Someone might assert that the sentiments I’ve expressed here are an example of what the aforementioned e-fictionist Michael Joyce has wittily called “modality envy.” So be it, if so it be, although I believe “modality curiosity” to be a more accurate characterization: Mine is the ongoing curiosity of a Postmodern Romantic Formalist about the state of the art, as well as about the state of such new and, after all, essentially different arts as I believe e-fiction to be — in case there’s something there that a writer like myself might make use of in my venerable medium.
THIS JUST IN from Scientific American, one of those “wigged-out zines” to which I subscribe: It appears that we late-Cretaceous p-fictionists may have an unappreciated edge in the evolutionary competition down the road. Give us acid-free paper, a source of light, and familiarity with our language, and we are in business for the long haul. Digitalized information, on the other hand (including e-fiction), turns out to be only theoretically invulnerable to the ravages of time; the alarming fact is that the physical media on which it is stored, not to mention the software and hardware required to get at it, are far from eternal, either as items in themselves or as modes of access. Jeff Rothenberg, a senior computer scientist at the RAND Corporation, declares (in print) that “the contents of most digital media evaporate long before words written on high-quality paper. They often become unusably obsolete even sooner, as media are superseded by new, incompatible formats (how many readers remember eight-inch floppy disks?). It is only slightly facetious to say that digital information lasts forever — or five years, whichever comes first.”
Good luck, electronic fictioneers: Golf courses and ski slopes last longer than that; may the products of your lively medium fare as well.
Two More Forewords
“Two more” in two senses: 1) This essay-collection has been foreworded already; and 2) its forerunner, Further Fridays, included a section called “Four Forewords”—to my first five published novels, on the occasion of their later reissue as trade paperbacks by Doubleday’s Anchor Press.1
TIME WAS WHEN the publishers of good-quality books with less than best-seller appeal could hope at least to break even by keeping such works in print and selling a modest number of copies per year over an extended period, meanwhile deducting for tax purposes the cost of warehousing the unsold copies. The U.S. Supreme Court’s unfortunate “Thor Tool Company” ruling in 19792 declared that practice illegal, with the unhappy result that in America nowadays, a book either makes its publisher a profit in a hurry or is fed to the shredder — just as, in commercial television, a high-quality drama series may be canned because its audience, while sizeable, is less so than that of some competing network’s offering: bad news for the culture in both cases. Periodic attempts by such organizations as the Authors Guild and PEN (Poets, Essayists, and Novelists) to overturn that infelicitous court ruling have thus far been unsuccessful; until they succeed, if ever, the slack has been taken up somewhat by university presses and others outside the “trade,” where volumes of poetry, essays, and good-but-non-“commercial” fiction may find sanctuary, and by the larger houses’ “trade paperback” lines: Doubleday’s Anchor Press, Random House’s Vintage Books, Houghton Mifflin’s Mariner Books, et cetera.
A number of my own past productions have had the good fortune to lead second lives in such editions, for which their new publisher often requests a foreword. Hence the “Four Forewords” aforementioned, and hence the two here following: one to the large and complex novel LETTERS, first published by Putnam in 1979; the other to the smaller, more straightforward Sabbaticaclass="underline" A Romance, from the same publisher three years later. Neither novel was a commercial success; happily for their author, both were subsequently reissued (in 1994 and 1996, respectively) by the University of Illinois’ excellent Dalkey Archive Press, to continue their trickle of annual sales. After all, one reminds oneself, long-haul trickles can have large effects: e.g., the Chesapeake Bay and its tidal tributary outside my workroom window, both formed in part by the eons-long trickles of the last Ice Age’s retreating glaciers….
LETTERS
“Another interminable masterpiece,” my comrade-in-arms William H. Gass has called the novel here prefaced. I like that.
“Irritating and magnificent,” says the critic Zack Bowen of the story’s ground-plan and overall conceit.3 I like that, too.
Gore Vidal, on the other hand (Or was it Tom Wolfe? One of those knee-cappers, anyhow, who write so entertainingly on other matters but often get literature all wrong), in a general diatribe against fictive Fabulism, Postmodernism, you name it, has declared that the movement “culminates in John Barth’s novel LETTERS, which even its author admits is unreadable.”
Author admitteth no such thing. Author happeneth to believe the novel enormously readable, as well as enormous in other respects. Complex? Well, yes. Complicated? For sure. Designed and constructed with a certain rigor? You bet: As in pro football and the knitting of argyle socks, rigor in novel-writing is the zest of complexity; the aim is to bring it off with brio, panache, even grace—“passionate virtuosity,” I’ve heard it called — never dropping the ball or a stitch. Not for every taste, no doubt; but in the author’s opinion (15 years now after the novel’s first publication) there is in LETTERS sufficient humor, range of passions, historical seriousness, and bravura theater to make it a rousing read despite its elegant construction, if “despite” is how it need be.
But let’s hope it needn’t.
HERE’S HOW THE thing came to be written:
• Although its action takes place through seven months of 1969 (seven years before the U.S. Bicentennial, which some Americans at the decade’s turn, myself included, were beginning to note the approach of), it was in 1973 that the novel itself moved from accumulated project-notes to the front burner of my concerns. That’s the year when the American 1960s really ended: with the Israeli/Egyptian Yom Kippur War and the consequent Arab oil embargo; with the humiliating wind-down of our Vietnamese misadventure, which had fueled and focused countercultural protest; with the leveling off and subsequent erosion of U.S. economic prosperity, which had grown with all but uninterrupted vigor through the generation since Pearl Harbor — an erosion that, for the Baby Boomers at least, continues yet. Not a bad benchmark, in short, ’73, for the beginning of the end of “the American Century,” as under the Nixon/Kissinger administration the nation ground unenthusiastically toward its 200th birthday — an event that I’d had my eye on, novel-wise, for some while already. This for the reason that