John Barth - The Sot-Weed Factor

" 'Tis as well," he judged on second thought, "for it hath a murtherous row of great French buttons."

Nor could he sacrifice his coat, shirt, or stockings, for he lacked on the one hand clothes enough to throw away, and on the other courage enough to give the barmaid further laundry. "A clever man is never lost for long," he repeated to himself, and regarding next the tail of a great bay gelding in a stall behind him, rejected it on the grounds that its altitude and position rendered it at once inaccessible and dangerous. "What doth this teach us," he reflected with pursed lips, "if not that one man's wit is poor indeed? Fools and wild beasts live by mother wit and learn from experience; the wise man learns from the wits and lives of others. Marry, is't for naught that I spent two years at Cambridge, and three times two with Henry in my father's summerhouse? If native wit can't save me, then education shall!"

Accordingly he searched his education for succor, beginning with his memory of history. "Why should men prize the records of the past," he asked, "save as lessons for the present?" Yet though he was no stranger to Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Suetonius, Sallust, and other chroniclers ancient and modern, he could recall in them no precedent for his present plight, and thus no counsel, and had at length to give over the attempt. " 'Tis clear," he concluded, "that History teacheth not a man, but mankind; her muse's pupil is the body politic or its leaders. Nay, more," he reasoned further, shivering a bit in the breeze off the harbor, "the eyes of Clio are like the eyes of snakes, that can see naught but motion: she marks the rise and fall of nations, but of things immutable — eternal verities and timeless problems — she rightly takes no notice, for fear of poaching on Philosophy's preserve."

Next, therefore, he summoned to mind as much as ever he could of Aristotle, Epicurus, Zeno, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and the rest, not forgetting his Platonical professors and their one-time friend Descartes; but though they'd no end of interest in whether his plight was real or fancied, and whether it merited concern sub specie aeternitatis, and whether his future action with regard to it was already determined or entirely in his hands, yet none advanced specific counsel. "Can it be they all shat syllogisms, that have nor stench nor stain," he wondered, "and naught besides? Or is't that no fear travels past their Reason, to ruin their breeches withal?" The truth of the matter was, he decided, peering across the court in vain for Henry, that philosophy dealt with generalities, categories, and abstractions alone, like More's eternal spissitude, and spoke of personal problems only insofar as they illustrated general ones; in any case, to the best of his recollection it held no answer for such homely, practical predicaments as his own.

He did not even consider physics, astronomy, and the other areas of natural philosophy, for the same reason; nor did he crack his memory on the plastic arts, for he knew full well no Phidias or Michelangelo would deign to immortalize a state like his, whatever their attraction for human misery. No, he resolved at last, it was to literature he must turn for help, and should have sooner, for literature alone of all the arts and sciences took as her province the entire range of man's experience and behavior — from cradle to grave and beyond, from emperor to hedge-whore, from the burning of cities to the breaking of wind — and human problems of every magnitude: in literature alone might one find catalogued with equal care the ancestors of Noah, the ships of the Achaians —

"And the bum-swipes of Gargantua!" he exclaimed aloud. "How is't I did not think of them till now?" He reviewed with joy that chapter out of Rabelais wherein the young Gargantua tries his hand, as it were, at sundry swabs and wipers — not in desperation, to be sure, but in a spirit of pure empiricism, to discover the noblest for good and all — and awards the prize at last to the neck of a live white goose; but hens and guineas though there were a-plenty in the yard around the stable, not a goose could Ebenezer spy. "Nor were't fit," he decided a moment later, somewhat crestfallen, "save in a comic or satiric book, to use a silly fowl so hardly, that anon must perish to please our bellies. Good Rabelais surely meant it as a jest." In like manner, though with steadily mounting consternation, he considered what other parallels to his circumstances he could remember from what literature he had read, and rejected each in turn as inapplicable or irrelevant. Literature too, he concluded with heavy heart, availed him not, for though it afforded one a certain sophistication about life and a release from one's single mortal destiny, it did not, except accidentally, afford solutions to practical problems. And after literature, what else remained?

He recalled John McEvoy's accusation that he knew nothing of the entire great real world and the actual people in it. What, in fact, he asked himself, would others do in his place, who did know the great real world? But of such knowledgeable folk he knew but two at all well — Burlingame and McEvoy — and it was unthinkable of either that they would ever be in his place. Yet knowledge of the world, he quite understood, went further than personal acquaintance: how fared the savage hordes and heathen peoples of the earth, who never saw a proper bum-swab? The Arabs of the desert, who had no forest leaves nor any paper? Surely they contrived a measure of cleanliness in some wise, else each perforce would live a hermit and the race die out in a single generation. But of all the customs and exotic practices of which he'd heard from Burlingame or read in his youthful books of voyages and travel, only one could he remember that was to the point: the peasant folk of India, Burlingame had once observed to him, ate with their right hands only, inasmuch as the left was customarily used for personal cleanliness.

" 'Tis no solution, but a mere postponement of my difficulties," the poet sighed. "What hope hath he for other aid, whom wit and the world have both betrayed?"

He started, and despite the discomfort of his position, glowed with pleasure when he recognized the couplet. "Whate'er my straits, I still am virgin and poet! What hope hath he. . Would Heav'n I'd ink and quill, to pen him ere he cools!" He resolved in any case to dog-ear a leaf in his notebook as a reminder to set down the couplet later; it was not until the volume was spread open in his hands, and he was leafing through its empty pages, that he saw in it what none of his previous efforts had led him to.

"A propitious omen, b'm'faith!" said he, not a little awed. He regretted having torn out in the London posthouse those sheets in the ledger on which Ben Bragg had kept his accounts, not only because his years with Peter Paggen had soured his taste for the world of debit and credit, but also because he remembered how scarce was paper in the provinces, and so was loath to waste a single sheet. Indeed, so very reluctant was he, for a moment he seriously considered tearing out instead what few pages he'd already rhymed on: his Hymn to Chastity, the little quatrain recalled to him by Burlingame, and his preliminary salute to the ship Poseidon. Only the utter impropriety, the virtual sacrilege of the deed, restrained his hand and led him at length to use two fresh and virgin sheets — and then two more — for the work, which, completed with no small labor, owing to the drying effect of the breeze, he turned into an allegory thus: the unused sheets were songs unborn, which yet had power, as it were in utero, to cleanse and ennoble him who would in time deliver them — in short, the story of his career to date. Or they were token of his double essence, called forth too late to prevent his shame but able still to cleanse the leavings of his fear. Or again — but his pleasant allegorizing was broken off by the appearance, from the rear of the King o' the Seas, of befreckled Dolly, bringing his drawers and breeches out to dry. Despite his embarrassment he craned his head around the stable entrance and inquired after Burlingame, who had by this time been absent for nearly an hour; but the woman professed to know nothing of his whereabouts.