My Two Muses

       Fall, 1978: the LETTERS novel all but done at last, and this final variation on the twin-problem theme, at a conference on Myth and Modernism sponsored by the Classics Department at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

       In a university as programmatically contemporary as this one, with its distinguished and formidable Institute for Twentieth Century Studies, I find it a comfort to be the guest of the Classics Department. As an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins in the 1940s, while I was cutting my writerly teeth on Joyce and Kafka and discovering that literature existed, it was my good fortune to work part-time as a book-filer in the library stacks of Greek and Latin classical literature and of W. F. Albright's Oriental Seminary. I read so much of what I was supposed to be reshelving that to this day I don't know whom to blame the more for my own literary productions: the High Modernists or the tale-tellers of antiquity.

       My particular interest in classical mythology, as distinct from classical literature, is a tale quickly recounted. When my novel The Sot-Weed Factor appeared in 1960, several critics remarked that it showed the influence of Otto Rank and the comparative mythologists. I had not in fact read Rank and company; I quickly did, and found the critics to be correct. Indeed, as I wandered through Jung and Lord Raglan and Joseph Campbell and the rest -- the way I'd once wandered through the Classics stacks -- I became fairly obsessed by the detailed abstract pattern, the actuarial profile, of wandering heroes in the myths of the world's cultures. That cyclical model tyrannized my imagination. I was quite aware that one arrives at such a level of generality as the Ur-Mythe, or Monomyth, only by ignoring enough particularity; I knew that to a cultural anthropologist, say, the differences between the adventures of Perseus and those of Watu Gunung might be more significant than their similarities. No matter. I was also aware of the several profound things that this general model was alleged to signify, or at least to correspond to: the circuit of the seasons, the rites of passage, the crisis of individuation, the psychoanalytical deep-dive, the mystic transcension of categories into undiflerentiated Being. But I confess that it was the model itself I loved, quite apart from its multiple significations, and whether or not it turned out to be, after all, just another fallible nineteenth-century-style synthesis.

       That is the confession, I suppose, of an unreconstructed formalist. It is also the confession of a failed musician whose youthful ambition was to be neither a composer nor a performer, but an orchestrator -- what in those big-band days was called an arranger. And that's my real bond with the authors of antiquity, for whom originality was chiefly a matter of rearrangement. I wrote a long comic orchestration of the abstract model (Giles Goat-Boy) and a number of short stories and novellas based on particular manifestations of it: the story of Menelaus and the Old Man of the Sea; the story of Narcissus and Echo; the story of Perseus and Medusa; the story of Bellerophon and the Chimera. These are beautiful, wonderful stories -- I mean the originals. Indeed, my problem -- since my muse is ineluctably the comic muse -- was not to trivialize, in my reorchestrations, those splendid melody-lines that moved and touched me so profoundly: the great myths themselves.

       I'm not sure I succeeded. In any case, that particular obsession is behind me now, replaced by others. But the capital-P Pattern continues to reverberate through the long work that I have been holding by the tail -- and it me by the throat -- since 1972, when the last of those "mythological" stories was published.

       Tonight I want to read to you two excerpts: one from the mythological comedies, as advertised, and one from the novel in progress. That novel, I almost blush to report, is a reorchestration of one of the oldest and riskiest of novel-forms: the epistolary novel, long since pronounced kaput by the coroners of literary criticism. But it happens that in addition to being a disappointed orchestrator, I am a bona fide honorary Doctor of Letters, who likes to take that distinction in its medical sense (Johns Hopkins is, after all, both my alma mater and my present employer), and who therefore makes it part of his Business to administer artificial respiration to the apparently dead, whether the patient is the classical myths or certain exhausted conventions of the novel. So. . .

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