John Barth - Where Three Roads Meet

Amen.

I.e., fucking him over?

"And over and over. Over and out, Gracie."

— as we used to say to our quickie customers back in undergraduate days, Junior, as we rolled over when their five minutes were up. See Lachesis, page something-or-other. Over and out, luv. And then, Next?

So, Junior: Instead of "We who are about to die salute you," as the Roman gladiators used to say, it's "We who are on our last legs give you the finger." Unless, lad — what's too much to hope for, we suppose, but stranger things have happened in the history of inadequate parents and their screwed-up spawn — unless you somehow see fit to include an unedited transcript of these tapes in your big-shit three-decker critical biography of your old man. A kind of appendix, maybe?

"Scratch that, Grace: Appendixes can be surgically removed. What we've laid on you here, Junie, is no appendix: It's the heart and backbone of the story."

Its very cock and balls, if you know what we mean. Take us out, Grace.

Roger wilco. As I was saying—

At this point, the third of the three "Bernbridge" audiotapes — purportedly recorded at my urging by the elderly Mason sisters on 31 December 1999 and 1 January 2000 —ran out, and (the ladies evidently not realizing that there was unused footage remaining on Tapes 1 and 2) their scabrous three-way commentary on their alleged association with the late author of The Fates terminates abruptly in mid-sentence: not artfully, like the "ending" of Finnegans Wake, which circles back to its mid-sentence opening to complete the cycle of Eternal Recurrence which is that master-work's Ground Theme, but unintentionally, leaving their potty-mouthed spiel unfinished like the Atropos volume of "my father"'s trilogy. One reasonably wonders why the harpy-in-chief, Ms. Grace Mason Forester, when she rewound, replayed, transcribed, and enlarged upon the trio's recorded conversation, didn't complete her closing statement, whether that statement was to be the sisters' nasty imprecation-in-progress against the present writer or their disillusioned adieu to the only historically significant aspect of their lives: their initial (unintended, accidental) inspiring of "my father" at a formative moment in his literary apprenticeship and their subsequent "input" (and, in Ms. Forester's case, stenographic and perhaps limited editorial assistance, to say no more) in the completion of his chef d'oeuvre —for both of which matters, to be sure, one has only their testimony, the ambiguous evidence of "C. Ella Mason" 's Wye novella, and that obscure, much-puzzled-over dedication of The Fates: "To the Gracious Masons, who…" *

The patient reader of this extended study, and especially of this appendix thereto, will have noted its author-editor's occasional quotation marks around "my father," and may well have inferred their reason. Of my biological parentage I have no doubts: Readers who compare the several photographs herein of Manfred F. Dickson Sr. at his son's approximate present age and the jacket-flap mug shot of myself will not fail to note the unmistakable resemblance. But as prevailingly cordial, or at least civil, as our connection was through my boyhood, adolescence, and young manhood, I never felt loved by the father whom, per Evolution's heedless program, I loved helplessly, and whom I honor yet (as witness this years-long labor, now all but concluded), despite his lifelong indifference to, amounting to virtual rejection of, his only child. As if Oedipus, put out as an infant by his father, Laius, to die lest he grow up as foretold by Apollo to become a parricide, upon encountering years later that road-hogging old Theban at the Place Where Three Roads Meet, instead of killing him to clear his own path, had graciously yielded the right-of-way and then, belatedly realizing who the elderly stranger must be, had hurried after him (as I've done here in three long volumes), crying, like a character out of Kafka, "Father! Look! Your son, alive and well except for an unaccountably swollen foot! Your son, who craves only reunion, reconciliation, and the father I never had! Wait for me! I forgive you everything! Let's go on from here together!" But the oldster's wagon is gone already down that westward road, with not a backward glance from its heartless driver at its heartbroken pursuer. Who, unable despite all to embrace the uncaring sire whose shade still taunts, trudges behind on his own career-long Heroic Quest, from the outset knowing it to be in vain.

How tempting it has been, through the years of this monumental labor, to settle scores with that father-who-was-no-father — perhaps by repeating in parlous detail my mother's still-festering grievances from the latter years of their "mis-marriage," as she calls it, when she in her way like I in mine was sacrificed to his obsession with The Fates! Or by dwelling, in three-volume detail, upon the undeniable literary shortcomings of that trilogy, whose "controversial" aspects include more than its relentless, hyperbolical, ultimately tiresome eroticism! Or even to make the case that the work's real authorship should be credited (or debited) more to Grace Mason Forester than to M. F. Dickson Sr. — a man so lost in his preoccupations that it is arguably more a matter of his having perversely inspired her (a would-be novelist of sorts like her daughter, perhaps, but obliged to conceal her virtual authorship of The Fates lest her scandalized husband divorce her, as subsequently he did on lesser grounds) than vice versa!

Or even…(words fail me, as at the unended end of Atropos they failed its author-up-to-that-point)…to take the most sweepingly "Oedipal" revenge of all, by publishing this "appended" tape transcript and its appended Editor's Note separately from the three-volume critical corpus whose (vermiform!) Appendix it was meant to be — indeed, perhaps by publishing it instead of that obese, yet-to-be-completed corpus — and planting in it the seed (or worm) of insinuation that "my father," "Manfred F. Dickson" ("Sr."), and "his" trilogy The Fates are in fact finally fictions, the score-settling invention of a justly aggrieved virtual orphan whose lifelong, single-minded, but altogether futile endeavor to follow in his "father" 's footsteps has deprived him of any "meaningful" companionship except — take this, damned Dad! — playing King Oedipus indeed to a certain long-discarded Queen Jocasta, in a secret, Sphinx-guarded Thebes of our own devising!

Ha! There is no Clotho, Reader! No Lachesis! No Atropos! No Arundel or Mason-Dixon University, Severn Day School, or Bernbridge Manor! Nor any "Agatha/Aglaia," "Thelma/Thalia," or "Grace Mason Forester"! There is not, nor was there ever, any "M. F. Dickson Senior," nor (ipso facto) any M-F Junior! Figments all! Hollow, pathetic fictions!

There is only…

THE END

No: There is not even that. Not even that!

As I was saying…

JOHN BARTH is the author of numerous works of fiction, including The Sot-Weed Factor, Lost in the Funhouse, The Book of Ten Nights and a Night, and the National Book Award winner Chimera. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, an F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Fiction, and a PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, among other honors. He taught for many years in the writing program at Johns Hopkins University.