by John Barth
Disillusioned, Bray resigned his instructorship and left his family to “become as a kindergartener again,” dedicating his energies to the solitary task of making a concordance to the writings of the goat-god George Giles, who is to our Pan as, say, Polyeidus to Proteus. Packing his few belongings into a sort of mechanical Pegasus named V. W. Beetle, he retreated to the Lilydale community of his letterhead, an entire polis of seers and sibyls; there he established himself in a sub-group called Remobilization Farm, supported by the eccentric Maryland millionaire Harrison Mack II, who either also was or at times fancied himself to be “George III, the mad monarch of England.” (Noting that Mack II, mad, imagined himself not as George III sane, but as George III mad who in his madness imagined himself Mack II sane, Bray uses our word paradox.) When the group, “dishonored as are all prophets in their own country,” later moved to “Canada,” Bray stayed on, supported in part by the conscience-stricken author who had basely lent his name to the plagiarism plot, in part by side-efforts of his own as goat-farmer, fudge-maker, and skipper of the Lake Chautauqua excursion boat Gadfly, but principally by George III via Mack II’s philanthropic organization, the Tidewater Foundation. As best I could make out, the Five-Year Plan for the ambiguous “Second Revolution” was conceived not by Bray directly but by a second ingenious machine, an automatic Polyeidus called Computer which Bray was using in his scholarly endeavors; it suggested to him one day that he might better vindicate himself to the world and attain his rightful place among its immortals by putting aside the tedious concordance in favor of a Revolutionary Novel—the “scientific fiction” aforementioned, which in Bray’s letters to Mack II, perhaps also in his own mind, was either confused with or had aspects of a Novel Revolution.
In “Year N” of the project (ciphered 1971/2), having “called [his] enemy [George III] to [his] aid,” Bray used the Tidewater Foundation grant to reconstruct his machine in such a way that, once a number of works by a particular author were fed into it, it could compose hypothetical new works in that author’s manner. The results of his first experiments were in themselves more or less inept parodies of the writings of the plagiarist aforementioned, upon whom Bray thus cleverly revenged himself: they bore such titles as The End of the Road Continued; Sot-Weed Redivivus; Son of Giles, or, The Revised New Revised New Syllabus—in Bray’s own cryptic words, “novels which mimic the form of the novel, by an author who mimics the role of Reset”; but they demonstrated satisfactorily the machine’s potential. Most of the rest of the year Bray spent recuperating from a nervous disorder, the effect of a poisonous gas sprayed about the area by his enemies on the pretext of eliminating lake-flies; nevertheless he seems to have acquired a mistress—“a tough little Amazon” (how my heart leaped at that!) named Merope, whose initial distrust of him as a “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” must have been overcome by the revolutionary nature of his work and his ardor in such causes as “the fight against DDT”—and to have altered radically his conception of that work itself. For in the Year O (code #1972/3) he began programming his machine to compose, not hypothetical fictions, but the “Complete,” the “Final Fiction.” Into its maw (more voracious if less deadly than Chimera’s) he fed all the 50,000-odd entries in “Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature” the entire stacks of Lilydale’s Marion Skidmore Library plus a reference work called Masterplots, elements of magical mathematics with such names as Golden Ratio and Fibonacci Series, and (I could not tell why; it seemed his mistress’s suggestion) a list of everything in the world that came in sevens. Thus equipped, the machine was to analyze the corpus of existing fiction as might an Aristotelian lepidopterist the existing varieties of butterfly, induce the perfect form from its “natural” approximations, and reduce that ideal to a mathematical model, preliminary to composing its verbal embodiment. Such was Bray’s genius, his machine began the year by producing such simple diagrams as this schema for the typical rise and fall of dramatic action—
—and ended it with such “perfected” alternatives as the “Right-Triangular Freitag”—
-and the “Golden-Triangular Freitag”—
—which prescribed exactly the relative proportions of exposition, rising action, and denouement, the precise location and pitch of complications and climaxes, the relation of internal to framing narratives, et cetera. Little wonder he describes himself as humming happily as the machine all summer, eager for the first trial print-out in the fall: I myself was as involved by this time in his quest as if it had been my own, and searched vainly, heart-in-mouth, among his technical appendices and catalogues to see whether they might include the Pattern for Heroes, which surely Polyeidus must have plagiarized from him—unless, as seemed ever less implausible, Computer itself was some future version of my seer.
But my disappointment was as nothing beside poor Bray’s, in Year T, “the midpoint of [his] life,” at that long-awaited print-out. The title, NUMBERS, bid fair enough: its seven capitals, ranged fore and aft of his central initial, reflected promisingly Bray’s mathematical preoccupations, his friend Merope’s own special contributions (two “ancient” literary-numerological traditions of her tribe, called gematria and notarikon), and “such literary precedents as the fourth book of the Pentateuch, held by the Kabbalists to have been originally a heptateuch, of which one book had disappeared entirely and another been reduced to two verses, Numbers 10:35,36.” But alas, as he himself was obliged to acknowledge, he “had not got all the bugs out of [his] machine”; what followed was no masterwork but an alphabetical chaos, a mere prodigious jumble of letters! These quires of nonsense “shocked [Bray] numb”—another sense of the title? To make matters worse, that very evening, thinking to divert him, Merope took him into the parlor of a group of militant radical students drawn to Lilydale by rumors that it was the hot center of a grand revolutionary conspiracy. When at one point in the conversation they brandished spray-guns filled with a chemical with which they planned to “defoliate the Ivy League,” Bray in his distracted anguish mistook them for his poisonous enemies and “narrowly escaped” (this part of the narrative is unclear) by means of a horrifying disguise, a venomous barb with which he struck down and temporarily paralyzed “[his] beautiful betrayer,” and a mad flight on V. W. Beetle. Merope, upon her recovery, left him to join the revolutionaries in their obscure immediate project of “filling the office water-coolers of certain large corporations with Lake Erie water”; Bray, convinced now that she was responsible for the NUMBERS fiasco, sat for a long while despondent in the rains of his project—for which, shortly after, the Tidewater Foundation withdrew its support. He describes himself as “rudderless as a ship whose T has been crossed”; as “without weather”; as “stung.” “Christmas, bah!” he snarls at the celebrants of Lilydale’s principal religious festival; at Year Ts end (“July 3, 1974”), in a startling allusion to Medusa, he surveys the debris of his grand ambitions and writes: “My scrambled notes are turned to stone.”
But the very next night, while steering the steamboat numbly around the lake, he is vouchsafed, whether by Computer or by V. W. Beetle, an astounding insight. Mourning the loss of Merope, he remembers her comparison of the NUMBERS print-out to the primordial lawbook of her tribe: according to some commentators, this Torah was originally a chaos of scrambled letters, which arranged themselves into words and sentences only as the events described by those sentences came to pass. At the same time he idly notes that notes is an anagram for stone and vice-versa, and is thus (“by this mild gematria”) re-reminded of his former mistress. On the occasion of her reading out those thousands of narrative motifs for him to feed in enciphered form to Computer—quite as Polyeidus had fed the magic spells to Chimera—she had remarked: “Hey, they missed one: The Key to the Treasure. This fellow’s born into this family where all the men for centuries have worn themselves out looking for this particular Secret Treasure, okay? So when he grows up, instead of chasing all over the world like they did, he reads all the books in the library about Quests and stuff
and decides that the Treasure’s probably somewhere in his own house—the Maeterlinck L’Oiseau Bleu thing, et cetera. That same night he dreams that there’s this big apartment of rooms right in his basement, that he’d never suspected, and for some reason or other, in the dream, this news doesn’t especially surprise him. When he wakes up he realizes that there isn’t any such apartment, but there is an old toolshed or storage closet down there that he’s never looked into, because the door’s all blocked with piles of junk left by his ancestors, and he’s absolutely certain that’s where the Treasure must be. So with no sweat at all he gets further than the others did after years of adventures and dangers and such. But to locate the Treasure’s one thing; to get it’s something else: when he clears the junk away he finds the door locked like a bank vault. The lock’s not jammed or rusty—in fact it’s very well lubricated—but it positively can’t be opened without the key, even by the best locksmith around. So he ends up having to search all over the world after all, right? But for the key instead of the treasure. He goes through the usual riddles and battles and monsters and clues and false trails and stuff and finally rescues this princess et cetera, and on their wedding night she finds this real pretty key in his own pants pocket. She thinks they ought to let it go at that, but he leaves her, rushes back to his own country and his old house, dashes down to the basement, unlocks the door, and finds the closet empty. Once he’s left the girl and her country he can’t go back, I forget why, so he throws the key away in despair and lives the rest of his life as a sour old hermit. On his deathbed, thinking about his adventures and his lost girlfriend and all, he sees that the Key to the Treasure was the Treasure, et cetera. It’s a piece of male chauvinist phallus-worship, but not a bad story.” At once, on his remembering this tale, everything is illumined for Bray in a series of flashes “like the fireworks reflected in Chautauqua Lake”: not NUMBERS but NOTES is his novel’s true title; 5, not 7, is its correct numerical base; what he’d thought a fiasco was the proper culmination of the first three-fifths of the project: a Five-Year Plan, so he realizes now, at whose “Phi-point” he presently stands (“NOT is to ES as NOTES is to NOT”). Those reams of random letters are a monstrous anagram for the Revolutionary Novel, to unscramble which will require no more than the “reprogramming” of Computer with these new insights.
To test his theory he feeds it a simple impromptu list of “fives”: the fingers, toes, senses, and wits of Homo sapiens, the feet of pentametric verse and “Dr. Eliot’s shelf of classics,” the tones (Computer hiccoughed happily at this word) of pentatonic music, the great books and blessings of “China,” the bloods of “Ireland,” the nations of “Iroquois” and divisions of “the British Empire,” the aforementioned Pentateuch, the days of the week, the vowels of the alphabet, the ages of man, the months of Odysseus’s last voyage, the stories framed by “Scheherazade’s Tale of the Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad,” the letters of the word novel (three-fifths of which et cetera), and a few non-serial odds and ends such as quincunx, pentagon, quintile, pentacle, quinquennium, quintuplet, and E-string. These are as nothing beside the hundred-odd “sevens” already in the machine; yet with that meager priming, valiant Computer belches forth two remarkable observations: On the one hand, inasmuch as “character,” “plot,” and for that matter “content,” “subject,” and “meaning,” are attributes of particular novels, the Revolutionary Novel NOTES is to dispense with all of them in order to transcend the limitations of particularity; like the coded NUMBERS it will represent nothing beyond itself, have no content except its own form, no subject but its own processes. Language itself it will perhaps eschew (in favor of what, is not clear). On the other hand, at its “Phi-point” (“point six one eight et cetera of the total length, as the navel is of the total height of human women”) there is to occur a single anecdote, a perfect model-of a text-within-the-text, a microcosm or paradigm of the work as a whole: not (what I anticipated) the “Key to the Treasure” story, but (what fetched me bolt upright in the Spartina alterniflora) “a history of the Greek mythic hero Bellerophon; his attempt to fly on Pegasus to Olympus like Apollo’s crew to the Moon; his sting; his free downfall to Earth like ditto’s to the U.S.S. Hornet; his wandering alone in the marsh, far from the paths of men, devouring his own Reset.”
Never mind that the events in this “quintessential fiction,” as Bray called it, were out of order and somewhat fanciful, like those in the lecture-scroll synopsis; they bespoke the presence of Polyeidus, Polyeidus, whose name I called and recalled, without effect. All his original conviction restored, Jerome Bonaparte Bray heroically concludes his appeal to the Executive Secretary of the Tidewater Foundation with a prospectus of the task ahead: In Year E (#1974/5), assuming the Foundation renews its support, he will reconstruct and reprogram Computer to compose Bellerophoniad, which he now describes as “that exquisite stain on the pure nothingness of NOTES; the crucial flaw which perfects my imitation of that imperfect genre the novel, as the artful Schizura unicornis larva mimes not the flawless hickory leaf (never found in fact), but, flawlessly, the flawed and insect-bitten truth of real hickory leaves.” In Year S, Computer will make the final print-out of the complete novel; the Second American Revolution will ensue at once upon its publication, and, like the First, trigger others, this time everywhere; J. B. Bray and H. Mack II will reassume their rightful names and thrones—the monarchies at first of France and England respectively, but eventually the emperorships of West and East; all existing stocks of DDT, pyrethrin, rotenone, and similar barbarous poisons will be destroyed, their manufacture prohibited forever; and the world will be restored to a New Golden Age.
I shivered with sympathy for the vision, loftier than my own in its redemption, not of a man, but of mankind—and for pity of the poor misfortunate visionary, his dreams struck down by a hand-scrawled cover-note to the application as lightly as the humming marsh-gnats I swatted with it:
File. Forget. Throw back in the river. No need to prosecute (or reply). T. A.
There was no aiding J. B. B. (as I thought then) across the eons—though he, perhaps, had aided me. Sadly I reposted Bray’s prospectus on the tide and spent the buggy night considering my own history and objectives. In the morning, impatient for the next high tide to bring its message, I strolled the beach, sun-dried, sea-salted, and skipped shells across the water. When I rereached my starting point I found in the wrack along the high-tide line where sandfleas jumped not my familiar jug but, amazingly, a clear glass bottle, unlike any I’d ever seen, wreathed in eelgrass full of sand and tiny mussels. Around the outside, in letters raised in the glass itself, a cryptic message: NO DEPOSIT NO RETURN; inside, a folded paper. Trembling, I removed the cap and tipped the bottle down; the note wouldn’t pass through the neck. I cast about for a straight twig and fished in the bottle with it, grunting at each near-catch.
“For pity’s sake bust it!” cried a small voice from inside. Seizing the neck, I banged the bottle on a mossed and barnacled rock. Not hard enough. My face perspired. On the third swing the glass smashed and the note fell out: half a sheet of coarse ruled stuff, folded thrice. On its top line, when I uncreased it, I found penned in deep red ink:
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
On the next-to-bottom:
YOURS TRULY
The lines between were blank, as was the space beneath the complimentary close. In a number of places, owing to the coarseness of the paper, ink spread from the letters in fibrous blots. Heartsick, I flung the blank paper down—whereupon it turned at once into a repellent little person, oddly dressed, with a sty in his eye and a smell of urine and stale cakes.
“I swear,” Polyeidus said, surveying himself with a sniff: “I tried your cousin Perseus—thought it would be appropriate? And look what I end up. I should stick to letters. How are things? Never mind; I know.”
“My life’s a failure,” I told him matter-of-factly. “I’m not a mythic hero. I never will be. I’m forty years old already. I’m going to die and be forgo
tten, like the rest.”
“Like your brother?”
“Never mind that. How do I get to be immortal fast?”
Polyeidus squinted. “You sure you trust me? Your wife seemed to think I was out to get you last time around.”
“Maybe you were. But you didn’t.”
“Why should I go on helping you whenever you get stuck? You think it’s been fun being Old Man of the Marsh all these years?” He swatted his arm. “Goddamn mosquitoes. And seafood makes me break out.”
“Evidently you had no choice,” I replied. “Zeus stuck you with the job, right? So it’s to your interest to get me constellated like Perseus. Who remembers the helper if the hero doesn’t make it?”