The Book of Ten Nights and a Night Hardcover - 2004

Details

• Title The Book of Ten Nights and a Night
• Author John Barth
• Binding Hardcover
• Edition 1ST
• Pages 295
• Volumes 1
• Language ENG
• Publisher Houghton Mifflin, Boston
• Date 2004-04-09
• Illustrated Yes
• ISBN 9780618405664 / 0618405666
• Weight 1.06 lbs (0.48 kg)
• Dimensions 8.6 x 5.82 x 0.97 in (21.84 x 14.78 x 2.46 cm)
• Library of Congress Catalog Number 2003067532
• Dewey Decimal Code FIC

INVOCATION: “WYSIWYG” There was meant to have been a book called Ten Nights and a Night, which, had it gotten itself written before TEOTWAW(A)KI 9/11/2001—The End Of The World AsWe (Americans) Knew It—might have opened with a sportive extended invocation to the Storyteller’s Muse, more or less like this: Tell, O Muse of Story, the hundred-percent-made-up tale of a modern-day Odysseus’s interlude with the brackish tidewater marshnymph here called WYSIWYG— “Wissywig?” Spelled W-Y-S-I-W-Y-G. Explanation to follow, if called for. How, in an advanced but still-healthy decade of his sleeping and waking, breathing air and pumping blood, eating/drinking/pissing/ shitting, learning and teaching, dressing and undressing— “Shall we cut to that part?” Not yet. Talking and listening, reading and writing, making love and sentences— “First part of that last part!” All in Miz Muse’s good time. He found himself lost— “Found himself lost?” Paradoxically speaking. Not shipwrecked like the original Odysseus for seven years on fair Calypso’s isle and obliged to service that nymph nightly, with the promise of immortality and eternal youth if he’d stay put for keeps— “He’d have a problem with that?” —when what he really wanted was to get his aging mortal ass back home to his ditto ditto wife.
“Lucky wife. Unlucky nymph.” Nor was our chap lost like Dante, in the Dark Wood of a midlife crisis from which only a detour through Hell to Heaven could get him back on track. Too old, this one, for midlife crises.
“Not that they’re the only kind.” Granted. Neither would he presume to compare his position to Scheherazade’s, who humped King Shahryar through a thousand nights and a night and told him her tales under threat of death if she pleased him not, her aim being to save not only herself and “the virgin daughters of Islam” from the guy’s murderous mysogyny, but the King too, and his kingdom. . . .
“Men, I swear.” Yes, well. But, as I was saying, No: The situation of this Senior Talester— Have we mentioned our strandee’s trade? So let’s maybe call him Graybard. . . .
“Got it. His situation, you were saying?” —was meant to be an Extended Congress, shall we say, with the above-invoked muse, or with some serviceable surrogate therefor— “Serviceable surrogate? And what manner of quote congress did the gentleman have in mind, may one ask?” Patience, please. Their uppercase Congress (and accompanying dialogue) to extend over eleven nights and serve as batterycharging interludes between his reviewing with her . . . post-Congressly? . . .
“Now we’re talking!” Merely talking, mind.
“On to the interlude!” Soon’s we’re done with this hypothetical invocation: . . . his retelling her, et cetera, eleven several stories: the previously published but hitherto uncollected fruits of her long collaboration both with their Original Author—whom never mind—and with their Present Teller: most of said stories perpetrated over the decade past (i.e., the closing decade of the Terrible Twentieth), but a couple of them dating back considerably farther; most of them pure fiction, but a couple more or less non-; most of them Autumnal, shall we say, in theme and tone, addressing such jolly topics as the approach of old age, declining capabilities, and death—but a couple not. And several having to do, for better or worse, with (hang on to your hats, folks) . . . the Telling of Stories!
“O very joy.” Well. Graybard-the-Talester’s purpose—this odd couple’s or trio’s purpose—in so doing would have been twofold: first, to put these originally unrelated tales into a narrative frame, connecting their dots to make a whole somewhat larger (and perhaps a bit friskier) than the mere sum of its parts, as in such exemplary instances as The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night; also Boccaccio’s Decameron, Marguerite of Navarre’s Heptameron, Giovanni Battista Basile’s Pentameron, and other such -amerons . . .
“In a word, a Hendecameron?” Why, thankee there,Wys: Hendecameron, yes! And second, by their Present Teller’s thus clearing the narrative decks, so to speak, to recharge and reorient their Original Author’s imagination. Whom never mind.
“She’s on the edge of her chair. If Present Teller happens to feel a bit frisky?” Patience, s.v.p.: The guy’s preoccupied with, among other things, this meant-to-have-been Invocation. In other words, between or among themselves to discover where they-all might go next by determining where they are now by reviewing where they’ve been lately, storywise and otherwise. Sound familiar?
“She’s on the edge of her bed, thisWissywhatever.” -WYG: explanation to follow, inexorably. Thus their initial intention: Original Author’’s (whom never mind), old Graybard-the- Teller’s, and their muse-in-common’s—muse’s-in-common?—who serviceth the first of those through the second, and vice versa.
“Kink-y! Shall they get on with it, then? Extended Congress and such?” Surely they would have so gotten, well ere now, had not shit hit the world-in-general’s fan, and the US of A’s in particular, on that certain September morn, killing thousands of innocents and, just possibly, American Innocence itself. And by the way so distracting Talester Graybard and present company— “Speak for himself. Present Company can still concentrate, believe it or not, when she puts her mind to it, and other relevant parts.” He stands corrected.
“Then let him lie corrected—beside her, and they’ll get on with Getting It On while old Never-Mind-Him shakes his mostly Autumnal head and the world goes ker.ooey.” There’s the problem,Wys: one of the problems, anyhow. If we think of capital-A Author as being the mere narrative hardware, so to speak (which is why we can forget about him), and Yours-Truly-quote-Graybard as embodying Narrative Imagination —the Art-of-Fiction software, if you will, for rendering Author’s story-ideas— “I will if you will. Whenever you’re ready?” —then lying might be said to be their collective vocation, right? Lying with her, we could even say, she serving after all as muse and accessory before, during, and after the fact of their .ctions—although those wordplays are bound to be lost in translation.
“First a Serviceable Surrogate, now an Accessory! Such gallantries!” She knows what we mean. And that they’re meant as compliments.
“Mm-hm. How about quote brackish tidewater marsh-nymph, some pages back? Another compliment?” Of course. As Reader will have noticed, she’s both fresh and salty. . . .
“Compliments accepted, then, she supposes. She reminds all hands, however, that there are other kinds of play than wordplay.” Perpended—and now back to our hypothetical and subsequently shot-down Extended Invocation, if I may? Their quandary (Graybard’s andWysiwyg’s) is that for him to re-render now, in these so radically altered circumstances, Author’s eleven mostly Autumnal and impossibly innocent stories, strikes him as bizarre, to put it mildly indeed—as if Nine Eleven O One hadn’t changed the neighborhood (including connotations of the number eleven), if not forever, at least for what remains of Teller’s lifetime. And yet not to go on with the stories, so to speak, would be in effect to give the massmurderous fanatics what they’re after: a world in which what they’ve done already and might do next dominates our every thought and deed.
“Hell with that.” Hell is that. And Thus, I say, his situation and their quandary: GB- the-Teller’s task—shall we call him GeeBee?
“Ick.” Forget it, then: Teller’s not-unfamiliar task, if I may recapitulate, had formerly been the more or less routine one of assisting Author by reviewing, in a maybe-sportive narrative frame dreamed up for that purpose, those eleven not-so-sportive waypoints from their Stories Thus Far, and, thus oriented, to proceed. After Black Tuesday, however, it’s how to tell those or any such tales in a world so transformed overnight by terror that they seem, at best, irrelevant.
End of aborted invocation.

“Okay. May I talk now?
I mean this brackish Wissywiggy accessory-surrogate, whose name you’ve yet to explain to her and whose utterances to date have been mainly mere teasing interjections?” Be Graybard’s guest—since, truth to tell, it’s he who’s hers.
“You got that right, pal, and here’s how she sees it: First off, while we’re forgetting about Whatsisname the Original Author or Mere Narrative Hardware, let’s forget about old Odysseus too, who at his final raft-wrecked landfall before reaching home simply reviews for the locals everything that’s happened to him in the ten years since he and his now-dead shipmates set sail from Troy’s Ground Zero, and whose four-chapter recounting of those tribulations is understandably short on lightness, not to mention humor.” Point taken: Farewell, Odysseus, or however it goes in Greek.
“Ếnnuód! as we say on Mount Helicon.” Epharisto.
“And let’s set aside Mister Middle-Aged Dante, whose excursion through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven can scarcely be called light storytelling, and whose predicament, like O’s, is his own, not his society’s. And who, by the way, never returns to that narrative frame of the DarkWood that he found himself lost in, to wrap it up after his culminating vision of the Big Gee—as if Homer were to end the Odyssey when its hero winds up that review of his Story Thus Far, and leave the whole second half of the epic unsung!” Addio, Dante. What a memory you have.
“Yes, well: I was there, more or less, right? I am, after all, the Serviceable Surrogate.” More than serviceable! “Yet yet to be serviced. Setting aside, I say, that pair, let’s consider your pals Scheherazade and Boccaccio. Her stories are mainly gee-whizzers: light in tone, heavy on special effects like magic rings and genies in bottles, often erotic and sometimes scatological, meant purely to entertain and keep her audience wanting encores—” Or else.
“Exactly: The girl’s in bed with the GuinnessWorld Record serial killer: a thousand innocent virgins de.owered and murdered in as many nights since he offed his unfaithful wife, and Scher’s next in line if she doesn’t get his rocks off and leave him wanting more. Talk about Performance Anxiety: If she’d been a man, she could never have gotten it up! Talk about Publish or Perish! Yet for ninety-one times our piddling eleven nights she delivers the goods both sexually and narratively; bears the monster three children and then marries him when he finally lifts the curse—despite there being never a hint anywhere that she loves the bastard! She’s just Doing What the Situation Calls For: telling marvelous stories with the ax virtually at her neck and the kingdom on the brink of collapse. . . .” Amen. And we believe we know what you’re going to say about the Decameron, but please say it anyhow.
“Great Plague of 1348 devastates city of Florence! People dropping like flies from the Black Death that’ll kill one out of every three Europeans over the next dozen years! Corpses piling up in the streets; law and order down the drain, if they’d had any drains—and in the face of this horror, what do Boccaccio’s three young lords and seven young ladies do? Why, they retreat with their lucky servants to their country estates (of which each of us owns several, one of the ladies points out), and they organize their own little play-world, with its rotating king- or queenfor- a-day and its chivalrous rules for ordering their pleasures, and they virtuously stroll and dine and sing and dance and tease and flirt, and then in the hottest part of the afternoon, after siesta- time, they amuse themselves with witty and/or racy stories: one tale per person per day for ten not-quite-consecutive days (Fridays and Saturdays off ) while the world dies unnoticed offscreen. And at the end of that period—congratulating themselves on having maintained their collective virtue despite the collapse of their society and the naughtiness of their tales, but apprehensive that prolonging their idyll will either lead them into capital-V Vice or tarnish their reputations back in the city (an odd scruple indeed, under the circumstances)—they return to the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, where they’d just happened to meet two weeks earlier, and there they bid one another arrivederci and go back to their town houses and on with their lives and business.” With nary a word, as I remember, about the devastation they’re returning to.
“Nary a word—but we’ll get to that later. The point to be made now is, dot dot dot?” Point made: Catastrophe, if not quite apocalypse, has them by the throat, but they spin their yarns nevertheless.
“Not nevertheless, Geeb: therefore. And not apocalypse-tales, we note, but How Abu Hasan Farted, and How Friar Rinaldo Lies with His Godchild’s Mother and Her Husband Finds Him with Her and They Make Him Believe That the Friar Is Charming Away the Child’sWorms? Stuff like that.” So what we’d like to believe . . . ?
“Is that to tell irrelevant stories in grim circumstances is not only permissible, but sometimes therapeutic. That their very irrelevance to the frame-situation may be what matters, whether the frame’s grim and the tales are frisky or vice versa. As somebody’s grandma-from-Minsk used to say about shtetl humor back in the time of the pogroms, If we didn’t laugh, we’d hang ourselves.” Oy: Observation perpended. On with the Mostly Autumnal, Mostly Recent, Mostly Fictive stories, then?
“Well: There remains the matter of a certain adverb back in that trial-balloon invocation: Present Teller reviews eleven tales with Muse, post- . . . How did it go? Not post-nuptially. Not postpartumly. Not postmodernly. . . .” Post-invocationally, maybe. Ms. Wysiwyg had a grandma from Minsk?
“Maybe. And maybe other kids besides young quote Wys shared her good luck in the Grandma way—if, in Wyssie’s case anyhow, not much good luck otherwise. A loving grandma from Minsk: If only!” Now her colleague’s on the edge of his chair. On with her story?
“Maybe somewhere down the line. First—assuming consent of all parties concerned?—they get that adverb out of the way. Then, post- adverbially, they start over again from Square One, explaining that queer name of hers and who and where she is and what’s going on here besides adverbing. Then Graybard Teller tells Forget-About-the-Author’s dozen-minus- one stories, if that’s how the game goes, between or after which maybe we’ll in a manner of speaking squeeze in hers? Never mind Homer and Dante and Boccaccio: Let our models be your pal Scheherazade (minus the nightly menace from her bedmate) and the Sanskrit Ocean of Story, as told by the god Shiva to his playmate Parvati: the longest story ever told, spun out by the Lord of Creation and Destruction as a thankyouma’am for big-time bedplay while the goddess sits on her lover’s lap. In both cases, comrade, it’s Ess-Ee-Ex before Storytelling; otherwise this game’s over before it starts.” Yes, well: Now that “Graybard” has been safely distin- guished from Never-Mind-Whom as Software from Hardware, and both of those from Inspiration, which is Ms. Muse’s department, her wish, we guess, is ipso facto Imagination’s command. On one major condition? And with one minor adjustment?
“Like, say, Imagination’s left hand here, while his right carries on . . . exactly . . . so?” Her pleasure’s his, in the nature of the case and their respective job-descriptions. And although their situation remained still Pre- rather than Post-Congressional, and the world-at-large’s was unimproved, and “GB’s” Major Condition and Minor Adjustment remained unstipulated, much less met or made, and even Ms. Wysiwyg’s alias du soir had yet to be glossed for the patient reader—not to mention where they-all are and how they got there— old Graybard-the-Teller at this point fetched forth, for his musefriend’s possible delectation . . .
“Yes!”

Copyright © 2004 by John Barth. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

"A moving epiphany about writing, living, breathing in the face of the ultimate terrorist: death and its long shadow." --Michael Agger The New York Times Book Review