literally by the book:• The Annunciation (1:22, 23): “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive [et cetera].’”14

  • The family’s flight into Egypt (2:15): “This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken of by the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt have I called my son.’”

  • Their subsequent residency in Nazareth (2:23): “And [Joseph] went and dwelt in a city called Nazareth, that what was spoken by the prophet might be fulfilled, ‘He shall be called a Nazarene.’”

  • Jesus’s later move to Galilee (4:12–14): “. . . he withdrew into Galilee . . . that what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled. . . .”

  • His “confidential” healing of the sick and the lame (12:15–21) : “. . . many followed him, and he healed them all, and ordered them not to make him known. This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: ‘[The Messiah] will not wrangle or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets. . . .’”

  And so on and on. It is from the master himself, one guesses, that the apostle borrows this operative formulation: from Jesus’s flat-out declaration in the Sermon on the Mount, as Matthew reports it (5:17)—“‘. . . I have come not to abolish [the law and the prophets] but to fulfill them’”—to his reminding those of his followers indignant to the point of violence at his arrest and impending judgment (26:53, 54): “‘Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then should the scriptures be fulfilled, that [what’s about to happen] must be so?’” For this reader, the climactic such moment comes at the Last Supper, when, facing the prospect of his “death foretold,” Jesus declares (25:24), “The Son of man goes as it is written of him.” Even nonbelievers may feel a frisson at that remark: the hero’s calm acceptance of his hard fate. He has, in effect, no choice: If upon his agonized later prayer the bitter cup really were rescripted to pass from him, then either he or the sacred original script would be falsified.

  Self-conscious, uninnocent mythic herohood; historically aware and prescient messiahship—they are not callings for the faint of heart.

  In real, non-scripted life, of course, the distinction between Case-1 and Case-2 heroes and saviors is often notoriously less clear, at least as perceivable from “outside,” than it is in these thought experiments .15 God knows whether the Nazarene from Galilee was the Messiah, although every Christian ipso facto believes him to have been, and it is only on the hypothesis of his having been that the Jesus Paradox is energized. He knows by heart the excruciating script; per the poignant paradox, however, he isn’t acting, but reciprocally validating to the end what has validated him—from the beginning.

  How It Was, Maybe: A Novelist Looks Back on Life in Early-Colonial Virginia and Maryland

  This address, on a subject about which I’m a bit more knowledgeable (or once was, anyhow) than about Biblical texts, was delivered at the Williamsburg Institute’s 50th Annual Forum, in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, in February 1998—a novel and rather challenging lecture-venue for me, but an attractive one. I include it here with a tip of the hat to the endlessly resourceful, somewhat protean Captain John Smith on the 300th anniversary of his first exploratory cruises from Jamestown to the head of Chesapeake Bay.

  THE OPERATIVE WORDS in my title, as I trust you’ll have noticed already, are the words “maybe” and “novelist.” They are intended not quite to disqualify me from addressing an audience of professional and amateur specialists on the subject of colonial life hereabouts, but to disclaim any particular authority in the matter—in short, to cover my butt. By trade and by temperament I am in fact not any sort of historian or antiquarian, but a novelist and short-story-writer, a fictioneer—a professional liar, we might as well say, of whom the most one can reasonably demand is that his fabrications be of professional quality. I’ll do my best.

  What’s worse, I’m not even a historical novelist, properly speaking. The straightforward historical novel—Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, Nordhoff and Hall’s Mutiny on the Bounty, James Michener’s Chesapeake—is a category of fiction that makes me just a tad uneasy,1 even though I’ve much enjoyed such exceptional specimens as Robert Graves’s Roman-Imperial epic I, Claudius. Of my dozen-plus published books, only one and a half have anything at all to do with colonial Virginia and Maryland, and the one called The Sot-Weed Factor—which very much does have to do with life in early-colonial Tidewaterland—was written between 1956 and 1960, when its author was not yet thirty years old. I wasn’t exactly a greenhorn back then in the medium of fiction (my first two novels had been published already), but I was an entire novice in the area of historical fiction and its attendant research. It’s gratifying to me that this many years after its initial appearance, the Sot-Weed novel remains in print. The flip side of that gratification, however, is that its author is still sometimes mistaken for an authority on matters of regional history, when in fact what I’ll be looking back on here is not only Life in Early-Colonial Et Cetera but my researches into that subject four decades ago.

  Just recently, for example, I got a call from a bona fide colonial historian at work on a study of William Claiborne’s 17th-century Virginian trading post on Kent Island, in the upper Chesapeake: a famous thorn in the side of Lord Baltimore’s first Maryland
settlers. She had noticed, this historian told me, that in my Sot-Weed Factor novel Lord Baltimore refers to that rogue Virginian as “Black Bill Claiborne”; her question was whether I could vouch for the use of “Bill” as a nickname for William in the 17th century. Heck no, I was obliged to tell her: Back when I was up to my earlobes in the documents of our colonial history, I might have confirmed or disconfirmed that usage with some confidence, but that time itself was history now. I then offered her my guess that although “Will” was unquestionably the most common nickname for William back then, if I chose to have Lord Baltimore say “Bill,” it was quite possible that I had seen that sobriquet deployed in some colonial document or other. But I reminded her, as I now remind you-all, of Aristotle’s famous distinction between History and Poetry—between how things were and how things might have been, or let’s say between verity and verisimilitude—and further, that while my memory is that in that novel I tried to stay rigorously close to the facts of colonial life and language where such rigor was appropriate, it was not at all impossible that the muse of Poetry rather than that of History dictated “Black Bill Claiborne,” as a denunciation more euphonious than “Black Will Claiborne.” (“Wicked Will,” I guess I could’ve called the fellow, if “Bill” is in fact an anachronism—but then “Wicked Will” sounds too much like that night-calling bird, doesn’t it....)

  You see how we storytellers operate: Truth, yes—but not always truth to the historical data. And how do historians operate? Well, my caller dropped me a note somewhile later to thank me for my assistance and to announce her intention of staying with “Bill,” despite my warning, on the strength of The Sot-Weed Factor’s “general historical authenticity.” It makes a person wonder.