mus MIICH IGAN STATEU UNWERSI TYL Ill! IL I”! HIIWWHM 31293 00917 1574 IUIIJ This is to certify that the dissertation entitled WRITERS WRITTEN: JOHN BARTH'S CHARACTERS AS WRITERS presented by Matthew Robert Nikkari has been accepted towards fulfillment of the requirements for Ph.D . degree in Ehglish 991/ g M 3101' professor Date April 20, 1990 MSU i: an Affirmatiw Action/Equal Opportunity Insritun'on 0- 12771 LIBRARY Michigan State Unlverslty PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record. TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due. DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE WRITERS WRITTEN: JOHN BARTH'S CHARACTERS AS WRITERS By Matthew R. Nikkari A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English 1990 é¢7~5ow ABSTRACT WRITERS WRITTEN: JOHN BARTH'S CHARACTERS AS WRITERS By Matthew R. Nikkari John Barth's professional life is comprised of three main activities conducted simultaneously from within academe: fiction writer, humanities and literature profes- sor, and writing teacher. All three of these concerns inform and shape Barth's novels, each of which is a sort of Bildungsroman centering on a writer-protagonist who must confront reality through writing and written texts as a way to learn about the self and the nature of reality. Although this general situation characterizes all of his novels, little attention has been given to how this operates over the course of Barth's canon. To examine this, I chart the course that Barth's novels take in regard to the situations faced by his writer- characters as they work to negotiate the world, at times even to control the world, through learning to use writing and written texts in various ways, from exploring epistemo- logical and cosmological assumptions to recreating them- selves and the world. But more important, Barth's writer- characters come to learn about the limits that writing encounters when used to make sense of the self and the world; they all come to understand that writing, both as act and artifact, undermines truth as much as it creates it. L:;~.z '-".migg¢ry of 3. Glenn Wright, friend and guide. Ar 3% LnIFu. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One The Key to the Treasure Chapter Two Writing to Escape the Abyss: IRS Floating Opera and The Egg gg the Road Chapter Three Subverted Texts and the Writer's Education: 233 Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat B22 Chapter Four Beginnings and Rebeginnings: Lost in Eh: Funhouse and Chimera Chapter Five Recycling and Reinventing: LETTERS: A Novel Chapter Six The Literally and the Literarily Marvelous: Sabbatical: A Romance and The Tidewater Tales: A Novel Chapter Seven Writing's Failure and the Writer's Success Bibliography 21 65 116 177 218 261 277 Chapter 1 The Key to the Treasure John Barth's professional life is comprised of three main activities conducted simultaneously from within academe: fiction writer, humanities and literature profes- sor, and writing teacher. However, he warns against taking any of his pedagogical roles at face value, saying I teach three things--"humanities," literature and fiction- writing. Of these three, my only specialty is fiction writing, and I'm not altogether persuaded yet that it can be taught; or, if it can, that it ought to be; or, if it ought, that I know how to teach it. . . . I'll make you the same disclaimer that I make to my students: that I'm not an expert in literature or in philosophy, but a mere storyteller. Which is to say a professional liar (Friday Book, 16). Yet, for Barth, being a teacher whose strengths derive from playing the part of professional liar implies more than what is often associated with equating fiction-making with lying. That is, "lying" through writing stories offers possibilities for discerning and creating reality beyond those available through more widely accredited and traditional avenues to the Truth such as religion, philosophy, and science. Barth sees his tripartite career providing ways to "manufacture a universe," one that very well might be "more orderly, meaningful, beautiful, and interesting than the one God turned out" (Friday Book, 17). Barth has some reservations about God's literary predilections: 2 If you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist. Some of the things he did are right nice: the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny is a master stroke; if you thought that up you'd be proud of yourself. But a certain kind of sensibility can be made very uncomfortable by the recognition of the arbitrariness of physical facts and the inability to accept tEeIr finaIIt . . . .this impulse to imagine alternatives to the worId can become a driving impulse for writer (Enck, 8). At first glance, however, the universes which Barth creates in his fictions appear anything but orderly or meaningful, and for good reason: he sees order and meaning as qualities that are subjectively experienced, created, and imposed upon the chaos of The Universe by individuals, each with unique perceptions about what Reality actually is, should be, or could be. The uniqueness of individual perception, always in process as it accommodates itself to changing circumstances, creates a kind of disorder as Barth's characters struggle to recognize, assess and overcome their limitations in opposition to static concep- tual systems as well as against "reality" itself. All of Barth's protagonists are, in some way, linked to established systems for defining reality--a11 of them find these structures too brittle, incomplete, and inadequate for constructing a personally meaningful and orderly "universe." Each of Barth's novels is, then, a sort of Bildungsroman wherein his protagonists undergo a process of learning and reassessment much broader and, for them, more relevant than 3 any provided by sanctioned educational and philosophical systems. He observes that I hadn't quite realized how academic, in this special sense, my life's work as a writer of stories has been. . . . More dismaying, when I reviewed my literary offspring under this aspect, I realized that what I've been writing about all these years is not only orientation and education (rather disorientation and education) but imperfect or misfired education at that. . . .many of the wandering heroes of mythology reach an impasse at some crucial point in their journey, from which they can proceed only by a laborious retracing of their steps ( NYTBR, 1984, 36). An important aspect of the process whereby Barth's characters attempt a "retracing of their steps" involves their recognition that the written texts making up the archives through which institutions of knowledge perpetuate themselves are useless for developing a personally satisfy- ing sense of meaning, especially because the archives support large-scale systems rather than accommodating themselves to individual realities. Further, though his characters seek to reestablish their faith in the authority of texts by producing their own writings, in the hope that the act of writing will create meaning, they all come to learn that writing undermines truth as much as it asserts it. For Barth, then, a persistent concern is how writing, both as act and artifact, is self-contradictory. That is, he sees writing as an important, even imperative, means for making sense of the world. But, at the same time, he denies the validity of writing as a way to create and enforce an authentic, comprehensive, or enduring_"meaning," whether it fl 4 be epistemological or cosmological, that holds true enough for individuals to act upon with any real certainty. These general concerns operating within Barth's novels relate to his professional situation. On the one hand, Barth's fiction both reflects and participates in contempor- ary debates in literary theory over the nature of modern literature and its relationship to the real world. On the other hand, his pedagogical activities and his novels' treatment of education and writing focus on issues germane to current debates in composition theory. Both areas have in common questions about how writing and written texts can or cannot define reality, help make sense of the world, facilitate communication, create order, or generate meaning. Barth, then, by virtue of his writing and teaching, is thematic concerns at the heart of John Barth's work. The relationship between writing and the world, the power of written language to shape and create reality, the complex nature of meaning, the efficacy or impotence of epistemolo- gical and cosmological systems, the struggle to achieve coherence and meaning in the face of chaos and disorder, the 5 individual learner--all of these general issues are explored throughout Barth's literary and non-fictional work. During a symposium of critics and novelists, Barth remarked It seems to me that reality is a nice place to visit . . .but literature has never wanted to live there very long. And in any case that making up stories is a process much closer to dreaming than it is to naively trying to represent our waking days (Henckle, 205). Such comments have led some critics to assume that Barth's fictional worlds are merely escapes from reality into limited, self-reflexive, and solipsistic realms of the fantastic and the irrational. For example, Jac Tharpe summarizes Barth as someone who writes in and of a world in which people must face all the big problems for which no explanation exists. His solution to this problem is to create a body of art that uses the technique of language to metaphorize--to put the ultimate reality off where it will bother nobody. Since we cannot find out what reality is, we shall simply create one to serve. Ordinarily, the result of this process was either myth or ideology. In Barth's case, it is to create a world of fiction, not a fictional world (115-116). When asked to respond to this assessment during an interview, Barth replies that Tharpe's description is only partly accurate. For him, Tharpe focuses too much on the development of the more fantastic elements over the course of his first six novels while ignoring the connection with reality that Barth insists he always maintains in his writing and that I don't like it to be charged against me that my fictions have no particular relation to the world that we experience. I would find that meaningless. I don't like fictions like that, though surely my fictions are not realistic fictions, 6 no question about it. But if I could not recognize some of my own passions and some of the passions of people in the novellas of the Chimera series or even in the most involuted and self-reflexive fictions in the Lost in the Funhouse series, I would not be interested in them. I would find them sterile and, perhaps, not uninteresting, but of a radically limited interest (Glaser-Wohrer, 214). For Barth, the balance between objective and subjective realities depends on a kind of gut certainty about where reality leaves off and irreality begins. . . .Just on the ground of mere metaphysics it seems to me perfectly obvious that the world is our idea. This doesn't mean that we go around living in dream-world. It only means that vigorously examined, obviously, categories come from us and not from out there (Glaser-Wohrer, 216). But passion and subjectively defined categories of reality do not mean that literature and writing depend upon a kind of philosophical or cognitive autism, nor on a deliberate rejection of historical and literary precedent. In "The Literature of Exhaustion," Barth outlines how he stands, among other things, in relation to literary history and postmodern literary experimentation. For Barth, "exhaus- tion" has nothing to do with a commitment to nihilism, a belief in inevitable cultural decline, or a perception that the novel is dead. By "exhaustion" I don't mean anything so tired as the subject of physical, moral, or intellectual decadence, only the used-upness of certain forms or exhaustion of certain possibilities--by no means necessarily a cause for despair. That a great many Western artists for a great many years have quarreled with received definitions of artistic media, genres, and forms goes without saying. . .(29). Barth is suspicious, however, about experimentation for its own sake, especially that which seeks to renew literary 7 possibilities by experimenting with form or the kind of technological manipulation of the physical aspects of the novel praised by Sukenick. Innovations such as novels that are looseleaf and unpaginated, printed on postcards, or that come boxed rather than bound are experiments that lead Barth to say It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art, and the area of "happenings" and their kin is mainly a way of discussing aesthetics, really; illustrating "dramatically" more or less vivid and interesting points about the nature of art and the definition of its terms and genres (29). Barth sees this tendency as reflecting a sort of new democratic attitude toward art, one that sets itself up in opposition to the traditional notion of the artist as a con- scious, controlling agent who, through talent and technique, depends upon dedication and the perfection of skill to produce works of unique virtuosity. Barth sees himself as a peculiar conservative, as an artist who "chooses to 'rebel along traditional lines'" by perfecting his craft to create "the kind of art that not many people can g2: the kind that requires expertise and artistry as well as bright aesthetic ideas and/or inspiration" (30); In other words, he does not find technical virtuosity alone interesting enough, for both the forms and techniques of artistic innovation are influenced, shaped, and given meaning by what came before. For him, tradition is a resource too rich to ignore as a source for renewal because fl 8 it might be conceivable to rediscover validly the artifices of language and literature--such far-out notions as grammar, punctuation. . .even characterization! Even algEt--if one goes about it the right way, aware of what one s predecessors have been up to (31). Barth admires such writers as Borges who manages to confront an artistic and "intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work" (31). The fruit of such an attitude is an art that renews or recycles itself by drawing on "exhausted" possibilities from the past to say something genuinely new and relevant to present realities. One aspect of this that Barth relies heavily on is the self-reflexive, parodic view that such a literary sensibility would have: an awareness of literary history ironically recycled to address both its won artifice and the contemporary historical moment. Or, as Barth puts it, he produces "novels which imitate the form of the Novel, by an author who imitates the role of Author" (33). However, some readers misunderstand Barth to mean that the gnly avenue left to contemporary writers is to parody, satirize, and repackage their literary forebears, a misconception that he sets out to correct in "The Literature of Replenishment." Leaving aside the celebrated fact that, with Don Quixote, the novel may be said to begin in self-transcendent paro y and has often returned to t at mode for its because no single literary text can ever be exhausted--its "meaning" residing as it does in its transactions with individual readers over time, space, and language (71). 9 What prompts Barth to readdress these issues thirteen years later is the growing debate between competing literary critical schools of thought, a situation he feels tends to obscure the teaching, writing, and discussion of literature in favor of arguments over critical categories. In his view, ignoring either impulse leads to imbalance. Indeed, I believe that a truly splendid specimen in whatever aesthetic mode will pull critical ideology behind it, like an ocean liner trailing seagulls. Actual artists, actual texts, are seldom more than more or less modernist, postmodernist, formalist, symbolist, realist, surrealist, politically committed, aesthetically "pure," "experimental," regionalist, internationalist, what have you. The particular work ought always to take primacy over contexts and categories. 0n the other hand, art lives in human time and history, and general changes in its modes and materials and concerns. . .are doubtless as significant as changes in a culture's general attitudes, which its arts may both inspire and reflect (69). In Barth's opinion, the conflict between competing critical elements--between, for example, romanticism and modernism, linearity and disjunction, rationality and irrationality, conventional morality and moral plurality-- should not necessarily dictate that a writer take sides by joining one camp or another. Instead, A worthy program for postmodern fiction. . .is the synthesis or transcession of these antitheses. . . .My ideal postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates his twentieth-century modernist parents or his nineteenth-century premodernist grandparents. He has the first half of the century under his belt, but not on his back (70). For Barth, the postmodernist writer's task is "the working out, not of the next-best thing after modernism, but of the best next thing" (71). He believes that literature 10 is less open to radical experimentation than the plastic arts, that the sense of story and the demands of written language (linearity, punctuation, words functioning as symbols for sense stimuli, etc.) put limits in the range of innovation that literature can bear. Technical wizardry is not sufficient by itself, yet on the other hand, according to Barth, a writer interested in exploring the limits and possibilities of literature does not "want to be a technical hick" (Enck, 6). The "trick," he says, is "to have it both ways": to assimilate and utilize what has already been done, yet find a way to be undeniably contemporary (Bellamy, 4), and this can be accomplished outside of critical battlegrounds. I happen to believe that just as an excellent teacher is likely to teach well no matter what pedagogical theory he suffers from, so a gifted writer is like to rise above what he takes to be his aesthetic principles, not to mention what others take to be his aesthetic principles ("Exhaustion," When asked how being a university teacher affects his writing and his opinion about how academic settings influence the relationship between the writer, the critic, and the scholar, Barth replies that This is a tiresome subject. . . .because, like so many questions of that sort, anybody who takes a serious position about it one way or the other, is forgetting how many kinds of writing there are, and how varied are the backgrounds out of which good art comes (Enck, 9). But some maintain that Barth's academic situation exercises great influence over his works. For example, Jerome Klinkowitz sees Barth as an artist writing in 11 opposition to the nonaligned (either to movements or institutions), nonrepresentational, noncommercial aesthetic which Klinkowitz sees as dominant in the 1950's and 1960's, as if Barth were somehow part of a reactionary literary and academic anti-movement. During all these years. . .John Barth was solidly aligned with a tenured academic community and a succession. . .of mainstream commercial publishers; each establishment maintained a vested interest in representational literary art, as eminently teachable and saleable (13). These associations lead Klinlowitz to see Barth catering, not to the general reading public, but to his colleagues in the profession of English. A knowledge of literary and philosophical tradition complemented by the life-experience of teaching these verities were the qualifications of Barth's ideal reader (7). Enoch P. Jordan, analyzing Barth's thematic and stylistic revisions of the published versions of his first three novels, somewhat agrees, saying that Barth excised some material in such a way that the reader is given fewer detailed explanations and analyses. This change. . .implies an alternative in Barth's conception of his reader, for it requires that the reader be capable of deducing motivation from action and of seeing the relationship between individual actions and the larger concerns of the novels . . . .Barth seems to have postulated a reading audience more sophisticated than the one he had in mind for the first editions (124). A possible reason for these changes, according to Jordan, might be Barth's realization that, though his novels sold poorly to the general public, they drew considerable 12 scholarly attention and, thus, two of Barth's succeeding works, Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera, present ambiguous surfaces of a sort historically unsuccess- ful among the general public, exploring the possibilities of a point of view and fictional structure with such intricacy that they are accessible only to an audience of considerable literary sophistication. . . .Barth's increased confidence in the reader results in versions [of his first three novels] that are swifter and more graceful that the first editions. As a result of the change the novels are more attractive to the critical reader (125). But these evaluations seem ironic when compared to Barth's own views on these matters. He repeatedly maintains that he is "naive about modern literature" and that he does not "know anything about philosophy" (Enck, 5;8), that critical, philosophical, and even literary issues are, as often as not, serendipitous, evident to him only when someone comes along afterward to point these things out because one works by hunch and guess and intuition, with some conscious patterns in mind, too, and one has a character do this instead of that because one feels this is appropriate. Maybe in the act of setting it down you say, "I know why he did that," but then you are looking at it as a college teacher. More often you read a piece years later by some bright fellow, interpreting your work, and you realize that while he's strictly left-field here and here, he's got your number in this other place here, In a way you recognize for the first time yourself. THIS is a rather upsetting, but pleasantly upsetting, experience: to be told by somebody else what you were up to, and recognize that he's right (Buck, 14). Further, the fact that his works have captured a certain amount of academic attention and managed to become part of required classroom reading is more a source of 13 bemused interest for Barth than the payoff for a more finely tuned targeting of his audience. Do you know what I think is interesting, by the way?. . .It' s the spectacle of these enormous universities we have now, all over the place, teaching courses in us! These birds in your series, like me, who haven't even— reached menopause yet, Notable Nobodies in the Novel, and already they're giving courses in us. Remarkable. Amusing. And I suppose it's admirable on the part of American universities. But I wonder what effect it will have on literature. For example, where I work there are 600 English majors--maybe 6,000, I don't know. . . .But imagine 600 people in central Pennsylvania knowing and caring who Hawkes and Donleavy are—-maybe before Hawkes and Donleavy find out themselves! Boggles the imagination (Enck, 6). In fact, some critics view Barth as a writer who stands in direct opposition to academe. For example, Theodore Baker Turner, III, groups Barth with writers such as Kesey, Mailer, Burroughs, Bellow, and Nabokov who feel that the very organization of universities gives these institutions a power which is inimical to human freedom and growth (2). Turner sees the work of these writers as strongly oriented toward the struggle between individual human growth, which entails an openness to novel perceptions and realities, and institutional growth, which demands conformity and prepackaged realities. Each of these authors, according to Turner, writes about individuals who try to break free from the domination of institutions in order to create their own truths, their own experiences, and to develop their own personal relationships in the major areas of perceived reality of the world. . .(3). In Turner's opinion, Barth, himself, 14 represents a serious danger to contemporary university education. Working within the institution, he exhibits subversive qualities of irreverence, and shows anew that living can be an education in itself, and that in spite of the elevation of literary studies to the status of religious exercises, writing can still be a means of communication as personal as making love (93). But, whether Barth is responding to, or working against, traditional academic forces, a concern with educational structures is central to his work, teaching not the least of them. While working on his M.A. in creative writing at Johns Hopkins, Barth taught course in freshman composition, and after starting the Ph.D. program in the aesthetics of literature, he had the chance to teach more complex matters to a night- school class of adults: expository, descriptive, argumentative, narrative, and imaginative writing, critical reading, logic, analysis of beliefs and propaganda. He also tutored high school and prep school students in grammar, English, American, and world literature, composition, and ancient and American history (Morrell, 126). Dropping out of the doctoral program because of financial pressures, Barth took a job at Pennsylvania State University teaching freshman composition as well as "those courses at Penn State that gave him the most free time, remedial English, for example, and prescriptive grammar . . ." (Morrell, 126). Later, Barth became a full professor, teaching creative writing, literature, and humanities, first at SUNY Buffalo, and then at Johns Hopkins where he presently teaches. In a recent essay titled "Writing: Can it Be Taught?" Barth explores questions about the teaching of writing by 15 first asking whether it can be learned. He refers to the overwhelming number of submissions to literary journals and contests as evidence that, somehow, writing is being learned "by more writers per annum than anyone has time to read" (1). And, in relation to the quality of writing being learned as reflected in applications to the Johns Hopkins writing program, he says that if not many of them knock our socks off (and we don't want to be desocked by more than ten or a dozen yearly), only a few are downright incompetent. Somehow, somewhere, these multitudes of authors have more or less learned their trade, even before they apply to us or others for fine tuning (1). Nevertheless, according to Barth, over three hundred American colleges and universities offer degree-granting programs in creative writing, "a phenomenon scarcely to be found outside our republic and scarcely to be found inside it before VJ Day" (36)--all despite a seeming decline in the chances for commercial success. Not economic recession, not declining literacy, failing bookstores, the usurpation of the kingdom of narrative by movies and television--nothing quenches the American thirst for courses in creative writing. In day school, night school, high school, college, graduate school, correspondence school, summer school, prison school, in writers' colonies and conferences and camps and cruises it is scribble, scribble, scribble, scribble, scribble, scribble, scribble (36). Whether or not this desire to be taught results in successful literary careers is, for Barth, beside the point. He feels that it certainly does not hurt students' talent to formally study writing, and at the very least, I'll bet they all read more knowledgeably and apprecia- tively, too. . . .If the chief product of all those hundreds 16 of American creative-writing courses is successful readers rather than successful writers, what a service they render (37). But for Barth, the most positive aspect offered by writing courses is a community of readers for those who want to write better, especially the feedback of interested peers and experienced teachers. The teacher. . .is aware of the strategic problems in composition. If he, himself, is a successful writer, his criticism and encouragement are regarded by the student as of great importance. Also, the approval of members of the class, their approval and their interest in improving creative expression, can be of lasting help (Smith, 104). However, a good writing teacher does not necessarily have to be a successful professional writer. Speaking of his own experiences, Barth expresses some reservations about the effect that a well-known literary personality might exert on apprentice writers: As an undergraduate I had a couple of tutors who were not themselves writers. They were simply good coaches. I've thought of that in a chastened way since. Dealing with my own students. . .I often wonder whether it's a good idea for them to have, at the other end of the table, somebody who's already working at a certain level of success and notoriety. Is that not perhaps intimidating? I just don't know, but I suspect the trade-off is fair enough. I might have learned some things faster had I been working with an established writer rather than a very sympathetic coach (Plimpton, 150). In Barth's case, he seems to have it both ways. 0n the one hand, he is a writing teacher who has attracted recognition and critical attention (and, judging by the responses of some critics, he has also managed to draw some measure of notoriety). On the other hand, the role of teacher-as-coach plays an important part in how Barth sees 17 himself in the classroom. But coaching, for him, is most useful to students at a particular point in their development. I happen to think there's some justification for having courses in so-called creative writing. I know from happy experience with young writers that the muses make no distinction between undergraduates and graduate students. The muses know only expert writers and less expert writers. . . .In time, a writer, or any artist, stops making mistakes on a crude, first level, and begins making mistakes on the next, more elevated level--let's say the upper slopes of slippery Parnassus--and it's at that point you need coaching (Plimpton, 151). But in Barth's novels, characters have to learn to write, or learn to deal with writing, beyond the artificial confines of the classroom, and though they often find guidance from mentors, guides, teachers, therapists, history, and philosophy, none of these provides enough stability or direction to relinquish the personal, active search for meaning through writing. Further, though many of his characters are linked with formal educational institutions, some directly and others only marginally, all of them learn to confront reality by, or by way of, coming to terms with the act of writing--even the reality that they themselves exist only as words written on a page, a fact against which a few rebel. Drawing on the phrase, "the key to the treasure is the treasure," words that possess magical powers in "Dunyazadiad" (the first novella in Chimera), a number of critics have offered what they believe to be the "key" to unlocking the underlying continuity in Barth's fictional 18 works. For Theodore Turner, III, this lies in what he sees as Barth's persistent reaction against the repressive forces of institutionalized education. That is, Barth emphasizes the creative, personal, intimate in fact, relationship which can exist between artist and audience, teacher and student, writer and reader. It may be that in the end it is this relationship. . .which can save art, education, and society from the negative, death impulses Barth has so vividly described. . . ; in the end, it is this relationship and the search for it which provide the foundation for Barth's educational curriculum (145). For Charles B. Harris, the key lies in Barth's employment of myth as a common thread running throughout his works. The central idea of the myth, as Joseph Campbell and others have demonstrated, is cosmic harmony, unity in multeity, and this idea recurs implicitly or explicitly in each book. . . . But each of Barth's protagonists, like Barth himself, is a writer in the world, not a mystic. The problem. . .is how to translate mythic intuitions, which are finally ineffable, into words capable of evoking that which may not be articulated (7). Underlying and propelling Barth's use of mythic elements are, according to Harris, philosophical questions about meaning, and when taken as a whole, Barth's novels achieve the effect of a constant grasping for meaning, on the one hand, balanced by the realization that all meaning is projected--invented rather than discovered, and therefore relat ve an contingent--on the other. . . .In Barth's fictions the assionate desire to construct meanin --not meaning itseI¥--assumes the status of a universaI Human value (8). For Jac Tharpe, the key is Barth's technical skill: Technique. . .is extremely important, It is the key to the treasure of both art and love. Technique, in fact, represents a Platonic essence. Once one finds the essential technique, he will have no reason to give it content. Or he would not have reason except that of course he still has the 19 problem of informing audiences that he has discovered the essence and wishes to show what it consists in (109-110). When asked by Glaser-Wohrer to respond to the widely divergent critical interpretations of "the key to the treasure is the treasure,’ and whether or not the key might be language itself, Barth answers that, for him, it all has to do with the processes of narration being part of the subject of narration. . .language and the things made with it, but not language and the things out there that language points to, right? . . .You know, in the same way, when Roland Barthes says that after 1850 or after Flaubert, when the whole of literature becomes the problematics of language, I always want to change his word there. I don't know whether there he is saying langue or p role, but I always want to change the word language to meaning", in the sense that if you go along with his myth about literature, the whole of literature becomes the problematics of the medium which involves language (263). Perhaps it is a mistake to search too closely for the key to Barth's ideas about writing and the teaching of writing. Certainly it would be futile to look for the key, one that exposes and unravels the complex web of plots, characterizations, motivations, philosophies, parodies, and techniques in each of Barth's works, or that which unlocks the complicated interrelationships existing between his novels as themes and characters continually reappear and recycle themselves. No single key can magically provide unqualified order and unity to Barth's ever-changing and multifaceted universe without seriously distorting and misrepresenting the worlds he creates. Nevertheless, some of the predominant elements in Barth's literary universe concern writing, the teaching and learning of writing, and 20 the limits that writing encounters when used to make sense of the world. Though not 522 key, a possible clue to a key might be phrased as "the key to writing is writing." What follows is my attempt to chart the course that Barth's novels take in regard to the situations faced by his writer-characters as they work to negotiate the world, even to control the world, through learning to use writing in various ways. In addition, I have organized the chapters by making each a discussion of pairs of novels that explore similar themes. That Barth tends to write his novels as sets of pairs is, to some extent, evident in the thematic elements employed in each set. But, in much the same way that Barth did not notice the educational motif in his books until he one day looked back over his work as a whole, he did not perceive that his canon was structured in this way: One day I realized to my delight. . .that all my books come in pairs. I had not realized that until there were enough pairs there for somebody to see the pattern and point it out to me (LeClair and McCaffery, 12). Chapter 2 Writing to Escape the Abyss: The Floatin Opera and The End of the Road Barth's first two novels are realistic tragi-comedies which open and explore themes that, to a greater or lesser extent, stand as central philosophical concerns in all of his fiction. Meaning, purpose, and definition of self comprise the predominant issues which, tempered by primary existential questions threatening these things, constitute Barth's general philosophical stance. The heart of Barth's work, the discourse which informs his comedy, is the problem of existence and identity. He sees the world as a fluid place, making any position slippery and untenable. If this is the case, why take any position? Why act? Why move? (Trachtenberg, 9-10). The consequent metaphysical conflicts his characters face, and the means by which they attempt to resolve them, shape and propel his artistic motivations and sensibilities: all of Barth's work is pervaded by a sense of moral and aesthetic crisis, the extreme artistic situation of what he has names "the literature of exhaustion", [sic] and it is this tension between narrative power and impotence, between the claims and failures of storytelling to make sense of individual and collective experience, that constitutes his fundamental subject (Garrett, 167). These issues not only predominate in Barth's first two novels, they make up the subject matter of both books. Both explore the complex responses demanded of the intelligent, eccentric, and isolated protagonists by their awareness and acknowledgment that nothing has intrinsic, absolute value. Both deal with methods for living in an absurd, chaotic 21 —l————'—"7 22 world. protagonists struggle, through writing, Both are written as first-person narratives whose to create sense and come to some kind of personally satisfying accommodation with such a world. are aware range of of the power of the mind things which are not the case, Both pertain to characters who to originate a whole or to provide such a variety of versions of what the case is that the very notion of any stable meaning or permanent actual given world is denied. his produces an of ambiguous freedom, both for the tion and the author in his fiction Yet, ultimately senseless and meaningless, -making (Tanner, value inhering in the atmosphere his situa- 230). character in though both present a view of the world as too arbitrary and complex to allow a finally legitimate scheme of order, at their core lies the idea of unity. simplest terms, ' ' the writer's only not refer except dent reality, then world? Can word whole? (Harris, and world resolve Preface). The problem, If language ture irreal since it does in the most arbitrary sense to an antece- writer become a writer-in-the stated in (specifically print, themselves into a unified These are some of the fundamental philosophical questions that Barth explores, citly, in all of his works, of a series of paired novels where revise, expand upon, or negate the The questions are important enough each of whom wants somehow to be a lead them to employ writing or the necessary tool in their search for unlocks the treasure of meaning, - . either implicitly or expli- which can be looked at in terms each book sets out to views of its predecessor. for Barth's protagonists, “writer-in-the-world," to analysis of texts as a some kind of key that of unity in multeity, in a 23 universe of arbitrary truths. The search is at its most desperate and poignant in Barth's first pair of novels whose main characters, acting as the "real" authors of the books in which they exist, discover that the quest for a way out of an epistemological dead end (and toward a coherence valid enough to give life meaning), through the act of writing their stories, can take on life-or-death significance when addressed to the existential questions that obsess them. The "author" of Barth's first novel, Th3 Floating 9225a, is Todd Andrews who opens his book by introducing himself and his purpose for writing. We learn that Todd was born in 1900 and writes in 1954, lives in the Dorchester Hotel in Cambridge on Maryland's Eastern Shore, and works as a partner in his deceased father's law firm. In addition to these autobiographical essentials, Todd supplies a great many personal details that might seem trivial and tan- gential: height and weight, hair style and shaving habits, annual salary, a brief outline of his education at Johns Hopkins and experiences during World War I, his resemblance to Gregory Peck, favorite cigars and whiskey, the efficiency of his digestion, etc. Though these latter facts help round out the initial identity that Andrews tries to create of himself for the reader, they come hurriedly and haphazardly, as if all personal details have equal weight, and this is symptomatic of one of his problems. That is, Todd suffers from an inability to distinguish what is immediately 24 important from what is irrelevant because he believes that "to understand any one thing entirely, no matter how minute, requires the understanding of every other thing in the world" (29, 6). What Todd seeks to understand, what compels him to write his story to include every possible personal detail, is his need "to explain that day (either the 21st or the 22nd) in June of 1937 when I changed my mind for the last time" (29, 3). The change he refers to concerns his decision not to commit suicide as his father did. Though such a momentous change of mind would seem to merit a more definite memory of when it took place, Todd can narrow it down to only two possible dates, despite the fact that his book is replete with apparently concrete information about conversations, chronologies, clothes, weather, meals, and a wealth of other minor details. This eventually makes the reader wonder about the authenticity of what Todd relates and leads to the suspicion that he is recreating, rather than merely recounting, his experiences. This sense of a recreated life is another result of Todd's obsession with conveying £3351 detail of his life-- an impossible task that forces him to reconstruct the essence, not the literal truth, of his story (a strategy which he occasionally confirms later in the book). But he has been a compulsive reviser all of his life in another way: he has survived and overcome uncertainty and insecurity 25 through assuming a series of different identities each time he has made an important adjustment in his posture toward life: It is a matter of attitudes, of stances--of masks, if you wish, though the term has a perjorativeness that I won't accept. During my life I've assumed four or five such stances, based on certain conclusions, for I tend, I'm afraid, to attribute to abstract ideas a life-or-death significance. Each stance, it seemed to me at the time, represented the answer to my dilemma, the mastery of my fact; but always something would happen to demonstrate its inadequacy, or else the stance would simply lose its persuasiveness, imperceptibly, until suddenly it didn't work--quantitative change, as Marx has it, suddenly becoming qualitative change--and then I had the job to face again of changing masks: a slow and, for me, painful process, if often an involuntary one (F9, 15). The fact that these role changes often come about involuntarily is significant because Todd assumes each new mask retroactively as a concession to forces over which he has no control, not as a carefully considered response to changing events. I know for certain that all the major mind changes in my life have been the result not of deliberate, creative thinking on my part, but rather of pure accidents--events outside myself impinging forcibly upon my attention--which I afterwards rationalized into new masks (F9, 21). Part of the impotence Todd feels over events results from the fact that each change, each newly assumed identity, is the product of some experience that causes him to face his mortality directly. A chronic prostate infection and a bayonet wound received during the war, have taught Todd early lessons of his physical vulnerability. But the dominating influence in his life since the age of nineteen is a congenital heart ailment that could strike him down 26 with a fatal myocardial infarction at any moment. As a result, Todd quite literally measures his life in heart- beats. This fact--that having begun this sentence, I may not live to write its end; that having poured my drink, I may not live to taste it, or that it may pass a live man's tongue to burn a dead man's belly; that having slumbered, I may never wake, or having waked, may never living sleep--this for thirty-five years has been the condition of my existence, the great fact of my life: had been so for eighteen years already, or five hundred forty-nine million, sixty thousand, four hundred eighty heartbeats by June 21 or 22 of 1937 . . . .This question, the fact of my life, is, reader, the fact of my book as well: the question which, now answered but yet to be explained, answers, reader, everything, explains all (29, 48-49). Death permeates Todd's life, so much so that he sees it inextricably linked to his identity. For example, he points out to the reader that his first name, Todd, is nearly the same as "Tod," the German word for death, a fact that influences his sense of self and the purpose of his book: Tod is death, and this book hasn't much to do with death; T33d is almost Tod--that is, almost death-~and this book, if It gets writtenT-Has very much to do with almost death (Q. 3). After Todd learned of his condition, he adopted his first mask: that of a rake pursuing any hedonistic pleasure available. This ended in 1925 after he was almost killed by a prostitute who, coincidentally, he had offended years ago during the sexual episode where Andrews lost his virginity. No longer finding adequate escape from ever-present death in a feverish, carpe diem haze of booze and sex, Todd decided that he must face his situation directly and "live with it soberly, looking it squarely in the eye" (29, 134). For 27 about five years, while still studying law, he became something like "a Buddhist saint, of the Esoteric variety," a detached and acetic role where he "renounced the world of human endeavors and delight. . .having no more to do with my fellow man and values than I had to" (29, 18-19). Then, following his father's suicide after the 1929 stock market crash, and finding the body hanging from a belt nailed to a basement rafter, Todd assumed the mask of a "cosmic cynic," believing that nothing had intrinsic value, that "Nothing, absolutely, made any difference" (F9, 208). He pays his hotel bill a day at a time, even going so far as to reregis- ter daily, and relishes what he calls "limited inconsisten- cy"--the deliberate disruption of consistent behavior. You have hundreds of habits: of dress, of manner, of speech, of eating, of thought, of aesthetic taste, of moral conduct. Break them now and then, deliberately, and institute new ones in their place for a while. It will slow you up sometimes, but you'll tend to grow strong and feel free. To be sure, don't break all your habits. Leave some untouched forever; otherwise you'Il be consistent (29, 122). But this mask, too, begins to wear thin for Todd and finally snaps when, on the night of June 20, the night before the day of my story, I became totally and forcibly aware of its inadequacy--I was, in fact, back where I'd started in 1919; and that, finally and miraculously, after no more than an hour's predawn sleep, I awoke, splashed cold water on my face, and realized that I had the real, the final, the unassailable answer; the last possible word; the stance to end all stances (£9, 15). The solution, what Todd assumes will be the final and most legitimate mask of all, is to become a suicide like his father. After a night spent in literally paralyzed 28 desperation, this answer comes in an instant the next morning, like an epiphany, leaving him feeling greatly relieved: no longer must he cope with a senseless life nor play a role in order to cope with the ever-present threat of sudden death nor remain powerless over his fate. Todd decides to open the acetylene gas jets on Captain Adam's "Original and Unparalleled Floating Opera" (an itinerate showboat that used to ply the tidewater regions of Virginia and Maryland and had docked in Cambridge for a performance) and blow himself up. Despite his initial joy at resolving to kill himself, he plots this with seeming indifference and objectivity, undisturbed that his act of self destruction will also take 699 of his fellow citizens--including Harrison and Jane Mack (his best friends and with whom he has been involved in a sexual triangle from 1932 to 1937, with a break from 1933 to 1935) and their three-and-a-half years old daughter Jeannine, who might very well be Todd's biological daughter. Yet, these plans are not as coldly dispassionate as they appear--Todd's acts are based on the same powerful psychological and emotional motivations as those that led to his taking on roles in the first place. Andrews is the first of several Barthian protagonists whose world suddenly ceases to make sense. While the resulting anxiety closely approximates Camus's "feeling of the absurd," it also resembles the schizophrenic experience that Laing calls "ontological insecurity," a pervasive anxiety about the vulnerability of the self (Harris, 12). But, instead of being forced to the point of ultimate despair and then following through with his self 29 destruction, Todd characteristically arrives at a new kind of awareness, changing his stance yet another time and insisting that his reasons for doing so result from a set of principles pursued to their logical end. To this point, Todd's reasoning has been this: If nothing has intrinsic value, and if any values are irrationally and arbitrarily assigned to things, then there is no reason for valuing anything, including life--therefore, there is no reason to continue living. However, he realizes that one more step remains: If there is no final reason for living, there is no final reason for not living either. This comes neither as a disappointment nor as cause for celebration, or so Todd says. According to him, it was merely "a simple matter of carrying out my plans to their logical conclusion" (fig, 246). He remains convinced that this act, as all the others, reflects consistent rationality and objectivity. . . .though the progress of my reasoning from 1919 to 1937 was in many ways turbulent, it was of the essence of my conclusion that no emotion was necessarily involved in it. To realize that nothing makes any final difference is overwhelming; but if one goes no farther and becomes a saint, a cynic, or a suicide on principle, one hasn't reasoned completely. The truth is that nothing makes any difference, including that truth. Hamlet's question is, absolutely, meaningless (F2, 246). This turnaround, as with all his changes, is not as calculated nor as deliberate as Todd would have the reader believe. All of his roles had been attempts to preserve self, even the decision to commit suicide. However, this 30 last role, Todd's "stance to end all stances," is far from convincing because he never intends that his plan to blow up himself and the others on the showboat will actually succeed. Earlier, while conducting Todd and Jeannine Mack on a private tour, Captain Adam makes it clear that the safeguards incorporated into the boat's equipment and design prevent explosions. Todd must, then, have another reason for slipping away from the show and turning on the gas. Therefore, rather than literal suicide, Harris proposes that Todd is engaged in another kind of self destructive mission: a simple declaration that the self is dead. At any rate, the posture remains defensive; therefore it is not destruc- tive, but ultimately protective. . . .his actions represent an existential suicide, a symbolic denial of being that is parEdEiTEETTy_intended to preserve being. If the self is dead, it cannot be destroyed (Harris, 17). From this point on, Todd assumes that he is free of masks, that the role of a suicide is the last part he has to play, and he persists in this belief after abandoning the idea of self extinction to lead what he thinks is a role- less, unillusioned existence. He feels freed from the burden of shielding himself with masks from all the pres- sures that had threatened to destroy him. But, on the contrary, he ignores the most persistent mask of all, one assumed long ago at the same time that he first began consciously to take on new identities, and he continues playing this part even after supposedly shedding masks forever with his suicide. This role that has sustained Andrews in his urgent battle against annihilation more 31 emphatically and consistently than he knows is that of a writer who uses his own and others' texts both to conceal, and as a controlling mechanism to combat, the mortality, chaos, and meaninglessness that he fears will overwhelm him. In addition, as with his "false" commitment to suicide, Todd is less that consistent or forthright in his belief that writing offers him real power to stave off doubt and despair. For example, as a practicing attorney, Andrews depends on the authority derived from the archives of written legal codes forming what society sees as the basis of its stan- dards of ethical conduct, its sense of order, and the way that it locates itself in relation to the progress of civilization over the course of history as reflected in the evolution of codified legal conventions. But all this is irrelevant and meaningless to Andrews--his decision to become an attorney was, in large part, a concession to make his father happy and, in light of his bad heart, no better and no worse than any other career selection. I didn't choose the practice of law as my career, except perhaps passively; it had been assumed from earliest memory that I was to study for the Maryland Bar and enter Dad's firm, and I never protested. Certainly I've never been dedicated to anything, although as with many another thing I've always maintained a reasonable curiosity about the meanings of legal rules and the workings of the courts (29, However, despite his passive and uncommitted attitude, Todd still wants the reader to know that he is the best 32 lawyer around--for him, this is not braggadocio but an unadorned, dispassionate fact. If I thought the practice of law absolutely important, then my statement would indeed be as much a boast as a descrip- tion; but truthfully I consider advocacy, jurisprudence, even justice to have no more intrinsic importance than, say, oyster-shucking. And you'd understand, wouldn't you, that if a man like myself asserted with a smile that he was the peninsula's best oyster shucker (I'm not), or cigarette roller, or pinball-machine tilter, he'd not be guilty of prideful boasting? (F9, 71) However, although meticulous and highly competitive when he puts his mind to it, Todd could not care less about legal ideals or ethics. Rather than worry about legal niceties, concern himself with whether the machinery of jurisprudence dispenses justice fairly or not at all, or even wonder about what the essence of the law might be, Andrews asserts flatly, "I think I'm not interested in what the law is." Instead, he is "curious about things that the law can be made to do; but this disinterestedly, without involvement" (F9, 82). He approaches the law as an amusing activity, in much the same way that a child finds amusement in making a toy tractor climb over a book. As for justice, he claims, "I don't know what you mean, sir, when you speak of justice" (29, 82). The law is only a means for Andrews to keep himself occupied. All right. I have no general opinions about the law, or about justice, and if I sometimes set little obstacles, books and slants, in the path of the courts, it is because I'm curious, merely, to see what will happen. . . .Winning or losing litigations is of no concern to me, and I think I've never made a secret of that fact to my client. They come to me, as they come before the law, because the think they have a case. The law and I are uncommitted __, 83). 33 The accusation that such an attitude is irresponsible and could lead to acts of injustice does not disturb Todd at all. In fact, the idea even holds some attraction for him: It does indeed allow for the persecution of innocence-- though perhaps not so frequently as you might imagine. And this persecution concerns me, in the sense that it holds my attention, but not especially in the sense that it bothers me. Under certain circumstances. . .I am not adverse to pillorying the innocent, to throwing my stone, with the crowd, at some poor martyr. Irresponsibility, yes: I affirm, I insist upon my basic and ultimate irresponsibil- ity. Yes indeed (F9, 83). Because he can divorce the law from justice and questions about right and wrong or truth and lies from the practice of law, Todd treats his cases as games where he can choose to try to win or deliberately lose depending on what his whims of the moment might be. Bribery, destruction of evidence, lying, and counterfeit grounds for delaying a trial until more favorable political circumstances arise are not beneath him, and he has no qualms about whether or not to introduce winning evidence by leaving the decision to the toss of a coin (though he might just as arbitrarily decide to inject some deliberate inconsistency into the choice and not follow the result of the toss). Courtroom argument is nothing more than a rhetorical contest, a battle of words, between rival attorneys who struggle to sway judges and juries through well-turned phrases that have the sound and insubstantiality of tabloid headlines. In Todd's view, "judges, no less than other men, are often moved by _ ‘. , 34 considerations more aesthetic than judicial" (29, 93-94), and any prejudices that judges might have regarding a litigant's political affiliations are "more often influenced by such things as the symmetry and logical evidence of a brief than by more mundane considerations like the appel- lant's politics" (29, 100-1). However, even though the power of legal texts and language to shape reality or discover and define truths is purely arbitrary and subjective for Todd, he wants to be taken seriously as a writer and have the reader believe that his own text, TEE Floating Opera, is an accurate and serious rendering of the facts of his experience (despite the fact that even he refers to his book as a novel). One of his strategies for accomplishing this is to confess being a novice storyteller. I've never tries my hand at this sort of thing before, but I know enough about myself to realize that once the ice is broken the pages will flow all too easily, for I'm not naturally a reticent fellow, and the problem then will be to stick to the story and finally shut myself up (F9, 1). As already seen, Todd cannot discriminate relevant facts from tangential details, and he recognizes this as one of the obstacles to his writing. Good heavens, how does one write a novel! I mean, how can anybody stick to the story, if he's at all sensitive to the significance of things? As for me, I see already that storytelling isn't my cup of tea: every new sentence I set down is full of figures and implications that I'd love nothing better than to chase to their dens with you, but such chasing would involve new figures and new chases, so that I'm sure we'd never get the story started, much less ended, if I let my inclinations run unleashed (F2, 2). 35 But Todd also works to turn these problems to his advantage and reassure the reader that, however daunting his task is for a beginner, his motivations are sincere and his purpose wothwhile. For example, he entitles the opening chapter "Tuning My Piano" as a way to acknowledge implicitly the difficulties of his undertaking. That is, tuning a guitar or a violin would be much easier for a novice musician, but for some reason, Todd feels that his purpose is much too complicated and important to settle for anything less than a comprehensive attempt at harmonizing all the complex details pertaining to his decision against suicide. He may have to adjust and readjust, tune and retune, the individual notes of his composition, but he is going to try to orchestrate a full account of his experiences into a meaningful arrangement even at the risk of producing some occasionally discordant and grating effects. For him, the opening chapter acts as a kind of warmup where he can tune his writing skills and, at least, get started on the task at hand. Anticipating potential criticisms that his beginning reflects an erratic and awkward sensibility, Todd lays claim to a personal line of reasoning that is, at worst, merely idiosyncratic, not illogical nor undisciplined. If other people. . .think I'm eccentric and unpredictable, it is because my actions and opinions are inconsistent with their principles, if they have any; I assure you that EHEyTre quite consistent with mine. . . .my life is never less logical simply for its beffig-unorthodox (£9, 1). Much later in the book, after gaining confidence in his 36 writing abilities, he attempts a more complex kind of two-handed exercise for the keyboard. In chapter twenty, "Calliope Music," though Andrews claims that "my prose is a plodding, graceless thing, and I've no comprehension of stylistic tricks," he nevertheless tries to write a form of literary fugue by opening the chapter with two narratives simultaneously, both parts printed side-by-side on the page. Both begin identically, but differences slowly occur until two very different pieces evolve--Todd expects the reader to separate them "ever so gradually until you're used to keeping two distinct narrative voices in your head at the same time" (F9, 168). Yet, perhaps sensing that he needs to do more in the first chapter to generate a reader's trust and tolerance, Andrews turns to another metaphor to explain his approach to writing by comparing his narrative to a "meandering stream," something that he justifies as a reaction against the kind of writing he dislikes. . . .it has always seemed to me, in the novels that I've read now and then, that those authors are asking a great deal of their readers who start their stories furiously, in the middle of things, rather than backing or sidling slowly into them. Such a plunge into someone else's life and world, like a plunge into the Choptank River in mid-March, has, it seems to me, little of pleasure in it. Now come along with me reader, and don't fear for your weak heart; I've one myself, and know the value of inserting first a toe, then a foot, next a leg, very slowly your hips and stomach and finally your whole self into my story, and taking a good long time to do it. This is, after all, a pleasure-dip I'm inviting you to, not a baptism (F9, 2). 37 He then promises to resist his predilection for digressions, saying that both he and the reader must exercise tight control over the "stream" of his story: We'll have to stick to the channel, then, you and I, though it's a shoal-draught boat we're sailing, and let the creeks and coves go by, pretty as they might be (E9, 3). But the most important influence of rivers and streams concerns the book's title and the controlling metaphor for Todd's attitude about how writing and reality convey meaning. Certainly the fact that he had initially decided to kill himself, and then changed his mind, on Captain Adam's Floating Opera would justify naming his book after the showboat. Yet Todd says that he has an even "better reason" for doing so. He imagines a showboat perpetually drifting up and down the river with a play continually in progress on deck, and the audience would sit on the banks catching whatever parts of the performance that they could see and hear as the boat went by. To fill in the gaps they'd have to use their imaginations, or ask more attentive neighbors, or hear the word passed along from upriver or downriver. Most of the time they wouldn't understand what was going on at all, or they'd think they knew, when actually they didn't. Lots of times they'd be able to see the actors, but not hear them (F9, 7). For Todd, this is not the product of idle imagination-- this is how, he believes, much of life really works. . . .our friends float past; we become involved with them; they float on and we must rely on hearsay or lose track of them completely; they float back again, and we either renew our friendship--catch up to date--or find that they and we don't comprehend each other any more (E9, 7). 38 As a way to link his view of life to his book, and make another try at persuading the reader to follow where he leads, he patterns what he writes on this outlook, saying that his novel is a floating opera, friend, fraught with curiosities, melodra- ma, spectacle, instruction, and entertainment, but it floats willy-nilly on the tide of my vagrant prose: you'll catch sight of it, lose it, spy it again; and it may require the best efforts of your attention and imagination--together with some patience, of you're an average fellow--to keep track of the plot as it sails in and out of view (F9, 7). But, despite Todd's admission that writing is new to him, as well as his attempts to mitigate any resulting narrative awkwardness or ward off a reader's confusion, it is immediately clear that he is no newcomer to writing. In fact, he is so prolific and committed a writer as to be obsessed with writing as meaning—making tool and an impetus for staying alive and continuing to act. For example, :95 Floating 9pg£§ itself grew out of many years of exhaustive preparation: nine years of setting down everything he could remember about the day he decided against suicide, the notes for which filled seven peach baskets; three years reading background material--novels and textbooks on such things as medicine, philosophy, history, and the physical sciences; and two years spent editing all this down to one basketful, then revising, commenting, and interpreting until he had again filled seven baskets, and finally distilling his material down to two basketfuls. 39 As ambitious as this task seems, it is only a small part of a much larger writing enterprise that Todd calls his Inquiry, an investigative work that seeks to explain why his father hanged himself. In order to provide some kind of control ensuring that his work reflects a minimum of personal bias, Todd also keeps a basketful of notes on himself to accompany what he adds to the Inquiry. But he soon realized that he would never reach the end of his work: the fact of his father's suicide is merely fact, no more; but "there is no will-o'-the-wisp so elusive as the cause of any human act" (F9, 214), and trying to bridge the gap between these two points and uncover a full understanding of his father's act is, for Todd, something that he has little hope of completing. Yet, this does not dissuade him from pushing on. Instead, the ever-ongoing nature of his effort changes the purpose for which he writes. So, the task is endless: I've never fooled myself about that. It doesn't follow that because a goal is unattaina- ble, one shouldn't work toward its attainment. Besides . . .processes continued for long enough tend to become ends in themselves, and if for no other reason, I should continue my researches simply in order to occupy pleasantly two hours after dinner (F9, 216). If, by some chance, Todd manages to discover the real cause of his father's death, his writing would only be partially complete because the first investigation, the death-Inguiry, only acts as a preliminary, "at most a relevant chapter," for a larger work--the life-Inquiry, which seeks to uncover everything about his father's life, 40 "from the umbilicus that tied him to his mother to the belt that hanged him from the floor joist" (F9, 215). Both Inquiries share the goal of uncovering the reasons for the "imperfect communication" between Todd and his father, and he admits of the second that, "If one can compare infini- ties, this task is even more endless than the other" (F9, 216). But even the "two colossal Inquiries combined are no more than important studies for one aspect: the Letter E2 My Father" (F9, 216). The Letter is Todd's original writing project. Begun in 1920 as a result of his failed attempts to inform his father about his heart condition, and believing that he would soon drop dead, Todd went to law school to please his father, composing the Letter as a posthumous explanation of his death. As he continued to remain alive, this purpose eventually became "subsumed into a larger one" in which he set out to study his own life history and "to discover why my communication with Dad had always been imperfect" (F9, 217). Todd had depended upon these parallel writing projects as a way to cope with his dread of chaos and death, laying them aside for only the brief period--one day-~between deciding to commit suicide and changing his mind. However, it is not the product of his work that sustains him, nor does the ongoing process of his endless tasks alone provide much real hope of effectively staving off his fears. 41 Instead, it is his novel, 222 Floating Opera, that after seventeen years, acts as a renewed defense against hopeless- ness. . . .Todd keeps himself alive by writin a book. His repertory of masks and evasions having failed, Todd turns to fiction as a last resort. By submitting "reality" to the reordering powers of his imagination, he is able to exert an artistic control over the painful facts of his existence. He keeps at bay an implosive reality by imaginatively transforming that reality according to his own artistic whim (Harris, 23). . But writing to manage or reshape reality is, in the end, only another holding action, something that will suffice, but only incompletely, until something else comes along, if it ever does. Todd's creative revision of his past, his taking on and dispensing of masks, his backing away from real suicide, his callous disregard for justice-- all these are evasions of, rather than confrontations with, the truth of his situation. And his book follows the same pattern. According to Harris, "IE2 Floating Opera is largely lies posing as autobiography" (23), and Todd's real purpose in writing is to distract both the reader and himself from the profound insecurities that plague him, not by offering imitations of reality in his novel, but by sidestepping reality as much as possible. Art provides Todd a means for manipulating his audience's responses in order to evade their understanding. In this sense, he "invents" his audience as surely as he invents his fiction. That fiction, in its sheer inventiveness, pro- claims the "mastery" of Todd's imagination over the materi- als of his existence. Language becomes the alchemy by which Todd transmutes, and therefore controls at least for a time, an otherwise menacing reality (Harris, 24). 42 Imaginative rather than actual, physical control is what Todd will settle for--he has no other choice except to succumb to paralysis, desperation, and fear should he surrender to his existential predicament. In Harris' view, this comes about because, throughout his life, Todd simulta- neously longs for and fears successful contact with others and being "at one with the world." He longs for communication with the other and wishes to be understood. . . .But any form of understanding threatens he whole defensive system, so he conceals his true meaning behind equivocations and evasions (Harris, 27). The question remains whether or not Todd, using writing to perpetrate lies, necessarily acts dishonestly or with malice toward the reader. . . .in the past man could mistake his words for things, his invented realities for Reality itself. It is one thing to construct fictions while under the delusion that they are truths, quite another knowingly to construct fictions that must nonetheless satisfy the need for belief (Harris, 28). Todd knows full well that his fictions are his own creations, yet he knows just as well that they are no more true or false, effectual or impotent, than any other system by which people live and negotiate reality. At the end of his book, he wonders "whether, in the real absence of absolutes, values less than absolute mightn't be regarded as in no way inferior and even lived by" (F9, 247). Though he has no answer as yet, and may never get one, he is still fatalistically determined, if not to persevere, at least to keep going, continuing with his Inquiry and Letter and leaving his options open. 43 It occurred to me. . .that faced with an infinitude of possible directions and having no ultimate reason to choose one over another, I would 92 ill probability, though not at all necessarily, go on behaving much as I’had thitherto, as a rabbit shot on the run keeps running in the same direction until death overtakes him (F9, 246). He can continue to live and act because he has some- thing, never mind how tenuous, by which to live--his writing--and in this sense, he is not unique because he, like so many artists of this and past centuries, has confronted a world suddenly grown threatening in its inscrutability. His dilemma recapitulates that primal' dilemma when ancient man, confronted with the primordial void, called a world out of nothingness. Like an aboriginal poet-magus Todd confronts chaos with art-~the lies that order. If the narrator of The Floatin Opera is a liar, and his tale is comprised of 11537 tfiose IIes. . .are necessary (Harris, 29). All in all, though far from ideal, Todd's situation is not so bad--his negotiation with the Nothingness he per- ceives as the underlying fact of reality permits him to continue living. Writing had helped carry him along from 1919 to 1937, FEE Floating Opera affords him much the same support seventeen years later, and there is little reason to suspect that the act of writing as a shaping, controlling, or meaning-making power will fail him completely in the future. But in his next novel, 122 929 pf 293 Road, Barth takes the same existential predicament faced by Todd Andrews and places it in a darker, bleaker context to explore what might result when nothing, not even writing when valued by a character as a means to potential salvation, proves effec- tive against Nothing, either in the short or the long run. 44 Jake Horner, the protagonist who, like Todd, acts as the "real" author of the book, cannot resolve his confronta- tion with an existential reality as well as Andrews. Where Todd suffers only a brief bout of paralysis on the eve of changing his mind, Jake is plagued by recurrent and debili- tating seizures of real physical and psychological cata- tonia. Where Todd assumes several masks to accommodate major life changes, Jake literally sees life as a constantly changing script where, from one moment to the next, he must improvise and change the part he plays in order to adapt to any new contingency. Where Todd is passively involved in a long-term love triangle which does not affect him very deeply, Jake becomes enmeshed in a brief triangle that ends tragically, leaving him badly shaken and on the verge of permanent immobility. But, despite his "spiritual kinship with Todd Andrews," the fundamental difference between them lies in Jake's much more limited vision. . . .Todd, as his name suggests, is closer to a realization of mortality and takes the problems of existence very seriously. Jacob Horner, as his name suggests, is far more likely to apply a pragmatic or existential text to his own situation in a parodic way--to pull out plums of meaning instead of considering the whole of a situation (Smith, 69). Like Todd, Jake writes retrospectively, attempting in 1955 (at the age of thirty) to give some meaning and shape to events that transpired two years earlier. Also like Todd, he Opens his book by trying to establish for the reader a sense of who he is and occasionally tells the reader that he has reshaped the literal truth of events for 45 the sake of convenience. However, though less awkward, halting, and apologetic than Todd (in fact, he seems very confident and capable playing the role of a writer), Jake is a great deal less certain of his real identity. Todd provides a fairly clear introduction to himself early in his opening chapter, but the first sentence of 295 929 2F the Road states: "In sense, I am Jacob Horner." What that "sense" might be remains ambiguous, for Jake is afflicted with an inability to choose--any option is equally as valid or invalid as any other because, to him, when one is faced with such a multitude of desirable choices, no one choice seems satisfactory for very long by comparison with the aggregate desirability of all the rest, though compared to any 923 of the others it would not be found inferior (F99, 3). This situation holds true for situations that offer only undesirable options as well, and even the mundane, everyday choices encountered in daily life, such as how to posture oneself while sitting in a chair, can become major problems for him. Referring to the above statement, Jake says It seems to me at just this moment (I am writing this at 7:55 in the evening of Tuesday, October 4, 1955, upstairs in the dormitory) that, should you choose to consider that final observation as a metaphor, it is the story of my life in a sentence--to be precise, in the latter member of a double predicate nominative expression in the second independent clause of a rather intricate compound sentence. You see that I was in truth a grammar teacher (EOR, 3). At first, Jake's elaboration hardly seems a more precise definition of what he means, but the "story" of his life in the form of a parsed sentence provides a clue to his 46 major problem: his repeated attempts to force-fit order to his experience fail because he relies too much on language and a view of life as, literally, a self-authored dramatic text. All of this comes about because of an incident that has placed him in an institution called the Remobilization Farm under the care of a mysterious figure known only as the Doctor, a distinguished looking black man in his fifties about whom-Jake claims to know very little--he may be a medical genius or a dangerous quack, a legitimate profes- sional physician or a gifted con man who periodically relocates his operation in order to avoid the law while running a scam on those who find themselves in his care. Jake first encounteres the Doctor in 1951 in the Pennsyl- vania Railroad Station in Baltimore. A graduate student in English literature at Johns Hapkins, he had come there with no clear reason, only a vague yet compelling need to leave the university and the city. Nor can he decide on a destination-~any one sounds as good as another. Leaving the ticket window to consider where he will go on thirty dollars, Jake sits on a bench and is overwhelmed by paraly- sis because he can find no reasons for action. . . .I simply ran out of motives, as a car runs out of gas . . . .My eyes. . .were sightless, gazing on eternity, fixed on ultimacy, and where that is the case there is no reason to do anything--even to change the focus of one's eyes . . . .It is the malady cosmopsis, the cosmic view, that afflicted me. When one his it, one is frozen like the bullfrog when the hunter's light strikes him full in the eyes, only with cosmopsis there is no hunger, and no quick 47 hand to terminate the moment--there's only the light (F93, 74). Jake spends the night on the bench, paralyzed and mentally empty, and is found the next morning by the Doctor who breaks his immobility by questioning him. He says that his specialty concerns various kinds of paralysis and convinces Jake to come to his treatment center where his approach differs from standard medical practices. The authors of medical textbooks. . .like everyone else, can reach generality only by ignoring enough particularity. They speak of paralysis, and the treatment of paralytics, as though one read the textbooks and then followed the rules for getting paralyzed properly. There is no such thing as paralysis, Jacob. There is only paralyzed Jacob Horner. And I don't treat paralysis; I schedule therapies to mobilize John Doe or Jacob Horner, as the case may be . . . .I don't treat your paralysis; I treat paralyzed you (993, 80-81). Agapotherapy, TheotheraPY. Atheotherapy. Scriptothera PY. as well as Nutritional, Medicinal, Surgical, Dynamic, Conversational, Sexual, Virtue and Vice, and Philosophical therapies are among the many individualized approaches the Doctor applies in treating his patients. For Jake, he prescribes several things to force him to choose and, thereby, avoid immobilization. Go out in the evenings; play cards with people. I don't recommend buying a television just yet. . . .Exercise frequently. Take long walks, but always to a previously determined destination, and when you get there, walk right home again, briskly. . . .Don't get married or have love affairs yet: if you aren't courageous enough to hire prostitutes, then take up masturbation temporarily (EOR, 85). This program is designed to eliminate minor, everyday choices from Jake's life. But, in order to address his 48 deeper problems, the Doctor insists that he engage in a strict set of text-oriented activities. First, Jake is to but a copy of the 1951 World Almanac and consider it his breviary, studying it as a form of Informational Therapy that provides Knowledge of the World to compensate in situations where logic and reason are insufficient for making choices. If he reads anything else, it is to he plays only, not novels or other nonfiction works. Second, he tells Jake to avoid religious issues and, instead, to "read Sartre and become an existentialist" (F99, 85). Third, the Doctor orders that, if Jake confronts any situation where he cannot make a choice, then he must Above all, act impulsively: don't let yourself get stuck between alternatives, or you're lost. . . .If the alterna- tives are side by side, chose the one on the left; if they're consecutive in time, choose the earlier. If neither of these applies, choose the alternative whose name begins with the earlier letter of the alphabet. These are the principles of Sinistrality, Antecedence, and Alphabetical Priority--there are others, and they're arbitrary, but useful (EOR, 85). Eventually, as Jake more or less gets used to these prescriptions, the Doctor suggests a new tack, one where the therapy shifts from Jake ordering his life through texts to turning his life into a text. The Doctor calls this MythotheraPY. a treatment which is based on two assumptions: that human existence precedes human essence, of either of the two terms really signifies anything; and that man is free not only to choose his own essence but to change it at will. These are both good existential premises, and whether they're true or false is of no concern to us--they're useful in your case (F93, 88). 49 The Doctor explains that Mythotherapy is a way to gain control over life by perceiving it as a script, a dramatized myth in which an individual plays the leading role in his or her life. In life. . .there are no necessarily major or minor charac- ters. To that extent, all fiction and biography are a lie. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. Hamlet could be told from Polonius's point of view and caIIed The Tra ed of Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark. He didnTT—thInE he his a minor character in anythrhg, I daresay (F99, 88). Feeling helpless, impotent, or out of control is, according to the Doctor, a result of failing to recognize that, consciously or unconsciously, we choose the sort of role we play in life. Playing a minor character is, normally, just a voluntary "distortion" of the fact that we are really the heroes of our own life's script. Problems arise when changing situations dictate the need for a new part but we can neither "distort" the new situation to fit our role nor, because we insist on maintaining a consistent- ly "authentic" personality, find a new mask to meet changed circumstances. Jake underwent an even worse conflict: when frozen on the bench, he suffered from a blank script and was completely without any kind of role to play. In addition, he suffered from occasional periods of "weatherlessness," which Horner describes as days when he was without personal- ity and, in effect, ceased to exist as a person. Like those microscopic specimens that biologists must dye in order to make them visible at all, I had to be colored with some mood or other if there was to be a recognizable self to me. The fact that my successive and discontinuous selves 50 were linked to one another by the two unstable threads of body and memory; the fact that in Western languages the word chan e presupposes something upon which changes operate; the fact that although the specimen is invisible without the dye, the dye is not the specimen--these are considerations of which I was aware, but in which I had no interest (EOR, 36). "T To avoid this in the future, the Doctor orders him to change scripts or masks as often as he needs to and to never be caught scriptless or with the wrong role for any given situation. The more sharply you can dramatize your situation, and define your own role and everybody else's role, the safer you'll be. It doesn't matter in Mythotherapy for paralytics whether your role is major or minor, as long as it's clearly conceived, but in the nature of things it'll normally always be major (F99, 90). To put all of this into practical effect, the Doctor tries to determine some kind of meaningful career field with strict disciplinary boundaries to act as a script for Horner to act out. So far, Jake has worked only at part-time jobs whenever he needed money, but this does not limit his choices enough or offer a stable, clearly defined role- playing Opportunity. However, when the Doctor questions him about his education in order to decide on a suitable profession, it turns out that Jake had no specific under- graduate major. Instead, he studied arts and sciences-- nearly all of them: philosophy, psychology, political science, zoology, and later in graduate school, Romance philology and cultural anthropology. In exasperation, the Doctor asks him if he studies lock-picking, fornication, sailmaking, or cross examination: 51 "No sir." ”Aren't these arts and sciences?" "My master's degree was to be in English, sir." "Damn you! English what? Navigation? Colonial policy? Common law?" "English literature, sir. But I didn't finish. I passed the oral examinations but I never got my thesis done" (£93) 4) ° To narrow Jake's focus and provide a strict framework to limit his options, the Doctor orders him to apply for a teaching position at the nearly Wicomico State Teachers College. However, he is not supposed to teach composition or English literature because these do not adhere to a narrow set of rules: "There must be a rigid discipline, or else it will be merely an occupation, not an occupational therapy" (EOR, 3). Therefore, the Doctor instructs Jake to teach prescriptive-~not descriptive--grammar because it depends on "a fixed body of rules": No description at all. No optional situations. Teach the rules. Teach the truth about grammar (F99, 5). Jake finds it easy to turn the job interview into an impromptu sketch, playing the role of an enthusiastic young pedagogue, and he impresses the selection committee despite his scant teaching experience which consisted only of "occasional tutoring jobs in Baltimore and a night-school class at Johns Hopkins" (F99, 16). Jake's audience is unreservedly receptive to his homilies about teaching, and he leads them along, pandering to their idealistic educa- tional visions. 52 I never seem to be content with ordinary jobs. There's something so--so stultifying about working only for pay. It's--well, I hate to use a cliche, but the fact is that other jobs are simply unrewarding. You know what I mean? (w. 17) Receiving an wholehearted positive response, Jake then turns to the wonders in store for the intellectually hungry but unpolished student who delves into the mysteries of English grammar. . . .you start him off. Parts of speech! Subjects and verbs! Modifiers! Complements! And after a while, rhetoric. Subordination! COherencel Euphony! You drill and drill, and talk yourself blue in the face, and all the time you see that boy's mind groping, stumbling, stretching, making false steps. And then, just when you're ready to chuck the whole thing-- (F99, 17). Cutting short, Jake allows his rapt audience to fill in saying that the wondrous moment when this hypothetical student finally has "got it" is what they "all live for" and "the greatest miracle on God's green earth" (F99, 17). Jake wows his audience and lands the job, and for a moment, it appears as if he will be able to follow the regimen laid out by the Doctor. However, the next morning, he impulsively drives thirty miles to Ocean City, a seaside resort on the Atlantic, and picks up Peggy Rankin: a single, lonely, forty year old English teacher at Wicomico high school at the end of her uneventful two-week vacation. Declaring, "ESE there ES pg horse manure between teachers 29 Englis " (EOR, 26), Jake manages to take advantage rather brusquely of her desperate loneliness and craving for affection and callously seduce her, beginning an on again- 53 off again sexual relationship where he drops in on her whenever he feels like it. In order to maintain distance and exercise control over what happens, Jake tries to cast Rankin in "the role of Forty-Year-Old Pickup" while he hopes to take the part of "The Fresh But Unintelligent Young Man Whose Body One Uses For One's Pleasure Without Otherwise Taking Him Seriously" (F99, 27). But, even though she gives in to his advances, she also insists on being taken serious- ly as an intelligent, warm, and interesting person, leaving Jake with the realization that she "was not the sort whom one could leave shuddering and moaning on the bed knowing it was all just good clean fun" (F99, 29). He takes all this philosophically, as a lesson, considering misassigned roles and reductive, inaccurate characterizations as part of getting on with the plot and keeping in schedule. Enough to say now that we are all casting directors a great deal of the time, if not always, and he is wise who realizes that his role-assigning is at best an arbitrary distortion of the actors' personalities; but he is even wiser who sees in addition that his arbitrariness is probably inevitable, and at any rate is apparently necessary if one would reach the end he desires (F99, 28). Jake's efforts to apply Mythotherapy by living life as an extemporaneous dramatic script face a greater challenge during his relationship with Joe Morgan, the only member of the selection committee not taken in by Jake's performance, and who teaches ancient, European, and American history as well as volunteering free time as a scoutmaster. Having taken a B.A. in literature and an M.A. in philosophy at 54 Columbia, Joe teaches at Wicomico to support himself and his family while leisurely finishing his doctoral work at Johns Hopkins by writing his dissertation--"an odd, brilliant study of the saving roles of innocence and energy in American political and economic history" (F99, 66). Speaking briefly with Jake after the interview, Joe tells him that the entire episode was "a line of horseshit" (F99, 19). Nevertheless, each senses something in the other, a kind of challenge, that draws them together in a contest of philosophical wills between intellectual equals. Each makes an effective foil for the other as both stand as polar opposites. Jake's existential outlook and Mythotheraputic roleplaying grow out of his conviction that all values are relative and arbitrary, that no one value is, ultimately, of greater or lesser validity than any other. Further, for him, language best manifests the paradoxes and ambiguities underlying any attempt to create a consistent and totalizing version of reality. For example, for most people, the power of language to order and categorize existence also precipi- tates conflict because labeling experience with words comes with inherent contradictions. Things can be signified by common nouns only if one ignores differences between them; but it is precisely these differ- ences, when deeply felt, that make the nouns inadequate and lead the layman (but not the connoisseur) to believe that he has a paradox on his hands, an ambivalence, when actually it is merely a matter of gfs being part horse and part grammar book, and completely neither. Assigning names to things is like assigning roles to people: it is necessarily a distor- tion, but it is a necessary distortion if one would get on 55 with the plot, and to the connoisseur it's good clean fun (F99, 141-142). Similarly, in the hands of a skilled practitioner (which is how Jake sees himself), language offers the best means for manipulating, and gaining power over, reality, and this is as close as Jake gets to a philosophy to live by. Articulation! There, by Joe, was 22 absolute, if I could be said to have one. . . . To turn experience into speech-—that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptual— ize, to grammarize, to syntactify it--is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking. It is therefore that. . .I responded to this precise falsification, this adroit, careful myth-making, with all the upsetting exhilar- ation of any artist at his work. When my mythoplastic razors were sharply honed, it was unparalleled sport to lay about with them, to have at reality. In other senses, of course, I don't believe this at all (F99, 119). The qualification that Jake makes at the end of his statement indicates that he can adhere to any proposition only for as long as it takes to make it because he only exists while verbalizing. . . .words are not formed by Horner into patterns in an attempt to arrive at some stabilizing notions about the conditions of the world around him [but] because he finds he has the capacity and inclina- tion to form them into patterns, and because he finds that he prefers this activity to any form of committed participa- tion in the outer world. Playing with all patterns . . .and believing in none, Horner celebrates something approaching the autonomy of language. Because he finds his first order of reality in language it is not surprising that his account. . .is marked by what one feels to be a very nominal sense of concrete reality. It is as though the dialectic between life and mind has broken down and the dissociated consciousness drifts along in sterile isolation, sealed off in its circular musings (Tanner, 240). Joe, in contrast, believes that a rigorous insistence on consistency and coherence, backed up by relentless self- 56 examination and challenge, can produce a kind of personal absolutism that effectively fends off the ambiguities and chaos of a relativistic, arbitrary epistemology. He has apparently faced the problems of existence as squarely as Jacob, but instead of becoming paralyzed by cosmopsis, he has created a complete ethic of his own based on the assertion of and consistency to his own relative values (Smith, 75). His belief does not result from any sort of philosophi- cal naivete--Joe, too, acknowledges the tentative nature of reality, and like a good modern, assumes of course the ultimate instabil- ity or unprovability of any premise, any value structure for human action; but he insists that a sane and honorable life can only be lived by adopting--arbitrarily but relentless- ly--a set of value premises and following them out with a passionate honesty to oneself that, finally, vitiates any question about their "ultimate" truth (McConnell, 129). In Joe's view, no one needs to feel remorse or guilt .because actions and choices are, consciously or not, deliberate expressions of a person's intentions or desires, not the products of randomness or serendipity. Where Jake derives power by becoming an adept and connoisseur of language, Joe becomes an autodidact and seeks the power of knowledge by studying texts and then testing what he learns in the real world. Joe is indeed an energetic American Pragmatist, more in the nature of John Dewey than William James. Like Dewey he believes that whatever a person does is what he "wants" to do at that moment. . . . Choices may be very limited, however, because both physical and psychological circumstan- ces tightly circumscribe possible actions, In order to insure the best long-term choice, the person must be educated to understand these circumstances and to see the possibilities as fully as possible (Hipkiss, 84). 57 Jake and Joe eventually engage in an ongoing philo- sophical battle of ethical systems: Jake partly to help pass the time, partly because he cannot help himself; Joe to test the mettle of his beliefs. At one point, watching Joe walk straight across the campus lawn, Jake observes that Apparently Joe Morgan was the sort who heads directly for his destination, implying by his example that paths should be laid where people walk, instead of walking where paths happen to be laid. All very well for a history man, perhaps, but I could see that Mr. Morgan would be a fish out of water in the prescriptive grammar racket (F99, 20). For himself, Jake cannot accept Joe's faith that an arbitrary reality can be turned into an effective system based on the selective generation of absolutes and the stubborn assertion of a concrete self because To feel, as Joe did, no regret for anything one has done in the past requires at least a strong sense of one's personal unity, and such a sense is one of the things I've always lacked. . . .for subjectivism implies a self, and where one feels a plurality of selves, one is subject to the same irrefutable conflict on an intensely intramural level, each of one's several selves claiming the same irrefutable validity for its special point of view. . . . In other words, judging from my clearest picture of myself, the individual is not individual after all, any more than the atom is atomistic: he can be divided further, and subjectiv- ism doesn't really become intelligible until one finally locates the subject (F99, 142). The "battleground" on which Jake and Joe engage eventually becomes Joe's wife, Rennie, and at this point, Jake more or less transfers his position onto her. That is, his early relationship with Joe consists in a series of confrontations and debates over the final "sanity" of the Morgan formula for a fully sane life. He becomes trapped, in fact, between two 58 compelling, contradictory, and deeply self-deceptive philosophical positions, the doctor's and Joe Morgan's (McConnell, 129). Now, however, it is Rennie Morgan who becomes trapped between Jake and her husband in their ethical power strug- gle. Besides being his wife, Rennie is Joe's student, and he expects her to understand and assert an independence of mind with a vigor and intensity equal to his own. Rennie once says, "I think of Joe as I think of God" (F99, 62), and in fact, he exerts a nearly Godlike power over her, seeking to make her over in his image. Joe, who dominated the marriage and has molded his wife into a replica of his own idea of himself, insists upon total-- sometimes brutal--honesty between them and upon a single- minded, unrelenting acting-out of the premises upon which they have based their relationship (McConnell, 128-129). But Jake sees all this "acting out" as less than authentic, almost as if the two were as guilty of roleplay- ing as he, and he sees Rennie acting much like a schoolboy "sparring with his gym teacher" (F99, 31) or playing Galatea to Joe's Pygmalian. Yet Jake also finds himself greatly impressed by their force and energy and has no real objec- tion to their relationship because, "after all, Galatea 222 a remarkable woman, and some uneasy young pugilists grow up to be Gene Tunney" (F99, 32). But verbal warfare is not enough of a test for Joe, and he contrives to throw Rennie and Jake together at every opportunity, ostensibly to inculcate greater intellectual rigor and confidence in his wife-protege. However, this 59 serves only to confuse her: one the one hand, she finds her love and respect for Joe compromised by her growing attrac- tion to Jake; on the other, she becomes increasingly frustrated by Jake's ephemeral identity, at one point saying, You know what I've come to think, Jake? I think you don't exist at all. There's too many of you. It's more than just masks that you put on and take off--we all have masks. BUt you're different all the way through, every time. You cancel yourself out. You're more like somebody in a dream. You're not strong and you're not weak. You're nothing (F99, 67). Her seemingly unshakable faith in Joe's integrity, as well as in the durability and consistency of his character, is soon undermined. One evening, returning with Jake to the Morgan's house, they realize that Joe is home alone, presumably working on his thesis, and Jake proposes that they spy on him to "See the animals in their natural habitat" (F99, 69). At first, Rennie sees no point in this, insisting that Joe differs from Jake in the sense that, "9529 people aren't any different when they're alone. No masks. What you see of them is authentic" (F99, 70). What they happen to see of Joe, regardless of how "authentic" it might be, comes as a shock: he is prancing around the room, performing an exaggerated, one-man military parade, "spin- ning, pirouetting, bowing, leaping, kicking" (F99, 70). Spying himself in a mirror, he proceeds to make faces and utter nonsense, and finally, according to Jake, He went to the writing table and apparently resumed his reading, his back to us. The show, then, was over. Ah, but 60 one moment--yes. He turned slightly, and we could see: his tongue gripped purposefully between his lips at the side of his mouth, Joe was masturbating and picking his nose at the same time. I believe he also hummed a sprightly tune in rhythm with his work (F99, 71). This grotesque display shatters Rennie's unquestioning reverence for Joe--soon after, she and Jake commit adultery, and once she admits this to Joe, the battle turns grim. Because neither she nor Jake can articulate just how and why they came to have sex, and because both express feelings of guilt and shame over what happened, Joe presses them unmercifully, demanding that they repeat their transgression until they can rationally and comprehensively account for their behavior and then make independent decisions about what to do next. But, aside from his strange actions while being spied on, Joe fails to realize that he acts inconsis- tently by demanding consistent thought and behavior from Rennie and Horner because He does not allow for the pressure of circumstances at given moments, for the fluctuation of human feelings, and for the reality of remorse. He does not see, ironically enough, that when Rennie apologizes, that she is doing then what she wants to do just as much as she did what she wanted to do when she had intercourse with Jake. When she is sent back to Jake to "do it again," she is doing what she wants to do but only because she thinks that is what Joe wants her to do and his wish is her command. Joe demands reasons for their conduct. Jake can give no reason. . . . The mixture of circumstance, emotion, and desire is just not reducible to a "reason" (Hipkiss, 54-55). The whole situation reaches a crisis when Rennie learns that she is pregnant but unsure whether the father is Joe or Jake. She resolves that, because she does not want the baby, she will either undergo an abortion or kill herself. 61 Joe is determined not to interfere with her decision as long as it is honestly what she wants--he even goes so far as to Offer her a pistol and then says that, if she cannot pull the trigger, he would do it for her. But Jake begs her to postpone her suicide, hoping that he can do what seems virtually impossible-~finding a legitimate and safe abortionist. At this point, Jake takes on responsibility for the first time, and he works desperately to find an abortionist. However, fraud, forgery, impersonation--all the resources of his imagination prove fruitless, even a futile, last-ditch appeal to Peggy Rankin. Running out of options and knowing that Rennie will kill herself that evening, Jake suffers a renewed bout of paralysis, and as a last resort, he seeks out the Doctor for help. The Doctor severely reprimands him for so carelessly ignoring orders by neglecting his readings, playing roles badly, entangling himself in love affairs, and getting too involved in complicated relationships. But, because he is in the process of moving the Remobilization Farm, the Doctor agrees to perform the abortion only if Jake quits his job, gives him all his money, and comes to the new location somewhere in Pennsylvania as a permanent resident of the facility. Desperate, Jake readily agrees and brings Rennie in that night. However, the procedure goes very badly after she panics and her struggles turn the Operation into a gruesome, bloody affair. To quiet her, the Doctor adminis- 62 ters anesthesia, not knowing that she had eaten hot dogs and sauerkraut only a few hours earlier--she vomits explosively and, before anything can be done, chokes to death. Joe takes all responsibility for what happens and is forced to resign quietly from his position at Wicomico. Jake, again in a state of weatherlessness, goes to the bus station to meet the Others going to the new Remobilization Farm, ending his story with a single word given to the cab driver-~"Terminal"--which leads critic Frank D. McConnell to remark that 193 End Of 293 Road. . .is about the end of the road: the termihET dEfeat, the end of all fictions which awaits even the most courageous and clever attempts to shape and control reality. . . . The end of the road is the end Of the road because it is the point at which the intellectual content of nihilism encounters the sheer fact of human love and human loss which it--or any philosophical position--is inadequate to account for or deal with (McConnell, 130-131) McConnell points out that one Of the most important elements in the book is Jake's Mythotherapeutic role as a teacher Of prescriptive grammar at once the most precise, most exhaustively formulated, and most pointless of the language arts. . . . Prescriptive grammar-—the simple, endless, and completely arbitrary rules pertaining to the civilized use of language--is at once a perfectly adequate and totally inadequate analogue to Barth's own sense of the art of fiction. . . . Like fiction, grammar is an artificial system, and abstraction from the true business of life, which nevertheless is indispensable for the functioning Of an efficient civiliza- tion, and indeed, for any more-than-minimal communication between human beings. . . .it is utterly sterile, ultimately in a state if perpetual defeat by the unruly, chaotic forces of speech itself-~the living matter of language--which it seeks to categorize and formulate (McConnell, 131). 63 Yet Jake and his predecessor, Todd Andrews, manage to use language to achieve, however imperfectly, important ends: to keep living and, while alive, to continue somehow to act. According to Charles B. Harris, both employ lies disguised as autobiography, but Jake manipulates language as artifice more directly and transparently in that unlike Todd Andrews, who tries to fool his reader, Jake candidly admits his story's basis in artificiality. . . . Todd Andrews also calls attention to the artificial nature of his narrative, but he pretends that it is the result of authorial ineptitude and inexperience. A narrative smoke- screen, Todd's feigned sincerity is calculated to convince us that in his bumbling way he is telling the truth. Jake has no such pretense. His formulation is a self-proclaimed falsification. . . . Not Objective representations of life as it exists "out there," each is a psychological projection onto life of its author's concerns, fears, moods, values, and general sensibility. To perceive life is to change it (Harris, 40). Both Todd and Jake ultimately fail to uncover absolute meaning or to develop an epistemology founded on guaranteed universal truths that can generate order beyond arbitrary, merely personal systems of value and ethical behavior. Yet, both have found a way to back Off from the abyss Of despair and Nothingness: for them, writing suffices as an imperfect but effective substitute for philosophical uncertainty and allows each to conduct an Open-ended existential existence. Part of their failure to reduce some Of the artificiality inherent in life and in their chief tools, language and writing, for manipulating reality results less from recon- structing events in any self-serving way or from the inevitable idiosyncracies Of their individual perceptions 64 than from a failure to grasp fully the existential concept of Dasein which, according to David Holbrook, is the need for every human being to feel that he has been capable of being there: Of being somewhere, and at the same moment being conscIous of his existence, and responsible for his existence, so that a sense of existential being has been experienced that cannot be taken away even by death. Without some solution to the Dasein problem, man cannot exist (Holbrook, 218). Todd and Jake are, certainly, very much aware of the problem, but a solution--one that not only resolves, but celebrates, multeity, Open-endedness, the tacit mystery of existence, and the power of the imagination to generate meaning through writing--remains largely beyond their reach for now as something that they and their literary suc- cessors, in Barth's subsequent novels, manage to approach more fully. Chapter 3 Subverted Texts and The Writer's Education: 293 SOt-Weed Factor and 99953 Goat-Boy Barth's second pair Of novels explores the ways in which his writer-protagonists come to learn about the limits of knowledge and human understanding as Opposed to the rich, unbounded possibilities that the world Offers. But, for the world, as well as their places as writers in the world, to make sense, they must undergo an Often confusing, even painful, learning process that outstrips and transcends their educations. Each central character comes to see that educational institutions do little, or nothing, to prepare him for living or writing, and each comes to value an education in, Of, and for life over mere training and acculturation; action and involvement over resignation and passive acceptance of the way things are; and the always Open-ended, constructive potential to make, and remake, a fluid self to accommodate and exploit an ever-changing set of circumstances over assigned or desperately contrived and limited identities. Both are novels about education and involve the central lessons that, one, the self can create itself and the world, and two, the texts by which writers and readers attempt to make the self and the world concrete, legitimate, and certain are themselves tentative, incomplete, ephemeral, and deceiving perpetrators of chaos. Unlike Todd Andrews and Jacob Horner who, out of indif- 65 66 ference or futility, took college degrees and relied on masks and writing as holding actions against despair, Barth's second pair of writers gradually learns to accomodate reality's multiple and ineffable nature as a source of creative energy and as a basis for self-generated meanings about the world. In other words, the situations that Todd and Jake find themselves in predominantly dramatize the search for absolute or relative objectives in reference to world and self; they suggest a failure of mythopoeic strategies in the service of self- formation, and they tend to deal with the issues in the manner of the novel of ideas. . . .The heroes of 292 Floatin O era and 995 End of 593 Road were forever seen cop ng wit questions Of_"quimate" sense and "absolute" value. Their answers to such questions consisted, simultaneously, in a gesture of futility and relative affirmation, emphasizing that Objectives are arbitrary stipulations not to be defended as absolute in a process of philosophical reasoning (Putz, 66). On the other hand, in Barth's next book, Eben Cooke, the central character, faces the same things, but his response differs from his predecessors' in that "In the absence Of clear-cut answers Cooke chooses to create the absolutes he will henceforth build and rely on" (Putz, 66). The Sot-Weed Factor is set in the late seventeenth-century, and Barth bases the novel on a real text of the same name written by a historical figure, Ebenezer Cooke, after whom the protagonist is named. The fictional Eben is the son of a widowed, middle class English merchant who also owns a sotweed (i.e., tobacco) plantation, called Malden, on Cooke's Point on Maryland's eastern shore which he manages by proxy through factors (i.e., overseers) since returning 67 to England when his children were four years old. Eben and his twin sister Anna, whose mother died giving them birth, then spend the next six years on the family's English estate, St. Giles. Because of their twinship, the absence of other children, and their father's relative wealth, the twins grow very close and, left largely to their own devices, create a private world spun out of their active imaginations. Their early education is self-conceived, consisting in part of a wide variety of games. In addition, Both were great readers, and loved the same books: among the classics, the 0d see and the Metamogphoses, the Book 29 Mart rs and the ves of the Saints; the romances of VaIentine and Orson, BEVi§_hf Hampton, and Guy of Warwick; the tales of Robin Good-Fellow, Patient Grisel, and the Foundlings in the Wood; and among the newer books, Janeway's Token for Children, Batchiler's Vir in Pattern, and Fisher's Wise VIE—in, as well as Cacoethes Eeaaen Ce ac , The Youn Mans arninngeece, The Booke of’Mer Ridaies, andT—s ort y after their publicatihh, PiIgrih's Progress and Keach's 929 with 295 Devil (999, 6). Eben and his sister enjoy nearly complete, virtually idyllic freedom in their pursuits, encountering little direction or constraint in their activities, "and hence drew small distinction between activities proper for little girls and those proper for little boys" (999, 6). They take most pleasure in role-playing, a pastime in which they improvise a host of selves and explore the possibilities of their imaginations. Indoors or out, hour after hour, they played at pirates, soldiers, clerics, Indians, royalty, giants, martyrs, lords and ladies, or any other creature that took their fancy, inventing action and dialogue as they played. Sometimes they would maintain the same role for days, sometimes only for minutes. Eben, especially, became ingenious at 68 disguising his assumed identity in the presence of adults, while still revealing it clearly enough to Anna, to her great delight, by some innocent gesture or remark (999, 6). The twins carry their games well into the night by lying in bed and continuing their make-believe roles solely through dialogue, or by playing word games of which they had an infinite variety, ranging from the simple "How many words do you know beginning with S?" or "How many words rhyme with faster?" to the elaborate codes, reverse pronunciations, and homemade languages of their later childhood (999, 7). When Eben and Anna turn ten, their father hires Henry Burlingame III, an unemployed yet extraordinary polymath and autodidact, as their tutor who had for reasons unexplained not completed his baccalaureate; yet for the range and depth of his abilities he was little short of an Aristotle. . . .who could sing the tenor in a Gesualto madrigal as easily as he dissected a field-mouse. . .(SWF, 7). He and the twins take to each other so quickly and enthusiastically that Burlingame is soon given full-time supervision of the children, who "he found to be rapid learners, especially apt in natural philosophy, literature, composition, and music; less so in languages, mathematics, and history" (999, 7). Burlingame's greatest appeal for the twins arises from the fact that, instead of stifling the imaginative and creative play they have so far been occupied with, he capitalizes on it as a foundation for their studies. Burlingame's pedagogical philosophy rests on three general principles. The first was that of the three usual motives for learning things--necessity, ambition, and curiosity--simp1e curiosity 69 was the worthiest of development, it being the "purest" (in that the value of what it drives us to learn is terminal rather than instrumental), the most conducive to exhaustive and continuing rather than cursory or limited study, and the likeliest to render pleasant the labor of learning (999, 8). Second, he believes that the best method for learning a subject is to teach it to someone, and third, that the sport of teaching and learning should never become associated with certain hours or particular places, lest student and teacher alike (and in Burlingame's system they were much alike) fall into the vulgar habit of turning off their alertness, except at those times and in those places, and thus make by implication a pernicious distinction between learning and other sorts of natural behavior (999, 8). Overall, this type of pedagogical orientation acts contrary to most established forms of schooling, especially that of late-seventeenth century England and in the United _States today, and in fact constitutes an attack on most of the common educational practices in America, wherein education is by and large separated from life in general. And even though curiosity is often repressed and students rarely teach each other. . .[Eben] does demonstrate that much of his most important learning takes place outside of a classroom, at odd times and places, in long conversations with people who have had diverse experiences of the world (Turner, 106). This approach to learning captivates the twins every bit as much as their earlier play had, particularly because Burlingame joins in their games as a way to guide their imaginations into active explorations of academic subjects. To teach them history he directed their play-acting to historical events; to sustain their interest in geography he produced volumes of exotic pictures and tales of adventure; to sharpen their logical equipment he ran them through Zeno's paradoxes as one would ask riddles, and rehearsed them in Descartes' skepticism as gaily as though the search for truth and value in the universe were a game of Who's Got the Button. He taught them to wonder at a leaf of thyme, a 70 line of Palestrina, the configuration of Cassiopeia, the scales of a pilchard, the sound of indefatigable, the eloquence of a sorites (999, 8). Though unorthodox by most standards, Burlingame's pedagogical system both fires the twins' imaginations and helps them identity with, and find meaning in, the academic subjects studied as well as showing how what they learn relates to the world around them. Just as important, though his system lacked the discipline of Locke's, who would have all students soak their feet in cold water, it was a good deal more fun (999, 8). The result of Burlingame's organic, dynamic, and playful tutoring is that the twins "grew quite enamored of the world" especially Eben who, growing into an awkward, gangly, sensitive young man, could be moved to shivers by the swoop of a barn-swallow, to cries of laughter at the lace of a cobweb or the roar of an organ's pedal-notes, and to sudden tears by the wit of Vol one, the tension of a violin-box, or the truth of the Pythagorean Theorem (999, 8). All this abruptly ends when the twins turn eighteen and their father unexpectedly, to Eben and Anna's horror, fires Burlingame and sends Eben off to Magdalene College, Cambridge. However, Eben's educational background, despite all its positive qualities, does nothing to help him succeed in the formal, structured environment of a traditional English university because, although a good teacher will teach well regardless of the theory he suffers from, and though Burlingame's might seem to have been an unusually attractive one, yet there is no perfect educational method, and it must be admitted that at least partly because of his tutoring Ebenezer took quite the same sort of pleasure in history as Greek mythology and epic 71 poetry, and made little or no distinction between, say, the geography of the atlases and that of fairy-tales. In short, because learning had been for him such a pleasant game, he could not regard the facts of zoology or the Norman Conquest, for example, with genuine seriousness (999, 9). Without direction at Cambridge, unable to find meaning in the subjects he studies, Eben soon begins to founder. His vivid imagination, sensitivity, and eclectic interests had, so far, been free of constraint and discipline, and though they led him to a great sense of the arbitrariness of the particular real world, they did not endow him with a corresponding realization of its finality. He very well knew, for instance, that "France is shaped like a teapot," but he could scarcely accept the fact that there was in existence at that instance such a place as France, where people werE—speakingFrench and eating snails whether he thought about them or not, and that despite the virtual infinitude of imaginable shapes, this France would have to go on resembling a teapot forever. And again, though the whole business of Greece and Rome was unquestionably delightful, he found the notion preposterous, almost unthinkable, that this was the onl way it happened: that made him nervous and irritable when he thought of it at all (pg. 9). Eben's situation increasingly degenerates. History, science and philosophy seem alien and nonsensical, and though he greatly enjoys reading such works as Paradise 9235, Hudibras, and History 29 993 Buccaneers, he can make no practical academic use of them. By his third year, he has to confront inevitable failure and returning to his father in disgrace. Worse, Burlingame's influence combines with his undisciplined imagination such that Eben is drawn to 399 possible activities and careers, yet no single profession dominates his interest. Writing to his sister, he bemoanes the fact that 72 All Roads are fine Roads. . .none more than another . . . .All Trades, all Crafts, all Professions are wondrous, but none is finer that the rest together (999, 11-12). Neither can he hold an opinion or favor a particular philosophy of the world--any position or argument, if presented with sufficient eloquence, moves him. The man (in short), thanks both to Burlingame and to his natural proclivities, was dizzy with the beauty of the possible; dazzled, he threw up his hands at choice, and like ungainly flotsam, rode half-content the tide of chance (SWF, 12). __— Feeling neither fish nor foul, Eben finds himself increasingly constrained by formalized learning and, much like Jacob Horner, he begins slipping into paralysis as he faces the arbitrariness and meaninglessness of reality. Having lost the playful, protean role-playing ability that made up such an important part of his childhood education, his condition worsens to a point where he sat immobile in the window seat in his nightshirt and stared at the activity in the street below, unable to choose a motion at all even when, some hours later, his untutored bladder suggested one (999, 12). Luckily, before Eben's situation reaches crisis proportions, Burlingame suddenly and unexpectedly bursts in after having disappeared three years previously, and Eben turns to him for advice. But advice, according to Burlingame, is no cure--Eben will have to decide whether or not to take advice and act on it, and making decisions is exactly what he cannot do at present. Instead, Burlingame offers himself as an example that might be helpful and reveals that he, too, has suffered from indecision and 73 paralysis since childhood. The remedy, he tells Eben, is action, even if taken without consistency or reason, for just as a mild siege of smallpox, though it scar a man's face, leaves him safe forever from dying of that ailment, so inconstancy, fickleness, a periodic shifting of enthusiasms, though a vice, may preserve a man from crippling indecision (as. 15>- To further convince Eben that he has turned arbitrariness to advantage,,Burlingame recounts to him for the first time the story of his life, which also centers largely on education. An orphan since early childhood and, thus, ignorant of his birthdate or even if his name is accurate, Burlingame was raised by a sea captain and, at about thirteen, accompanied him for a couple of years sailing the West Indies. The captain had taught him to read and write, and one day, Burlingame came across a copy of Motteux's 9gp Qpixote; reading it changed his life: 'twas the first real storybook I'd read. I grew so entranced by the great Manchegan and his faithful squire as to lose all track of time. . . . From that day on I was no longer a seaman, but a student. I read every book I could find aboard ship and in port--bartered my clothes, mortgaged my pay for books, on any subject whatever, and reread them over and over when no new ones could be found (999, 18-19). So great did Burlingame's bibliophilia grow that he ignored everything else, eventually angering the captain to the point where he forbade him to read aboard ship. Distraught, Burlingame jumped ship in Liverpool and took to singing in the streets for handouts until he joined a troupe of gypsies, from whom he learned arts, crafts, and trickery. Being the only one among them who could read and write, 74 Burlingame performed numerous services for them. When the gypsies found out that many books contained stories, the telling and hearing of which was one of their passions, "they began to steal every book they could find for me" (999, 18). After they had provided him with a primer, Burlingame taught the gypsies how to read and write, and out of gratitude, they allowed him access to their deepest secrets and fullest confidence. Eventually, when the troupe wound up in Cambridge where he and the gypsies became popular with the students and a few of the dons, Burlingame found his "eyes first opened to the world of learning and scholarship" (999, 19), a world which he now longed to join. Penniless and without social connections or formal preparation, Burlingame contrived to get into Trinity College by first becoming Thomas More's servant and then, taking advantage of More's homosexuality, seducing him into a Platonic love affair--all of which Burlingame exploited to the fullest. In the two years with More I'd mastered Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, read all of Plato, Tully, Plotin, and divers other of the ancients, and at least perused most of the standard works of natural philosophy. My benefactor made no secret that he looked for me to become as notable a philosopher as Herbert or Cherbury, John Smith, or himself. . .(999, 23). In addition, due to his weakness in math, Burlingame covertly began to court the favors of Issac Newton in a similar way, but unlike More, Newton's pederasty was not Platonic. More and Newton had, for years, been hostile to one another, mainly over the farmer's zealous regard for, 75 and Newton's competition with, the published works of Descartes. As Burlingame described it, Descartes, you know, is a clever writer, and hath a sort of genius for illustration that lends force to the wildest hypotheses. He is a great hand for twisting the cosmos to fit his theory. Newton, on the other hand, is a patient and brilliant experimenter, with a sacred regard for the facts of nature. Then again, since the lectures De Motu Cor orum and his papers on the nature of light have BEen avaiIahIe, the man always held up to him by his critics is Descartes (31:. 25). In time, More and Newton discovered Burlingame's erotic duplicity, both growing furiously jealous and threatening his position as a student. Although Burlingame ignored the matter, preferring to continue his studies, eventually the two dons modified their philosophical stances, reconciled their differences, and fell to tearful embraces, and decided to cut me off without a penny, arrange my dismissal from the College, and move into the same lodgings, where, so they declared, they would couple the splendors of the physical world to the glories of the ideal and listen ravished to the music of the spheres (as. 2.). With less than a year to go for his degree, Burlingame was ruined at Cambridge and once more adrift in the world. He set off for London where, as he informs Eben, your father found me; and playing fickle to the scholar's muse, I turned to you and your dear sister all the zeal I'd erst reserved for my researches. Your instruction became my First Good, my Primary Cause, which lent all else its form and order. And my fickleness is thorough and entire: not for an instant have I regretted the way of my life, or thought wistfully of Cambridge (999, 27). Ending his story, Burlingame then tells Eben not to worry about failing his studies, that he is not cut out to be a scholar anyway and should let himself pursue another 76 course of action--in particular, that Eben should go with him to London. Unsure of himself in the wide world and fearing his father's wrath, Eben initially balks at the prospect, but Burlingame presents an existential argument in favor of taking action, one that would have thrown a Todd Andrews or a Jacob Horner into despair, yet it gives Eben courage: . . .we sit on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the worms will care, when anon they make a meal of you, whether you spent your moment sighing wigless in your chamber, or sacked the golden town of Montezuma? Lookee, the day's nigh spent; 'tis gone careering into time forever. Not a tale's length past we lined our bowels with dinner, and already they growl for more. We are dying men, Ebenezer: i'faith, there's time for naught but hold resolves (999, 27-28). At this point, Eben's formal education comes to an end, and he begins to evolve into a writer. Still unable to decide what to do to support himself, Burlingame suggests that he become a teacher like himself. Eben protests that he does not know enough about anything to teach it, to which Burlingame replies that this is an advantage, that Eben should even raise thy fee for't. . .inasmuch as 'tis no chore to teach what you know, but to teach what you know naught of requires a certain application. Choose a thing you'd greatly like to learn, and straightaway proclaim yourself professor of't . . . .for just so have I lined my belly these three years. B'm'faith, the things I've taught! The great thing is always to be teaching something to someone--a fig for what or £2 whom (999, 30). Not entirely reassured, Eben nevertheless accompanies Burlingame to London and, without notifying his family of his plans, occupies himself for several months as a 77 freelance tutor. However, he only halfheartedly takes up this work, preferring the company of unemployed poets he meets in a pub whose example leads him into trying his hand at poetry. But lacking confidence and subject matter, Eben finds it impossible to compose anything he feels is worthwhile. After several months, Eben establishes a clandestine correspondence with his sister and, eventually, she arranges a visit to London on another pretext. She tells Eben of their father's anguish over his disappearance, and overcome by remorse and concern, he returns with Anna to St. Giles. Trying to reconcile himself with his father, Eben pledges that, if he were sent back to Cambridge, he would make up for his failure. However, the elder Cooke will have none of this and vehemently orders a different kind of education for his son. Cambridge my arse! 'Tis Maryland shall be your Cambridge, and a field of sot-weed your library! And for diploma, if ye apply yourself, haply you'll frame a bill of exchange for ten thousandweight of Oronoco! (999, 43). In his father's mind, scholarship provides nothing of real or lasting value, and to rid his son of the softness he thinks due to the influence of Burlingame and Cambridge, sends him back to London as an apprentice clerk to learn how to run Malden. For his part, Eben initially feels mildly enthusiastic about what he romantically fantasizes as the life of a gentleman landlord: leisurely rides about the estate, refined company and conversation, and the chance to indulge in the finer things in life. But once again, he 78 soon lapses into lethargy and uninterest; after nearly six uneventful years of an indifferent apprenticeship, he has progressed hardly at all in learning his trade. Instead, as before, he is drawn to the self-proclaimed poets and wits who haunt the pub instead of pursuing their degrees or careers. Eben, though still somewhat diffident and unsure of his literary potential, begins to identify more and more with this crowd and more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent who, like his friends in folly. . .had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut wit 8 m as to the snapping point