Final Fridays by John Barth Read Free Book Online

American heritages represented (in the novel) by Francis Scott Key and Edgar Allan Poe. First and finally, the story is what its subtitle declares it to be: a romance, in the several senses of that term.
    â€”Postscript, possibly evidencing that truth is more Postmodern than fiction:
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    After Sabbatical’s first publication in 1982, I learned from certain ex-colleagues of his and readers of mine that the unhappy Mr. Paisley had toward the end grown fond of declaring that “in life, as on the highway, fifty-five is enough” (his age at death). Moreover—and more poignantly, sober-ingly, vertiginously—I was informed by his son that the late Agency operative had been a fan of my novels, especially The Floating Opera and The Sot-Weed Factor —which it pleases me to imagine his having enjoyed in happier times as he and Brillig sailed the Chesapeake.
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    R.I.P., sir: Having surfaced in Sabbatical as in the Bay (and resurfaced in this novel’s successor, The Tidewater Tales ), you shall not float through my fiction again.

“In the Beginning”: The Big Bang, the Anthropic Principle, and the Jesus Paradox
    Turning now to a bit of proto-Postmodernism: Though far from being a Biblical scholar myself, I was successfully tempted by the bona fide Biblicist David Rosenberg to contribute the following essay on Genesis and Matthew to his anthology Communion 1 —having perused which, the distinguished journalist Bill Moyers persuaded me in 1996 to take part in one episode of his 10-part PBS series Genesis : 2 a lively round-table conversation with Moyers; the novelists Rebecca Goldstein, Mary Gordon, Oscar Hijuelos, Charles Johnson, and Faye Kellerman; and the theologian Burton Visotzky, on the subject of “The First Murder,” Cain’s offing of his brother Abel in Genesis 4. Whereafter I happily retired from amateur scriptural exegesis.

1.
    Bereshith —in Hebrew, the first word of the first verse of the first chapter of the first book of the Bible—says it more aptly than does the usual English translation, “In the beginning.” Both expressions are adverbial, and their sense is inarguably the same: Bereshith means, indeed, “in the beginning,” 3 its first syllable corresponding to the English preposition. But if, as John’s subsequent gospel affirms (1:1),
“In the beginning was the word,” then any form-conscious writer of a creation-story will prefer that beginning word to be the word Beginning . The text of Genesis (called, in Hebrew, Bereshith ), especially its opening chapters, is virtually proto-Postmodernist in its deployment of what art critics call “significant form”—the form a metaphor for the content, or form and content reciprocally emblematical—and the original Hebrew begins the story best: beginningly. 4
    In the “Near Eastern” stacks of my university’s library, once the distinguished haunt of William Foxwell Albright’s Oriental Seminary, there is half an alcove of scholarly commentary, in a babel of languages, on the text of Genesis; enough to frighten any self-respecting fictionist back to his/her trade. Of all this (except for Sacks’s excellent treatise aforenoted) I remain programmatically innocent. No professional storyteller, however, especially of the Postmodernist or Romantic-Formalist persuasion, can fail on rereading this seminal narrative to be struck by two circumstances, no doubt commonplaces among Bible scholars: 1) that the structure of Genesis, particularly of its opening chapter, is self-reflexive, self-similar, even self-demonstrative; and 2) that its narrative procedure echoes, prefigures, or metaphorizes some aspects of current cosmogonical theory.
    â€¢ Taking, like an artless translator, second things first: As everybody knows, according to the generally accepted Big Bang hypothesis (as opposed to various currently-disfavored “steady state” hypotheses),