1、Chimeraby John Bartha.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at EOFBack Page:At this point I interrupted my sister as usual to say, “You have a way with words, Scheherazade. This is the thousandth night Ive sat at the foot of your bed while you and the King made love and you told him stories, and the one in progress
2、 holds me like a genies gaze.“The speaker here is Dunyazade, kid sister of Scheherazade of The Thousand and One Nights, who has her own way with words. There is also Perseus, the demigod who slew the Gorgon Medusa, and yet finds himself at forty “sea-leveled, parched and plucked, every grain in my m
3、olted sandals raising blisters, and beleaguered by the serpents of my past.“ And Bellerophon, the hero who tames the winged horse Pegasus only to discover, “My lifes a failure. Im not a mythic hero. I never will be.“Like the Chimera of myth, which had a lions head, a goats body, and a serpents tail,
4、 they are all joined into a single, dazzling whole that is the culmination of all John Barths work thus far, transforming myth into reality as we know it and live it.“Literally stunning. . . the words rain down like a shower of gold. . . Make no mistake: John Barth is a mandarin modern master.“ - Li
5、fe“Soaring, rich, majestic. . . Barths most rewarding creation.“ - National ObserverCHIMERATHIS BOOK CONTAINS THE COMPLETE TEXT OF THE ORIGINAL HARDCOVER EDITION.A Fawcett Crest Book reprinted by arrangement with Random House, Inc.Copyright 1972 by John BarthAll rights reserved, including the right
6、to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.Grateful acknowledgment is made to Collins-Knowlton-Wing, Inc., for permission to reprint material from The Greek Myths
7、by Robert Graves. Copyright 1955 by Robert Graves.“Dunyazadiad“ first appeared in slightly different form in Esquire magazine, June 1972. “Perseid“ first appeared in Harpers magazine, September 1972.Alternate Selection of the Saturday Review Book Club, September 1972Alternate Selection of the Time I
8、nc. Book Club, October 1972 Alternate Selection of the American Journal Book Club, March 1973Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-3389Printed in the United States of America October 1973ContentsDUNYAZADIADPERSEIDBELLEROPHONIADDUNYAZADIAD1“At this point I interrupted my sister as usual to say,
9、 You have a way with words, Scheherazade. This is the thousandth night Ive sat at the foot of your bed while you and the King made love and you told him stories, and the one in progress holds me like a genies gaze. I wouldnt dream of breaking in like this, just before the end, except that I hear the
10、 first rooster crowing in the east, et cetera, and the King really ought to sleep a bit before daybreak. I wish I had your talent.“And as usual Sherry replied, Youre the ideal audience, Dunyazade. But this is nothing; wait till you hear the ending, tomorrow night! Always assuming this auspicious Kin
11、g doesnt kill me before breakfast, as hes been going to do these thirty-three and a third months.“ Hmp, said Shahryar. Dont take your critics for granted; I may get around to it yet. But I agree with your little sister that this is a good one youve got going, with its impostures that become authenti
12、c, its ups and downs and flights to other worlds. I dont know how in the world you dream them up.“ Artists have their tricks, Sherry replied. We three said good night then, six goodnights in all. In the morning your brother went off to court, enchanted by Sherrys story. Daddy came to the palace for
13、the thousandth time with a shroud under his arm, expecting to be told to cut his daughters head off; in most other respects hes as good a vizier as he ever was, but three years of suspense have driven him crackers in this one particular - and turned his hair white, I might add, and made him a widowe
14、r. Sherry and I, after the first fifty nights or so, were simply relieved when Shahryar would hmp and say, By Allah, I wont kill her till Ive heard the end of her story; but it still took Daddy by surprise every morning. He groveled gratitude per usual; the King per usual spent the day in his durbar
15、, bidding and forbidding between man and man, as the saying goes; I climbed in with Sherry as soon as he was gone, and per usual we spent our day sleeping in and making love. When wed had enough of each others tongues and fingers, we called in the eunuchs, maidservants, mamelukes, pet dogs and monke
16、ys; then we finished off with Sherrys Bag of Tricks: little weighted balls from Baghdad, dildoes from the Ebony Isles and the City of Brass, et cetera. Not to break a certain vow of mine, I made do with a roc-down tickler from Bassorah, but Sherry touched all the bases. Her favorite story is about s
17、ome pig of an ifrit who steals a girl away on her wedding night, puts her in a treasure-casket locked with seven steel padlocks, puts the casket in a crystal coffer, and puts the coffer on the bottom of the ocean, so that nobody except himself can have her. But whenever he brings the whole rig ashor
18、e, unlocks the locks with seven keys, and takes her out and rapes her, he falls asleep afterward on her lap; she slips out from under and cuckolds him with every man who passes by, taking their seal rings as proof; at the end of the story she has five hundred seventy-two seal rings, and the stupid i
19、frit still thinks he possesses her! In the same way, Sherry put a hundred horns a day on your brothers head: thats about a hundred thousand horns by now. And every day she saved till last the Treasure Key, which is what her story starts and ends with.“Three and a third years ago, when King Shahryar
20、was raping a virgin every night and killing her in the morning, and the people were praying that Allah would dump the whole dynasty, and so many parents had fled the country with their daughters that in all the Islands of India and China there was hardly a young girl fit to fuck, my sister was an un
21、dergraduate arts-and-sciences major at Banu Sasan University. Besides being Homecoming Queen, valedictorian-elect, and a four-letter varsity athlete, she had a private library of a thousand volumes and the highest average in the history of the campus. Every graduate department in the East was after
22、her with fellowships - but she was so appalled at the state of the nation that she dropped out of school in her last semester to do full-time research on a way to stop Shahryar from killing all our sisters and wrecking the country.“Political science, which she looked at first, got her nowhere. Shahr
23、yars power was absolute, and by sparing the daughters of his army officers and chief ministers (like our own father) and picking his victims mainly from the families of liberal intellectuals and other minorities, he kept the military and the cabinet loyal enough to rule out a coup dtat. Revolution s
24、eemed out of the question, because his woman-hating, spectacular as it was, was reinforced more or less by all our traditions and institutions, and as long as the girls he was murdering were generally upper-caste, there was no popular base for guerrilla war. Finally, since he could count on your hel
25、p from Samarkand, invasion from outside or plain assassination were bad bets too: Sherry figured your retaliation would be worse than Shahryars virgin-a-night policy.“So we gave up poly sci (I fetched her books and sharpened her quills and made tea and alphabetized her index cards) and tried psychol
26、ogy- another blind alley. Once shed noted that your reaction to being cuckolded by your wife was homicidal rage followed by despair and abandonment of your kingdom, and that Shahryars was the reverse; and established that that was owing to the difference in your ages and the order of revelations; an
27、d decided that whatever pathology was involved was a function of the culture and your position as absolute monarchs rather than particular hang-ups in your psyches, et cetera - what was there to say? “She grew daily more desperate; the body-count of deflowered and decapitated Moslem girls was past n
28、ine hundred, and Daddy was just about out of candidates. Sherry didnt especially care about herself, you understand - wouldnt have even if she hadnt guessed that the King was sparing her out of respect for his vizier and her own accomplishments. But beyond the general awfulness of the situation, she
29、 was particularly concerned for my sake. From the day I was born, when Sherry was about nine, she treasured me as if I were hers; I might as well not have had parents; she and I ate from the same plate, slept in the same bed; no one could separate us; Ill bet we werent apart for an hour in the first
30、 dozen years of my life. But I never had her good looks or her way with the world- and I was the youngest in the family besides. My breasts were growing; already Id begun to menstruate: any day Daddy might have to sacrifice me to save Sherry.“So when nothing else worked, as a last resort she turned
31、to her first love, unlikely as it seemed, mythology and folklore, and studied all the riddle/puzzle/secret motifs she could dig up. We need a miracle, Doony, she said (I was braiding her hair and massaging her neck as she went through her notes for the thousandth time), and the only genies Ive ever
32、met were in stories, not in Moormans-rings and Jews-lamps. Its in words that the magic is - Abracadabra, Open Sesame, and the rest - but the magic words in one story arent magical in the next. The real magic is to understand which words work, and when, and for what; the trick is to learn the trick.“
33、This last, as our frantic research went on, became her motto, even her obsession. As she neared the end of her supply of lore, and Shahryar his supply of virgins, she became more and more certain that her principle was correct, and desperate that in the whole worlds stock of stories there was none t
34、hat confirmed it, or showed us how to use it to solve the problem. Ive read a thousand tales about treasures that nobody can find the key to, she told me; we have the key and cant find the treasure. I asked her to explain. Its all in here, she declared - I couldnt tell whether she meant her inkstand
35、 or the quill she pointed toward it. I seldom understood her any more; as the crisis grew, she gave up reading for daydreaming, and used her pen less for noting instances of the Magic Key motif in world literature than for doodling the letters of our alphabet at random and idly tickling herself.“ Li
36、ttle Doony, she said dreamily, and kissed me: pretend this whole situation is the plot of a story were reading, and you and I and Daddy and the King are all fictional characters. In this story, Scheherazade finds a way to change the Kings mind about women and turn him into a gentle, loving husband.
37、Its not hard to imagine such a story, is it? Now, no matter what way she finds - whether its a magic spell or a magic story with the answer in it or a magic anything- it comes down to particular words in the story were reading, right? And those words are made from the letters of our alphabet: a coup
38、le-dozen squiggles we can draw with this pen. This is the key, Doony! And the treasure, too, if we can only get our hands on it! Its as if - as if the key to the treasure is the treasure!“As soon as she spoke these last words a genie appeared from nowhere right there in our library-stacks. He didnt
39、resemble anything in Sherrys bedtime stories: for one thing, he wasnt frightening, though he was strange-looking enough: a light-skinned fellow of forty or so, smooth-shaven and bald as a rocs egg. His clothes were simple but outlandish; he was tall and healthy and pleasant enough in appearance, exc
40、ept for queer lenses that he wore in a frame over his eyes. He seemed as startled as we were - you shouldve seen Sherry drop that pen and pull her skirts together! - but he got over his alarm sooner, and looked from one to the other of us and at a stubby little magic wand he held in his fingers, and
41、 smiled a friendly smile.“ Are you really Scheherazade? he asked. Ive never had a dream so clear and lifelike! And youre little Dunyazade- just as Id imagined both of you! Dont be frightened: I cant tell you what it means to me to see and talk to you like this; even in a dream, its a dream come true
42、. Can you understand English? I dont have a word of Arabic. O my, I cant believe this is really happening!“Sherry and I looked at each other. The Genie didnt seem dangerous; we didnt know those languages he spoke of; every word he said was in our language, and when Sherry asked him whether hed come
43、from her pen or from her words, he seemed to understand the question, though he didnt know the answer. He was a writer of tales, he said - anyhow a former writer of tales - in a land on the other side of the world. At one time, we gathered, people in his country had been fond of reading; currently,
44、however, the only readers of artful fiction were critics, other writers, and unwilling students who, left to themselves, preferred music and pictures to words. His own pen (that magic wand, in fact a magic quill with a fountain of ink inside) had just about run dry: but whether he had abandoned fict
45、ion or fiction him, Sherry and I couldnt make out when we reconstructed this first conversation later that night, for either in our minds or in his a number of crises seemed confused. Like Shahryars, the Genies life was in disorder - but so far from harboring therefore a grudge against womankind, he
46、 was distractedly in love with a brace of new mistresses, and only recently had been able to choose between them. His career, too, had reached a hiatus which he would have been pleased to call a turning-point if he could have espied any way to turn: he wished neither to repudiate nor to repeat his p
47、ast performances; he aspired to go beyond them toward a future they were not attuned to and, by some magic, at the same time go back to the original springs of narrative. But how this was to be managed was as unclear to him as the answer to the Shahryar-problem was to us - the more so since he could
48、nt see how much of his difficulty might be owing to his own limitations, his age and stage and personal vicissitudes; how much to the general decline of letters in his time and place; and how much to the other crises with which his country (and, so he alleged, the very species) was beset- crises as
49、desperate and problematical, he avowed, as ours, and as inimical to the single-mindedness needed to compose great works of art or the serenity to apprehend them.“So entirely was he caught up in these problems, his work and life all had come to a standstill. He had taken leave of his friends, his family, and his post (he was a doctor of letters), and withdrawn to a lonely retreat in the marshes, which only the most devoted of his
