Author breathes humor into jumbled letters
By KEVIN HARDEN
Of the Emerald
John Barth waved another flash
card in the air. "Reset,” he said,
drawing laughter from the
audience. He continued his
soliloquy on “Letters”, his latest
venture in fiction.
It is a sad, strange and con
fusing story of a young man
whose suspected lineage goes
back to Napoiean Bonaparte’s
brother. He is trying to program
an obsolete computer (of the
vacuum-tube type, Barth ex
plained) to write the great
American novel. The five-year
project, appropriately called
NOVEL, has fizzled in the third,
or “V” year. Instead of an historic
novel, the ancient computer has
printed a jumble of numbers,
throwing the young Bonaparte
descendant into a state of
confusion and wonder at the
meaning of it ail.
Somehow, through some twist
of fictional fate supplied by the
author, this bewildered character,
in his efforts to decode the
suspected message, begins to
think of himself as nothing more
John Barth
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Western
farmers say the way to solve the
illegal alien problem is to make it
legal for foreign labor to come
into this country.
But labor leaders oppose it,
especially a return to the so
called Bracero program of World
War II, when the war effort dried
up the U.S. labor pool. An
estimated five million Mexican
nationals came into the United
States under the Bracero program
before it was scrapped in 1964.
Most were employed on
California farms.
“We vehemently oppose any
reimposition of the Bracero
program,” said Marc Warren,
press spokesman for United Farm
Workers president Cesar Chavez.
“The Bracero program was a
synonym fa slave I aba," says
the Chavez spokesman, “it was
just one incident of abuse,
mistreatment and broken
promises after another.”
Organized laba leaders feel
the same way.
“We worked fa about 10 years
to get rid of the old one and we’re
not anxious to get it rein
stituted,” said Kenneth
Meiklejohn. He’s an AFL-CiO
lobbyist who represents
aganized laba on Capitol Hill.
Another key issue in the alien
problem Is criminal a civil
sanctions against farmers who
use illegal aliens, the Idaho
Statesman said.
Vernon Clinton, chalrer of a
committee of the Sprinkler
Irrigators of Idaho Association,
said a new Bracero program is the
only answer to the Idaho farm
tabor problem.
“What we should do to solve
the problem is first of all
recognize we have certain areas
of work that our own citizens will
not do,” said Clinton.
One is moving sprinkler pipe.
Thousands of illegal Mexican
aliens are employed for that task
than a giant insect. “If nature
were to evolve us all into In
sects,” Barth humorously
pointed out in his explanation of
the story, “we would probably
resemble some sort of realistic
literature, probably of the
epistolary style.” Another plug
for this forthcoming book.
Barth, speaking on campus
Wednesday night as the annual
Henry Failing guest lecturer, is a
respected author-educator and
currently professor of English
and creative writing at the Johns
Hopkins University of Baltimore,
Md.
Considered by some literary
critics to be a brilliantly inventive
writer of contemporary American
seriocomic fiction, Barth has
been compared to such writers as
Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding
and James Joyce. Some have
placed him in the “black
humorist" category, but he
rejects that, saying those writers
dramatize while he muses.
Barth’s writing has been called
“pure folly” and “blitheringly
sophomoric.” Book World
Magazine, reviewing Ns 1968
novel, “Lost in the Funhouse”,
said it contained “bushels of
junk...but pinnacles of wit.”
He has written six novels, from
“The Floating Qpera” (1966),
inspired by a river boat that
operated near Ns childhood
home in Maryland, to “Chimera”
(1972), a collection of three
novellas based loosely on Arabic
and Greco-Roman lore and in
tertwined with such modern
topics as women’s liberation,
ecology and hallucinogenic
drugs. He recieved the National
Book Award in fiction in 1973.
Barth’s first aspiration was to
music. He played the drums in
his Maryland High School band
and went on to enroll in the
Juiiiiard School of Music in New
Farmers seek legality for aliens
in Idaho, Clinton said.
His group spent $12,000 trying
to enlist sprinkler pipe movers.
“We proved to our satisfaction
that we could not get Americans
to do this job,” he said. But labor
leaders say the problem isn’t
people to do the job; it’s what
they get for it.
York. Leaving Juilliard, he went
to Johns Hopkins University to
study journalism. He served on
the faculties at Pennsylvania
State University and at the State
University of New York, Buffalo,
before returning to Johns
Hopkins to teach in 1973.
“I don’t see myself with a
Doctorate of Letters,” Barth said,
opening his presentation. “I like
to think of myself as more of a
doctorer of letters.”
Reading from the manuscript
of his latest work, a book-length
fiction in the form of letters,
Barth explained that the form of
his new novel has been con
sidered dead since it gained fame
and then faded in the 18th
Century. “But I shall take it In my
province as a doctorer of letters
to breathe life into the
phenomenon once again,” he
said.
The number seven plays an
important part in the novel. There
are seven correspondents writing
seven letters each, the action
spans seven months and takes
place in 1989 and contains
references to the Bicentennial,
seven years in the future. It also
concerns three wars, the Vietnam
war, the Revolutionary War and
the War of 1812.
While Barth admitted to being
preoccupied with ancient Greek
her os, “Letters” is relatively
modern and deals with “the role
of letters in the history of
history.” “Novels, god help us,
practice an impure art and we
should practice it to the fullest,”
he said.
The characters of “Letters”,
Barth explained, are “fictitious
and without any life at all.” “I’ve
never drawn any characters from
real life,” he says. "As a writer of
fiction I see it as a medieval
cruelty to those poor characters
to take them from real life.”
Barth continued to read from
his manuscript and occasionally
held a flash card in the air with
the word “marganayfaei”, un
fortunately the only word poor
Bonaparte’s computer can spell.
“A beefy anagram of monstrous
proportion,” exclaimed one
character to the insect-man trying
to decipher the message. More
reading and more flash cards
bore symbols to enhance the
narrative.
Finally, the end was near. The
characters began to tire of the
computer's silly game and quietly
slipped away exclaiming, “Leave
him alone with his jumbled
letters.”
COLLEGIATE
INVITATIONAL KARATE
TOURNAMENT
Free-Sparring and
Kata Competition
featuring Temo Chinen
Chief Instructor Go)u-Ryukarate-Do jB jlw
(North America) fHHv
with teams from: Canada. Washington. Oregon & California
Saturday
7:00 p.m. Mac Court
Admission $2.00
Tickets available EMU Main Desk and at the door
sponsored by *be EMU Club Sports Karate Club
»V.-***'*^,*
POETRY READING
TODAY
1 p.m.
FORUM ROOM
KEITH
JEFFERSON
Poet
author: The Hyena Reader
founder: Student Society for Preservation
of Afro-American Culture
lead singer: The Runners
J-fCJAy-u,
1 ! i
♦ * I ♦ 1 >>
Jnj « "u h r
- “ L.t
"i spit into the pit of the burning sun,
not out of envy, but because i like the
sound of steam, a hyena grows intimate
with Mysteries of Nature, and soon
learns to laugh loud and strong at the
niggardly pulse
that those who are not lovers that those who
are not lovers give to the living — and the
flamboyant sincerity of Dying.”
• an ASUO Production •
Pace 9