Heide Ziegler:

Perhaps the most striking feature of your writing is the importance you give to the past. In The Sot Weed Factor you are concerned with the historical past; in Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera with the mythic past. But it is the twentieth-century mind that is at work in all of your novels. In which way do you believe that the past relates to the present in your fiction?

John Barth:

The Latin motto of one of the characters in the work in progress [LETTERS] – he is an industrialist borrowed from my first novel, The Floating Opera, who has expanded his pickle business into chemical fertilizers and freeze – drying – Praeteritas futuras stercorat: The past shits up the present. His PR man changed that to Praeteritas futuras fecundat: the past fertilizes the present, a proper motto for a chemical fertilizer firm, I suppose. But in LETTERS – and I think this applies to the other novels as well – any historical or mythic past that haunts, craps up fertilizes the present is an emblem of our personal past. The theme, certainly of the Perseus story, certainly of the Bellerophon story [two of the three novellas in Chimera], and most certainly of LETTERS, is the comic, tragic, or paradoxical re-enactment of the past in the present.

Bellerophon is a good example: he attempts to become a mythic hero by perfectly imitating the ‘programme’ for mythic heroes. Of course, that doesn’t work, and he finds that by perfectly imitating the model of mythic heroism, what he becomes is a perfect imitation of a mythic hero. My characters in the new novel, LETTERS, will act out, whether they know it or not, Marx’s notion that historical events and personages recur, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. This is also what happens to Perseus in Chimera: his attempts to re-enact his heroic past become farcical, a fiasco. It is only when he reassesses his situation (with the help of Calyxa and eventually Medusa) that he is able to elevate his re-enactment into something greater: which, if not heroic, is at least more personally successful.

Ziegler:

That implies, then, that it is important that the hero character overcomes his past in the end, doesn’t it?

Barth:

Indeed, it does.

Try to imagine a chambered nautilus whose prior chambers are accessible: a creature who carries its past on its back but isn’t confined strictly to the present room of that past. He can move freely into past rooms, using what’s there to energize and inform the present.

That’s the optimistic view. I am reminded, though, of a statement by D’Arcey Thompson, the English biologist who attempted to describe organic growth and form mathematically. He points out that it is only the very lip of the shell of marine molluscs that is alive and generative; the rest of it is dead material. He also remarks that it is not the snail that shapes the shell, but the shell that shapes the snail. I think that applies in an obvious way to ourselves: our thirties are a product of what we were in our twenties and what we were in our teens. But we are not just product. Our past lives a more or less active half-life in us, let’s say, but we’re continuously reshaping and reinterpreting it, restructuring it: re-orchestrating it, if you like.

Ziegler:

Does this mean that we approach the past as something like a game?

Barth:

Oh, indeed so! Somebody in The Sot Weed Factor – Burlingame, I think – says that the past is a clay that, willy-nilly, we must sculpt. And sculpting is play as well as work.

Ziegler:

The most astonishing trait, to me, in your recent novel LETTERS is what I would like to call your new flirt with realism. A realism, however, which, although it refers to recognizable times and places, even to strictly autobiographical details, is, at the same time, less past-oriented than it is ‘mildly prophetic’. Does this ‘realism’, then, define a special relationship – a dialectic – between the fictional and the factual?

Barth:

It’s been a while since I wrote any fiction that has to do with the here and the now, with recognizable places, and with characters characterized in the fashion of traditional bourgeois realism. The other thing, the dialect – the contamination of the real by the fictitious and of the fictitious by the real – is one of the main lines of the plot. Do you remember, Heide, Borges’s remark that among the four characteristics of the fabulous in fiction is the contamination of reality by dream? We just have to change the terms: the contamination of reality by fiction. But Borges himself, I think, sometimes includes in that notion the contamination of exterior reality by the imagined, by fiction, and, as witness the story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, the reverse process, where the fictitious begins to contaminate the real. Yes: if that convention is not the backbone of the novel, it’s certainly part of the armature of the theme and of the action. But, as you have seen, the whole mode of operation of that novel is the re-orchestration of old conventions, beginning with the convention of the epistolary novel. The dialectic between the fictitious and the real is a convention that goes way back past the modernists; it’s at the heart of Don Quixote. When you said earlier that you found an element of the prophetic in the novel, I wondered what you meant.

Ziegler:

I thought it meant that, once written, fiction can, in a sense, influence the subsequent life of its author. In this sense, couldn’t we say that the relationship between the fiction an author writes and his own life is a precarious version of ‘life following art’?

Barth:

Precarious but real. And while that prophetic aspect is not at the heart of the novel, it certainly spooks around the corners and margins. The theme of LETTERS is re-enactment; and re-enactment is a phenomenon at least as full of hazards and perils as of opportunities.

Ziegler:

One of the most interesting aspects, I find, in your re-use of characters from previous novels is that the characters seem to constitute the author. In a way, he exists for them, as the centre for their lives and the information they impart. What struck me, though – and what must strike most of your readers – is the question of your relationship to these characters, whom you have, over the years, created, and who, over the years, seem to be influencing you – the greatest manifestation of which is LETTERS itself.

Barth:

Obviously the things we do, either as artists or as human beings, change and affect us. The dreams we dream as novels, novels that occupy years of our imaginative energy, obviously work changes in us. That old convention of earlier modernism – of the dialogue between the author and his characters, the assumption of an independent life by those characters, even the mutiny of the characters against the author – that’s simply a metaphor for the way things actually are. I’m not very romantic about writing, and it always makes me uncomfortable when I hear an old-fashioned writer talk about the way his or her characters assume a life of their own: ‘I wanted this character to be such and such. But, no, she insisted on . . .’ This is the kind of hogwash you hear from a certain kind of writer who talks in a romantic way about art. But on the level of simple fact, I think it’s undeniable that the work we do changes us; the dreams we dream change us. Everything we do in art is likely to turn out to be either prophecy or exorcism, whatever its other intentions.

Ziegler:

But I think it should be stressed that you make use of this fact in a particular way. I assume that every author knows that his own characters will influence him and that he has to live with them after he has created them. But, in LETTERS , the characters literally constitute their own author: he exists on the fictitious level for his other characters in the same way that they seem to exist on a kind of ‘real’ level for him.

Barth:

Is that a reversal of Flaubert’s famous remark about Madame Bovary: ‘C’est moi?’ Not only is Madame Bovary Flaubert, but Flaubert is Madame Bovary. That’s certainly true in the case of my characters.

You will find, and I think you have probably found already, that the author of the letters from the author in LETTERS is the least characterized character. Not only does the author very properly not engage in the action – he doesn’t affect the plot or become at all involved in it. But also he is the one who, if you were trying to draw little character sketches, you would have the least handle on, I believe. No doubt that’s because, for the purposes of the novel at least (and it’s not just a modernist game that’s being played), his character is simply a kind of emptying-out – a kénosis, as the theologians say.

In a mild way, every author who’s involved, especially in realistic fictions, in drawing characters absolutely from the whole cloth, as these characters are drawn – who have no counterparts in real life – is doing just that. No future PhD investigator is ever going to find anybody now living who could be said to be the real-life models for Lady Amherst or Ambrose Mensch or Todd Andrews. That amuses me because most actual realistic writers have not historically worked in that fashion. They do draw from life; and, of course, people from the period of Germaine de Staël boasted of the fact that their novels were drawn literally from their lives and that they were all romans-à-clef. These are not, and I think that this emptying-out of the characteristics of the author into the characteristics of his characters is most likely to happen when you try to write something that will pass for verisimilitude in characterization, but is, in fact, not drawn from life.

Hazlitt made a wonderful remark about Richardson that I came across when I was doing a little homework on Richardson. He said that, for all of Richardson’s much touted realism, he, Hazlitt, suspected that Richardson’s characters weren’t drawn from life at all. Hazlitt’s phrase was that Richardson simply spun them out of his own head. I’m sure that’s true. Hazlitt meant it as a criticism, but I regard it as a marvellous truth. And I’m sure that, as soon as you have heard that remark, you cannot read through any of Pamela or Clarissa and for a moment believe in the reality of those characters in the sense that Mr B. is carefully modelled after so and so, etc. They are as absolutely make-believe characters as ever came down the pages of literature, I’m sure. I would regard it as a tribute if somebody made that Hazlitt kind of remark about LETTERS. I would be delighted.

Ziegler:

My next question takes up what we have been talking about on the level of form. In LETTERS as well as in Chimera , Jerome Bray is trying to create the perfect novel with the aid of the computer Lilyvac II. He wants to create a novel that will of necessity ‘contain nothing original whatever, but be the quintessence, the absolute type, as it were the Platonic Form expressed.’

Barth:

I’m sure LETTERS doesn’t so much aspire to as stumble towards it. It’s certainly not ‘the Platonic Form expressed’, but it certainly participates in the Platonic idea that Bray is speaking of. Clearly this is a novel in which, on one level, there is nothing original whatsoever; that is, it is a novel which is conspicuously assembled out of old literary conventions. On the other hand, I regard it is a very original novel. Bray’s serious role in the novel is to be a kind of mad, limiting case of preoccupations which are also my preoccupations. The difference is that Bray takes them dead seriously and, of course, he is going to refine and escalate his aspirations as he goes along until, finally, not even literature will do. No novel made out of mere words, mere language could ever arrive at Bray’s notions of formal perfection and purity.

I look at the activities of the old and new formalists with a kind of fascination: there is a kind of madness in the speculations of Propp and Klebnikhov. But they are perfectly fascinating as limiting cases. However, you are not to regard LETTERS as a kind of Remembrance of Things Past, where at the end you realize that you are holding in your hand the artefact which demonstrates the author’s preoccupations about time: I mean that wonderful climax where Marcel is going to sit down to write the novel, and when he sits down to write the novel, you have finished the novel, and time, literally, is defeated. At the end of LETTERS, you are holding in your hand not the novel that Jerome Bray aspires to compose, not the mad limiting case or the pure form, but something that has fallen from Plato, although it participates in Bray’s idea.

Ziegler:

The Platonic idea is, in the end, a static idea, and, moreover, because it presupposes substance, can’t really serve as an analogue for postmodern literature. Your concept of history in the novel, however, is more useful as it suggests that documents constitute history while being, at the same time, interpretations of it. Substance – or fact – doesn’t really exist then. Nevertheless, doesn’t this suggest the possibility of a sort of dialectic at work in your writing which, although it does away with the notion of substance, can nevertheless, through sheer continuance – the sheer length of the novel, for instance – create something like a substitute for the Platonic idea, a substitute for substance?

Barth:

I hope so. I like the idea. Our friend John Hawkes, in the conversation which we had in Cincinnati that was later published in the New York Times, made a remark which touched me much at the time and seemed, to me, to look deep into my preoccupations as a writer. Jack said that he had the feeling about my novels, especially the long ones, that they were spun out against a kind of nothingness, almost as a shield against a kind of nothingness. I guess, leaving Plato aside for the moment, that there is an impulse, if not in all long novels, certainly in my long novels, that somehow they will assume a kind of substance, or pseudo-substance, or similitude of substance by their mere persistence. I think that’s an exorcism of nothingness, of the vacuum that one fears might exist if one stops to look at the void. It’s a long exorcism of silence, too. As for the quality of this persistence: I believe it takes seven years for every cell in the human body to replace itself. One should write a novel that would take just that long to read – maybe this one will – so that the reader, at the end, is literally not the reader who began the novel. Not just in a mild Heraclitean sense, but literally. No material cell that was in the reader’s body on page 1 is still there on page 772. I would love that.

Ziegler:

So LETTERS reconstitutes itself just as the reader’s body?

Barth:

Also the writer’s.

Ziegler:

I think that what you just said can be related to one of the characters in your novel. In The Floating Opera Todd Andrews held that nothing had intrinsic value; in LETTERS he has changed his concept and has come to believe that nothing has intrinsic value, which I understand to mean that nothing contains intrinsic value or may lay sole claim to intrinsic value. Therefore, ‘everything has intrinsic value’. I wanted to ask what it means when Todd Andrews speaks of value in this way. Does it mean that nothing contains intrinsic value or may lay sole claim to intrinsic value. Therefore, ‘everything has intrinsic value.’ I wanted to ask relating, in your novel, so very many facts which really are connected by coincidence (I am thinking, for example, of the long catalogues of dates and lists of persons born on one or the other particular date or of things that happened on that date) do you intend to give intrinsic value to every word?

Barth:

Mind you, Heide, I regard both of Todd Andrews’s propositions as strictly unintelligible. The two fates that await all of the principal characters in the novel are either (a) that they will literally re-enact crises from earlier on in their lives or their careers, or (b) that they will realize an opposite notion or be driven by a notion that is exactly the reverse of the notion that drove them previously.

Todd Andrews’s notions are his and not mine, and they were in the original case, too. I have never been a nihilist in the complete and naive way that Todd Andrews was in The Floating Opera. But Andrews’s notion, which he fears himself and admits to himself that he doesn’t quite understand, is that perhaps his earlier nihilism is the reverse of the truth. If that is extended to other aspects of the novel, it would lead, of course, to the absolute chaos and anarchy of indiscrimination that threatens the novel, that threatens all lists, catalogues, anatomies and the rest. But against which, in fact, I hope novels like LETTERS are shores or buttresses. I might add, too, that, by the rules of dramaturgy, it’s fatal to come to the kind of conclusion that Todd Andrews comes to. He is risking death in the same way that you risk moral chaos and paralysis by flirting with the notion that everything has intrinsic value. When Todd Andrews says that nothing has intrinsic value, that’s as much as saying that everything has intrinsic value – just by the old rule of logic that whatever is true of everything in general is true of nothing in particular. That’s fatal intellectually and morally. And because we are writing novels and not talking philosophy, it’s also fatal in the other sense: a character must die if he comes to the realization that Todd Andrews did. Or at least he risks death.

Ziegler:

That’s what I thought his notion of taking the tragic view of the tragic view of life implies. It’s true that Todd Andrews is only one character in the novel. On the other hand, he is very self-conscious, very self-reflective, and he knows, himself, that whatever opinion he holds he risks being wrong.

Barth:

That’s right. This does not paralyze him for action, though it always threatens to, and I will say, unabashedly, that I am more sympathetic to Andrews’s character and ideas than to those of any other character in the novel. It’s not a case of Todd Andrews c’est moi at all, but it is a case of there, but for the grace of God, go I. When Todd Andrews is talking about the tragic view, he is certainly echoing ideas close to my own thought – especially when he wonders if he must take the tragic view even as the tragic view, because it doesn’t always work. I feel that way, too.

Ziegler:

Would it, then, make sense to say that you take the tragic view of character in LETTERS ?Drawing a line from, let’s say, Ambrose Mensch’s realistic description of his East Dorset family to the letters which Todd Andrews is writing to his dead father, or which A. B. Cook IV is writing to his unborn son or daughter, to eventually the author’s own fictitious but elusive personality within the novel, one could say that the concept of character gradually seems to disintegrate. On the other hand, if one understands Ambrose Mensch as the alter ego of the author, then this would become a re-affirmation of characterization or – because Ambrose but not the author dissolves – character.

Barth:

I would subscribe to that – with an amendment which acknowledges that the characterization which they and I realize is completed by the end of the novel, but what they have become are completed fictional characters. The tragic – or skeptical view – of characterization, I suppose, would be the recognition that, even in the hands of a great psychological realist (which I am not), even in the hands of a Tolstoy, let’s say, the characters that are achieved are finally fictitious characters. The tragic view of characterization is that we cannot, no matter how hard we try, make real people by language. We can only make verisimilitudinous people. That view itself is on the minds of the characters themselves in a novel like LETTERS, and it’s very much on the author’s mind in a novel like LETTERS.

But as to the countermotions that you mentioned: those characters who don’t actually dissolve by the end do come indeed through as characters should in a plot – if not to an affirmation of themselves, then to a kind of integration of themselves. But what is integrated is not a person, but a fictitious character. I want the reader to be left with the feeling – it has just the right flavour – that these are remarkably lifelike puppets going back into the box. I want them to act like real people in the reader’s imagination for a time, but I want them to begin by seeming made up and to end by seeming made up. I take the tragic view of the tragic view of character.