Stories about story-telling

The story that John Barth has to tell is that he had planned a book, to be entitled Ten Nights and a Night, in which he would reprint ten already published stories, interweaving them with a new story about his relations with his Muse. The purpose would have been to put these tales into a narrative frame, ‘connecting their dots to make a whole somewhat larger (and perhaps a bit friskier) than the mere sum of its parts’, on the model of The Thousand and One Nights and the Decameron. But before the book was completed there came the events of 9/11, which seemed to make story-telling hopelessly irrelevant. Still, the story-telling in the Decameron took place under the threat of the Black Death and hence was a studied gesture of irrelevance. Could this (just), he wondered, give him the warrant to do likewise?

As frame, each of his ten stories has a prelude, a dialogue between the story-teller, the aged or ageing ‘Graybard’ (a sort of male Scheherazade), and his willing Muse. (She has acquired the nickname ‘Wysiwyg’, short for the computer instruction ‘What you see is what you get’.) They drink wine, they strip and bathe in an adjacent marshy creek, return to his Scriptorium, which strangely becomes transparent from floor to ceiling, drink some more (she still wet and naked), and copulate on his waterbed. The sequence of their Nights occupies the 11 days following 9/11. All this may be supposed to be mythological and is a myth of dizzying complexity and involution, bristling with metaphorical booby traps, false exits and dissolving identities. (‘Graybard’, it appears, is the Teller, not the Author.)

It is usual to call Barth an ‘apocalyptic’ writer (or ‘comic-apocalyptic’, to use Bernard Bergonzi’s phrase), and in a well-known essay, ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’ (1967), he argued that apocalyptic feelings about the ‘death of the novel’ were best handled by writing a novel which only pretended to be a novel (‘novels which imitate the form of the Novel, by an author who imitates the role of Author’).