John Barth: Chimera

P .: Whatever for, your dying father asks obligingly, inasmuch as you'd already decided that immortality is a bad trip? Megalomania? Ambitious affirmation of the absurd?

B .: Certainly I was ambitious, all along; but to call ambition on that epic scale mere vanity is a double error. For while it's true that Bellerophon's aspiration to immortality was without social relevance, for example, and thoroughly elitist — in fact, of benefit to no one but himself — it should be observed that it didn't glorify "him," either, since the name he's called by is not his actual name, but a fictitious one. His fame, then, such as it was, is, and might have been, is as it were anonymous. Moreover, he does not, like an exiled tyrant or absconder, enjoy his fortune incognito; even had his crazy flight succeeded, he'd not have known it: there'd be another constellation in the sky, bearing the name he'd assumed — but Perseid to the contrary notwithstanding, it's hardly to be imagined that those patterns we call "Perseus," "Medusa," "Pegasus" (There he is! Sweet steed, fly on, with better riders than myself!) are aware of their existences, any more than are their lettered counterparts on the page. Or, if by some mystery they are, that they enjoy their fixed, frigidified careers. Got that, Dad? For you are my dad — old pard, old buck, old worm! — I don't question that: only Polyeidus's son could have mimed a life so well, so long.

P .: So. Well. So long is right. And so much for Poseidon's name on your birth certificate.

B .: False letters spell out my life from first to last. But not Bellerus's.

P .: Here it comes. You down there: wake up for the anagnoresis!

B .: What marsh did you say we're falling into? Do the people speak my language?

P .: Forget it. The present tenants are red-skinned, speak Algonkian, and have a mythology but no literature. At the rate we're falling, by the time we land they'll be white and black, speak more or less in English, and have a literature (which no one reads) but no mythology. On with the story: even in Greek it's muddy enough, but I've known what's coming for two hundred pages. In any language, it's Sibyl's Letter's Second Clause.

B .: Right. POSEIDON'S SON HE ISN'T . I'm not star-bound Bellerus, but starstruck Deliades. Bellerus died in the grove that night, in my place, while I humped (half-sister!) Sibyl in holy his. I was his mortal killer; therefore I became his immortal voice: Deliades I buried in Bellerophon, to live out in selfless counterfeit, from that hour to this, my brother's demigoddish life. It's not my story; never was. I never killed Chimarrhus or Chimera, or rode the winged horse, or slept with Philonoë, or laid my head between Melanippe's thighs: the voice that spoke to them all those nights was Bellerus's voice. And the story it tells isn't a lie, but something larger than fact. .

P .: In a word, a myth. Philonoë guessed all this, you know, back in First-Ebb days. And Melanippe long before she wrote the horse-race episode. As for me, it goes without saying that this and everything else you say goes without saying? I knew it before it was true, and if I'm astonished now it's because seers see past and future but not et cetera — everything takes your true prophet by surprise. So, you blew your big scene. That's no Elysium rushing up at us: it's Dorchester County, Maryland, Upsilon Sigma Alpha, and will be for several generations yet. When you hit it, you'll go deeper underground than your brother.

B .: How many questions left?

P .: One for me, two for you. Now that I've answered you, one apiece.

B .: Can you turn me into this story, Polyeidus? Let me be Bellerus's voice forever, an immortal Bellerophoniad .

P .: Out of the question.

B .: It's what you've tried to trick me into for half a dozen pages! I'm offering to take your place! Don't tell me it's impossible!

P .: Quite impossible — in the naïve way you mean. I can't turn anybody but myself into anything.

B .: Then I'm dead. Good night, Bellerus. Good night, all.

P .: What I might manage — not because I owe you any favors, but for reasons of my own — is to turn myself from this interview into you-in- Bellerophoniad-form : a certain number of printed pages in a language not untouched by Greek, to be read by a limited number of "Americans," not all of whom will finish or enjoy them. Regrettably, I'll have to have a certain role in the thing also — not beating Zeus out on that. But since I'll be there as an aspect of you, so to speak, I'll be free enough to operate in a few aspects of my own: "Harold Bray," perhaps, or his nonfictional counterpart, the legitimate heir to the throne of France and impresario of the Second Revolution, an utterly novel Reset No Perseid , I grant you, but it's the best I can do in what tune we have left. That tidewater's coming up fast.

B .: I don't like the sound of it. I'd rather fall into a thornbush; become a blind lame vatic figure; avoid the paths of men; float upon the marshy tide forever, reciting my Reset

P .: Stop gnashing your teeth. Take it or leave it.

B .: I'll take it.

P .: Done. Heh. Any last words to the world at large? Quickly.

B .: I hate this, World! It's not at all what I had in mind for Bellerophon. It's a beastly fiction, ill-proportioned, full of longueurs, lumps, lacunae, a kind of monstrous mixed metaphor —

P .: Five more.

B .: It's no Bellerophoniad . It's a

THE END