Final Fridays by John Barth

Author:John Barth [Barth, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Essays, General, American, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9781619020870
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2012-04-09T23:00:00+00:00

ET CETERA. BUT none of these considerations has to do with public readings as an art form. They may justify, even partially vindicate, my presence here onstage this evening and yours in the audience, or my presence in the audience some other evening to hear some other writer onstage. But is it art, or art of other than the lowest order?

IN THE CASE of a great many fine poets, it unquestionably is art, of a very high order. The utterance of lyric poetry is no doubt more intimately bound to speech than is the recitation of prose; one remembers somebody-or-other’s definition of poetry as “memorable speech,” and any of us fortunate enough to have heard the likes of Dylan Thomas or Robert Frost or Anne Sexton speak their poems has experienced an unforgettable dimension of that verbal art beyond its silent presence on the printed page. But what about poor old fiction? Here are three things that I believe:

1. That the art of reading it publicly is different from the art of writing it. The well-written story and the well-spoken story are two different entities, although a given text may happen to be suitable for both.

2. Or it may not be, since a gifted reader may breathe life into an indifferent text, and an ineffective reader can make humdrum-mery out of a passage that might quite move us on the silent page. And there are passages of world-class fiction that one would be ill-advised to choose for “performance”: the exhaustive and exhausting catalogues in Francois Rabelais’ great Gargantua and Pantagruel, for example, or those deliberately grueling, unparagraphed, relentless stretches in some of the late Thomas Bernhard’s first-rate novels.

3. That an excellent reading need not at all be histrionic or “dramatic” in the popular sense of that adjective. The art of theater is not the same as the art of public reading, and indeed some of the most memorable author-readings of my experience—the late Donald Barthelme’s, for instance—were delivered in a downright anti-histrionic, even deadpan style perfectly appropriate to the material and wonderfully effective. I have heard John Updike read memorably despite his occasional, fleeting, and actually quite endearing stammer, which only served to remind us that his extraordinary eloquence is after all human. I have heard Joseph Heller read the scene of Snowden’s dying in Catch-22 in the author’s unreconstructed Coney Island accent, which at once became for me the voice of that novel, the way Grace Paley’s New York Jewish intonations, once heard live, spring pleasurably thereafter from her pages to my ear. And my (alas!) also-late friend John Hawkes:3 Who of us who’ve relished his sonorous cadences in the flesh, so to speak, does not hear them with a smile and a wistful headshake whenever our eyes fall upon any of his pages?

Oscar Wilde once mischievously declared that anyone who can read the death of Little Nell (from Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop) without laughing must have a heart of stone. I understand what he means, but all the

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