More Troll Than Cabbage

INTRODUCTION FOR

TAPE-AND-LIVE-VOICE PERFORMANCES

FROM THE SERIES LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE

       As a boy experimenting with sin, I once hollowed out a book -- it was called 365 Bedtime Stories -- to hide a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes in, the way Renaissance princes sometimes packed pistols in eviscerated prayer-books. It had been my thought while writing the series Lost in the Funhouse to publish the finished book with a tape cassette enclosed in that same fashion. I have however a daimon like Socrates's, who seldom tells me what to do, but (less dependably than Socrates's) sometimes whispers "For pity's sake, don't do that." Distinctly, when the time came, it announced that the tape-in-a-book idea was an egregious gimmick; that even to print the tape-and-live-voice pieces in reading-script format would be tiresome, unbecoming. In 1968 the book appeared therefore by my own decision in ordinary left-to-right roman type as if composed for print alone like any other book, at cost of part of the sense and most of the entertainment of the tape pieces, which to the eye alone may be wearisomely self-reflexive exercises in hyperselfconsciousness. That's show business; and for writers as writers, show business is no Business.

       As show Business, on the other hand, those little experiments worked well for a season or two on the campus circuit, until my nay-saying daimon whispered that it was time to close a run that began at the Library of Congress on Mayday, 1967.

       Why should a mere introduction to a program of readings be here collected and printed? Because this Friday Book is also a resume of my Stories Thus Far and an account of what I believe myself to have been up to in writing them.

       I have a program of readings from my novels that I've given here and there on university campuses in the last year. It's called "The Heroical Curriculum"; what it consists of is a series of excerpts from The Floating Opera, The End of the Road, The Sot-Weed Factor, and Giles Goat-Boy, selected ostensibly to illustrate some of their common themes -- that self-knowledge is generally bad news, for example; or that if you don't look out, you may get pinched between two of the great axioms of Western civilization: Socrates's lesson that the unexamined life is not worth living, and Sophocles's lesson that the well-examined life may turn out to be unlivable. But the real motivating principle behind the selections was that they all read well out loud and lead one to suppose that my fiction has been getting better over the years.

       If we can only accept that last as granted, I'd like to skip the demonstration today and do a thing more risky from the show-biz point of view: I want to lay on you a sample of the short pieces I've been up to since my goat-boy book was finished in 1966. They are what used to be called "experimental" pieces: Most haven't been published yet; some won't ever be. A few don't make much ordinary sense out of the context of their neighbors; others were composed specifically for tape and would lose part of their point in print. At least one was composed exclusively for public readings like this one -- but I didn't bring it to Washington with me.

       If a writer is not simply going to repeat himself (which isn't always a bad thing to do), he has to keep changing, more or less reinventing himself. He hopes that the changes are "developments"; that his "stages," like a rocket's, are all pushing the same payload toward heaven, in their different ways. He hopes too -- since some legs of the trip are liable to be rougher than others -- that his audience will stay with him across the troll-bridges and that they'll reach the sweet cabbage fields together. It may be that there is more troll than cabbage in these pieces; I hope not. I don't think it's a good idea, as a rule, for artists to explain their art, even if they can. Jorge Luis Borges puts it arrogantly: God shouldn't stoop to theology. A modern painter put it more politely and poetically: Birds have no need of ornithology. But since you'll be hearing these pieces aloud and for the first time, I'll say one or two things about them and about the series-in-progress from which they're taken.

       One advantage of electronic tape as a narrative medium is that it has some of the virtues of the oral tradition, where literature started -- I mean the immediacy of the human voice and the intimacy of storytelling, which can only be echoed on the printed page -- and some of the virtues of print, such as referability and repeatability. You can replay a tough or delightful passage on tape, or pause to let it sink in, as you can when you're reading but can't when you're watching a film or a stage play.

       These pieces share some preoccupations with my novels. They're meant to be serious enough to be taken seriously, but they're not long-faced. They're pessimistic, but I hope they're entertaining. In all of them, for better or worse, the process of narration becomes the content of the narrative, to some degree and in various ways; or the form or medium has metaphorical value and dramatical relevance. The medium really is part of the message. Second, most of them exploit, one way or another, ambiguities of language and narrative viewpoint -- especially narrative viewpoint -- to make their particular sense. Neither of these is a new idea. Third, one objective of most of these stories -- the most important to me -- is to try whether different kinds of artistical felt ultimacies and cul-de-sacs can be employed against themselves to do valid new work: whether disabling contradictions, for example, can be escalated or exacerbated into enabling paradoxes. This objective represents to me in its little way a general task of civilized people nowadays.

       Finally, if the pieces are successful by my personal standards, they have to be more than just tricky. If I believed my writing were no more than the formal fun-and-games that Time magazine makes it out to be, I'd take up some other line of work. The subject of literature, says Aristotle, is "human life, its Happiness and its misery." I agree with Aristotle.

       That's why we object to the word experimental. It suggests cold exercises in technique, and technique in art, we all know, has the same importance as technique in love: Heartless skill has its appeal; so does heartfelt ineptitude; but what we want is passionate virtuosity. If these pieces aren't also moving, then the experiment is unsuccessful, and their author is lost in the funhouse indeed.

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