The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (13 page)

My window is a grave, and all that lies within it's dead. No snow is falling. There's no haze. It's not still, not silent. Its images are not an animal that waits, for movement is no demonstration.

What is art?

Art is energy shaped by intelligence. The energy that the text of
Madame Bovary
generates for the right reader is equal to that which sustains the consumer of
Rebecca
. The ordering intelligence of each writer is, of course, different in kind and intention. Gass's problem as an artist is not so much his inability to come up with some brand-new Henry Ford–type invention that will prove to be a breakthrough in world fiction (this is never going to happen) as what he calls his weak point—a lack of dramatic gift—which is nothing more than low or rather intermittent energy. He can write a dozen passages in which the words pile up without effect. Then, suddenly, the current, as it were, turns on again and the text comes to beautiful life (in a manner of speaking of course…who does not like a living novel? particularly one that is literate).

I have seen the sea slack, life bubble through a body without a trace, its spheres impervious as soda's.

For a dozen years I have been trying to read
The Sot-Weed Factor
. I have never entirely completed this astonishingly dull book but I have read most of John Barth's published work and I feel that I have done him, I hope, justice. There is a black cloth on my head as I write.

First, it should be noted that Barth, like Gass, is a professional schoolteacher. He is a professor of English
and
Creative Writing. He is extremely knowledgeable about what is going on in R and D land and he is certainly eager to make his contribution. Interviewed, Barth notes “the inescapable fact that literature—because it's made of the common stuff of language—seems more refractory to change in general than the other arts.” He makes the obligatory reference to the music of John Cage. Then he adds, sensibly, that “the permanent changes in fiction from generation to generation more often have been, and are more likely to be, modifications of sensibility and attitude rather than dramatic innovations in form and technique.”

Barth mentions his own favorite writers. Apparently “Borges, Beckett and Nabokov, among the living grand masters (and writers like Italo Calvino, Robbe-Grillet, John Hawkes, William Gass, Donald Barthelme)—
have
experimented with form and technique and even with the
means
of fiction, working with graphics and tapes and things….” What these writers have in common (excepting Robbe-Grillet) “is a more or less fantastical, or as Borges would say, ‘irrealist,' view of reality….” Barth thinks—hopes—that this sort of writing will characterize the Seventies.

What is “irrealism”? Something that cannot be realized. This is a curious goal for a writer though it is by no means an unfamiliar terminus for many an ambitious work. Further, Barth believes that realism is “a kind of aberration in the history of literature.” I am not exactly sure what he means by realism. After all, the Greek myths that he likes to play around with were once a “reality” to those who used them as stuff for narrative. But then Barth broods. “Perhaps we should
accept
the fact that writing and reading are essentially linear activities and devote our attention as writers to those aspects of experience that can best be rendered linearly—with words that go left to right across the page; subjects, verbs and objects; punctuation!” He ends with the rather plaintive, “The trick, I guess, in any of the arts at this hour of the world, is to have it both ways.” How true!

The Floating Opera
(1956) and
The End of the Road
(1958) are two novels of a kind and that kind is strictly R and R, and fairly superior R and R at that. The author tells us that they were written in his twenty-fourth year, and a good year it was for him. Publishers meddled with the ending of the first novel. He has since revised the book and that is the version I read. It is written in first-person demotic (Eastern Shore of Maryland, Barth's place of origin). The style is garrulous but not unattractive. “I was just thirty-seven then, and as was my practice, I greeted the new day with a slug of Sherbrook from the quart on my window sill. I've a quart sitting there now, but it's not the same one….”

There is a tendency to put too much in, recalling Barthes's “The Prattle of Meaning” (
S/Z
): certain storytellers

impose a dense plenitude of meaning or, if one prefers, a certain redundancy, a kind of semantic prattle typical of the archaic—or infantile—era of modern discourse, marked by the excessive fear of failing to communicate meaning (its basis); while, in reaction, in our latest—or “new” novels,

the action or event is set forth “without accompanying it with its signification.”

Certainly Barth began as an old-fashioned writer who wanted us to know all about the adulteries, money-hassling, and boozing on what sounded like a very real Eastern Shore of a very real Maryland, as lacking in bears as the seacoast of Illyria: “Charley was Charley Parks, an attorney whose office was next door to ours. He was an old friend and poker partner of mine, and currently we were on opposite sides in a complicated litigation….”

In 1960 Barth published
The Sot-Weed Factor
. The paperback edition is adorned with the following quotation from
The New York Times Book Review
: “Outrageously funny, villainously slanderous…. The book is a brass-knuckled satire of humanity at large….” I am usually quick, even eager, to respond to the outrageously funny, the villainously slanderous…in short, to
The New York Times
itself. But as I read on and on, I could not so much as summon up a smile at the lazy jokes and the horrendous pastiche of what Barth takes to be eighteenth-century English (“‘ 'Tis not that which distresses me; 'tis Andrew's notion that I had vicious designs on the girl. 'Sheart, if anything be improbable, 'tis…'”). I stopped at page 412 with 407 pages yet to go. The sentences would not stop unfurling; as Peter Handke puts it in
Kaspar
: “Every sentence helps you along: you get over every object with a sentence: a sentence helps you get over an object when you can't really get over it, so that you really get over it,” etc.

To read Barth on the subject of his own work and then to read the work itself is a puzzling business. He talks a good deal of sense. He is obviously intelligent. Yet he tells us that when he turned from the R and R of his first two novels to the megalo-R and R of
The Sot-Weed Factor
, he moved from “a merely comic mode to a variety of farce, which frees your hands even more than comedy does.” Certainly there are comic aspects to the first two books. But the ponderous jocosity of the third book is neither farce nor satire nor much of anything except English-teacher-writing at a pretty low level. I can only assume that the book's admirers are as ignorant of the eighteenth century as the author (or, to be fair, the author's imagination) and that neither author nor admiring reader has a sense of humor, a fact duly noted about Americans in general—and their serious ponderous novelists in particular—by many peoples in other lands. It still takes a lot of civilization gone slightly high to make a wit.

Giles Goat-Boy
arrived on the scene in 1966. Another 800 pages of ambitious schoolteacher-writing: a book to be taught rather than read. I shall not try to encapsulate it here, other than to say that the central metaphor is the universe is the university is the universe. I suspect that this will prove to be one of the essential American university novels and to dismiss it is to dismiss those departments of English that have made such a book possible. The writing is more than usually clumsy. A verse play has been included. “
Agnora:
for Pete's sake, simmer down, boys. Don't you think / I've been a dean's wife long enough to stink / my public image up?”

Barth thinks that the word “human” is a noun; he also thinks that Giles is pronounced with a hard “g” as in “guile” instead of a soft “g” as in “giant.” But then the unlearned learned teachers of English are the new barbarians, serenely restoring the Dark Ages.

By 1968 Barth was responding to the French New Novel.
Lost in the Funhouse
is the result. A collection (or, as he calls it, a “series”) of “Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice.” Barth is not about to miss a trick now that he has moved into R and D country. The first of the series, “Night-Sea Journey,” should—or could—be on tape. This is the first-person narrative of a sperm heading, it would appear, toward an ovum, though some of its eschatological musings suggest that a blow-job may be in progress. Woody Allen has dealt more rigorously with this theme.

The “story” “Lost in the Funhouse” is most writerly and self-conscious; it chats with the author who chats with it and with us. “Description of physical appearance and mannerisms is one of several standard methods of characterization used by writers of fiction.” Thus Barth distances the reader from the text. A boy goes to the funhouse and…“The more closely an author identifies with the narrator, literally or metaphorically, the less advisable it is, as a rule, to use the first-person narrative viewpoint.” Some of this schoolteacherly commentary is amusing. But the ultimate effect is one of an ambitious but somewhat uneasy writer out to do something brand-new in a territory already inhabited by, among other texts that can read and write, the sinister
Locus Solus
, the immor(t)al
Tlooth
and the dexterous
A Nest of Ninnies
.

It is seldom wise for a born R and R writer to make himself over into an R and D writer unless he has something truly formidable and new to show us. Barth just has books. And sentences. And a fairly clear idea of just how far up the creek he is without a paddle. “I believe literature's not likely ever to manage abstraction successfully, like sculpture for example, is that a fact, what a time to bring up that subject….” What a time! And what is the subject, Alice? Incidentally, Barth always uses quotation marks and “he saids.”

In 1972 Barth published three long stories in a volume called
Chimera
. Two of the stories are based on Greek myths, for are they not, as admirers of Jung declare, part of the racial memory, the common stock of all our dreams and narratives? Well, no, they are not. The Greek myths are just barely relevant to those Mediterranean people who still live in a landscape where the
anima
of a lost world has not yet been entirely covered with cement. The myths are useful but not essential to those brought up on the classics, the generation to which Dr. Jung (and T. S. Eliot) belonged; and of course they are necessary to anyone who would like to understand those works of literature in which myth plays a part. Otherwise they are of no real use to Americans born in this century. For us Oedipus is not the doomed king of Thebes but Dr. Freud's depressing protagonist, who bears no relation at all to the numinous figure that Sophocles and Euripides portrayed. Thebes is another country, where we may not dwell.

Joyce's
Ulysses
is often regarded as a successful attempt to use Greek myth to shore up a contemporary narrative. But it is plain to most non-creative readers that the myth does not work at all in Joyce's creation and were it not for his glorious blarney and fine naturalistic gifts, the book's classical structure alone could not have supported the novel. Since Joyce, alas, the incorporation of Greek myth into modern narrative has been irresistible to those who have difficulty composing narrative, and no Greek. These ambitious writers simply want to give unearned resonance to their tales of adultery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, of misbehavior in faculty rooms, of massive occlusions in the heart of the country. But the results are deeply irritating to those who have some sense of the classical world and puzzling, I would think, to those taking English courses where the novel is supposed to have started with Richardson.

Barth has browsed through Robert Graves's
The Greek Myths
(and gives due acknowledgment to that brilliantly eccentric custodian of the old world). At random, I would guess, Barth selected the story of Bellerophon (tamer of Pegasus) for modernizing; also, more to his point, Perseus, the slayer of Medusa. The first story is taken from Arabian mythology, a narrative called “Dunyazadiad,” as told by the “kid sister of Scheherazade.” It should also be noted that two of the stories in
Lost in the Funhouse
were wacky versions of certain well-known high jinks in old Mycenae.

         

The kid sister of Scheherazade is a gabby co-ed who mentions with awe the academic gifts of her sister “Sherry,” “an undergraduate arts-and-sciences major at Banu Sasan University. Besides being Homecoming Queen, valedictorian-elect, and a four-letter varsity athlete…. Every graduate department in the East was after her with fellowships.” This unbearable cuteness has a sinister side. Since Barth's experience of literature and the world is entirely that of a schoolteacher, he appears to take it for granted that the prevailing metaphor for his own life (and why not all life itself?) is the university. There is also an underlying acceptance of the fact that since no one is ever going to read him except undergraduates in American universities, he had better take into account that their reading skills are somewhat underdeveloped, their knowledge of the way society works vague, and their culture thin.

Barth's
Hamlet
would no doubt begin, “Well, I guess flunking out of Rutgers is no big deal when I got this family up in Wilmington where we make these plastics that, like, kill people but I'm changing all that or I was going to up until my mother went and married this asshole uncle of mine….” Perhaps this is the only way to get the classics into young television-shrunk minds. But the exercise debases both classics and young minds. Of course Barth is no fool. He is often quick to jump in and forestall criticism. Sherry's kid sister remarks: “currently, however, the only readers of artful fiction were critics, other writers, and unwilling students who, left to themselves, preferred music and pictures to words.”