This review of John Barth’s The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor appeared in the TLS in 1991:
Every teller of tales, John Barth tells us, is a supplicant. The ageing trouper Scheherezade–having long ago lost her Sultan, her children and her audience–looks Death in the face and asks him: “So then… What’s my ticket price ?” It is, of course, a story. The joke is lost on no one. Not Death, not Scheherezade herself, not the ageing trouper John Barth, not us the audience of John Barth.
Launched like a paper boat from Scheherazade’s deathbed, Simon Behler comes to life on “a tidewater shore” in East Dorset, Maryland, 1930. At seven he discovers water. He receives premonitions of a “boundary between worlds”. At fourteen, he is sexually initiated by Crazy Daisy Moore, a girl puzzlingly mature for her years. Crazy Daisy’s father Sam introduces Behler to A Thousand and One Nights, on the grounds that one day it might help him find out who he is. By the time we next see him, as New Journalist “William Baylor”, cruising the Virgin Islands to celebrate his fortieth birthday, he certainly needs help. His wife has just tried to kill him. He is sexually attracted to their daughter Juliette. So far, his “voyages” have had only a metaphorical resemblance to those of Sindbad the Sailor. Now, in the sexual, spiritual and psychic frustration of middle age, he needs the world to be more than it is. Wandering dazedly through Charlotte Amalie he makes his first brief astonishing trip “over the boundary”, out of the Caribbean and into the bazaar of Jmaa el Fna, Marrakesh, then back again.
Ten years later, he has settled with Crazy Daisy Moore’s younger sister, the adventurous photo-journalist Julia. (Daisy herself, trapped on the lee shore of her incestuous relationship with Sam Moore, is enacting her nickname in a Florida asylum.) Julia drowns when, reporting an historical reconstruction of the Sindbad voyages, they are shipwrecked near Sri Lanka. Baylor is pulled from the sea fifteen hundred miles away, having crossed the boundary Crazy Daisy helped him find, to become “Somebody the Sailor” –pirate, navigator, unwilling witness to the local commerce of castration and murder, ransomed maidenheads, treasure and betrayal. Finally, first rapist then lover of Sindbad the Sailor’s beautiful daughter Yasmin, he fetches up in “a Baghdad not out of The Arabian Nights but in it”, there to become a beggar in the house of the incestuous old merchant himself. They begin to trade stories. Will Somebody ever get home again ? How will he get home ?
With its turban unwound like this, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor is a cheerful confection and not much else. In the reading, it’s a cheerful confection and too much else. This effect is achieved by Barth’s extraordinary narrative method. “To sail from Serendib to Basra, one sets a course for Basra,” Behler tells Sindbad: “but to sail from Basra to Serendib is quite another matter. As we both know, it is in the nature of that elusive island that under no circumstances can it be reached by heading in its direction.” The moment we leave port it is to be lost at sea.
We begin at the middle, itself an outcome of events we will not see until the end. Behler narrates Scheherazade, who narrates Behler, who invents “Baylor”, who, as “Somebody”, must identify Sindbad from his own fabrication “My Six Voyages”. Sindbad tells himself into existence. He is promptly untold again through the anecdotes and biographies of his abused daughter, his abused foster-son, his sociopathic household staff. Beneath this “sea of stories”, motives multiply chaotically until its surface is ripped into a surf noir of inversions, insertions, recursions: then further, into puns and word games. This chaos often resembles an attempt by Walt Disney to animate Gerard Genette’s Narrative Discourse. But as he and Somebody exchange narrative strokes, Sinbad’s fabulations steadily reveal a man weakened and emptied by experience rather than, as he has claimed, filled and strengthened by it. When we enter his house–which is his identity–we find peace, tranquility, wisdom. By the time we leave it we recognise that any sense of order is an ephemeral effect of plot and boiling counterplot. Sometimes we wonder about our own house.
Clearly, a book so full of story-telling is in some way about story-telling. “…in my other life,” Barth has Somebody say, “I had been not exactly a teller of tales but a successful reporter of my own adventures.” This is Sindbad’s position too. The anecdote, that barest form of fiction, is not dissimilar to its nearest non-fictional counterpart, the lie. When Julia Moore, making a photographic essay on “the new Spain”, poses a shot of hang-gliders circling above Don Quixote’s windmills, then claims to have “seen” this conjunction, we can appreciate that fiction and fact might be inextricably webbed. Barth goes further. We lie the world into existence, he claims, on a daily basis. He accepts it with the calm of an old man, perhaps tired of the sea.
You don’t have to agree with him to enjoy the tale; and, metafiction aside, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor is fun. When she finishes at last–her “catharsis catharsed, epiphany epiphed, dramatic tension resolved, ground situation altered meaningfully and irreversibly” –Scheherazade’s classical audience has netted all the fish of classical narrative: frustration and delight, impatience and anger, and a resolution staged by the benificent Haroun al-Rashid himself, Caliph of Baghdad and Dispenser of Denouements.
What interests me now is that penultimate paragraph. (I’m not saying it didn’t interest me when I wrote it.)
11 Comments
August 12, 2008 at 12:19 am
I first read that review a few years back, and it prompted me to seek out Barth’s book – which I still haven’t completely read, though I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the deserts and jungles of it that I have ventured through. I loved the Arabian Nights when I was younger (is there anyone who didn’t ?) but I find I can’t read it now without Borges, Barth, Irwin, Mahfouz, Rushdie, and all those other story-addled old men leaning over my shoulder and pointing and pontificating. Which is a shame really.
It had never occurred to me that a lie is non-fiction. I feel enlightened.
Does the penultimate paragraph interest you differently now, though ? Perhaps ‘might be’ would be more definite, would be ‘are’, if you had written the review only yesterday. Are you more accepting now of that inextricable webbiness ? do you agree with Barth’s claim that lies construct the daily world (lies here I think are different from falsehoods – not quite sure why, just feels that way) ? do you have the calm of an old man ? (can’t see that last one, somehow…).
I recently read a much older review of yours – The Problem of Sympathy in New Worlds 4, about a Jack Trevor Story novel. I’ve been reading a lot lately about the problems of character development in fiction – all the usual suspects, Forster and so on – and you just nailed it. I’d never heard of JTS, so now I’m looking for him in Brisbane’s secondhand book shops. (Yet more to read, oh dearie dearie me…)
August 12, 2008 at 9:03 am
Robert, I was going to respond to the post, but then I read your comment. In particular, “It never occurred to me that a lie is non-fiction.” And then I return to the post, and read that “fiction and fact might be inextricably webbed” and, “we lie the world into existence on a daily basis”…
And, as a former news reporter, I really want to say, smugly and crudely, “Well I’ve known that for years”. But I don’t want to be so smug, because it glosses over how depressed that has made me.
But today, I feel like saying this: What is the difference between fact and fiction anyway? That’s the real lie: this idea that there is something so sturdy and steadfast as fact, and something else, so loose and creative and fairylike as fiction. It is inextricably webbed, yes, MJH. That’s the whole point. But I might go further, and suggest that our human need to lie is what created the distinction in the first place. I no longer think there is one.
And now I’ve ended up sounded terribly smug after all.
August 12, 2008 at 10:05 am
I’m sure some philosophers and psychologists have written about the possibility of lying being a crucial element of being human. And also that one of the differences that literacy makes (in contrast with oral-only communication) is that it’s much easier to check ‘facts’: does that make lying more difficult, or simply shift the location of the lie? That said, even some chimps have been spotted lying. But this reminds me of something in ‘Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed’, which I’m struggling to get through: theft as the original act of exchange, leading to the ‘coding’ of pleasure and desire that leads to tyranny and capitalism. I’ve definitely not explained that very well.
August 12, 2008 at 10:37 am
Hi Robert & Lara
That’s a chilling image, “the story-addled old men”, & I hope to God I’m not one of them. Another reason to hate story. I hope I never have that old-guy calm either (but part of me is tired enough to want it, which is in itself a scary age-related change).
At New Worlds we condemned writers who found their subject matter in “mythologising their own experience”. You were supposed to cleave to genre fiction & “make things up” instead, as if that was a pure unsullied process. By the early 80s I’d dumped that as naive & gone through writers like Isherwood with glee–rather puzzled that he later “apologised” for abusing the line between biography & fiction (Christopher & His Kind, 1976). I’d also begun to love–but suspect–travel writing. So Climbers was based on the idea of that tension between kinds of fiction & their nearest nonfiction equivalent. I hope in Climbers, & later The Course of the Heart, The Ice Monkey & Travel Arrangements, I teased out several varieties of “mythologising your own experience”.
What I feel now, especially in terms of the penultimate paragraph of the Barth review, & also in response to Lara’s stark position, is this: in Barth’s example of the hang gliders & windmills, the hang gliders actually flew, and they flew above the windmills–that’s an event in the class of “facts”; but the incident (or more particularly its meaning, the meaning the photographer then sold to her audience) wasn’t witnessed. It was managed into existence–that’s an event in the class of fiction. Even the Simulacrum, the fully mediated world, needs gravity & aeronautics; without that substrate of fact, you can’t make anything up. (That’s why Baudrillard was wrong when he claimed that the first Iraq war “never happened”.) The “lie” –or newslike fiction–is that the photographer observed the event. The only possible “truth” would be to stumble over that iconic image by accident.
Are we saying, when we claim that there’s never a “sturdy and steadfast” fact, that it’s never possible, in any circumstance (a) to fly a hang glider; or (b) to stumble over an event–hang gliders flying above windmills–and record it, without having first managed it into existence ? I think that’s the indefensible part of the postmodern position, & the one which reveals the fear & wish-fulfilment at the heart of it. The contemporary Western psyche is founded on the idea–the desperate plea, actually–that nothing happens it doesn’t initiate & control.
Julian: I like the idea that literacy “shifts the location of the lie”.
August 12, 2008 at 11:34 am
[...] This is from an introduction to Kafka’s The Castle. I’ve been thinking about it since my memory was jogged by Tim Etchells’ notebook from Prague (’An Axe to Break the Frozen Sea, 8 August 2008), and I’ve been thinking about it even more since reading M John Harrison’s brilliant 1991 book review here. [...]
August 12, 2008 at 12:07 pm
It doesn’t really matter whether the photographer told the hang-gliders what to do. Even if she did not know in advance they would be there, she still (literally) organised the event – in the viewfinder, in her perception. In my short career as a photojournalist, that was all I knew how to do. I lacked what I thought of as the integrity of the true photojournalist to choose subjects and angles and framing and lighting to say something s/he believes to be true or at least interesting and valid and fair. I just wanted to make nice pictures, creating a frame from a potential movie, regardless of whether the temporary, momentary role I allocated to my subject bore any relationship to their actions in the non-photographic world. But I’m not sure there are any true photojournalists out there, or if such a person is even possible. The hang-gliders did indeed fly over the windmills, but so what? Maybe the miller was at that moment spitting into the flour, two gusts of wind were colliding invisibly in centre frame, and just out of frame the photographer’s driver was using a sign known only to locals to warn off a beggar child. Am I missing the point here? I suspect so.
August 12, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Hi Julian. I doubt you’re missing the point, because we’ve had this argument before… But you do seem to be arguing that it’s never possible to photograph things; or least that events from one descriptive system–the ideological composition & subsequent use of images–always & in every possible scenario, over-ride events in the other (”reality”). I kind of take the point (as I always do), but think it’s a council of despair.
I left you a present in a post above, by the way, which I think you already found…
August 12, 2008 at 1:11 pm
the artist’s trap–after spending all those hours painting or writing one emerges into the world and sees variations of that everywhere–the extension of ones inventions….and one goes on contemplating them as such.
when you are up on the cliff do you consider the truthfulness of your grip? Is the rock face fact or fiction?
Is the mouth full salty or sweet?
Does that make one more perceptive to the nuances of reality or weighed down by the old men and their stories?
I think I’ll go make another painting–the only answer that always works.
August 12, 2008 at 4:25 pm
“And if the day came when I felt a nat’ral emotion
I’d get such a shock I’d probably jump in the ocean.”
I think part of what intrigues me about photography is just that autistic, arbitrary blankness of the process. It’s an invitation to contemplate, opening the way to a space where other, more unpredictable but none the less visceral things can happen. Which is why I sometimes like photographs that try to get as close as possible to showing nothing at all – not literally featureless, but as close to the ground state of nothing-in-particularness that is effective invisibility. Once you get there, lost, half asleep, if the picture is good, and if you’re lucky, the spirits start talking. (whooo!)
Not despairing, or not necessarily so. Austere, maybe. But you’ll probably find yourself laughing in there too.
That’s where the reality is: not in the things the picture shows. Or not just in them: sometimes something can, as Roland Barthes said, pierce the surface of the picture; or it can make you feel a texture, as in Edward Weston’s pictures, or the superabundance of reality, the more-than-you-could-possibly-take-in-ness of things, which is why I like lots of resolution. I’m tempted to say reality is wrapped up in there like some higher dimension of quantum physics, but that’s probably scientifically illiterate.
Or maybe what I mean is reality in pictures has to be cautiously tracked down and coaxed out before it will show itself. The most memorable bit of Tarkovsky’s ‘Nostalgia’, for me, is where the man walks for no good reason three times back and forth across the bottom of a drained open-air Roman bath, holding a lit candle: one take, followed closely by a tracking camera. Plenty of time to realise that this simple action cannot be faked, that if the candle blew out, they’d have to start all over again, that the camera is anxiously following the unrehearsable movements of an actor who is at one with his character, entirely focused on keeping the candle alight. It says, you thought you were watching a fiction film, but this really happened.
Mia, in my very limited experience of climbing, there’s nothing like it for reminding you what reality is all about, the indubitable truths of gravity, strength, flexibility, friction, pain, fear, joy, ambition. Even doubt seemed quantifiable, tradeable. And there’s nothing like losing yourself in reality; an alternative to losing yourself in contemplation of mediation (as I don’t lose myself in painting. Lucky you). Losing yourself: good thing or bad thing?
Sorry if I repeat myself, Uncle Zip. It happens at my age.
August 13, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Something I wrote a long time ago, in an attempt at ‘mythologising [my] own experience’, was to the effect that a truth (of an event, say) is like a pearl: a fact, an ungainsayable grain of sand, buried forever in layers upon layers of interpretation and perspective and interest and falsehood and imperfect memory so that the grain, the fact, is lost to relevance – verifiable by some kind of x-ray, but meaningless because the accretions are what everyone has come to value: “Look, turn it this way, so the light shines there – how perfect!”.
It’s this sentence from the Barth review – ‘The anecdote, that barest form of fiction, is not dissimilar to its nearest non-fictional counterpart, the lie’ – that I find endlessly fascinating. There’s something ouroborosian about it. And something terribly true, something engendering and emblemising the discussion here.
I love this blog…
August 16, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Hi Mia
Always my questions, too. A resounding no to the first, but the second is more complicated. In a way, climbing is a discourse, an act of speech in a technical language limited by values, which turns the rock into a set of linguistic limitations on behaviour; it’s a rule-generated space, like any game, & to that extent “not real”.
But of course it ceases to be a fiction the moment you let go…
Certainly solves it from the point of view of being alive. Why struggle to resolve two mutually exclusive descriptive systems when there’s no practical need… ?
Unless you go with Julian’s solution (hi Julian)–
–in which the event takes place in both descriptive systems at once, & is anchored in neither but becomes entirely itself. (I think that’s what I liked about “dancing with Julie Tolentino”, too). I agree with Julian–it’s one of the most stunning film sequences ever.
Hi Robert. For me it’s the result of a dynamic process, in which a lot of very thin, debatable layers of content constantly shift into completely & intensely complex relationships with one another. “Truth” (your pearl) may exist, briefly, as an artefact of any one of these configurations. The reader, at a particular cut down in time (usually the point at which they finish reading) tries to guess which one of them it was… That’s the act of interpretation. I think we might be saying the same thing, but I always want to stress the dynamic aspects of the system.
My feeling: all four of us are in deep Zen here.