Postscripts: (Or Just Desserts) (American Literature) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Barth is our most celebrated postmodernist. From the appearance in 1956 of The Floating Opera, his first published book, through the essay collection Final Fridays, released in 2012, he has published at least two books in each of the seven decades spanning his writerly life thus far. Thrice nominated for the National Book Award—The Floating Opera, Lost in the Funhouse, and Chimera, which won in 1973—Barth has received the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. A native of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he taught for twenty-two years in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He now lives in Florida with his wife Shelly.

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“Out of the Cradle” (1,178 words)

“I stand here ironing,” declares the narrator of Tillie Olsen’s much-anthologized short story of that title. Me, I sit here rocking—in my two-dozen-year-old swivel desk chair at my forty-plus-year-old work table, between strokes of my Parker (19)51 fountain pen in the seventy-year-old loose-leaf binder (picked up during my freshman orientation at Johns Hopkins in 1947) in which I’ve first-drafted every apprentice and then professional sentence of my writing life, up to and including this extended one—my now nearly nine-decades-old body taking idle comfort in the so-familiar oscillation that has, this workday morning, caught the attention of its octogenarian mind.

Nothing vigorous, this rocking: just a gentle, intermittent back-and-forthing as I scan my notes and exfoliate them into these sentences and paragraphs. Notes, e.g., on the ubiquitous popularity of rocking chairs (including the iconic John F. Kennedy Rocker), porch swings, hammocks, and the like: a popularity surely owing to our body’s memory of having been calmed and soothed through babyhood in parental arms, cradles, infant-slings, maybe, later on, rocking-horses. And in adulthood, a particularly delicious feeling for my wife and myself was the gentle rocking of our cruising sailboat at anchor in one of the many snug coves of Chesapeake Bay. These calmative effects in turn no doubt derive from our prenatal rocking in the womb as our mothers went about their pregnant daily business, themselves rocking in chairs now and then to rest between stand-up chores and to lull their increasingly active cargo. We are not surprised to hear from neuroscientists and physicians that rocking releases endorphins, which abet our physical and mental health—though one also remembers the furious, feverish rocking of the never-to-be-soothed protagonist in D. H. Lawrence’s ironically titled “The Rocking-Horse Winner.”

Old-timers, especially, favor rockers as they circle toward second childhood, and nursing homes, particularly ones for patients with dementia, are more and more using rocking chairs as therapy: Thus from “Rock-a-Bye Baby” we rock and roll our way to Hoagy Carmichael’s “Old Rockin’ Chair’s Got Me.” “Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking,” writes Walt Whitman of the waves of Long Island Sound, “I . . . a reminiscence sing.” A boyhood beach-memory, it is, of his having sharply pitied the keenings of a male mockingbird bereft of its mate: desolated love-cries that the Good Gray Poet is pleased in retrospect to imagine having inspired his whole ensuing poetical life’s work. And that he now “fuses” with the sea’s “low and delicious word”—“Death, death, death, death, death”—to arrive at an intellectual acceptance and emotional transcendence of The End. Not for us to question whether, in Whitman’s case, the poem’s conclusion declares a psychological accomplishment on its author’s part or merely raises a hopeful/wishful possibility.

In my own case, as befits a mere novelist, the out-of-the cradle rocking-reminiscence is more prosaic: For the first seventeen-and-then-some years of my life—from babyhood until college—it was my fixed nightly habit to rock myself to sleep. Left-side down in bed, I would roll gently back and forth into oblivion at a rate slightly lower (so I’ve just confirmed by comparing kinesthetic memory, surprisingly strong, with my watch’s sweep-second hand) than my once-per-second normal pulse. About 1.5 seconds per rock it was, by my present reckoning, or forty rocks per minute—which I now further discover to approximate my most natural-feeling frequency for desk-and rocking-chair rocking as well. Try it yourself, reader: Once per second feels frenetic, no? And once every second second a bit laggard? When “restive” (odd adjective, that; it sounds as if it ought to mean rest-conducive rather than rest-resistant), I would rock even in partial sleep.

So I learned from my twin sister, whom my habit never seemed to bother in the ten or so prepubescent years when we shared a bedroom (with, appropriately, twin beds); perhaps she was inured to it from our months together in the womb. And so I was reminded further and less patiently by my older brother in the several subsequent years of our room-sharing, between my puberty and his departure for college and military service, through which interval I troubled his repose with my rockrockrocking and he mine in turn, more intriguingly (if I ceased rocking and feigned sleep), with the soft slapslap of adolescent masturbation, which his kid brother was only just discovering. And so I was reminded finally by the teasing of college roommates, who pretended to think I must be jerking off in some exotic waywise when, too ashamed at that age and stage to rock myself to sleep, I sometimes embarrassed myself and entertained them by endlessly rocking in my sleep.

An old-time Freudian, one supposes, would maintain that it was in fact masturbative, that rhythmic back-and-forthing that wore away the shoulder of my teenage pajamas from friction against the bed-sheets. But hey: masturbation as far back as pre-Kindergarten? Sure, our hypothetical Freudian would reply: All toddlers play with their privates until shamed out of doing so, whereupon the instinctual itch finds other outlets, or inlets. Yes, well, maybe: but about my rocking as a mode of post-pubescent-though-still-virginal Getting It Off, I feel the way Robert Frost felt about his critics’ reading his “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” as a poem about the death-wish: “When I write a poem about death,” Frost maintained in effect, “I write a poem about death. When I want to write about stopping by woods on a snowy evening, I write about that.” Or, more directly to the point, the young woman in one of Bruno Bettelheim’s classes whose fiddling with her hair during his lectures reputedly so distracted the eminent psychiatrist that he admonished her publicly by declaring that what she was doing was a sublimated form of masturbation—to which she spiritedly replied, “When I feel like masturbating, Dr. Bettelheim, I masturbate. When I fiddle with my hair, I’m fiddling with my hair.” By age fourteen, when I was inclined to whack off I whacked off. Rocking myself to sleep was a different business altogether.

Which is not to deny any twenty-first-century holdout’s contention that even to the busily copulative and/or explicitly masturbatory, the gratification of rocking in bed—yea, even of rocking in desk chair or front-porch rocker—may have a mild erotic component. If so, however, then like reflexology or floating on gentle sea-waves (in my experience of giving or indulging those pleasures, at least), it’s more assuaging than arousing to the carnal itch—rather like “shuckling,” the Jewish custom of swaying back and forth while reciting the Torah. Anyhow, as a wise philosophy-professor used to remind us Hopkins undergrads, one arrives at generality only by ignoring enough particularity: The more a proposition applies to everything in general, the less it applies to anything in particular. If my real subject were erotic gratification, I’d be...