by John Barth
As you can tell from that vintage slang, the question as given is dated. Its current version would be “Are any of your novels available as videos?”9 The answer is still No, and I can’t recommend the audiocassette versions, either. The updated question, I fear, has to be translated “Hauling out to the Cineplex has gotten to be almost as much of a bummer as reading books, but I do like to slug the old VCR if there’s nothing on Cable.”
What can a mere novelist say? Echoing Robert Frost’s famous definition of poetry as “that which gets lost in translation,” William H. Gass defines story as “that which is extracted from a novel to make a movie.” I agree, I guess, although for me the element of story remains first among equals in the ingredients of fiction. But in a good novel (it goes without saying) the story is truly inseparable from the language it’s told in and the voice that tells it. Movies are, literally, another story altogether, and videocassettes another story yet. As it happens, the best I can say even for a good movie-adaptation of a good novel—such as Anthony Minghella’s film of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient or Emma Thompson’s screenplay for Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility—is what Thomas Mann said about reading Shakespeare in German translation: “It’s like taking a hundred thousand dollars from a millionaire,” Mann declared: “He remains a very rich man.”
It now appears evident that what movies and network television did to live theater earlier in this century (not to mention what they did to the audience for printed fiction), the VCR and cable TV are doing to the movie houses and to some extent to the film industry. That’s just a fact of technological life. Of more interest to me is a different analogy: If movies and television have affected the art of prose fiction in the 20th century in something like the way that still photography affected the art of painting in the latter 19th, then we can reasonably expect that the development of interactive television and high-tech “virtualism” in the century to come will have a comparable effect on movies and videos as we know them today. We are told by another of my fellow American scribblers, Robert Coover, that electronic fiction and computer hypertext generally will have a comparable revolutionary impact on what remains of printed-book culture, with its obsolescent notions of author, reader, text, publisher, copyright, and the like.10 I confess that I won’t at all regret missing that particular technological revolution, which along with electronic virtuality offers to do to the audience for “p-fiction” what the rise of the novel since the 17th century did to the audience for poetry. It gives me some comfort to note, however, that while in my lifetime I’ve had to replace my 78 rpm records with 45s and then with 33.3 LPs, and then those with audiocassettes and then those with compact disks, each time discarding and expensively rebuilding the Barths’ recorded-music library, the oldest volumes in our book library remain by and large as conveniently accessible as they were on their publication-day, perhaps centuries ago. If fewer and fewer people read printed fiction in the century to come, that won’t be because the marvelously low-tech, high-protein medium of the book is outmoded, but because the pleasures of reading will have been displaced by glitzy and evanescent high-tech distractions for which civilization may on balance be the poorer. If thus it must go, then I shall with some small relief go first.
That curmudgeonly sentiment brings me to the last of these evolving but nevertheless routine questions, after which we’ll move on to a couple of less routine ones and then have done.
Q: What effect does your university teaching have on your novels?
A: My reply to this gee-whizzer used to be, “It delays their completion.” In this case, however, although the question remains the same, the respondent’s altered circumstances require a different answer. As afore-established, I was indeed for four decades a full-time teacher as well as a full-time writer, and for the first two of those four decades I was a full-time parent as well—when you’re young, you can full-time it on several fronts at once. Then my children grew up and (just as my late friend and I had foretold) my academic workload eased off, so that for several years I taught only one semester out of two, and for a few years after that only one graduate-level seminar every second semester. More lately, for the first time since kindergarten I’ve been out of the classroom altogether. To my total unsurprise, in these progressively time-richer circumstances my literary output has remained almost exactly what it was 40 years ago, when I was teaching four sections of freshman composition, six days a week, and helping to raise three small children, and moonlighting in a dance band on weekends for extra cash. Back then I stole time to write, and my larceny was sufficiently grand that I was able to go straight later on. Now that I have all the writing-time I want—in a day, in a week, in a year, if never in a lifetime—I find that although I enjoy generating sentences and stories as much as ever, I don’t spend any more time at it than I did when I wished that I had a lot more time to spend. One’s musely metabolism, evidently, is what it is almost regardless of circumstances, and so I infer that what used to delay the completion of my novels was not university teaching after all; it was (and it remains) living that part of life that doesn’t consist of writing fiction—the part of life without which, in my case anyhow, there wouldn’t be any fiction to write, even though that fiction seldom has to do directly with its author’s biographical experience.
Does that, too, go without saying, I wonder? In any case, there it is: said.
SO MUCH FOR those profoundly routine questions, which I seem to find routinely profound. Of the non-routine sort I shall instance just one, and then ask myself one myself, and then we’re done. Now and then, in the post-reading or post-lectorial Q&A, someone will come up with something at least as perceptive, and on occasion as unsettling, as anything that my most attentive critics have laid on me. It was an anonymous member of some audience a quarter-century ago who in the Q&A observed that my books thus far (of which there were back then only six) tended to come in pairs, the second member of each pair a sort of complement or corrective to the first. Inasmuch as the questioner understood me to be one half of a pair of opposite-sex twins, she wondered how programmatic on my part might be this metaphor of more-or-less-paired books, and what I took to be its significance.
Well, I was floored; I had never until that moment noticed what now seemed evident, even conspicuous—the more so since the theme of twinship itself comes up in a couple of those books. Moreover, although I’ve never regarded my twin sister and me as complements other than anatomically, and certainly not as reciprocal correctives,11 I was so intrigued, even charmed by the unintended metaphor that I resolved perversely to defy it. And so I did in Book #7 (a monster novel called LETTERS), to which the slender novel that followed it had only the most tenuous connection; and Book #9, a collection of essays, was surely no twin to either of those—so there. But then Book #10, I noticed after writing it, can fairly be regarded as dizygotic not to Book #9 but to Book #8, and Books #11 and #12 to each other, and Book #13 (a second essay-collection) to the aforementioned Book #9, and Book #14 (a story-series) as trizygotic to Book #5 on the one hand and to Book #15 (another story-series, currently in progress) on the other, and so it would appear that only that gargantuan Mittelpunkt, Book #7, remains (so far) untwinned—although, come to think of it, it contains within its intrications sequels to all six of its predecessors....
Make of all this, too, what you will; I myself have come to shrug my shoulders—first the left, and then, complementarily, the right....
LET US RETURN to the country of Things That Go Without Saying. One Q that I’ve never had a chance to A in these public circumstances is the perhaps most basic and apparently elementary of all—which is why I used frequently to put it to my coachees (especially the most advanced apprentice writers among them) and why I put it still to myself, most often in the well-filling interval between books: What is fiction? What’s a story?
Okay, so that’s two questions, really, and for the long replies thereto I refer anyone who’s interested to an essay of mine called “
It Goes Without Saying,” in the collection Further Fridays12—one of those dizygotic twin volumes afore-referred-to. The short answer to the question “What’s a story?” was provided me by some member of yet another audience past, who after the show pressed upon me a treatise on something called Systems Philosophy and urged me to read it on the flight home. As I had no idea what Systems Philosophy might be, I did indeed leaf through that gift-book up there in the stratosphere, and although I landed not much wiser as to its subject, it did provide me with some wonderful jargon, out of which I constructed the following rigorous definition of the term story: A story (it goes without saying) consists of the incremental perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a complexified equilibrium.
I confess to being in love with that definition13—which in fact quite accurately describes classic Aristotelian dramaturgy. The “unstable homeostatic system” is what I’ve called elsewhere the Ground Situation of any story: a dramaturgically voltaged state of affairs pre-existing the story’s present action, like the ongoing feud between the Capulets and the Montagues. Its “incremental perturbation” is the “rising action” or complications of the conflict following upon the introduction of a Dramatic Vehicle into the Ground Situation (Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet fall into star-crossed love, a turn of events that precipitates Bandello’s tale and Shakespeare’s play out of the Ground Situation; the couple’s incrementally more desperate attempts to consummate that love comprise the story’s action). The “catastrophic restoration” is the climax or Aristotelian peripateia, catastrophic in its relative swiftness and magnitude even in the quietest of stories. And the “complexified equilibrium” thereby restored is the classic denouement, dramaturgically consequential vis-à-vis the original Ground Situation or else no story has been told or sung or written down or played out (the lovers’ death, e.g., puts the interfamily squabble at least temporarily on Hold).
All that sort of thing really does go without saying for most storytellers, who work at least as much by the hunch and feel of experienced talent as by articulated theory, and who are likely to find it easier to make up a story than to explain the difference between stories and non-stories or not-quite stories. If such high-tech theorizing makes no more sense to you than, say, much of life does, then I offer you another pet maxim from my inventory, to wit: Of of what one can’t make sense, one may make art. May I repeat those eleven quasi-stammering monosyllables? Of of what one can’t make sense, one may make art.
O self-demonstrating bliss.
BUT WHY does one make art? Specifically, what accounts for the odd circumstance that people in every time and place appear to enjoy, whether as individuals or as cultures, making up non-factual yarns, for example, and telling or writing or acting them out and hearing or reading or spectating them? Why is it that we Homo sapiens pleasure in the incremental perturbation of imaginary unstable homeostatic systems and their catastrophic restoration to complexified equilibria? In the vicarious turning of screws on cooked-up predicaments until those quantitative increments effect a comparatively sudden and significant qualitative change?
Damned if I know. In the Friday-piece mentioned above (“It Goes Without Saying”), I itemized some two dozen of fiction’s feasible functions, from reality-testing and -mapping to reality-avoidance, from aphrodisia through anaphrodisia to mere linguistical futzing around. Behind all of those catalogued functions, I believe (as well as any of the many that I no doubt missed), lies a neuroscientific argument that strikes me as both plausible and pleasing, and with which I’ll close my spiel. The self-styled “neurophilosopher” Daniel C. Dennett, of Tufts University, maintains that human consciousness itself has an essentially narrative aspect, grounded in the biological evolution of the brain. I won’t attempt here to summarize Dennett’s thesis, but I am immediately persuaded of its validity—at least as an explanatory fiction. To me it seems a short and plausible step, though a consequential and doubtless an intricate one, from the “if” propositions characteristic of computer and neural programming—If x, then y, et cetera, which in animal behavior might be called the Four F-propositions: whether Stimulus or Situation X prompts one to Flee, Fight, Feed, or, you know, Mate—it’s a short and plausible step, I was saying, from these to the what ifs and as ifs of fictional narrative. I second the motion that the “neural Darwinism” by which consciousness may evolve—evolve not only to recognize and act upon stimuli but to reflect upon, disport with, and be moved to aesthetic pleasure by certain of them—has an inherently narrative aspect. Professor Dennett goes even further, conceiving of consciousness as essentially a “multi-draft scenario-spinner,” or “Joycean machine”; of the self itself as an as if, a “posited Center of Narrative Gravity”—in short, as an intricate, on-spinning fiction. “We are the stories we tell ourselves and others about who we are,” he concludes (in his treatise Consciousness Explained 14): stories that we edit continually, and that continually edit us.
Amen to that, say I. Whether or not one goes the whole way with Dennett’s neurophilosophy (and some very prominent neuroscientists do not), he has I think established at very least that when we make up stories or take pleasure in made-up stories, we are literally doing what comes naturally.
NOW, THEN, I ask you: Did the pondering of questions like these ever make anybody a better writer? Wouldn’t any fictionist be just as well off following the example of Norman Mailer, say, who in his 1984 Hopwood Lecture declared his tendency “to mumble about technical matters like an old mechanic”? “‘Let’s put the thingamajig before the whoosits here,’” said Mailer, “is how I usually state the deepest literary problems to myself.” Same here, more often than not, when I am in actual intimate congress with the muse. It’s in the recovery-time between such sessions that I incline to put such questions more formally to myself and to entertain them from others. And I happen to believe that when we do that, too, we’re doing what comes naturally—perhaps more naturally to some people than to others.
But I suppose that that goes without saying.
Any further questions?
Incremental Perturbation
Some further “Further Questions.” This little essay—written for and first published in an anthology on fiction-writing compiled by one of my former graduate students1—should be skipped by any who’ve heard enough already about the mechanics of storytelling.
What’s a story?
Storytellers (it goes without saying) tell stories. Fiction-writers write them; playwrights and screenwriters script them; opera singers sing them; balletists dance them; mimes mime them. But what’s a story?
Damned if I know, for sure. “A whole action, of a certain magnitude,” says Aristotle in effect in his Poetics. “A meaningful series of events in a time sequence,” say Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their New-Critical textbook Understanding Fiction.
Yes, well. But . . .
Most working writers of fiction—myself included when the muse and I are at it—operate less by articulated narrative theory than by the hunch and feel of experience: our experience of successfully (sometimes unsuccessfully) composing, revising, and editing our own stories and, prerequisite to that, our experience of the tens of thousands of stories that all of us audit, read, spectate, and more or less assimilate in the course of our lives. But it’s another matter when, as teachers of novice fiction-writers and coaches of more advanced apprentices in the art, we find ourselves in the position of trying to explain to them and to ourselves why the manuscript before us, whatever its other merits, lacks something that we’ve come to associate with stories, and is in our judgment the less satisfying for that lack. “Gets off on the wrong foot,” somebody in the room may opine. “Something askew in the middle there. . . .” “The ending bothers me. . . .”
Okay: But exactly what about the beginning, the middle, the ending, fails to satisfy? What keeps the thing from achieving proper storyhood? Freud remarks that he didn’t start out with such peculiar notions
as the Oedipus Complex; that he was driven to their articulation by what he was hearing from the psychoanalytical couch. That’s how I feel with respect to dramaturgical theory.
What’s dramaturgy?
In my shop, “dramaturgy” means the management of plot and action; the architecture of Story, as distinct from such other fictive goodies as Language, Character, Setting, and Theme. Be it understood at the outset that mere architectural completeness, mere storyhood, doth not an excellent fiction make. Every competent hack hacks out complete stories; structural sufficiency is hackhood’s first requirement. On the other hand, about a third of Franz Kafka’s splendid fictions, for example, and a somewhat smaller fraction of Donald Barthelme’s, happen to be “mere” extended metaphors rather than stories—metaphors elaborated to a certain point and then, like lyric poems, closed—and they are no less artistically admirable for that.2 Such exceptions notwithstanding, the fact is that most of the fiction we admire is admirable dramaturgically as well as in its other aspects. If we admire a piece of prose fiction despite its non-storyhood, we are, precisely, admiring it despite its non-storyhood. Even the late John Gardner—by all accounts a splendid writing teacher despite his cranky notions of “moral fiction”—used to advise, “When in doubt, go for dramaturgy.” Amen to that.
Back to Aristotle: The distinction between Plot and Action can be useful to what we might call clinical dramaturgical analysis, since a story’s problems may lie in the one but not the other. As a classroom exercise, one can summarize the story of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, for example, entirely in terms of its plot with little or no reference to its action: “A happily married and much-respected head of state comes to learn that his eminent position is owing to his having unwittingly broken two major-league taboos, and in a day his fortunes are reversed.” Clearly, any number of imaginable sequences of action might body forth that summarized plot. One then proceeds to examine for efficiency and effect the particular sequence chosen by Sophocles to do the job. Indeed, one may summarize the drama contrariwise, entirely in terms of its action with little or no reference to its plot: “A delegation of Theban elders complains to King Oedipus that a plague has fallen upon the place. The King sends his brother-in-law to the Delphic oracle to find out what’s going on. That emissary returns with news of the gods’ displeasure. The chorus of elders sings and dances apprehensively,” et cetera.