ON BARTH
103
father; a first clumsy attempt at lovemaking which, as he happens to see
it in a mirror, gives him a lasting sense of the ineradicably animal ab–
surdity of copulation. (The tendency to gaze in mirrors seems to indicate
a habit of disabling reflectiveness in Barth's novels. In his latest book
Peter Greene only recaptures his ability to live at ease among the rampant
contradictoriness of life when he regains his aversion to mirrors. Self–
scrutiny and action seem close to being mutually exclusive in Barth.) But
the facts do not have any value or significance. Andrews can thus see no
real reason for doing this rather than that, or something rather than noth–
ing. "There is, then, no 'reason' for living." In a sense this attitude is a
form of total freedom: "faced with the infinity of possible directions which
the rejections of absolutes opens to one" is a typical pronouncement. But,
as
Barth well shows, it is also a form of total bondage, for Andrews is
really imprisoned among the adroit negations of his unresting mind. Of all
possible directions he chooses suicide. Until, in what seems to me a too
manifestly contrived conclusion, the sudden sickness of his (probable)
daughter brings home to him the realizations that he is still capable of
spontaneous (unreasoning) emotion, that at least there are relative values,
and anyway if there's no reason for doing anything that holds good for
suicide as well. But the main focus of this witty and clever book is on a
mind cut adrift from the matter and life around it, a wry intelligent
consciousness which lacks any sense of the value of the context it finds
itself operating in. Life itself, in its motley confusion, is a floating opera.
("Adam's Original and Unparalleled Ocean-Going Floating Opera" no
less.) Andrews would rather build his own boat (i.e., construct his own
philosophical position-he himself draws the analogy). But, just as he
never finishes any of the actual boats he sets out to build, so his own
structures of ideas never serve to get him afloat and into the stream of
things. In the book Andrews finally takes a seat on the floating opera-a
gesture of acceptance. But there is something quixotic in the gesture and
we never see his new reconciliation to living, instead of thinking, in action.
For Jacob Horner (who sat in a corner?) , in
End of the Road,
there
is likewise "no reason to do anything" and one character at least is con–
vinced that he is only a series of self-canceling masks with nothing under–
neath (shades of Peer Gynt and the onion). He suffers variously from
recurrent feelings of not existing, moods of inertia, days which seem
"weatherless," and occasional attacks of total immobility. His enigmatic
doctor seeks to cure him with the advice-"Move! Take a role!"; but such
half-hearted participating ventures into reality as he does make tend to
cause misery and bring about destruction. After a particularly repellent
fatal abortion scene (there is something of a grim relish in the way Barth
shows just how messy and repugnant sheer facts can be) Horner is sick-
