Chimera by John Barth
P.: That asks and answers your second question.
B.: Who cares?
P.: Come come. You’ve wrecked a certain number of good women, my daughter by who knows whom included, and you’re heroically chastened by the wreckage—small comfort to them! But you admit you’re new at second sight, which at its clearest is foggier than first: what if I told you that your view was strictly from your viewpoint? That in her “mortal part” at least (per Perseid), Philonoë remembers you with much affection and some gentle amusement as her first real lover, regrets (but no longer bitterly) your deserting her for Melanippe, but has come rather to enjoy and even prefer her more or less solitary life? And that while Melanippe, a more demonstrative young woman, did indeed stick herself with the dagger, she was saved from Hades by a passing Gargarensian, a handsome young visiting surgeon of promise who heard her cries, rushed to the rescue, took her with him on a tour of the Mediterranean to cheer her up, subsequently married her, and made her the happy mother of ten beautiful children, nine of them sons?
B.: I’d like it fine, god damn you. So much for your third, fourth, and fifth. Is it true?
P.: Who knows? All I see when I look in that direction is their (relatively) immortal part, this endless story of yours. So let’s not count rhetorical questions. What about Chimera, my greatest invention? I hope you don’t think you’ve killed an image like that with the line “I saw the chimera of my life.”
B.: Not at all. What I saw was that it’s not a great invention: there’s nothing original in it; it neither hurt nor helped anyone; it’s preposterous, not monstrous, and compared to Medusa or the Sphinx, for example, even its metaphoric power is slight. That’s why, up there in the crater, it cooperated in its own destruction by melting the lead on my lance-point: its death was the only mythopoeic thing about it. Needless to say, the moment I understood that was the moment I really killed Chimera. No need to go to Lycia then; I changed course, chucked Athene’s bridle, dug in my heels, and made straight for Olympus.
P.: Whatever for, your dying father asks obligingly, inasmuch as you’d already decided that immortality is a bad trip? Megalomania? Ambitious affirmation of the absurd?
B.: Certainly I was ambitious, all along; but to call ambition on that epic scale mere vanity is a double error. For while it’s true that Bellerophon’s aspiration to immortality was without social relevance, for example, and thoroughly elitist—in fact, of benefit to no one but himself—it should be observed that it didn’t glorify “him,” either, since the name he’s called by is not his actual name, but a fictitious one. His fame, then, such as it was, is, and might have been, is as it were anonymous. Moreover, he does not, like an exiled tyrant or absconder, enjoy his fortune incognito; even had his crazy flight succeeded, he’d not have known it: there’d be another constellation in the sky, bearing the name he’d assumed—but Perseid to the contrary notwithstanding, it’s hardly to be imagined that those patterns we call “Perseus,” “Medusa,” “Pegasus” (There he is! Sweet steed, fly on, with better riders than myself!) are aware of their existences, any more than are their lettered counterparts on the page. Or, if by some mystery they are, that they enjoy their fixed, frigidified careers. Got that, Dad? For you are my dad—old pard, old buck, old worm!—I don’t question that: only Polyeidus’s son could have mimed a life so well, so long.
P.: So. Well. So long is right. And so much for Poseidon’s name on your birth certificate.
B.: False letters spell out my life from first to last. But not Bellerus’s.
P.: Here it comes. You down there: wake up for the anagnoresis!
B.: What marsh did you say we’re falling into? Do the people speak my language?
P.: Forget it. The present tenants are red-skinned, speak Algonkian, and have a mythology but no literature. At the rate we’re falling, by the time we land they’ll be white and black, speak more or less in English, and have a literature (which no one reads) but no mythology. On with the story: even in Greek it’s muddy enough, but I’ve known what’s coming for two hundred pages. In any language, it’s Sibyl’s Letter’s Second Clause.
B.: Right. POSEIDON’S SON HE ISN’T. I’m not star-bound Bellerus, but starstruck Deliades. Bellerus died in the grove that night, in my place, while I humped (half-sister!) Sibyl in holy his. I was his mortal killer; therefore I became his immortal voice: Deliades I buried in Bellerophon, to live out in selfless counterfeit, from that hour to this, my brother’s demigoddish life. It’s not my story; never was. I never killed Chimarrhus or Chimera, or rode the winged horse, or slept with Philonoë, or laid my head between Melanippe’s thighs: the voice that spoke to them all those nights was Bellerus’s voice. And the story it tells isn’t a lie, but something larger than fact…
P.: In a word, a myth. Philonoë guessed all this, you know, back in First-Ebb days. And Melanippe long before she wrote the horse-race episode. As for me, it goes without saying that this and everything else you say goes without saying? I knew it before it was true, and if I’m astonished now it’s because seers see past and future but not et cetera—everything takes your true prophet by surprise. So, you blew your big scene. That’s no Elysium rushing up at us: it’s Dorchester County, Maryland, Upsilon Sigma Alpha, and will be for several generations yet. When you hit it, you’ll go deeper underground than your brother.
B.: How many questions left?
P.: One for me, two for you. Now that I’ve answered you, one apiece.
B.: Can you turn me into this story, Polyeidus? Let me be Bellerus’s voice forever, an immortal Bellerophoniad.
P.: Out of the question.
B.: It’s what you’ve tried to trick me into for half a dozen pages! I’m offering to take your place! Don’t tell me it’s impossible!
P.: Quite impossible—in the naïve way you mean. I can’t turn anybody but myself into anything.
B.: Then I’m dead. Good night, Bellerus. Good night, all.
P.: What I might manage—not because I owe you any favors, but for reasons of my own—is to turn myself from this interview into you-in-Bellerophoniad-form: a certain number of printed pages in a language not untouched by Greek, to be read by a limited number of “Americans,” not all of whom will finish or enjoy them. Regrettably, I’ll have to have a certain role in the thing also—not beating Zeus out on that. But since I’ll be there as an aspect of you, so to speak, I’ll be free enough to operate in a few aspects of my own: “Harold Bray,” perhaps, or his nonfictional counterpart, the legitimate heir to the throne of France and impresario of the Second Revolution, an utterly novel Reset No Perseid, I grant you, but it’s the best I can do in what tune we have left. That tidewater’s coming up fast.
B.: I don’t like the sound of it. I’d rather fall into a thornbush; become a blind lame vatic figure; avoid the paths of men; float upon the marshy tide forever, reciting my Reset
P.: Stop gnashing your teeth. Take it or leave it.
B.: I’ll take it.
P.: Done. Heh. Any last words to the world at large? Quickly.
B.: I hate this, World! It’s not at all what I had in mind for Bellerophon. It’s a beastly fiction, ill-proportioned, full of longueurs, lumps, lacunae, a kind of monstrous mixed metaphor—
P.: Five more.
B.: It’s no Bellerophoniad. It’s a
Back Cover
At this point I interrupted my sister as usual to say, “You have a way with words, Scheherazade. This is the thousandth night I’ve sat at the foot of your bed while you and the King made love and you told him stories, and the one in progress holds me like a genie’s gaze.”
The speaker here is Dunyazade, kid sister of Scheherazade of The Thousand and One Nights, who has her own way with words. There is also Perseus, the demigod who slew the Gorgon Medusa, and yet finds himself at forty “sea-leveled, parched and plucked, every grain in my molted sandals raising blisters, and beleaguered by the serpents of my past.” And Bellerophon, the hero who tames the winged horse Pegasus only to discover, ??
Like the Chimera of myth, which had a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail, they are all joined into a single, dazzling whole that is the culmination of all John Barth’s work thus far, transforming myth into reality as we know it and live it.
“Literally stunning… the words rain down like a shower of gold… Make no mistake: John Barth is a mandarin modern master.”—Life
“Soaring, rich, majestic… Barth’s most rewarding creation.”—National Observer
Scan Notes, v3.0: Proofed carefully against DT, italics intact. There are 5 or 6 images embedded in this file, and in several places I used the font “Symbol” to reproduce the Greek words “Nαω ’AOἠνηϛ” and “Nαω ’Aφροδίτηϛ”. Paragraphs checked carefully because of run-on discussions, especially in Dunyazadiad. And yes, the book really ends that way.
Conversion Notes: Some of the Greek letters were wrongly proofed, have replaced them with correct versions.
converted to .ePUB by antimist on 10/01/15
John Barth, Chimera