BOOKS
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sidering and rejecting forms" (and of course the plurality of available
forms and styles can have a paralyzing as well as a liberating effect).
He concludes
"It
was my wish to elevate maroonment into a minstrel
masterpiece; instead, I see now, I've spent my last resources contrari–
wise, reducing the masterpiece to a chronicle of minstrel misery." He
then launches the last of his "opera," but foresees the time when it will
perish, "with all things deciphered and undeciphered : men and women,
stars and sky."
Perhaps in this account of seemingly futile writing in an endless
solitude Barth has constructed an analogue for his own situation as he
experiences it. But whereas before he distracted himself with stories, he
now seems to be tormenting himself with accounts of stories that failed,
that cannot be written, that can never be started. The first piece is
called "Frame Tale" and
it
invites the reader to make a circular strip
out of a page, which will then read ''Once upon a time there was a
story that began once upon a time ..." and so on ad infinitum. And
inside that verbal circle which moves but does not progress Barth seems
temporarily to have trapped himself. At one point in the "Anonymiad"
he says, "I yearned to be relieved of myself.... I'd relapse into numb–
ness, as if, having abandoned song for speech, I meant now to give up
language altogether and float voiceless in the wash of time like an am–
phora in the sea, my vision bottled." To abandon the difficulties of
language is to leave behind the problems of self: Barth is here giving
utterance to a recurring temptation or desire, detectable in much Amer–
ican writing, to give up all forms and definitions and abandon the con–
tours of self and style to dissolution and silence. But this ultimate solu–
tion to the torments of identity and narration - torments amply, in–
deed profoundly, demonstrated in this volume, hovering and limping
obsessively around the arbitrariness of all names and naming, all fictions
and their telling - is irreversible, a final capitulation to some unselving
flow which, along with the dread of getting trapped in fixed patterns, is
a nightmare which haunts many contemporary American writers. To
float voiceless in the wash of time is effectively
to
die, and even the self–
paralyzing voice in Barth's latest book resists that particular quietus and
quietness - "I'll mutter to the end."
Tonv Tanner
