SAILOR & SON: BARTH & THE LAST VOYAGE OF SOMEBODY THE SAILOR, CANTOR & ON GIVING BIRTH TO ONE’S OWN MOTHER

Should a good device reveal its own devising? Should I say, before attempting to point out the often-mystical gyrations of John Barth’s new novel, that I’ve twice taken classes with him? Yes: a semester apiece in Boston and in Baltimore. At the time the author’s latest was Chimera, winner of the ’73 National Book Award, and the most useful comparison with his new one, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor. Working with Barth triggered a private metamorphosis. Before those seminars I was your typical Big Man of Letters on Campus: Beat-besotted, Dylan-dreamy, Kafka-cantankerous, Melville-megalomaniacal. After, I’d become smaller and yet tougher. Aside from timeless lessons (humility, study, perseverance), I’d learned what was then a new coinage, the term Postmodern. Postmodern work, I’d learned, does this and that—and reveals its own devising.

In this, postmodernism challenged the aesthetics of the previous era. A time that might be bracketed between the poems of Baudelaire and the movies of John Huston took it as art’s ruling purpose to create a detached perfection, a Chinese box which only another expert could unlock. By contrast, the postmodern offers show and tell, collage, the exposed simplicity of an Erector set. Consider, for instance, the stage show of most rap groups. And while this impulse to demystify is neither entirely new (Don Quixote did it), nor impor tant to everyone (Paul McCartney couldn’t care less), it’s certainly an honest reaction to recent history.

No matter how an informed artist constructs this century, his or her own work in it must seem suspect. Marx derides most art as a toy of the privileged. Freud warns that it may be no more than a spectacle, before which personality turns passive. In Jay Cantor’s new collection of essays, On Giving Birth to One’s Own Mother, the author considers film in relation to the Holocaust. “Art must be,” Cantor argues, “from now on, poised on a knife’s edge, aware of its own blandishments, its dangerous penchant for deception, its implication in catastrophe.”

And yet, perversely, Cantor goes on making artful things. Giving Birth offers belle-lettres at the level of William Gass or Susan Sontag—or, for that matter, of John Barth’s twin essays, “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967) and “The Literature of Replenishment” (1979). But Cantor is significantly younger than those bellwethers. His essays include insights about Dylan and Vietnam and Allan Bloom. He’s young enough to have been in Barth’s seminar himself, and these two books offer an opportunity to understand how the Postmodern torch has passed.

Critics have been kind to The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, in general recalling the excitement Barth generated with his The Sot-Weed Factor (’60). This success must be, in large part, a response to the new book’s emotionality. Somebody presents a spooky Moebius strip of realism and fantasy, fascinating as a good sailor’s knot, but it’s drenched with passion. There are bittersweet tradeoffs between growth and loss, genial insights concerning changes and challenges, and above all fevered sexual couplings, sweet or unwilling, approved or taboo (incest is a recurring motif). The plot turns on a raucous storytelling contest, mortally threatening and surrounded by deceit.

“Somebody” is Simon William Behler, a contemporary American who’s somehow survived a near-drowning in the Indian Ocean to find himself—a fifty-year-old grandfather, a sober survivor of divorce, and a successful if uncertain journalist—in the world of the Arabian Nights. Behler’s reminiscences offer Barth at the top of his form: brisk, clamorous, forceful, smart. Then there’s the American’s opponent in the storytelling contest, none other than Sindbad the Sailor, rich but weary after six terrible voyages. Sindbad retells Scheherazade (not badly, though at first his tales risk merely trotting through their assignment), and so eventually reveals his own devices. The sailor’s narratives outline a moral dissolution; his rocs and snakes and cannibals turn out to be elaborate cover-ups for piracy and worse. Juicing things further are the stories of the man’s concubine, Jayda, who knows all the secrets of her unsavory lord but remains committed to him. Then there’s the story hidden from both those two, the secret love that’s bloomed between Sindbad’s daughter, Yasmin, and this man out of time, Behler. An ingenious formal experiment, Somebody nonetheless throbs with blood and dark laughter.

Emotion, its absence, has been a problem for Barth’s work. That’s the perception of many recent critics, at least, all of whom make the same complaint about postmodern fiction generally. Revealing the device severs cathartic connections, goes the argument; the Erector set lacks attachments to the heart. Barth, as one of the Americans who more or less created the new aesthetic, has been saddled with the responsibility for that breakdown. In Somebody he’s particularly caring about those bonds, about caring itself, and most reviewers at least have given him credit. In fact, however, this author has been finding new ways to work more emotion into his fiction for years now. Texts like Chimera and its predecessor, the story collection Lost in the Funhouse (’68), are among the most technically experimental in our literature. Their substance, paradoxically, is often drawn from classic material like Greek myths and the The Thousand Nights and One Night, and indeed if there’s such a thing as a “postmodern clas sic,” it’s the title piece of Funhouse. But the Barth of this era can also read like Euclidean proofs of theoretical notions, peculiarly late ’60s in its freaky excess. To some extent, then, a critical backlash was inevitable. Chimera provides an extraordinary scenic route, but also a dead end—as does, for instance, Frank Zappa’s ’69 opus, Uncle Meat.

But the backlash ignores how this author has made his experiments more humane. He followed Chimera with books rooted in the tragedies of our times, in particular LETTERS (’79). That novel and Sabbatical (’82) are in many respects “social novels;” they might fairly be shelved with, for instance, the Dos Passos USA Trilogy (1930–36). Their stories work terrorist drama into very real Chesapeake Bay settings, along with charged family sagas. LETTERS in fact may be the man’s greatest accomplishment, Melvillean in its vision and complication, despite relatively bad press.

Somebody is a more modest book, accessible and kind. It’s Barth’s most direct assertion of the feminist argument implicit in his fiction since The End of the Road (1958), and it’s lovely stuff, really—a late-career peak, with fugue-like spirals of physical death and spiritual cleansing. But I for one miss the stick and grit of lived history that distinguished one or two of his other novels.

For stick and grit, see Jay Cantor. History haunts the eight long essays collected in On Giving Birth to One’s Own Mother. Meditations on the contemporary impact of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud open the book (Cantor calls them “patriarchs of the tribes of the modern”), and the author closes with the wish that he could say Kaddish for the dead of the Holocaust. There is one humorous piece here, a deliciously nasty birthday greeting to Mickey Mouse from Ignatz Mouse, the brick-throwing wise guy of the old comic strip Krazy Kat—also the eponymous protagonist of Cantor’s second novel. But this touch of comedy serves as the exception which proves the rule, and it concludes with Ignatz driving nails into his palms in order to avoid falling under the smarmy spell of Mickey’s cartoons. Ha, ha.

In fact Giving Birth is modeled on the polished high seriousness of the patriarchs, more than on the naked scaffolding of the post-moderns. This is by no means a handful of occasional pieces (as was Barth’s ’86 collection, The Friday Book), but a coherent attempt at durable and work-shaping insight. While not above a smart aleck aside or a sudden tart touch of contemporeana, Cantor’s tone remains by and large noble and deliberate, unapologetically eyes on the prize: “I reread my past by the light of the patriarchs’ ideas, and allow my past and its bewilderments to interrogate their works, so that, after the long sleep of the past decade [roughly, ’75–’85], I can reknit my involvement with these texts and look for what they might still ask our present.”

This rereading recalls that of Cantor’s superb and challenging first novel, 1983’s The Death of Che Guevara, which “reread” a century of armed Marxist struggle, recasting its famed protagonist as Ahab and Quixote and Christ. Krazy Kat, in ’87, had a zanier, more abbreviated take on the civilization. Kat‘s metaphors came from pop culture, starting with that same Sunday-comics love story and spiraling out into Hollywood, black music, and a lot else. Ignatz and Krazy even enjoyed a few bouts of S&M: kisses and bricks. The novels share a central obsession—each depends on what might be called the Sick Patriarch. Offissa Pup wastes away in Kat (and with him the childish hope for eternal comic simplicity), and throughout Che, the Revolution seems to be on its last legs (as does Che himself). Thus the present essays arise out of the writer’s most persistent concerns, his deepest fears over what’s wrong.

Not that Cantor sees nothing to like in the Now. He takes pains to understand his comic strips, his Aretha Franklin, his protests against Vietnam, and to distance himself from conservative broadsides like The Closing of the American Mind. He understands that an inspired pop artifact is a self-sustaining, time-arresting “gadget”—as capable of meaning, in its way, as Thus Spake Zarathustra is in its. Comparisons like that illuminate, especially, the essay “Looking High and Low,” which ought to be required reading for anyone trying to wring insights from so-called “low culture.”

Yet during “the long sleep of the last decade,” Cantor has suffered a nightmare. He’s seen the highest ideals of aesthetics, and the most profound things said by the patriarchs, turned into a mere “pattern-book,” a source for “quotation”—a way of proving an artist’s hip without ever confronting whether he or she is wise. Yes, Marxism resulted in the Gulag, but does that mean our reflections on it now it should be nothing more than shrugs and quips? Yes, Nietzschean search for ecstasy and the Superman took us to Treblinka and Auschwitz, but does that mean our seeking now should go no further than the local heavy metal show? Cantor’s particularly disturbed by the notion that ours has become a “society of spectacle” (the phrase is from Guy Debord), our sensibilities MTV-empty, rejecting any real transformative confrontation with our core paradoxes in favor of passive attendance. Finally, Giving Birth is an outcry on behalf of renewed transformation, renewed belief in the possibility of transformation, all the braver because it’s raised despite full knowledge of past failures.

This inability to shake off what has gone before seems, for better or worse, a defining characteristic of the younger postmodernist. Compared to Cantor, Barth seems happily unencumbered, outside history: his man is an island. But Cantor is young enough to have witnessed the intensifying critique of postmodernism—Giving Birth twice mentions Barth, in lists of “the best contemporary work”—and smart enough to understand the lack of human connection which caused that critique. Thus younger writers of equal ambition (and there are others, among them Carole Maso) feature history as part of their wit and designs. To reveal the device, these days, means first to reveal how human hardship has forced it into being.

—L.A. Weekly, 1991