The Friday Book Page 28

  About this wonderful history of lost innocence, I offer two remarks.

  First, it is in my opinion an innocence well lost. One should be no great admirer of innocence, in either narratives, individuals, or cultures. Where it’s genuine, after a certain age it’s unbecoming, off-putting, even freakish and dangerous. Where it’s false, it’s false. To admire it much is patronizing and sentimental; to aspire to it is self-defeating. Let us admire—in cultures, narratives, and people—not innocence, but experience and grace.

  Second, and on the other hand, self-consciousness, even self-reflexiveness, are so much in the cultural air we breathe now that they can have a kind of innocence of their own. I am reminded of this paradox by every Woody Allen movie, every television news show opening shot of the cameras filming the cameras filming John Chancellor or Walter Cronkite watching the monitors showing the cameras, etc.: naïve, unselfconscious self-consciousness. And so perhaps of self-consciousness, too, we may say with Huck Finn: That is nothing.

  But if self-consciousness goes back to Adam and Eve, and authorial self-consciousness back at least to Flaubert if not to the scribe Khakheperresenb, surely postmodernist authorial self-consciousness has a shorter pedigree, at least if we detach it from the modernism of which it is variously regarded as an extension, an attenuation, an aftermath, an anticlimax, or an adversary reaction. I have been told that Arnold Toynbee uses the term “post-modern” somewhere in his vast Study of History: I haven’t the heart to check. Let’s content ourselves that in 1967 or thereabouts, certain literary critics seem to have borrowed the term from their colleagues in the graphic and plastic arts, as their forebears borrowed the term modernism.

  Now, my notion of postmodernist fiction is rather different from the other notions of it that I’ve encountered: enough so that I was moved not long ago to a little essay on the subject.† Its purpose was to investigate for myself whether this clumsy term postmodernism describes anything very good very well. What I discovered was that not only do critics disagree about what postmodernism is, but that modernism itself is a bird whose field-identification marks are only very approximately agreed upon. I should have known.

  Emboldened by this anarchy of critical opinion, I proceeded to legislate what postmodernist fiction ought to be, if it’s to be anything worth taking seriously. I shall omit here both the documentation and the wit of my essay and encapsulate its simple argument, which implies, if not a definition of postmodernist fiction, at least a program for it. By extension, it implies as well my sentiments about the proper and seemly role of authorial self-consciousness and narrative self-reflexiveness in P.M. fiction.

  A worthy program for postmodernist fiction, I believe, is the synthesis or transcension of these antitheses, which may be summed up as premodernist and modernist modes of writing. My ideal postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his twentieth-century modernist parents or his nineteenth-century premodernist grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back. Without lapsing into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship, Madison Avenue venality, or either false or real naïveté, he nevertheless aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such late-modernist marvels… as Beckett’s Texts for Nothing or Nabokov’s Pale Fire…

  The ideal postmodernist novel will rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and “contentism,” pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction. Alas for professors of literature, it may not need as much teaching as Joyce’s or Nabokov’s or Pynchon’s books, or some of my own. On the other hand, it will not wear its heart on its sleeve, either; at least not its whole heart… My own analogy would be with good jazz or classical music: One finds much on successive listenings or close examination of the score that one didn’t catch the first time through; but the first time through should be so ravishing—and not just to specialists—that one delights in the replay.

  Well, now: If part of the energy of such a novel happens to come from a “performing” authorial self, as it conceivably might, we shall look for that self to be at least as self-knowing and self-controlled, perhaps even as self-effacing, as it is self-conscious. Its presence will be at once as functional and as finally beside the point as the novel’s being set on the Mississippi, say, or in Macondo. And we shall be able to say of it, with Huck Finn: “That ain’t no matter. That is nothing.”

  * The line is from my story “Title,” in Lost in the Funhouse.

  † “The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodern Fiction,” the preceding Friday-piece.

  Revenge

  … Short and sweet.

  The novel LETTERS took a considerable beating from U.S. book reviewers, a number of whom found the story too complicated and difficult for their enjoyment and too dependent upon the reader’s familiarity with the author’s earlier fiction. Against the former charge there is no defense: The story is complicated, but difficulty is in the mind of the beholder. The latter charge I understand but respectfully disagree with, it being a rule in our house that one may echo or reprise one’s former fiction, but must not presume that any reader knows that fiction even slightly. I believe that LETTERS meets that rule.

  More tongue-tiskish than the reviewers’ reservations about the novel was a recurring note of impatience, in a few cases even of sweeping anger, directed less at the work in hand than at the author himself, who seemed to have become in the minds of some critics the embodiment of an avant-garde literary experimentalism which they deplored.

  Tant pis. By the fall of 1981 I had finished a new novel, Sabbatical: A Romance, to be published in June of the following year. Though it is a shorter and altogether simpler story, which I hoped might recoup some of my publisher’s investment in LETTERS, I suspected that it too would get banged on the head not solely for whatever its own demerits but for its author’s having been generally badmouthed, along with other American “postmodernist” writers, by the likes of John Gardner (in his treatise On Moral Fiction) and Gore Vidal (in the essay “American Plastic,” in The New York Review of Books). Even a little blood will sometimes fetch the sharks—and the sharks in turn fetch rescuers—when all the swimmer has in mind is to go on swimming.

  That suspicion must account for my agreeing to Rust Hills’s merry proposal that I contribute to an Esquire Magazine “Revenge Symposium,” in which a number of writers would settle scores with some particularly scathing reviewer. Payment was to be six bottles of one’s favorite booze, with which to toast one’s sweet revenge upon the son- or daughterofabitch.

  But it is another shop rule hereabouts that one does not reply to critics of one’s work, and so when the Friday came to take revenge, I found myself taking it upon a reviewer who (so far as I can remember) has never reviewed a book of mine, but whose attacks upon some authors I admire had had that familiar ad hominem tone.

  The Revenge Symposium project was set aside by its conceivers, revived, set aside again, and finally published two years later, in the June 1983 number of Esquire. By the time it appeared, Sabbatical: A Romance had had its drubbing—and its praise—from the reviewers, and I was at work upon its successor and this Friday Book.

  My favorite booze? I asked for a half-dozen bottles of 1970 Château Pauillac, on sale just then at about $65 the bottle: better Bordeaux by a factor of ten than anything in our cellar. There was an embarrassed shuffling of feet in New York City. Okay, then: Make it six bottles of Dom Perignon (then about $50 the bottle), a champagne particularly admired in our house, where it has almost never appeared. More shuffling of feet: What they’d had in mind was, um, Jack Daniel’s bourbon, J & B Scotch—like that. But unless guests are in for cocktails, nearly no hard liquor is drunk chez nous. Who, I wondered, is taking revenge upon whom? I settled finally for six quarts of Mount Gay Sugar Cane rum in memory of my first romantic Caribbean visit, twelve years earlier, when Shelly and I had run off from Boston to Barbados. Six quarts of Mount Gay Sugar Cane, I reckoned, would m
ake six summersworth of nostalgic rum punches at Langford Creek, and I feared that further dickering might leave me with a six-pack of Miller Lite. What the liquor store finally delivered was six fifths of Mount Gay Eclipse (not the same rum at all as Sugar Cane): presumably neither Esquire’s fault nor the subtle revenge of the critic here criticized. Whom I have never met; against whom I have no personal grudge; and who, I learned after the piece appeared (minus its final sentence, here reappended), is my present editor’s brother-in-law.

  Eclipse, anyone?

  My fiction has so excited the spleen of so many and various reviewers over the past quarter-century that while I can still be instructed by intelligent criticism, I am proof against invective. My revenge is to forget who it was, say, who dismissed The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy as “mere inflated spoofs”—though the word spoof, which anyhow sounds like an imperfectly suppressed fart, retains its malodor in my house. And who was that other imperfectly suppressed fart who, in the columns of The New York Review of Books, called the author of Chimera a “narrative chauvinist pig”? Gone from my memory, though I relish the phrase.

  There are worse; I have forgot them. The dogs bark, says the Arabian proverb, but the caravan moves on.

  About splenetic assaults upon the art of other writers whom I admire, however, I remain thin-skinned. I neither forget nor forgive, e.g., Roger Sale’s savaging, ten years ago—also in The New York Review of Books—of John Hawkes’s novel The Blood Oranges: an attack which opened with the sentence “The Blood Oranges fails because it is the work of a contemptible imagination.” There are earlier and later novels of Hawkes’s which I myself prefer, but in The Blood Oranges, as in all his fiction, John Hawkes is one of our purest and most memorable verbal artists, whereas Roger Sale is a mere inflated spoof. There is a reviewer whom I will not shrive until he recants by writing of some future Hawkes novel, “Whatever its apparent flaws (and they are only apparent), this is a luminous, transcendent work of art, not least because it proceeds from a luminous, transcendent imagination…”

  Tales Within Tales Within Tales

  BACK TO BUSINESS.

  Science-fiction writers are not like you and me; they have more fun. This truth was revealed to me at the Second International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, held at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton in March, 1981. One of the fun things SF writers do is organize convention after convention—regional, national, international, intergalactic—among which they hop like drivers on the auto-racing circuit, reinforcing one another’s enthusiasm for their genre, enlarging their personal acquaintance with its practitioners, and enjoying one another’s company with a high-spirited camaraderie hardly to be found for example at a meeting of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

  My reservations about science fiction are much the same as my reservations about historical fiction, as set forth in that blue-crab Friday-piece earlier on: The more it is about science, the future, other worlds, etc., the less it is likely to be about the proper subject of literature: “human life, its happiness and its misery.” Fantasy is another matter: a mode of literature as old as the narrative imagination.

  Florida Atlantic University’s annual International Conferences on the Fantastic in the Arts are unusually well organized, well funded, and well attended affairs, ecumenical enough in spirit to include among their principal speakers each year one “mainstream” writer whose works at least occasionally involve fantasy. I accepted their lecture-invitation partly because it gave me a chance to think again about my friend Scheherazade and partly because Shelly and I planned to spend our vacation that spring sailing in the Caribbean; the Boca Raton stopover would help pay for the cruise and give us a few beach-days to shape up for it. The SF people, however, turned out to be as enjoyable in their way as the British Virgin Islands in theirs; at conference’s end, as we took off for Tortola, our fellow fantasts were calling to one another “Next month in Cincinnati… next summer in Vancouver… next year in Adelaide…”

  This lecture was published in amended form in the Autumn 1981 number of the quarterly Antaeus. The figures and footnotes are reprinted here as they were printed there.

  It is an honor to follow Isaac Bashevis Singer as your guest at this Second International Conference on the Fantastic. Mr. Singer has been called by one critic a modernist in traditionalist’s clothing: I approve equally of the disguise and of the thing disguised, and sometimes suspect my own case to be simply the reverse. Like a good Cabalist, Singer understands God to be a kind of novelist and the world to be His novel-in-progress; as a fellow storyteller, he is therefore able to appreciate the great Author’s masterstrokes and to sympathize with, if not excuse, His lapses. As Horace says, Sometimes even good Homer sleeps. What’s more, the story is not done yet: Who knows what plot-reversals the Author may have up His/Her sleeve for the denouement?

  I second that attitude, too; I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist.

  It is remarks like that, I suppose, that have fetched Mrs. Barth and me to Boca Raton so that I can speak to you about a certain standard device of fantastic literature: stories within stories. I have begun by invoking two other storytellers: I. B. Singer and God. I trust that neither of them would disapprove of my pausing here, or anywhere, to tell you a little story.

  Once upon a time—it was 1971—I made up a story about Scheherazade’s younger sister, Dunyazade, who sat at the foot of the royal bed for 1001 nights (so we’re told in the Arabian version) watching her sister and the king make love and listening to all those beguiling, usually fantastic, old stories. In my version, Scheherazade is assisted in her exhaustive narrative enterprise by an American genie of sorts from the second half of the twentieth century: He has always been half in love with her and inspired by her situation, and he contrives, by a certain arrangement between them, to supply her from the narrative future with those stories from the narrative past which she needs to deal with her present danger.

  My genie gets these stories, needless to say, from his copy of The 1001 Nights. And, like bread cast upon the waters, his assisting Scheherazade solves his problem, too, which is hers and every storyteller’s: What to do for yet another and yet another encore? How to save and save again one’s narrative neck? The genie’s next story, we learn toward the end of my story,* will be the story of his interlude with Scheherazade.

  How I wish that that fantasy were a fact: that I could be that genie, and meet and speak with the talented, wise, and beautiful Scheherazade.

  One part of it is a fact: Dunyazade, the narrator of my story, recounting the genie’s first appearance to the sisters, says, “Years ago (the genie told us), when he’d been a penniless student pushing book-carts through the library-stacks of his university to help pay for his education, he’d contracted a passion for Scheherazade upon first reading the tales she beguiled King Shahryar with, and had sustained that passion… powerfully ever since…” What Diotima was to Socrates in the Symposium, Scheherazade has always been to me; her name stares at me from a 3x5 card above my writing table, both to encourage me when the critics are working me over—for I’ve never doubted since first meeting her that she is my true sister—and, contrariwise, to chasten me when my stories are overpraised, for I’ve never doubted that that true sister is immeasurably my superior.

  Nevertheless, there are two white lies in the genie’s protestation. First, Scheherazade’s is not the only name on that 3x5 card: My very big brothers Odysseus, Don Quixote, and Huckleberry Finn, towards whom I harbor similar feelings, join her in buoying me up and staring me down. And second, it was never Scheherazade’s stories that seduced and beguiled me, but their teller and the extraordinary circumstances of their telling: in other words, the character and situation of Scheherazade, and the narrative convention of the framing story.

  Of that situation I have written elsewhere†: the significance of there being 1001 nights rather than 101 or 2002; the r
itual of sex before storytelling; the terrifying but fertilizing relation between the storyteller and her audience; the primordial publish-or-perish ultimatum and its familiar consequence (after the king, on the 1002nd day, awards Scheherazade the relative tenure of formal marriage and orders a deluxe hardcover edition of her work, the woman evidently never tells another story); the crucial role of little Dunyazade at the foot of that bed; the even more intriguing and emblematic problem that she must deal with on her bridal night, etc. I won’t speak further of those things here.

  Let’s look instead at the phenomenon of stories within stories. A contemporary of mine, the novelist John Gardner, distinguishes between what he calls “primary fiction,” which he defines as fiction about life, and “secondary fiction,” which he defines as fiction about fiction. There are several grounds on which one might question this distinction, especially when its inventor turns it into a value judgment and even into moral categories. For the moment let’s simply be reminded that the phenomenon of framed tales—that is, of stories within stories, which always to some degree imply stories about stories and even stories about storytelling —that this phenomenon is ancient, ubiquitous, and persistent; almost as old and various, I suspect, as the narrative impulse itself.