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A Traveler's Tale
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19193 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1991 |
2,174 Words |
| Author
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Gregory Wolfe
Gregory Wolfe is the founder and coeditor of Image: A Journal
of the Arts and Religion, and a frequent contributor to The
World & I. |
THE LAST VOYAGE OF SOMEBODY THE SAILOR
John Barth
Boston: Little, Brown, 1991
573 pp., $22.95
John Barth must have relished the ironies surrounding the publication of his latest novel, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor. An ingenious reworking of the immortal tales from the Arabian Nights, Barth's novel evokes the magical atmosphere of medieval Baghdad, the "City of Peace." Sindbad the Sailor's voyages, recounted in the novel at length, all begin and end in the bustling, prosperous port city of Basra. Written before the invasion of Kuwait, Voyage was published in the month that the Persian Gulf War reached its violent conclusion. Just as the novel reached the bookstores, the Allied bombing of Baghbad reached its greatest intensity and coalition forces drove to the very outskirts of Basra itself.
The disparity between the exotic, fragrant evenings of once upon a time Baghdad and its modern counterpart, devastated by cruise missiles and high tech laser bombs, may appear immense. But Voyage is, in fact, a story that speaks rather directly to the present. It is, among other things, a novel about survival, tall tales, lies, plunder, and betrayal.
And yet Barth's novel can hardly be read as an allegory on Saddam Hussein or Islamic absolutism, for the two central characters, Sindbad the Sailor and the modern American writer Simon William Behler, are at once admirable and villainous. When Middle East meets West in the novel, they are seen, despite dislocations of time and place, to be mirror images of each other.
Barth would have welcomed the coincidence of the Gulf War because the major theme of his writing is the problematic relationship between fiction and reality. Barth has long held that rational systems of thought have failed to help modern man find his place in the cosmos. Rather, each of us creates stories--constructs or models of the world in which we live--in order to locate ourselves. But our desire to spin tales, whether in novels or in our own lives, lands us in another paradox: What relationship do our stories have to reality? Are they true images of the world, or attempts to escape it? Or both?
Seaborne escapades
Voyage is Barth's latest foray into the heart of this paradox. It bears
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