My Two Problems: 3

       Could I still have been doing the Two Problems bit in 1977? Evidently so, though as with all literary formulas, repetition had rendered it by then more than a touch perfunctory. At the University of Louisville, Kentucky, in February 1 977, for example, the general topic of the university's annual Conference on Twentiety-Century Literature was "Speed, Time, and Change". . .

       I have two problems this evening.

       The first, of which I gave our hosts fair warning, is that I haven't much to say directly upon the subject of our conference: Speed, Time, and Change in Twentieth-Century Literature. The reason for this is that although I read impertinent critics now and then who suggest that John Barth has fallen silent, a victim of the Literature of Exhaustion, I have in fact been hard at work for a number of years at top speed, on a literary project that has turned out to demand more time than I'd expected, and which, Proteus-like, has changed its nature under my hands while I, like Menelaus on the beach at Pharos, wrestle to hold onto it -- and, in the wrestling, grow wiser but no younger.

       Among the hazards of composing long works is the Heraclitean one: The Proust who finished The Past Recaptured was not the Proust who began Swann's Way. My novel-so-long-in-progress bids to take seven years to complete: long enough for every cell in the author's body to replace itself. Long enough for a young person to matriculate as a college freshman and complete a Ph.D. And just long enough, Horace tells us, for the composition of a proper epic.

       So much for my first problem. Our hosts have kindly given me leave to illustrate the subject that I cannot dissertate upon, by excerpting from this protean project and growing older before your very eyes. As for the second problem. . .

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