by John Barth
For reasons that will deliver me to the conclusion of this little homage, I regard Calvino as by far the finest writer in that lively Parisian group, which included the French/Polish Georges Perec and the American Harry Mathews, along with Queneau himself and a number of “recreational mathematicians” disporting with algorithmic narratives, or narrative algorithms. Calvino’s skill at and delight in combinatory possibilities, a sort of structural molteplicità, led him into enthusiasms that I cannot always share—e.g., for the aforementioned Georges Perec, whose “hyper-novel” La vie mode d’emploi (Life, a User’s Manual) Calvino calls “the last real event in the history of the novel thus far” (surely he means “latest,” not “last”) and which I myself find not only vertiginously ingenious but almost merely vertiginously ingenious. I read about a quarter of it, got the intricate idea (with Calvino’s help), nodded my official approval, and could not force myself through the remaining three-quarters, confident as I was that the author would not miss a trick. Likewise, I have to confess, with Perec’s algorithmic earlier novel La Disparition (translated as A Void), which so ingeniously manages not to use even once the most-used alphabetical letter in both French and English that at least some of the book’s reviewers failed to notice that stupendous stunt. I shake my head in awe, but agree finally with the Englishman who said, vis-à-vis some other such feat, “It’s a bit like farting Annie Laurie through a keyhole: damned clever, but why bother?”
That question happens to be answerable, but I prefer to move on to Calvino’s superiority, in my view, to such near-mere stunts; to his transcension of his own “oulipesque” enthusiasms; and to the close of this talk. At his Johns Hopkins reading in 1976, Calvino briefly described the conceit of his Invisible Cities novel and then said, “Now I want to read just one little . . .” He hesitated for a moment to find the word he wanted. “. . . one little aria from that novel.” Said I to myself, “Exactly, Italo, and bravissimo!” The saving difference between Calvino and the other wizards of OULIPO was that (bless his Italian heart and excuse the stereotyping) he knew when to stop formalizing and start singing—or better, how to make the formal rigors themselves sing. What Calvino said of Perec very much applied to his own shop: that the constraints of those crazy algorithms and other combinatorial rules, so far from stifling his imagination, positively stimulated it. For that reason, he once told me, he enjoyed accepting difficult commissions, such as writing the Crossed Destinies novel to accompany the Ricci edition of I Tarocchi or, more radically yet, composing a story without words, to be the dramatic armature of a proposed ballet (Calvino made up a wordless story about the invention of dancing).
TO COME NOW to the last of these paralleli: Both Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino managed marvelously to combine in their fiction the values that I call Algebra and Fire (I’m borrowing those terms here, as I have done elsewhere, from Borges’s First Encyclopedia of Tlön, a realm complete, he reports, “with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire”). Let “algebra” stand for formal ingenuity, and “fire” for what touches our emotions (it’s tempting to borrow instead Calvino’s alternative values of “crystal” and “flame,” from his lecture on exactitude, but he happens not to mean by those terms what I’m referring to here). Formal virtuosity itself can of course be breathtaking, but much algebra and little or no fire makes for mere gee-whizzery, like Queneau’s Exercises in Style and A Hundred Thousand Billion Sonnets. Much fire and little or no algebra, on the other hand, makes for heartfelt muddles—no examples needed. What most of us want from literature most of the time is passionate virtuosity, and both Borges and Calvino deliver it. Although I find both writers indispensable and would never presume to rank them as literary artists, by my lights Calvino perhaps comes closer to being the very model of a modern major Postmodernist (not that that very much matters), or whatever the capacious bag is that can contain such otherwise dissimilar spirits as Donald Barthelme, Samuel Beckett, J. L. Borges, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Gabriel García Márquez, Elsa Morante, Vladimir Nabokov, Grace Paley, Thomas Pynchon, et al. . . . What I mean is not only the fusion of algebra and fire, the great (and in Calvino’s case high-spirited) virtuosity, the massive acquaintance with and respectfully ironic recycling of what Umberto Eco calls “the already said,” and the combination of storytelling charm with zero naiveté, but also the keeping of one authorial foot in narrative antiquity while the other rests firmly in the high-tech (in Calvino’s case, the Parisian “structuralist”) narrative present. Add to this what I have cited as our chap’s perhaps larger humanity and in-the-worldness, and you have my reasons.
All except one, which will serve as the last of my anti-paralleli: It seems to me that Borges’s narrative geometry, so to speak, is essentially Euclidean. He goes in for rhomboids, quincunxes, and chess logic; even his ubiquitous infinities are of a linear, “Euclidean” sort. In Calvino’s spirals and vertiginous recombinations I see a mischievous element of the non-Euclidean; he shared my admiration, for example, of Boccaccio’s invention of the character Dioneo in the Decameron: the narrative Dionysian wild card who exempts himself from the company’s rules and thus adds a lively element of (constrained) unpredictability to the narrative program. I didn’t have the opportunity to speak with Calvino about quantum mechanics and chaos theory, but my strong sense is that he would have regarded them as metaphorically rich and appealing.
DID THESE TWO splendid writers ever meet?7 Calvino’s esteem for Borges is a matter of record; I regret having neglected to ask Borges, in our half-dozen brief conversations, his opinion of Calvino. My own esteem for both you will by now have divined. In Euclidean geometry, paralleli never meet, but it is among the first principles of non-Euclidean geometry that they do meet—not in Limbo, where Dante, led by Virgil, meets the shades of Homer and company, but in infinity.
A pretty principle, no? One worthy of an Italo Calvino, to make it sing.
Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. From Album Calvino, ed. Luca Baranelli and Ernesto Ferrero (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1995).
My Faulkner
First delivered at a conference on William Faulkner at the University of Mississippi in 1999, this brief appreciation of that novelist’s importance to this one was subsequently included (along with more scholarly presentations by other participants in the conference) in the volume Faulkner and Postmodernism, published later that year.1 Reviewing my amateur remarks in the context of theirs, I’m reminded of what Flannery O’Connor is reported to have said about her work’s being compared to Faulkner’s: “Best get off the track when the Dixie Special’s coming down the line.”
IT’S UNDERSTOOD, I trust, that I’m with you today not in my capacity as a Faulkner specialist, for I have no such capacity, but merely and purely as a writer of fiction, who will presently read a short passage from a not markedly Faulknerian work in progress.2 But the great American writer celebrated by this annual conference happens to have been among my first-magnitude navigation stars during my literary apprenticeship, and I’d like to speak a bit to that subject before I change voices.
In 1947, virtually innocent of literature, I matriculated as a freshman at the Johns Hopkins University. I can scarcely remember now what I had been taught before that in the English courses of our semi-rural, semi-redneck 11-year county public school system on Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore; I certainly don’t recall having been much touched by any of it, or inspired by any of my pleasant, well-meaning teachers. I borrowed books busily from the available libraries3—Tom Swift, Edgar Rice Burroughs—and indiscriminately from my father’s small-town soda-fountain/lunchroom, whose stock in trade included magazines, piano sheet music, and the newfangled paperbound pocket books: Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, and my favorite of all, the Avon Fantasy Reader series (Abe Merritt, John Collier, and H. P. Lovecraft, inter alia). I remember being baffled but intrigued by an item called Manhattan Transfer, by one John Dos
Passos, and by another called Sanctuary, by somebody named William Faulkner, when they turned up randomly in my borrowings. Those were, I came to understand later, my accidental first exposures to modern lit; I sensed their difference from my regular diet, and even found and read some other items by that Faulkner fellow in the pile: The Wild Palms, Soldier’s Pay, and Pylon. On the whole, however, I was more intrigued by another anthology series just then appearing on Dad’s shelves, called The Ribald Reader: pretty spicy stuff by my then standards, and illustrated with titillative line-drawings. What I only dimly registered at the time was that those naughty anthologies were of considerable literary quality and admirable eclecticism: Their ribaldry was culled from the Decameron, Pentameron, and Heptameron, from The 1001 Nights and the Gesta Romanorum and the Panchatantra, among other exotic sources—all news to me, and not to be found in either the Dorchester County Public or the Cambridge (Maryland) school libraries (where The Arabian Nights was a much-abridged and expurgated edition illustrated by N. C. Wyeth).
My declared major as a very green Hopkins freshman was Journalism: One was obliged to choose something, and I had done a humor column for our school newspaper in my senior year. Never mind how I stumbled from journalism into fiction-writing; what’s relevant here, in retrospect, is that the literature most provocative to my adolescent curiosity, apart from the mystery novels and Tom Swifties, was not the canonical classics, but Modernism on the one hand (as represented in its American grain by the Dos Passos and those early, mostly minor Faulkners) and on the other hand the venerable tale-cycle tradition, as represented ribaldly in those Avon Readers. At Hopkins I had professors both excellent and inspiring and was at last baptized, though not totally immersed, in the canonical mainstream—but two circumstances, fortunate for me, reinforced those earlier, fugitive, extracurricular samplings.
The first, as I’ve written elsewhere,4 was my very good luck in having to help pay my way by filing books in the university library. “My” stacks happened to be the voluminous ones of the Classics Department and of William Foxwell Albright’s Oriental Seminary, as it was then called; the books on my cart therefore included not only Homer and Virgil and other such standard curricular items, but also Petronius and Apuleius and the unabridged Scheherazade and the Panchatantra and The Ocean of the Streams of Story and the Vetalapanchavimsata as well as, by some alcove-gerrymandering, Boccaccio and Rabelais and Marguerite of Angouleme and Giovanni Basile and Poggio Bracciolini and Pietro Aretino—hot stuff, which I sampled eagerly as I filed, and often borrowed from the book-cart to take home and read right through: what I think of as my à la carte education.
The second lucky circumstance is that in Hopkins’s literature departments at that time, one did not generally study still-living or even recently dead authors; but our brand-new and somewhat frowned-upon Department of Writing, Speech, and Drama (later renamed the Writing Seminars) broke ranks and energetically held forth on Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, and Faulkner—this last via my very first fiction-writing coach, a Marine-combat-veteran teaching assistant from the deep South at work on the university’s first-ever doctoral dissertation on the sage of Oxford, Miss.
Let’s cut to the chase: For the next three years I imitated everybody, badly, in search of my writerly self, while downloading my innumerable predecessors as only an insatiable green apprentice can. Owing to some tension between our writing operation and the English Department, my curricular reading in literature was freighted with the Greek and Roman classics, with Dante and Cervantes and Flaubert, and with the big Modernists aforementioned, while my library cart supplied me with extracurricular exotica. What I never got, for better or worse, was the standard fare of English majors: good basic training in Chaucer and Shakespeare and the big 18th-and 19th-century English novelists, though there had been some naughty Canterbury Tales in those Ribald Readers, and I reveled in Fielding and Dickens on my own. So many voices; so many eloquent and wildly various voices—none more mesmerizing to me (thanks to that ex-Marine T.A. writing coach, the late Robert Durene Jacobs of Georgia State University) than Faulkner’s. I read all of him, I believe—all of him as of that mid-century date—and I saw that the Faulkners I’d stumbled upon in high-school days were mostly warm-ups for such chef d’oeuvres as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom. It was Faulkner at his most involuted and incantatory who most enchanted me, and while I had (and have) never thought of myself as a capital-S Southerner—nor a Northerner either, having grown up virtually astride Mason’s and Dixon’s Line—I felt a strong affinity between Faulkner’s Mississippi and the Chesapeake marsh-country that I was born and raised in. My apprentice fiction grew increasingly Faulknerish, and when I stayed on at Johns Hopkins as a graduate student, my M.A. thesis and maiden attempt at a novel was a heavily Faulknerian marsh-opera about sinisterly inbred Chesapeake crabbers and muskrat trappers. The young William Styron, visiting our seminar fresh from winning his National Book Award for Lie Down in Darkness, listened patiently to one particularly purple chapter, a mishmash of middle Faulkner and late Joyce, and charitably praised it; but the finished opus didn’t fly—for one thing, because Faulkner intimately knew his Snopeses and Compsons and Sartorises, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Maryland marsh. A copy of the manuscript made the rounds of Manhattan in vain until my agent gave up on it; I later destroyed it as an embarrassment. The original languished in the dissertation-stacks of the Hopkins library for a couple of decades until, to my indignant half-relief, some unprincipled rascal stole it. Thanks anyhow, Bill Faulkner and Bill Styron.
AND WHERE WERE Scheherazade and company all this time? Singing in my other ear and inspiring my second and final major apprentice effort: A Faulknerian/Boccaccian hybrid this time, called The Dorchester Tales: 100 tales of my Eastern Shore Yoknapatawpha at all periods of its human history. This, too, failed, at round about Tale 50, and this manuscript too, lest it come back to haunt me, I later destroyed except for a few nuggets that worked their way, reorchestrated, into The Sot-Weed Factor. But I like to think that it was a step in the right direction: an attempt to combine the two principal strains of my literary DNA. In hindsight, as I’ve declared elsewhere,5 it’s clear to me that what I needed to do was find some way to book Faulkner, Joyce, and Scheherazade on the same tidewater showboat, with myself at both the helm and the steam calliope. Another way to put it is that I needed to discover, or to be discovered by, what later came to be called Postmodernism. With the help of yet another fortuitous and highly unlikely input—the turn-of-the-century Brazilian novelist Joaquim Machado de Assis, whose works I stumbled upon in the mid-1950s, this came to pass.
In the decades since, I am obliged to report, although the figure of Ms. Scheherazade has remained so central to my imagination that merely to hear one of the themes from Rimsky-Korsakov’s suite is enough to deliquesce me yet, Mr. Faulkner’s currency in my shop has had its ups and downs. My wife used to teach Light in August to her high-school seniors; while rereading it periodically for that purpose, she would recite memorable passages to me, and a time came when the rhetoric that had once so appealed to me now seemed . . . over-pumped. I would tease her (and Faulkner, and myself) by wondering, for example, whether it was the Immemorial Wagon-Wheels going down the Outraged Path or the Outraged Wheels on the Immemorial Path, and what final difference there was between those sonorous propositions.
¿Cien Años de Qué?
The following was delivered (in English) in 1998 at Spain’s León University as part of the conference described below and published two years later in Volume I of that conference’s proceedings.1
WHAT A REMARKABLE occasion for a pan-American literary conference at a Spanish university: the centennial of the Spanish-American War and of Spain’s consequent loss of her last American colonies; the end of her enormous empire, which, as the British historian Hugh Thomas recently declared, “in its duration and cultural influence . . . overshadows the empires of Britain,
France, Holland, Belgium, and even Russia.”
At first one might wonder, Why commemorate such an historical setback with a literary conference? But then one remembers that when a newspaper reporter once asked William Faulkner what, in his opinion, accounted for the impressive literary flowering of the North American Southland after our Civil War, Faulkner replied: “We lost.” And does not Homer somewhere remark ironically that “Wars are fought so that poets will have something to sing about”? Perhaps we can revise that obiter dictum to read “Wars are lost so that” et cetera. Clearly, the aphorism applies with particular poignancy to Spain after 1898. I shall return to it after expressing my gratitude to this university, to the Fulbright Commission, and to the organizers of this conference for providing my wife and me with an occasion to revisit España: a country for which we share a longstanding affection; a country that we have visited a number of times over the decades, and that has been of some importance to me as a writer of fiction.
Indeed, for reasons that I shall presently make clear, one of my tentative titles for this talk was “One Hundred Years of Gratitude” (Cien Años de Gratitud: The rhyme with solitude works in English, though not in Spanish). Reflecting upon the literary activity in North and South America since 1898 and upon literary relations between the two continents as well, I also considered “One Hundred Years of Plenitude.” But then, shaking my head at some unfortunate aspects of our political relations through that period, I thought perhaps “One Hundred Years of Turpitude” might be more appropriate. (Do we have the word turpitud en español? No? We certainly have it in English.) And then, considering what my more knowledgeable friends tell me of the vigor and diversity of contemporary Spanish literature, I considered “The (Re)Generation of ’98;2 or, Forget the Maine!” To this subject, too—I mean the infamous event that triggered the Spanish-American War—I shall return.