Final Fridays by John Barth Page A

aware of itself as a monumental epic poem than are its great predecessors and models, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey . Just as the poem’s story-line traces the triumphant Roman empire back to wandering refugees from fallen Troy (and thus settles historical scores with Homer’s Greeks), so the Roman poet programmatically combines in Aeneas’s adventures an Odyssey and an Iliad, respectfully going one-on-one with the master, so to speak, in episode after episode, as if to say “Anything you Greeks did, we Romans can imitate, equal, and perhaps exceed.” Politically and militarily there are winners and losers in such competitions; in art, one does better to speak not of victors and vanquished but of inspiration and reciprocal enrichment. Readers who know both Homer and Virgil find their enjoyment of each enhanced by its prefiguration or reorchestration of the other. Whether or not, as Jorge Luis Borges declares, “Every great writer creates his own precursors” (a sort of literary Anthropic
Principle), great artists unquestionably enrich and revalidate their precursors, as well as conversely. 12
    In analogous wise, the Christian New Testament is much aware of itself—or at least its compilers and commentators have been thus aware of it—as following, perhaps as “completing,” the Hebrew Bible. To this lay and respectfully agnostic reader, that awareness is most intriguing in what I think of as the Jesus Paradox. Indeed, at a point some decades past in my novelizing career, this paradox virtually possessed my imagination, although I came to it not from any particular preoccupation with the Bible but via a more general preoccupation with the myth of the wandering hero—Joseph Campbell’s “hero with a thousand faces”—as it appears in virtually all ages and cultures. The résumés of such mythic figures are famously similar: Lord Raglan’s early study The Hero lists 22 items more or less common to their CVs, from “(1) The hero’s mother is a royal virgin,” to “(22) He has one or more holy sepulchres,” and proceeds to measure against this template a fair assortment of candidates, from Oedipus to Robin Hood, giving each a score.
    Fascinated, in the 1960s, with three novels under my authorial belt, I set myself the following thought-experiment: Imagine a candidate for or aspirant to mythic-herohood who happens to know the script , so to speak, as Virgil knew Homer’s epics and as Dante knew both Virgil’s and Homer’s, and who takes it as his project to attain mythic-herohood by following that script to the letter: by repeating or imitating in detail the curriculum vitae or typical career-moves of his eminent predecessors. Those precursors, let us imagine, unselfconsciously did what they did, as we imagine the bardic Homer unselfconsciously composing, evolving, or refining his brace of epics; our man, however, does what he does because he knows that that’s
what mythic heroes do . He is, in a word, uninnocent. I then imagined (and got gratifying fictive mileage from) two exemplary, perhaps cautionary, case studies: the minor Greek mythic hero Bellerophon and the tragicomic protagonist of my novel-then-in-progress, Giles Goat-Boy .
    In Case 1, per my reorchestration of the myth, Perseus’s envious cousin Bellerophon conscientiously and meticulously imitates the pattern of mythic-herohood as embodied by his celebrated relative and becomes, not the mythic hero he aspires to be, but a perfect imitation of a mythic hero, which is of course not the same thing at all. He has completed the curricular requirements, as it were, but that circumstance no more makes him a bona fide mythic hero than completing the requirements for an M.A. makes one a true master of the arts. Similarly (to reapproach our subject), one might imagine a David Koresh or Jim Jones who takes himself to be not only divinely inspired but in some sense the