298
TONY TANNER
through its cloaks of story? How many veils to naked Helen?" sounds
like a projection of Barth's own despair at ever reaching and holding
any authentic formed reality through the multiplying layers of fiction
in which he feels entangled - the HeIIenic quest is impeded at every
turn by the Protean encounter. Even when he does regain his Helen
he cannot be sure it is the real Helen or a dream substitute made of
cloud. "For all I knew, I roared, what I now gripped was but a
further fiction, maybe Proteus himself." The crippling and inhibiting
worry that even Helen may be Proteus is a precise analogue of the
suspicion that even Reality is a Fiction. At one point Menelaus says,
"Menelaus! Proteus! Helen! For all we know, we're but stranded figures
in Penelope's web, wove up in light to be unwove in darkness." Again
the triangle, again the ever underlying suspicion that all apparent facts
may be part of some larger fiction. Penelope's "embroidrous
art,"
Menelaus' "raveled fabrication," Barth's own "cloaks of story" - where
does
it
or can it stop? One hope expressed by the story is that one thing
wiII survive all the changing receding fictions of existence - "the absurd,
unending possibility of love." But the story itself is a story of loss, a
demonstration of how we lose what we don't believe in, how we can
never again be sure of the Helen we caned into question. Floundering
in fictions, we may never regain a firm hold on reality. This I think is
the dread of deprivation which is detectable in these recent pieces by
Barth.
It is evident in the last story, "Anonymiad." This is the first-person
account of a minstrel who was not taken to Troy but left behind in the
court of Clytemnestra and subsequently marooned on an island. There he
dreams dreams with multiple possible endings, he invents private My–
cenae for the real city he has been excluded from, and he invents a new
mode of writing - "what I came to call fiction." Although excluded
from the Trojan war and all knowledge of it, he amuses himself by
imagining various versions of its progress and different possible denoue–
ments. Lacking an audience he commits his compositions to the sea in
bottles. After running through various genres he finds he has "begun
to run out of material" and in a new pessimism he imagines his
"opera
sinking undiscovered" - a neat pun looking back to Barth's own
Float–
ing
Opera.
He finds that "as my craft improved, my interest waned,
and my earlier zeal seemed hoIIow as the jugs it filled. Was there any
new thing to say, new way to say the old?" He outlines his idea for his
next work which would synthesize all genres, merging everything from
"grub fact" to "pure senseless music." But of course he does not write
it, he only writes about planning to write it. His time is spent in "con-
