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Fowles /Irving /Barthes FOWLES /IRVING /BARTHES Miami University, through an arrangement with the Ohio State University Press initiated in 1975, publishes works of original scholarship, fiction, and poetry. The responsibility for receiving and reviewing manuscripts is invested in an Editorial Board comprised of Miami University faculty. FOWLES / IRVING / BARTHES Canonical Variations on an Apocryphal Theme RANDOLPH RUNYON Published for Miami University by the Ohio State University Press Quotations from Daniel Martin, by John Fowles, are copyright ® 1977 by J. R. Fowles Ltd., and are reprinted by permission of Little, Brown &Co. Quotations from The Ebony Tower, by John Fowles, are copyright ® 1974 by J. R. Fowles Ltd., and are reprinted by permission of Little, Brown & Co. Quotations from The World According to Garp, by John Irving, are copyright ® 1976, 1977, 1978 by John Irving, and reprinted by per­ mission of the publisher, E. P. Dutton, and Literistic, Ltd. Quotations from The Water-Method Man, by John Irving, are copyright ® 1972 by John Irving, and are reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. Quotations from Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (Fragments d'un discours amoureux), translated by Richard Howard, are copyright ® 1978 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., and are reprinted by permission of the publisher. Quotations from Roland Barthes's Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes), translated by Richard Howard, are copyright ® 1977 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., and are reprinted by permission of the publisher. Quotations from Roland Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text, translated by Richard Miller, are copyright ® 1975 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., and are reprinted by permission of the publisher. Quotations from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Rob­ ert M. Pirsig, are reprinted by permission of William Morrow & Com­ pany, Inc., and The Bodley Head. Two quotations from Four Quartets, by T. S. Eliot, are reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., publisher of The Com- (Continued on page vi) Copyright ® 1981 by Miami University All Rights Reserved. Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Runyon, Randolph, 1947- Fowles/Irving/Barthes: canonical variations on an apocryphal theme. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Bible and literature. 2. Literature, comparative—Themes, mo­ tives. 3. Fowles, John, 1926- —Criticism and interpretation. 4. Irving, John, 1942- —Criticism and interpretation. 5. Barthes, Roland. 6. Bible. O. T. Apocrypha. Tobit. I. Title. PN56.B5R86 809\93382 81-11125 ISBN 0-8142-0335-3 AACR2 In patris memoriam plete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950, and by Faber and Faber, Ltd., publisher of The Collected Poems 1909-1962. Quotations from Godel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter, are used by permission of Basic Books, Inc. An earlier version of Chapter 3 was originally published as "Fragments of an Amorous Discourse: Canon in Ubis" in the autumn, 1977, issue of Visible Language. It is reprinted here in revised form by permission of the editor and publisher. Reproduction of Johann Sebastian Bach's fourteen canons on a Gold­ berg bass (Cote Manuscript 17669 in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris) is by permission of the Chef de Conservation du Department de Mu­ sique of the Bibliotheque Nationale and Editions Salabert, which pub­ lished them in 1976 in 14 Canons sur la basse Goldberg. CONTENTS Introduction xi 1 Fowles's Enigma Variations 3 2 The World According to T. S. 37 3 Barthes's Amorous Discourse: Canon in Ubis 67 4 Coda: Wolf, Pirsig, Barth 91 Bibliography 117 Index 119 ILLUSTRATIONS Tobias and the Angel, by Verrochio 73 Inside back cover of Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations; fourteen circle canons based on the first eight notes of the aria 104 Introduction The title of this book states its thesis, that through the works of these authors there runs a common theme in the musical sense, an original air that appears in ever changing guise among the fourteen books con­ sidered here, variations on a story that has the kind of multipurpose inner harmony that in music is an essential prerequisite to a canonical theme. It is only because they are read here together, of course, that from these texts something like a canon emerges; reading them in light of each other, putting them together in a particular way, is a critical activity that finds, however, a distinct counterpart in canonic compo­ sition. A canon true to its name is a puzzle, as are, for example, the fourteen enigmatic circle canons recently discovered on the inside back cover of a copy of the Goldberg Variations annotated by the composer; written in Bach's own hand, they are based on the first eight notes of the ground of the aria on which the preceding thirty variations were composed. They are not, however, written out in their entirety. Instead, clues are provided to indicate the kind of canonic treatment required in each case—the number of voices, the point at which these voices should enter. Yet a great deal is still left to the ingenuity of the reader, in particular the manner in which the later voices imitate the first: though they are all rigorous copies of the subject, they may well be inverted, reversed, and/or begin at a different pitch (indeed, at least two of these new additions to the Bach canon can be solved in more XI xii INTRODUCTION than one way).1 The name of this form of imitative composition derives from KOLVUV, rule; it calls for the discovery and application of a hidden rule, and in each case a different one, a rule somehow suggested by the nature of the theme and by whatever clues are given. The Oxford English Dictionary gives this illustrative quotation: 1609, Douland, Ornith. Microl., 48: A Canon .. is an imaginarie rule, drawing that part of the Song which is not set downe out of that part which is set downe. Or it is a Rule, which doth wittily discover the secret of a Song. Like Nicholas of Cusa's conception of human history, this process of drawing out what is already there is the explicatio of a complicato. Douglas Hofstadter, in his recent Gbdel, Escher, Bach, raises an inter­ esting question about this drawing-out procedure: "How hard are you allowed to pull?" For there are instances—the solving of enigmatic canons, the transformation through DNA from molecule to organism— when "the pulling-out may involve such complicated operations that it makes you feel you are putting in more information than you are pulling out" (GEB, 159).2 Drawing, however, upon the example of the genetic meaning contained in DNA, "one of the best possible examples of implicit meaning," he argues that even here, where "[i]n order to con­ vert genotype [molecule] into phenotype [organism], a set of mecha­ nisms far more complex than the genotype must operate on the geno­ type" (GEB, 160), the arduousness and complexity of the pulling-out process are not in themselves evidence that any meaning was added through the interaction of message with interpreter, or of DNA with its necessary chemical context, that was not already there. The test is whether the original message has "enough compelling inner logic that its context [the chemical context necessary for DNA to become, through the transcribing RNA, protein; or the cultural context neces­ sary for a composition of J. S. Bach (in the form of a record sent swirling through space, according to Hofstadter's example, without benefit of a record player, to be picked up by some alien but highly intelligent civilization) to be deciphered and enjoyed] will be restored automati­ cally whenever intelligence of a high enough level comes in contact with it. If some message did have that context-restoring property, then it would seem reasonable to consider the meaning of the message as an inherent property of the message" {GEB, 164). Even a molecule of DNA, Hofstadter maintains, "sent out to seek its fortune in the uni­ verse" would contain enough inner logic to enable a highly advanced civilization "to deduce from its chemical structure what kind of chem­ ical environment it seemed to want and then supply such an environ­ ment" {GEB, 175). Introduction xiii Providing a context is the aim of this book, although it is not easy to say which is the context and which the original message: Fowles, Irving, and Barthes (and Goethe and Balzac) both illuminate and are illuminated by Tobit, as well as by each other. And it is not clear that what they wrote was influenced by that text from the Old Testament Apocrypha in the traditional sense. But read in the perspective of Tobit, Fowles's most recent works of fiction, Irving's novels, and Roland Barthes's Fragments d'un discours amoureux begin to show a unity they had not revealed before, both in themselves and among each other. It is their repetition of the story in Tobit that brings them together; that such a reunion of texts of independent origins is possible is surely due to what could be called the compelling inner logic of that original text. Like the first eight notes of the bass of the Goldberg Variations' aria, that ancient account of how Tobias became Sarah's eighth and final husband is so constructed that its story doesn't end when its plot does, but continues, its hero reappearing in the person of at least eight later protagonists: Charles Smithson, Daniel Martin, T. S. Garp, Fred Trumper, Werther, Daniel d'Arthez, Roland Barthes, and a certain Phaedrus. What follows, then, is simply the result of the discovery of something akin to Dowland's imaginary rule, a reunion of texts and heroes that makes it possible to see that, separately, they had already been drawing out the secret of that noncanonical theme.
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