John Barth - Letters

It was my further pleasure to reorchestrate the venerable conceit, old as the genre of the novel, that the fiction is not a fiction: G.G.B. pretends to be a computer-edited and — printed, perhaps computer-authored, transcript of tapes recorded by the goat-boy and — under the title R.N.S.: The Revised New Syllabus, etc. — laid on the Author by Giles’s son for further editing and publication.

I have before me your letters of March 2 and April 1. Their imputation of plagiarism, their allegation that I somehow pirated an extraterrestrial scripture from you and published a distorted version of it as fiction, their ominous demands for reparation, and the rest, I take in the spirit of that lengthy satire. Like those book reviewers who choose to mimic (and attempt to surpass) the author under review, you have seen fit to address me in the manner of my novel, as though you were one of its characters nursing a grievance against your author.

Such mimicries and allegations are best left unacknowledged: Claw a churl by the breech, an Elizabethan proverb warns, and get a handful of shite. But your passing invocations of Napoleon, George III, Mme de Staël, Bellerophon and the Gadfly — these echo provocatively, not to say uncannily, some concerns of my work in progress; and I am intrigued by your distinction between the fiction of science and the science of fiction. Finally, it interests me that the world may actually contain a person who raises goats and devises “revolutionary” computer programs to analyze, imitate, revolutionize, and perfect the form of the Novel — or is it the form of Revolution?

Inasmuch as my current, nowise revolutionary story includes a character rather like that person (derived from the putative editor of Giles Goat-Boy, or, The Revised New Syllabus), I am curious to hear more from you on the subject of your LILYVAC 5-Year Plan, for example. In exchange, if you’re interested, I offer what I’ve learned since the publication of G.G.B. about actual computer applications in such areas as literary structural analysis and the generation of, say, hypothetical plots: information laid on me by workers in the field of artificial intelligence who happen to have read or heard of my novel.

To be sure, none of what I’ve learned may be news to you; or you may not care to share your investigations with me. But if you’re willing, please address me at my university office, which reliably forwards my mail. And do let’s keep the letters “straight”: the 700-plus pages of Giles Goat-Boy have surfeited their author with that particular vein of “transcendent parody” and (literally, of course) sophomoric allegory.

Cordially,

F: The Author to Jacob Horner.Accepting the latter’s declining of his invitation of May 11 and thanking him for several contributions to the current project.

Chautauqua, New York, July 13:

Bedford Forrest Day in Tennessee,

Boxer Rebellion quelled in Tientsin,

Civil War draft riots in N.Y.C.,

Marat stabbed by Charlotte Corday, etc.

Dear Jacob Horner,

Fact or fiction, your letter to me of May 15—vigorously declining my invitation to you to play a role, as it were, in another fiction of mine — I accept with sympathy and respect. You will hear no more from me; nor shall I otherwise attempt, though I’m mighty curious, to learn how goes Der Wiedertraum.

For that notion, at least, and the Anniversary View of History, and the principle of Alphabetical Priority (I mean the priority of that principle, which I ought to have listed first), I thank you. I presume that they are not copyrighted, and that you will not object to my making use of them with this acknowledgment of their source.

Best wishes,

A: The Author to A. B. Cook.Expressing dismay at the latter’s presumption and withdrawing the invitation of June 15.

Chautauqua, New York

July 20, 1969

A. B. Cook VI

Chautaugua Road, Maryland

Dear Mr. Cook,

Actually, I am as dismayed as gratified by your long letter to me of a month ago and its even lengthier enclosures. Gratified of course by your ready response to my inquiry concerning your ancestors; by your providing me with copies of those remarkable letters from Andrew Cook IV to his unborn child; by your diverting account of the subsequent genealogy down to yourself; by your supererogatory offer — nay, resolve — to enrich me yet further with the materials of your abortive Marylandiad: the posthumous adventures, as it were, of A.B.C. IV. But dismayed, sir, by your misconstruction of my letter and by your breathtaking assertion that we collaborated on my Sot-Weed Factor novel — indeed, that we have had any prior connection whatever!

Paper is patient, observes the Jewish proverb, and verily: elsewise that sheaf of 75 % rag 32c 16 lb. 8½ x 11’s on which your secretary transcribed your telephoned-Dictaphoned account of our “meeting,” our “conversation,” our “collaboration,” would have rebelled against the pica’d propositions Royaled themupon. We are not acquainted, sir! Until you answered my letter, I was not even certain of your factual existence — which, given the several transsubstantiations of your reply between “Barataria” and me, remains still more than usually inferential. We have never met, never heretofore conversed, much less collaborated on anything! The “actual” poet laureate of Maryland I understand to be a colorful fellow named Mr. Vincent Godfrey Burns, who I imagine must be less than delighted by your pretension to his office. And — ahem, sir! — my invitation to you was not to play the role of Author in my novel-in-letters; merely to be a model, one way or another and perhaps, for one of its seven several correspondents: an epistolary echo of Ebenezer Cooke the sot-weed factor, no more.

That invitation, at risk of offending you, I believe I had really better withdraw. I return with thanks the enclosures of yours of 18 June and earnestly request that you not favor me with their sequelae (or anything else) in future. For the suggestion that I take as my ground theme the notion of First and Second Revolutions, in whatever sense, I here thank you, even though it was not exactly news. Also for your plausible relation of Chautauqua and Chautaugua: there are other, homelier etymologies, I have learned since—“fish-place,” for example — but the principle nonetheless applies.

Do please let that proximate place-name be the one bridge between us henceforward, as it has in fact been hitherto. Let us both turn now from letters to TV: to watch the images of men first stepping upon the moon; to ponder the strange tale piece-by-piecing from Chappaquiddick of Senator Kennedy, a drowned young woman, a bridge more dark and ominous than mine and

Yours,

4 encl

C: The Author to Jerome Bray.Some afterthoughts on numbers, letters, and the myth of Bellerophon and the Chimera.

Department of English, Annex B

State University of New York at Buffalo

Buffalo, New York 14214

July 27, 1969, 7 Sleepers’ Day

Jerome B. Bray

General Delivery

Lily Dale, New York 14752

Dear Mr. Bray:

Can you perhaps make use, in your NUMBERS project, of, for example, the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition III 18b of that term (“Metrical periods or feet; hence lines, verses”)? Or the Kabbalistic tradition that the Torah was a septateuch before it became a pentateuch, one of its original books having gone the way of the 10 lost tribes, another shrunk to 2 verses in the Book of Numbers? Or the consideration (which occurred to me on receipt of your letter of July 8) that NUMBERS is a 7-letter word arranged symmetrically about your initial; that its 5th letter, or Phi-point, is also the 5th of the alphabet; that even more things in the world come in 7’s than come in 5’s; that by perfectly imitating the pattern of mythic heroism one may become not a mythic hero but merely a perfect imitation; that one might cunningly aspire neither to perfect nor to revolutionize the flawed genre of the Novel, say, but to imitate perfectly its flaws? (There is a bug in the unicorn caterpillar family, I believe, which mimics the appearance of a leaf partially eaten by unicorn caterpillars.)