by John Barth
12 E.g. Dante’s out-Virgiling of Virgil in Canto IV of the Inferno, where he writes of himself being saluted in Limbo by the shades of both Homer and Virgil (not to mention Horace, Ovid, and Lucan), who welcome him as their peer.
13 Aeneas sometimes strays from destiny’s path, as in his Carthaginian interlude with Queen Dido (Virgil’s dutiful remake of Odysseus’s long tryst with Calypso), but Mother Venus soon enough corrects his course.
14 A passage that never fails to remind me, profanely but respectfully, of Yeats’s awed question in Leda and the Swan: “A shudder in the loins engenders there / The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead.... / Did she put on his knowledge with his power . . . ?” On Matthew’s evidence, the son, if not the mother, did.
15 As instanced by Virgil and Dante, the vocation of artisthood bears some analogy to those of mythic-herohood and messiahship—conspicuously so for the Romantics and the great early Modernists, with their characteristic conception of the artist as hero (one recalls James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, originally named Stephen Hero, vowing to “forge, in the smithy of my soul, the uncreated conscience of my race”), more modestly so even for Postmoderns. In at least some cases, the present author’s included, one’s apprentice sense of calling may be far from clear even to oneself, and the “Jesus Paradox” may take on difficult additional dimensions, though seldom with such high stakes as attend the callings of mythic heroes and messiahs. One may be uncertain of both one’s vocation and one’s talent for it, or confident of one of those but not the other, or confident of both but mistaken, or doubtful of both but mistaken, or correct on one or both counts. In the happiest case, one comes to have reasonable faith in both calling and gift and at least some “objective” confirmation that that faith is not altogether misplaced. But “real, non-scripted life” is slippery terrain, in which templates and prophecies are ill-defined, elastic, arguable, and verdicts are forever subject to reversal. One crosses one’s fingers, invokes one’s muse, and does one’s best.
How it Was, Maybe
1 It’s the genre’s notorious tendency to substitute period color, historical information, and melodrama for other novelistic values.
2 A totally fabricated account of the doughty Captain’s defloration of that thitherto impregnable maiden. But many scholars question Smith’s own account of his rescue by Pocahontas.
3 In fact, Powhatan’s people stream-bathed almost daily, and found the English to be foul-smelling.
4 Indeed, in a second edition of the satire, published in Annapolis in 1731, Cooke quite de-fangs the sot-weed factor’s closing curse:. . . may that Land where Hospitality
Is every Planter’s darling Quality,
Be by each Trader kindly us’d,
And may no Trader be abus’d;
Thus each of them will deal with Pleasure,
And each increase the other’s Treasure.
I confess my preference for the original ending.
Further Questions?
1 Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.
2 See the memoir “The Judge’s Jokes,” farther on in this volume.
3 A decade later, it exceeds 500.
4 Both figures proportionately higher a decade later, like the number of degree-granting creative writing programs in American colleges.
5 See my essay “It’s a Long Story,” in The Friday Book.
6 For more on these tools, see “The Inkstained Thumb,” farther on in this collection.
7 Enrique García Diez, late of the University of Valencia.
8 “Night-Sea Journey,” in Lost in the Funhouse.
9 Itself now a dated question in the age of DVDs, themselves perhaps outdated in turn by technologies that more with-it folk than my wife and I are acquainted with.
10 See “The State of the Art,” earlier in this volume.
11 See “Eulogy for Jill,” at this volume’s close.
12 Or to the essay following this one: “Incremental Perturbation.”
13 Further elaborated in “Incremental Perturbation.”
14 Boston: Little, Brown, 1991.
Incremental Perturbation
1 Creating Fiction, ed. Checkoway (Cincinnati: Story Press, 1999).
2 More typically, however, the productions of these two writers, unconventional as may be their material and manner, are rigorously conventional in their dramaturgy. Kafka’s “Memoirs of the Kalda Railroad” and Barthelme’s “Bone Bubbles” are examples of non-dramatic extended metaphors; “A Hunger Artist,” “The Country Doctor,” “The Indian Rising,” “Me and Miss Mandible,” and most of the rest are classically constructed stories.
3 E.g., Samuel Beckett’s 35-second drama Breath: Curtain opens on stage empty except for scattered rubbish. Voice-off sound of single human cry. Voice-off sound of single long inhalation and exhalation of breath, accompanied by brightening and then dimming of stage-lights. Again the cry. Curtain closes.
“The Parallels!”
1 I pause immediately here to insert a footnoted but emphatically grateful hurrah to Mr. Weaver for bringing so many excellent modern Italian writers to us language-challenged Americans. There was a time, back in the 1950s and ’60s, when I suspected that the French New Novel might have been invented in New York City by the poet Richard Howard, inasmuch as most of what I knew of Alain Robbe-Grillet and company was in Mr. Howard’s translations. Similarly, most of what I know of such splendid writers as Elsa Morante, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Italo Calvino, and Umberto Eco I know in William Weaver’s English. If I hadn’t had the good fortune to interrogate a couple of these authors personally in the matter, I might well suspect Mr. Weaver of having invented Italian Postmodernist fiction—not that his having Englished it isn’t a sufficiently admirable achievement. Molto grazie, William Weaver!
2 Collected in The Friday Book.
3 The unwritten sixth, to be called “Consistency,” was to have dealt with Samuel Beckett and with Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. Esther Calvino’s foreword reports her husband’s remark that he had material enough for eight Norton lectures, of which the last was to have been on Beginnings and Endings (“Sul cominciare e sul finire”). There is no mention of what the seventh lecture might have addressed.
4 “Don’t Count on It: A Note on the Number of The 1001 Nights,” in The Friday Book; see also “The Morning After” in this volume.
5 Included in his posthumously published The Road to San Giovanni (New York: Pantheon, 1993).
6 Indeed, in the “Autobiographical Essay” he declares, “In the course of a life devoted chiefly to books, I have read but few novels, and in most cases only a sense of duty enabled me to find my way to their last page.”
7 More knowledgeable participants than myself in the University of California at Davis Calvinofest subsequently assured me that they did in fact meet, at least once, in Rome, near the end of Borges’s life, and supplied me with a handsome photograph of the pair chatting over parallel cups of coffee in the Hotel Excelsior di Roma.
My Faulkner
1 Ed. Duvall and Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999).
2 The novel Coming Soon!!! (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001).
3 See the essay “Ad Lib Libraries and the Coastline Measurement Problem,” in Further Fridays.
4 E.g., in the aforementioned “Ad Lib Libraries” and the essay “The Ocean of Story” in Further Fridays; likewise in “The Morning After,” farther on in this volume.
5 In the Foreword to the Doubleday Anchor edition of The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, reprinted in Further Fridays.
¿Cien Años de Qué?
1 Literatura de las Américas 1898–1998 (León: Universidad de León, Secretariado de Publicaciones, 2000).
2 The influential Spanish “Generation of [18]98” included, among other notable literary figures, Pio Baroja, Antonio Machado, and Miguel de Unamuno.
3 The late-20th-century efflorescence of Latin-American literature, of which more pr
esently.
4 Alas, the question is now moot: Federman died in 2009.
5 New York: HarperFlamingo, 1998.
6 Already quoted in the preceding essay, “My Faulkner.”
A Window at the Pratt
1 And alas, died in 2009 without ever receiving: See my tribute to Updike farther along in this volume.
2 Indeed, in the years since, a couple of the Kerr Prize winners have placed items for publication—and the value of the award has increased to more than $60,000.
On Readings
1 See the preceding Friday-piece, “A Window at the Pratt.”
2 The afore-referred-to Coming Soon!!!, which came too late (2001) for the turn of the millennium.
3 See “The Passion Artist,” in the Tributes and Memoria section of this volume; likewise my tributes to Heller and Updike.
The End of the Word As We’ve Known It?
1 When Prophecy Fails, by Leon Festinger, Henry Riechen, and Stanley Schachter (Minneapolis: U. Minnesota Press, 1956).
2 “Largely,” but by no means entirely—as witness the international public health alarm in 2007 over an Atlanta lawyer’s managing to evade quarantine and make transatlantic flights despite having been diagnosed with drug-resistant TB.
3 The most elegant example of the quasi-electronic that I’ve seen to date is the admirable novel Love in a Dead Language, by Lee Siegel (University of Chicago Press, 1999), with its elaborately simulated “windows” and other computerish trappings.
4 See the essay “Incremental Perturbation.”
5 Also from “The State of the Art.”
6 Michael Korda, in “Out of Print,” Harper’s, April 2001.
“I’ve Lost My Place!”
1 Quoted in Thomas Flanagan’s review-essay “Western Star,” in The New York Review of Books, November 29, 2001.
The Place of “Place” in Fiction
1 Subsequently published in the Hartford Courant under the title “An Author’s Sense of Place.”
2 In his essay “The Argentine Writer and Tradition.”
Liberal Education
1 Not mentioned in what follows (because I judged it inappropriate to the occasion) is my chief reservation about the admirable St. John’s curriculum: its deployment of “tutors” in seminar-size discussion groups instead of (as at most good universities) eminent professorial authorities in a lecture-hall setting. The usual objection to the latter is that the students do more listening and note-taking than discussing; but we Hopkins undergrads did plenty of arguing and discussing in post-lecture Q&As as well as among ourselves and in follow-up seminars with Graduate Assistants—and our wrestlings with the texts were immeasurably illuminated by what we’d heard from those distinguished professors.
The Relevance of Irrelevance
1 “La rilevanza dell’irrilevanza: Scribere da americani.” And the State Department’s diplomatic phrase “explicit commentary on the events of September 11” can itself be translated into “explicit criticism of the George W. Bush presidency.”
2 In 2003, Coetzee was quite deservedly awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, perhaps in part because of his work’s political as well as literary merits—whereas the at least equally deserving Borges and Nabokov (like Kafka, Joyce, Proust, and many another first-magnitude literary star) were never laurelled with that prize, to which they would have done more honor than it could imaginably do them.
3 For more on Scheherazade, see “The Morning After,” later in this collection.
4 Whose trespasses against the civil liberties of U.S. citizens were much further empowered by the ill-named and hastily passed “Patriot Act” of October 2001, on the heels of the 9/11 bombings.
“All Trees Are Oak Trees . . .”
1 First delivered in 2003 at my alma mater, this talk was published the following year in Poets & Writers Magazine.
2 Already quoted in the preceding essay, “The Relevance of Irrelevance.”
The Inkstained Thumb
1 Cincinnati: Writers Digest Press, 2006.
I.
1 Ed. Molly McQuade (Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, 2009).
2 “We are the stories that we tell ourselves and others about who we are,” declares Dennett in his treatise Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1991).
“In the Beginning, Once Upon a Time, It Was a Dark and Stormy Night”
1 More on Ms. Scheherazade in the following essay, “The Morning After.”
2 For more on Genesis, see “‘In The Beginning,’” supra.
3 And for more on this famous dictum of Horace’s, see “Incremental Perturbation,” also supra.
The Morning After
1 See the essay “Don’t Count On It: A Note on the Number of The 1001 Nights,” in The Friday Book.
It Can Be Arranged
1 Some decades later, when I returned to Hopkins as a professor and checked my old library-stack haunts, I was relieved to find that some scoundrel had stolen that thesis: Its title refers to the poisoned garment that killed Heracles.
2 Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1995.
Introduction to Not-Knowing
1 The first, “The Thinking Man’s Minimalist: Honoring Barthelme,” appeared in The New York Times Book Review of September 3, 1989, just a few weeks after his death; the latest—“By Barthelme Beguiled,” introducing two previously unpublished DB stories—in the October 2007 inaugural issue of the new Hopkins Review.
2 Not-Knowing, ed. Kim Herzinger (New York: Random House, 1997).
3 Some other Usual Suspects were Robert Coover, William Gaddis, William H. Gass, John Hawkes, and Thomas Pynchon.
4 For my own take on this subject, see the essay “Historical Fiction, Fictitious History, and Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs, or, About Aboutness,” in The Friday Book.
The Passion Artist
1 NYTBR, June 21, 1998.
2 New York: New Directions, 1984.
3 From MacLeish’s poem “Not Marble Nor the Gilded Monuments”:. . . men shall remember your name as long
As lips move or breath is spent or the iron of English
Rings from a tongue. . . .
The Accidental Mentor
1 Leslie Fiedler and American Culture, ed. Kellman & Malin (U. Delaware Press, 2003).
2 True at the time: Fiedler died in Buffalo, NY, on January 29, 2003.
3 Cited earlier in this volume, in “The State of the Art,” and happily still an overstatement. See my essay “Inconclusion: The Novel in the Next Century,” in Further Fridays.
4 Subtitled Class Culture and Mass Society (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).
“As Sinuous and Tough as Ivy”
1 First published in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 2004.
The Last Introduction
1 As of 10/04/88, when this introduction was first delivered. Two more volumes were to come: the novel Closing Time in 1994 and the memoir Now and Then in 1998.
The Judge’s Jokes
1 First published in The American Scholar 76:2, Spring 2007.
a Not really ‘final’ after all: In 2011 we were delighted to receive a just-published copy of Updike’s essay-collection called Higher Gossip—not least of its pleasures the sprightly cover photo of the author by Irving Penn.
Copyright © 2012 John Barth
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