Chimera by John Barth

  “Bellerus and Deliades,” I’m saying to the children, back in Lycia; “Deliades and Bellerus. From the day we were born, the country quarreled over which of us should succeed to the throne of Corinth, and my brother and I quarreled over it ourselves, for fun and profit, just as you boys will when you drive me out of town.”

  O Bellerophon! “Bellerus it was then, and do stop bawling.” All of you. “Twins we were; twin brothers; look-alikes and inner opposites; and Polyeidus was our tutor. Bellerus from toddlerhood passionate, impetuous, Aphrodite’s ardent darling; Deliades circumspect, prudential, in all things moderate, a venerator of Athene. And Polyeidus was our tutor. Everyone thought Deliades legitimate, as he shared the famous gray-green eyes of Glaucus and his forebears; but my earliest memory is of Mom and Dad squabbling in the next bedroom over me, whether I was Poseidon’s son or the horse-groom’s: a bastard to be exposed on the hillside or a demigod destined for the stars.”

  Melanippe herself, though she loves her lover and is held to be recording his history faithfully, can be of two minds on this point when she hears him speaking to his children so. Yes, well, even Bellerus has his doubts; but though we teased and contested which was heir apparent, Deliades alone never questioned which was mortal: I liked the kid well enough; he worshipped me.

  “And Polyeidus was your tutor,” the children chorused. I’m sending them supperless to bed: Isander has announced that he hates this story because its words are too big and it lasts too long. Hippolochus has kissed him and promised to repeat it all in little words at nap-time. My curly darling Laodamia sleeps in my lap; Philonoë deftly replaces the thumb with a pacifier. Dead now, all of them: dead and dead and dead! Then do let them stay up awhile, Bellerophon, to hear the Polyeidus part.

  “Our tutor he became, Polyeidus, Polyeidus, after being prophet laureate to the court of Corinth. Though featured in several other myths, on the strength of which Dad had hired him, he declared to us he had no memory of his pre-Corinthian past, or any youth. Some said he’d been Proteus’s apprentice, others that he was some stranded version of The Old Man of the Sea himself. At such stories Polyeidus shrugged, saying only that all shapeshifters are revisions of tricky Proteus. But he dismissed the conventional Protean transformations—into animals, plants, and such—as mere vaudeville entertainment, and would never oblige us with a gryphon or a unicorn, say, howevermuch we pled, or stoop to such homely predictions as next day’s weather. For this reason, among others, he was demoted to tutor; and he urged upon us, even as boys, a severer view of magic. By no means, he used to insist, did magicians necessarily understand their art, though experience had led him to a couple of general observations on it. For example, that each time he learned something new about his powers, those powers diminished, anyhow altered. Also, that what he “turned into” on those occasions when he transformed was not altogether within his governance. Under certain circumstances he would frown, give a kind of grunt, and turn into something, which might or might not resemble what if anything he’d had in mind. Sometimes his magic failed him when he called upon it; other times it seized him when he had no use for it; and the same was true of his prophesying. ‘It will be alleged that Napoleon died on St. Helena in 1821,’ he would announce, with no more notion than we of the man and place and date he meant, or the significance of the news; ‘in fact he escaped to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, to establish his base for the Second Revolution.’ Most disappointingly to Deliades and me, his transformations were generally into what he came to call ‘historical personages from the future’: this same Napoleon, for example, or Captain John Smith of the American plantation of Virginia: useless to our education. But no sooner did he see this pattern than he lost the capacity, and changed thenceforward only into documents, mainly epistolary: Napoleon’s imaginary letter from King Theodore to Sir Robert Walpole, composed after the Emperor’s surrender; Plato’s Seventh Letter; the letter from Denmark to England which Hamlet transferred to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; the Isidorian Decretals; the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; Madame de Staël’s Lettres sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau; the ‘Henry Letters’ purchased for $50,000 by President Madison’s administration from the impostor Compte de Crillon in 1811 to promote the War of 1812; the letter from Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, commander of the British fleet at Halifax, to that same president, warning that unless reparations were made for the Americans’ destruction of Newark and St. Davids in Canada, the British would retaliate by burning Washington—a letter said to be either antedated or intentionally delayed, as it reached its address when the capital was in ashes; the false letter describing mass movements of Indian and Canadian forces against Detroit, planted by the Canadian General Brock so that the U.S. General Hull would discover it, panic, and surrender the city; a similar letter dated September 11, 1813, which purported to be from Colonel Fossett of Vermont to General MacComb, advising him of massive reinforcements on the way to aid him against the Canadian General Prevost in the Battle of Plattsburg: it was entrusted to an Irishwoman of Cumberland Head whom the U.S. Secret Service, its actual author, knew to be loyal to the British; Prevost, when she dutifully turned it over to him, took it to be authentic and retreated into Canada, though no such reinforcements existed. Et cetera. Doctored letters. My brother and I were not very interested.”

  “Kill Granddad and Uncle Deliades, Daddy,” Isander begged. His brother shushed him. All dead now, and sent supperless to bed. Hippolochus giddyaps happily upstairs on a fancied flying-horse to do battle with imaginary dragons, declaring to Isander, who gallops beside, that what might seem to be arbitrary and excessive punishment is in fact the stern discipline of mythic herohood, to which I am as lovingly apprenticing them as did Polyeidus me. So their mother has explained to him. Dead.

  I want sons, Bellerophon. I want my belly full. Don’t withdraw. I’m tired of Amazoning.

  A novel in the form of artificial fragments. A novel in diary form, in epistolary form, in notebook form, in the form of notes; a novel in the form of annotated text; a novel in the form of miscellaneous documents, a novel in the form of the novel. The tradition that no one who believes himself to be losing his mind is losing his mind. The tradition that people who speak much of committing suicide are talking themselves out of committing suicide, or is it into committing suicide. Kill Glaucus and Deliades.

  “Our apprenticeship in herohood was real enough—all at Deliades’s instigation, for Bellerus never took it seriously. My brother drew Polyeidus out upon the subject, from love of me, never presuming to the role himself.” My dead son’s candles gutter in the uncut cake; I sit in the palace dark; my wife clicks serenely on; I don’t know who my audience is.

  “ ‘Hurrah!’ cried Deliades—the Corinthian equivalent of our hooray—after one of Polyeidus’s lectures: ‘We don’t have to hate Daddy any more!’ Using, as usual, Cousin Perseus as his example, Polyeidus had enounced the first several requisites and features of the heroic vita: that the circumstances of conception be unusual; that the child be born to royal parents but be alleged to be the son of a god; that an attempt be made on his boyish life either by his maternal grandfather or his mother’s spouse; et cetera. To Deliades, ever a peacemaker, this explained and excused Glaucus’s jealous quarrels with Eurymede, which, as my brother loved us all, had been particularly painful for him to overhear.

  “ ‘You merely have to fear him,’ Polyeidus replied, ‘your mother’s father being already among the shades. At least Bellerus does, if we assume he’s Poseidon’s son.’ I remember replying with a merry shrug that I feared no one. We were young men; Deliades was comely in a mortal way, but Bellerus, standing on the Isthmian strand, his copper curls lit by the descending sun—divine!

  “ ‘We needn’t fear him either,’ Deliades maintained: ‘You said yourself that the attempted murder never does more than leave a mark, usually on the hero’s thigh or foot, by which he’ll be recognized later in the cycle—and Perseus seems to’ve managed without even that. All we have to worry
about is that Dad himself will get killed accidentally when the thing backfires’—as had been the would-be ancestral assassins of Perseus, Oedipus, and countless other heroes, some not to be born for generations yet, with whose biographies Polyeidus documented his point.

  “Our tutor smiled. How describe a man who from semester to semester seldom resembled himself? That season, I believe, he was bald, shag-chinned, ill-odored, goatish; season before he’d been leonine; season to come—we’ll come to that. He pointed out that to satisfy the prerequisites of herohood was not necessarily to be a hero; for every young Perseus or Moses boxed and shipped and rescued, scores of candidates must expire in their floating coffins, a menace to navigation and pollutant of the littoral. I hadn’t proved I was the sea-god’s son; Glaucus’s attempt on my life might be successful. If it weren’t, and I was a hero after all, the mythographical odds against his survival were great indeed: but he might, like Danaë‘s father Acrisius, live a long and useful life before retribution overtook him. For that matter, there was just a chance that the filicidal episode would be purely symbolic, a moment of peril in the company of my progenitor but not at his hands: young Odysseus’s accidental goring by the boar while hunting with his Grandfather Autolycus would be a case in point when it came to pass. All the same, he said, one in my position did well to be wary—as did one in Glaucus’s—especially as the attempt must be expected quite soon. We were well past puberty; actuarially speaking, it was overdue already.

  “ ‘Tell us how it’s going to turn out!’ Deliades demanded, as would have little Isander had he heard this far. He would if he could, Polyeidus replied, but concentrate as he might, all he came up with were the images of two odd beasts: a lovely white winged stallion who had just that moment been born into the world, and a vague monstrosity in three parts, obscured from clearer view by the smoke of its own respiration. What these had to do with me and Glaucus, he couldn’t say.

  “Curling my lovely lip—how well I see me!—I said, ‘A stallion would have to have wings to get into our stables!’ Where, remember, there had been none since my conception—a policy I opposed as contrary to nature and conducive to nervousness in the mares. Deliades, as fond of horses as myself, was enchanted with the notion of a winged one; he wished Dad had it for the chariot events in the Argonauts’ Funeral Stakes, to be run that night. Here I make a three-part digression…”

  Over my dead body. Yes. We’re in a three-part digression already, sinking in exposition as in quickmire! The Deterioration of the Literary Unit: yes, well, things are deteriorating right enough, deteriorating; everything is deteriorated; deterioration everywhere. God knows I’m not what I used to be; no help for that. But never for want of words! Too much to say, that’s my complaint: everything to get said, and all at once or I’ll forget it. Already I’ve forgotten half what I’d in mind to write; pen can’t keep up; I make mad side-notes, notes of notes for notes; each phrase begets two more, four; I can’t sleep for them; my joints are stiff; it’s cold and damp here; this moment I should be lying with my warm young friend; instead it’s scribble scribble the night through, red-eyed, dizzy: fine shape I’ll be in at tide-turn, when the long ebb ends! What was I saying? There, gone. Digression from digression will not lead to the main stream; it’s the wrong way out of the swamp. “Float with the tide,” I’m told. By whom? My mistress? Monstrous. I know who sticks in my throat.

  “The Corinthian succession,” I press on: “Over that we teasily disputed, Bellerus and Deliades, mocking the arguments of the polis. Deliades had been born first, by an hour or so, but as we were twins, primogeniture struck most people as a technicality. The issue more often hassled in the Corinthian bars and byways was the issue of legitimacy. No one denied that we had different fathers, whether because they accepted it that all twins do, or because our demeanors were dissimilar, or because the royal quarrels on that point were common gossip. What one might call the conservative position was that since Glaucus was King of Corinth, his legitimate son was his legitimate heir, regardless of who had been born first; on this view, the only question was which of us was legitimate, and as was established pages ago, nearly all inclined to Deliades by reason of his verdigris eyes. The more radical position was that if one of us had been sired by Poseidon, biological legitimacy and primogeniture were both superseded, or should be, and the proper problem was how to determine which if either of us was a demigod. Here the larger following was mine, though as the Glaucus-Deliades faction was fond of pointing out, popularity is not proof. Moreover, what was true in most such cases (Heracles and Iphicles, for instance)—that one twin was immortal and the other not—was not true in all; both might be either; therefore the experiment proposed in jest by Polyeidus and taken up seriously by others, of throwing us both into the Gulf of Corinth, say, and seeing who survived, was opposed as inconclusive as well as repugnant, since at best it would kill the King’s legitimate son, and at worst terminate the dynasty without settling the dispute.

  “These positions were fueled and complicated by political, historical, even logical considerations: the mare-cult itself, for example, was held to be a survival from a bygone matriarchal era, dating from the days before men realized that copulation, rather than magic, was the cause of pregnancy. The more militant votaries of the cult denied that even Glaucus had been the rightful king, and urged Eurymede to a coup d’état. Few favored an outright duumvirate of twins, but several groups called for joint rule by annual alternation, citing various actual and mythical precedents, as a peaceful resolution of the question. Even such apparently irrational expedients as the toss of a coin were seriously put forward: since only the gods knew whether one of us was a demigod and if so which, let the gods decide who should rule Corinth, et cetera.

  “These arguments grew more heated every year, and more inextricable from political power-alignments. Glaucus, though he took no open measures against me and made every show of treating us equally, could not conceal his jealousy and alarm, especially after Polyeidus, pressed, admitted the risks involved in ‘fathering’ a demigod. Eurymede, for her part, loved both her sons and took no stand on the issue of succession; even in the matter of my paternity she was shrug-shouldered by comparison to Deliades. But on one point she brooked no question: that it was Poseidon and no other who had climbed her in the surf.

  “ ‘A woman knows,’ she would say firmly, and Glaucus tear his hair.

  “On our thirteenth birthday”—shades of my sons, forgive me!—“asked by our parents what we wanted in the present-way, I requested the usual hunting gear, racing mares, new tunics; Deliades, secretly coached by Polyeidus, surprised the court by demanding our pedigree-papers. Glaucus blushed: ‘They’re blank. You know why. Ask for something else.’ ‘I want Polyeidus to fill in the blanks,’ Deliades declared: ‘Bring out our papers and make him turn himself into the answers.’ Glaucus glowered at his seer. Eurymede sharply asked Polyeidus whether he could in fact make such a transformation; if so, why hadn’t he long since, to quiet the country? Glaucus protested that any such stunt would amount to no more than another man’s opinion, on the vexed question, which opinion, if Polyeidus had one, he could as well state plainly without recourse to the sort of circus tricks he famously disdained. Polyeidus nervously began a lecture on what he called the proto-existentialist view of ontological metamorphosis: within certain limits, everyone’s identity was improvisable and responsible; man was free to create himself et cetera. A willful lad, I drew my sword: ‘Fill in the blanks or die.’ Polyeidus blinked, grunted like a costive, disappeared. Deliades kissed me and showed gleefully to the court a scroll that popped from nowhere into his hands: son of Glaucus and Eurymede, it read beneath his name, and under mine: out of Eurymede by Poseidon. “Thus ended, not the quarrel (which was fired additionally thenceforth by accusations of forgery and fraud), but Polyeidus’s influence in the palace, at least with Glaucus; only the good offices of Eurymede, who was pleased with both her sons’ behavior on this occasion, kept him on as our tutor. It
was also the end, so far as anyone knew, of his ‘animate’ transformations, and the first of his documentary. It was not, however, as some allege, the invention of writing, though to Polyeidus rightly goes the credit for having introduced, some seasons earlier, that problematic medium to Corinth, where it never caught on. Writing itself, he told us in the Q & A after his act, would be invented some generations later by a stranded minstrel pissing in the sand of a deserted Aegean isle, making up endings to the Trojan War. It was the seer’s limited capacity to read the future that enabled him to borrow certain ideas therefrom prior to their historical introduction. Why didn’t he make use of this powerful ability to take over the world? Because knowledge, not power, was his vocation; he did not agree with Francis Bacon that the two are one; on the contrary, his own experience was that the more he understood, the less potent he became; the semantic and logical problems alone, to look no further, posed by such a stunt as stealing from the future, were a can of worms that no sane man would stir up unnecessarily. Et cetera. No one understood. ‘Put it this way, then,’ he grumbled: ‘when I look back at the history of the future I see that Polyeidus in fact never capitalized on this trick. Since I didn’t, I can’t; therefore I won’t.’ ‘Thanks for the present,’ I said to my brother. ‘Many happy returns,’ he replied—not knowing, as he couldn’t see seer-wise, there’d be but five.”

  The eyes of Melanippe’s lover are gray-green: explain. Directly. Happy birthday, dead Hippolochus; happy birthday to you. Digression won’t save them, dear Bellerophon; do come to it. Your eighteenth birthday. Sibyl. Chariot-race scene. The curse of God upon you, Polyeidus, snake in the grass, whom even as I bored kind Philonoë decades after with this tale I didn’t know to be its villain!

  “Eighteen, are we? On the beach? The horse race? Sibyl. Polyeidus had a daughter, who knows by whom. Sibyl. Younger than we. That summer she was our friend. Deliades adored her, she me. I screwed her while he watched, in a little grove down on the shore, by Aphrodite’s sacred well. Honey-locusts grew there, shrouded by rank creepers and wild grape that spread amid a labyrinth of paths. There was about that place a rich fetidity: gray rats and blackbirds decomposed, by schoolboys done to death; suburban wild dogs spoored the way; part the vines at the base of any tree and you might find a strew of pellets and fieldmouse-bones disgorged by feasting owls. It was the most exciting place we knew; its queer smell retched us if we breathed too deeply, but in measured inhalations it had a rich, a stirring savor. There they played, Bellerus and Sibyl, while Dee-Dee watched: no spite intended, but it cut him up. I told her to let him in too; I didn’t mind, and he was virgin. Nothing doing. I held her down for him to hump; he wouldn’t even look.