Playing

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In the following essay, Robert Taubman critiques John Barth's Sabbatical as a postmodernist novel that skillfully blends realism with fantasy to explore complex themes of love, literary imagination, and the fantastical nature of reality, ultimately suggesting that its playful tone may detract from the seriousness of its darker elements.

'There was a story that began—' begins Sabbatical, and the story is then interrupted for two nights and a day by a storm at sea, itself interrupted by a dialogue on Aristotle's distinction between lexis and melos. Like most Post-Modernist fantasies, Sabbatical takes a lot of unpacking. But this is John Barth in a holiday mood, and a virtuoso display of techniques brought together from different kinds of novel is here frankly offered for enjoyment. One of its methods is purely realistic: it is full of information, for instance, about sailing in the Chesapeake Bay…. Sabbatical is as devotedly a novel about sailing as The Riddle of the Sands; and like that rather staid classic it uses a sailing trip to get its crew involved in a real-life mystery story. Where Erskine Childers was writing about the Kaiser's invasion plans, Barth is writing about the CIA. An island not on the charts, a shot in the morning mist, deaths and disappearances occur, to a running commentary of texts and footnotes documenting CIA practices. And then there's realism of a more sociological cast, in a trip ashore to Susan's family at Fells Point, Baltimore. The period is almost exactly that of John Updike's last Rabbit novel, and one recognises the same obsession with the placing of America at a moment in time—the stuff in the shops, the news items, the current stresses of family life, the curious national mood of confidence combined with irony, shame and foreboding.

But this novel is capacious. A legendary sea-monster appears, looking no more out of place than the one in Phèdre. Fenwick and Susan—he an aspiring writer, she a professor of classic American literature—have literary imaginations; and symbolism out of Poe and erudition about luc-bát couplets in Vietnamese oral poetry help to feed the fantasy…. When not fully employed in sailing the boat, they have weird dreams in common, which include flashbacks and flashes forward. Or again, at the same healthy level as the sailing, this is also a love story: a shipboard romance after seven years of marriage…. Realism does its job, so that when they conclude that their story has their love in it, this is convincing. A happy love story is a rare event in the Post-Modernist novel.

Playing like this with mixed modes of fiction tends to foreground, as they say, the author. Barth sidesteps by engaging Fenwick and Susan as supposed authors, as if to divert suspicion of too much authorial cleverness. Even so, the technical aplomb, the stylishness of the cutting between one mode and another, do have the effect of focusing the attention on a game of skill, and of distancing the reader from what isn't altogether play in the book. How truthful is it, for instance, about the United States. The sociological observation and the documentary evidence about the CIA make use of plenty of real facts: but all they can tell us, in their context here, is that the ostensibly real world is even more fantastic than sea-monsters and the novel's other mysteries. Susan and Fenwick themselves have a broad suspicion that 'we have been, in the main, indulging ourselves, amusing ourselves,' and even that 'our years together, precious as they've been to both of us, are themselves a kind of playing: not finally serious …' It shows in the kind of playing which is the story they make of their lives. And this becomes a moral question when the novel touches directly on real horror, as it does in the episode of Susan's sister's rape—which the subtitle calls 'The Story of Miriam's Other Rapes' ('Mim's other rapes! Jesus, Susan!'). This is as full and particular as realism demands, and it sickens Susan, telling it. But for the reader it is horror distanced into fantasy, even into a kind of black comedy. So was the horror of the Dresden bombing in Slaughterhouse Five; perhaps there is no other way of dealing with maximum horror. But here, in a mainly sunny and engaging book, one comes up against a limitation. The note of fantasy looks like an evasion. If the scene belongs perfectly to the tone of the book, that is because the book guards itself against being taken too seriously.

Robert Taubman, "Playing" (appears here by permission of the London Review of Books and the author), in London Review of Books, August 5 to August 18, 1982, p. 19.∗

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