Final Fridays

by John Barth

  2. Or it may not be, since a gifted reader may breathe life into an indifferent text, and an ineffective reader can make humdrum-mery out of a passage that might quite move us on the silent page. And there are passages of world-class fiction that one would be ill-advised to choose for “performance”: the exhaustive and exhausting catalogues in Francois Rabelais’ great Gargantua and Pantagruel, for example, or those deliberately grueling, unparagraphed, relentless stretches in some of the late Thomas Bernhard’s first-rate novels.

  3. That an excellent reading need not at all be histrionic or “dramatic” in the popular sense of that adjective. The art of theater is not the same as the art of public reading, and indeed some of the most memorable author-readings of my experience—the late Donald Barthelme’s, for instance—were delivered in a downright anti-histrionic, even deadpan style perfectly appropriate to the material and wonderfully effective. I have heard John Updike read memorably despite his occasional, fleeting, and actually quite endearing stammer, which only served to remind us that his extraordinary eloquence is after all human. I have heard Joseph Heller read the scene of Snowden’s dying in Catch-22 in the author’s unreconstructed Coney Island accent, which at once became for me the voice of that novel, the way Grace Paley’s New York Jewish intonations, once heard live, spring pleasurably thereafter from her pages to my ear. And my (alas!) also-late friend John Hawkes:3 Who of us who’ve relished his sonorous cadences in the flesh, so to speak, does not hear them with a smile and a wistful headshake whenever our eyes fall upon any of his pages?

  Oscar Wilde once mischievously declared that anyone who can read the death of Little Nell (from Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop) without laughing must have a heart of stone. I understand what he means, but all the same I wish I could have heard the great Charles read that passage, and I’ll bet I’d have been moved if not to tears (as were the Victorian audiences of that most famous of author/readers) then at least to the exhilaration that comes from virtuoso instances of the oldest of narrative arts: the art of Homer and Scheherazade, of Uncle Remus and Garrison Keillor; the art not only of storytelling but of story-telling.

  The End Of The Word As We’ve Known It?

  A follow-up to “The State of the Art,” delivered here and there on the lecture/reading circuit back at the turn of the millennium.

  NOW THAT WE seem to have made the transition more or less safely into the new century and millennium, it may require some effort of memory to recall that back in the late Nineteen Hundreds—especially in the year we called “1999”—the word “TEOTWAWKI” was a popular acronym for the most apocalyptic of “Y2K” scenarios: TEOTWAWKI, The End Of The World As We Know It. Difficult as it may be to believe from this historical distance (a full twelvemonth later), chronicles of the period tell us that in certain precincts of Planet Earth it was seriously believed that either widespread critical computer failures or the Second Coming of Christ, perhaps both, would precipitate the collapse of our technology-dependent society, followed very possibly by literal or anyhow figurative Armageddon. The End Time! Eschaton! The end of the world as we’d known it! Convinced TEOTWAWKIs went so far in some instances as to build well-stocked refuges out in the boondocks and to arm themselves against the expected desperate hordes of a no longer civilized civilization. A few, of the Christian-apocalyptic persuasion, put everything behind them and followed their leaders or went on their own to Jerusalem or some comparably appropriate venue to await the Rapture and its sequelae. Even among the skeptical and conservative, we’re told, many withdrew a wad of extra cash and laid in some daysworth of nonperishable food and jugged water, as their government’s Y2K advisors recommended. For such as those (my wife and me among them) these precautions amounted to a scaled-down secular version of Pascal’s famous Wager concerning the existence of God: The world as we knew it wasn’t likely to end, we figured, but at least the weekend might be messed up; no harm in hedging our bets a bit. And so we did.

  TEOTWAWKI: In my tidewater-Chesapeake ears, the word sounds like a large, rather ungainly waterfowl taking flight. Great Blue Herons, for example, make a sound like that when they take off or flap in for a landing: TEOTWA W-KI! Characteristically too, on lift-off they emit, along with the squawk but from their other end, a copious white jet of birdlime. And there was certainly no shortage of that back in ’99, associated with what in our house was known as TEOTCAMATTGCACM: The End Of The Century And Millennium According To The Gregorian Calendar As Commonly Misconstrued.

  ENOUGH, HOWEVER, OF all that. My advertised topic here is not TEOTWorldAWKI, but TEOTWordAWKI (with a question-mark after it): the here-and-there-speculated end of the Word—specifically the printed and bookbound fictive word—as we’ve known it. But I can’t resist wondering for another paragraph or two how red-faced (or whatever) those folks must have been, must indeed still be, who really believed back in ’99 that the show was over, the end truly at hand. The rest of us could more or less sheepishly redeposit our excess cash, draw down our hoard of trail mix and bottled water, and go on with our lives, feeling that we had after all merely been being prudent. But what of those (so my novelist’s imagination wonders) who truly burned their bridges; who put behind them, perhaps irretrievably, everything once dear in order to follow—perhaps even to lead—a gaggle of like-minded TEOTWAWKIs to wherever in preparation for The End, and then saw Y2K-night embarrassingly come and go with no other fireworks than the jim-dandy ones televised from Sydney and London, Times Square and the D.C. Mall?

  One can hazard a few educated guesses about those folks. Apocalypticism was not invented in 1999; indeed, what the novelist Salman Rushdie once called “endism”—the conviction that the world’s clock has just about run—has such a long and busy history that back in 1956 a team of sociologists published a fascinating study of what happens among dead-serious TEOTWAWKIs out in their desert or up on their mountaintop the morning after, so to speak, and the morning after that, as the world mortifyingly persists much as before.1 What they found—as one might have guessed—is that while some disillusioned and disaffected disciples give their prophet the finger and make their way back home to pick up what pieces they can, the more common reaction is rationalization, followed by even more radical commitment or coercion—for these folks are, after all, way out on a limb, their entire self-respect at stake, their “belief structure” in crisis. So okay, they’re likely to say, or to be told by their leader: The timetable may require a bit of tweaking, but the essential prophecy remains valid. Curtains-time is coming soon, don’t you doubt it; what may appear to our merely mortal eyes and minds to be delays and postponements are simply errors in our human reckoning, perhaps even tests to weed out the weak of faith. We did not pray hard enough; we did not burn every bridge behind us, purge ourselves of every reservation. Here’s our chance to show the world (and our Leader, and our fellow followers) what real commitment is! Et cetera.

  The pressures in that line must be tremendous. Back in November of 1978, when 914 disciples of the guru Jim Jones more or less voluntarily drank poisoned purple Kool-Aid in their Jonestown Guyana commune, the novelist James Michener happened to be our guest at Johns Hopkins, and was asked by someone in his audience what he thought of that prodigious autodestruction. Michener’s reply—a quite sage reply, in my opinion—was that the first 50-or-so “victims” didn’t surprise him; it was at that enormous remainder that he shook his head in sad amazement. But after all, their world had ended: not only the world of their previous lives and the life-connections put behind them, but also the isolated world of voluntary submission and exploitation that they had seen fit to commit themselves to under their charismatic leader’s spell, which seemed about to be dispelled by congressional investigators of the Rev. Mr. Jones’s reported abuses of his position.

  Well: Worlds are always ending, are they not? Not only such catastrophically beleaguered worlds as that of the Zealots besieged by Roman legions at Masada in 73 c.e., for example, or that of European Jews before Hitler’s Final Sol
ution; not only such more gradually beleaguered worlds as that of the Algonquin Indian tribes upon the arrival of English Colonists in Virginia and Maryland, but likewise the temporarily victorious worlds that displaced these unfortunates: the worlds of Imperial Rome and the Third Reich and the prosperous 18th-century colonial tidewater tobacco plantations that supplanted the indigenous Native Americans. The small-town Maryland neighborhood in which I was born and raised during the Great Depression and World War II is a world long since gone, although most of its streets and trees and houses spookily remain in place. From the microworlds of the Harlem Renaissance and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age to the macroworlds of Victorian England and the Soviet Union, or for that matter the worlds of Earth’s Pleistocene era and its fast-fleeting successor, our very own Holocene; from MGM musical extravaganzas of the 1940s to our local solar system, whatever lives in time dies in time, and can be considered ipso facto to be always in the process of ending. So?

  SO LET’S CONSIDER whether—or, rather, how—the same applies to the world in which we meet here today: the world that fetches people like me to college campuses to speak to people like you, and that fetches you from your other pleasures and concerns to come hear what I have to say. I mean, of course, the world in which literature, for example, is written, published, and at least occasionally read and discussed: literature in general, but more particularly prose fiction, and most particularly what we’re accustomed to calling novels. Printed novels, as it used to go without saying: the dramatic interactions of imaginary characters narrated at some length by their author in language printed in ink on paper pages numbered sequentially and bound into books, to be read by presumably though not necessarily individual readers who (also presumably though not necessarily) begin on page one and proceed thence to page two, page three, et cetera, in typically though not necessarily silent transaction with the printed text. Will that do as a working definition of the form? It is a category of art and entertainment, please permit me to remind you, that more or less developed in the 17th century, although there are notable earlier instances even before the development of print technology; that then flowered in the 18th and 19th centuries, fertilized by the Industrial Revolution and the ascendancy of a middle class with the time, means, and ability to read; and that then in the 20th century was believed in many quarters to have become more or less moribund, an endangered species, its niche in the culture’s aesthetic ecology usurped by successive new technologies of narrative/ dramatic entertainment such as movies, network radio, television, videocassette recorders, and, at that century’s close, by the interactive pleasures of the Internet, including online magazines, “e-books,” and even hypertextual multimedia electronic fiction, of which more presently. Toward mid-century especially—at the apex of what was called High Modernism in the arts of what was called Western Civilization, before Postmodernism and personal computers had even hit the fan—it became so fashionable for literary theorizers to titillate themselves with the subject of The Death of the Novel that I used half-seriously to warn aspiring fiction-writers, in the universities where I coached them back then, that they were apprenticing themselves in an art perhaps destined soon to become as passé as vaudeville, as quaint as the Magic Lantern and the Stereopticon, as limited and “special” in its range of audience as is equestrian dressage, say, or narrative poetry since the ascendancy of the novel. While busily writing novels myself, I took it as my coachly duty in those days to familiarize my coachees with such mordantly witty Cassandras of our medium as the European critic E. M. Cioran, from whom I would quote cautionary tidbits like this one, from his essay “Beyond the Novel”: . . . the material of literature grows thinner every day, and that of the novel, more limited, vanishes before our very eyes. Is it really dead, or only dying? My incompetence keeps me from making up my mind. After asserting that it is finished, remorse assails me: what if the novel were still alive? In that case, I leave it to others, more expert, to establish the precise degree of its agony.

  And then I would encourage them, and myself, with the critic Leslie Fiedler’s heartening observation that the novel was, after all, born a-dying, like all of us (Fiedler had in mind the genre’s European origins in parody and satire, such as Cervantes’s transcendent satire of chivalric romances in Don Quixote and Henry Fielding’s hilariously scathing Shamela, a parody of Samuel Richardson’s pioneering epistolary novel Pamela); that it has gone on dying vigorously for several centuries since, and that we may hope to enjoy its continuing terminality for some time to come. I would suggest to my charges that like the doomed tubercular sopranos dear to 19th-century Italian opera, the Novel might be reserving its best arias for the end of Act Three, its ring-down-the-curtain swan song. And since neither I nor they had been on hand to compose Act One, mightn’t it be something to score that curtain-closer?

  Having thus encouraged and inspirited them, however, I felt obliged to remind my young Novelist Aspirants that the art of made-up stories appears to have managed quite nicely for a very long while before the invention of writing, even, not to mention before the inventions of paper, ink, movable-type printing, general literacy, and mass-produced book-bound extended prose fictions borrowable from public libraries or purchasable online as well as from mega-bookmarts along with croissants and cafe latté; and that that art would doubtless survive the supersession of any or all of those inventions. The Death of the Novel, in short—if that so-long-heralded, almost anticlimactic expiration should finally come to pass—would not likely be the end of story-making, story-transmission, and story-reception by one means or another. Even TEOTWordAWKI, the end of the word as we’ve known it, would not spell the doom of Storying, although it would certainly leave us old-fashioned print-novelists in an awkward position.

  SO: IS OUR soprano still robustly melodious in her terminality, like Violetta in La Traviata and Mimi in La Bohème, or has her song all but given way to last-gasping? One notes that the literal tuberculosis that was such a grim staple of 19th-century life, and therefore of 19th-century novels as well as operas, made an ominous curtain-call toward the end of the 20th, thanks to international air travel, but that it has (at least for the present) been largely contained by antibiotics. 2 Could it be that some cultural-historical-technological equivalent of the TB-pharmaceutical Isoniazid has appeared like a deus ex machina to save the Novel’s life, or at least to postpone The End? And why should anybody care one way or the other, except the few people who happen to devote their lives to the writing of fiction, and the slightly larger number engaged in editing, publishing, and selling it, and the larger yet but by no means overwhelming number who still read it for pleasure? What did those literary-critical Cassandras mean anyway, back there in the 20th century, by “the death of the novel”? That the likes of John Grisham and Danielle Steel and their millions of readers are dinosaurs unaware that the asteroid of their extinction has already struck? Or merely that the Heroic Age of the novel—the age of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, of Tolstoy and the Brontë sisters, Balzac and Victor Hugo and Mark Twain—had given way to the brilliant decadence of Modernism, to Proust and Joyce and Kafka, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein and Thomas Mann (whose 1924 novel The Magic Mountain happens also to be the great culminating gasp of Tuberculosis as a literary and thence operatic motif)?

  I shall speak to those questions, perhaps even systematically, after a classical digression—by which I mean a digression into classical lit, not a classical instance of wandering from the subject. In Spain a few years ago, by the way, my wife and I stopped in the attractive old hill-town of Úbeda, in the Andalusian foothills of the Sierra Morena, where the 11th-century soldiers of King Alfonso VI were besieged by the Moors until the legendary El Cid belatedly arrived with reinforcements to lift the siege. “What took you so long?” the exasperated king is said to have demanded of his tardy rescuer—to which El Cid is said to have replied, “I have been wandering the hills of Úbeda.” Spanish friends of ours told us subsequently that that phrase is still use
d to describe a lecturer, for example, who strays from his or her announced subject: “Se marcha por los cerros de Úbeda.” Awhile back I referred to those mid-century Death-of-the-Novel types as “Cassandras,” invoking the apocalyptic prophetess in Homer’s Iliad who foresees the destruction of Troy but can’t get anybody to take her seriously. Now that I’ve used the word apocalyptic—a much-heard word indeed at the close of the past century and millennium—it occurs to me to point out that while many of us were reminded in print and on television, as Y2K approached, that apocalypse comes from the Greek apo, meaning “reversal,” and kalupsein, meaning “to cover,” hence an uncovering, an unveiling, or (as every reader of the New Testament knows) a revelation, perhaps fewer of us remember that the sexy sea-nymph Calypso in Homer’s Odyssey, who detains the hero for seven lusty years on his erratic homeward voyage from ruined Troy, takes her name from the same root. Calypso is “she who conceals,” metaphorically speaking, Odysseus’s proper objective from him—his return to faithful Penelope and their troubled estate—by her long-term seduction of that errant though resourceful fellow. Calypso is the alluring aspect of Melville’s “great shroud of the sea,” which rolls on and covers everything at the end of Moby-Dick; she can also be thought of as the Goddess of Digression—to whom I have now paid more than adequate homage, and from whose embrace I now return to my apocalyptic subject: TEOTWordAWKI.

  Back to the burning questions, beginning with whether the novel is toast as a major mode of popular narrative entertainment in what we call the advanced industrialized world or merely passé as a major genre of literary art. I myself would say “Neither,” although the answer obviously depends on what’s meant by Major. Indisputably, most people in the world we’re speaking of spend more time spectating stories via television and movies nowadays than reading them off the printed page or the pixelated computer monitor. And indisputably the popular audience for the noble genre of the short story has all but disappeared by comparison to the palmy days of periodicals like The Saturday Evening Post, when an Edna Ferber or an “O. Henry” could acquire an enormous readership on the basis of magazine publication alone—quite apart, in Ms. Ferber’s case, from her success as a popular novelist. But the short story is a whole’nother story. Back at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, however, the commerce in printed book-length fiction evidently remains brisk, although the institutions of trade fiction publishing, distribution, and sale are less kind than they were half a century ago to non-blockbuster, “mid-list” novelists of high literary quality. One still sees occasionally, though perhaps less often than once upon a time, novels of impressive literary merit and low advance promotion, written by previously unknown authors, make their way onto the bestseller lists by sheer word-of-mouth advertising: Charles Frazier’s admirable Cold Mountain (1998) comes hearteningly to mind. And I believe that the aesthetics of literary Modernism, with its notorious tendency to divide novels, for example, into either High Art on the one hand or pop entertainment on the other, is far enough behind us now so that I, for one, am gratified at the sight of people still reading any kind of fiction for pleasure, in airports and airplanes and on beaches and for all I know in the privacy of their homes as well, between surfing the Web and surfing the cable channels. Competition from glitzy and convenient alternative media has no doubt reduced the novel’s share of literate-audience attention (I mean “literate” here in both senses of that adjective); but the fiction alcoves of our public libraries remain fairly busy still, with wait-lists for popular titles; one hears that community book-clubs are on the rise; and even noncommercial fictors like me may learn to their surprise that there exist websites for our books out there in Cyberland. On a continuum of species-imperilment extending from starlings and rabbits on the safe end to pygmy owls and rhinoceri on the other, I’m inclined to position the capital-N Novel somewhere in the neighborhood of the bald eagle or maybe even the osprey, its numbers unquestionably reduced from its glory-days by habitat loss and other ecological pressures, but its status still considerable and its reasonably vigorous continuation in no apparent short-term danger. I’ll return to this zoological analogy later.