Handout 2

Reading List:

Norman Mailer, The Man Who Studied Yoga (1959)

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
John Barth, The Floating Opera (1956), Life Story (1968)
Philip Roth, Defender of the Faith (1959)

1. Norman Mailer, The Man Who Studied Yoga (1959)

I would introduce myself if it were not useless. The name I had last night will not be the same as the
name I have tonight. For the moment, then, let me say that I am think of Sam Slovoda. Obligatorily, I
study him, Sam Slovoda, who is neither ordinary nor extraordinary, who is not young nor yet old, not
tall nor short. He is sleeping and it is fit to describe him now, for like most humans he prefers sleeping
to not sleeping. He is a mild pleasant-looking man who has just turned forty. If the crown of his head
reveals a little, he has nourished in compensation the vanity of a mustache. He has generally when he
is awake an agreeable manner, at least with strangers; he appears friendly, tolerant, and genial. The
fact is that like most of us, he is full of envy, full of spite, a gossip, a man who is pleased to find others
are as unhappy as he, and yet this is the worst to be said he is a decent man. He is better than
most. He would prefer to see a more equitable world, he scorns prejudice and privilege, he tries to hurt
no one, he wishes to be liked. I will go even further. He has one serious virtue he is not fond of
himself, he wishes he were better. He would like to free himself of envy, of the annoying necessity to
talk about his friends, he would like to love people more; specifically, he would like to love his wife
more, and to love his two daughters without the tormenting if nonetheless irremediable vexation that
they closet his life in the dusty web of domestic responsibilities and drudging for money. How often he
tells himself with contempt that he has the cruelty of a kind weak man.
May I state that I do not dislike Sam Slovoda; it is just that I am disappointed in him. He has tried too
many things and never with a whole heart.
[]
However could he [Sam] organize his novel? What form to give it? It is so complex. Too loose, thinks
Sam, too scattered. Will he ever fall asleep? [] In the middle from wakefulness to slumber, in the
torpor which floats beneath blankets. I give an idea to Sam. Destroy time, and chaos may be ordered.
I say to him.
Destroy time and chaos may be ordered, he repeats after me, and in desperation to seek his coma,
mutters back, I do not feel my nose, my nose is numb, my eyes are heavy, my eyes are heavy.
So Sam enters the universe of sleep, a man who seeks to live in such a way as to avoid pain, and
succeeds merely in avoiding pleasure. What a dreary compromise is life!

2. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

Foreword
"Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male," such were the two titles under which the
writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. "HumbertHumbert," their
author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days
before his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate
Clark, Esq., now of the District of Columbia bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his
request on a clause in his client's will which empowered my eminent cousin to use the discretion in
all matters pertaining to the preparation of "Lolita" for print. Mr. Clark's decision may have been
influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a
modest work ("Do the Senses make Sense?") wherein certain morbid states and perversions had
been discussed.

My task proved simpler than either of us had anticipated. Save for the correction of obvious
solecisms and a careful suppression of a few tenacious details that despite "H.H."'s own efforts still
subsisted in his text as signposts and tombstones (indicative of places or persons that taste would
conceal and compassion spare), this remarkable memoir is presented intact. Its author's bizarre
cognomen is his own invention; and, of course, this mask through which two hypnotic eyes seem to
glow had to remain unlifted in accordance with its wearer's wish. While "Haze" only rhymes with the
heroine's real surname, her first name is too closely interwound with the inmost fiber of the book to
allow one to alter it; nor (as the reader will perceive for himself) is there any practical necessity to
do so. References to "H.H."'s crime may be looked up by the inquisitive in the daily papers for
September-October 1952; its cause and purpose would have continued to come under my reading
lamp.
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the "real" people
beyond the "true" story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. "Windmuller," or
"Ramsdale," who desires his identity suppressed so that "the long shadow of this sorry and sordid
business" should not reach the community to which he is proud to belong. His daughter, "Louise," is
by now a college sophomore, "Mona Dahl" is a student in Paris. "Rita" has recently married the
proprietor of a hotel in Florida. Mrs. "Richard F. Schiller" died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn
girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. "Vivian
Darkbloom" has written a biography, "My Cue," to be publshed shortly, and critics who have
perused the manuscript call it her best book. The caretakers of the various cemeteries involved
report that no ghosts walk.
Part One
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of
three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the
morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was
Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did,
indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a
certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was
born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies
and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noblewinged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
()
I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a
Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going
to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on
the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he
married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset
parsons, experts in obscure subjectspaleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic
mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth
in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you
can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all
know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or
suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry
warmth, golden midges.
()
Bourbon Street (in a town named New Orleans) whose sidewalks, said the tour book, may [ I liked the
may ] feature entertainment by pick a ninnies who will { I liked the will even better] tap-dance for
pennies (what fun), while its numerous small and intimate night clubs are thronged with visitors
(naughty). Collections of frontier lore. Ante-bellum homes with iron-trellis balconies and hand-worked
stairs, the kind down which movie ladies with sun-kissed shoulders run in rich Technicolor, holding up
the fronts of their flounced skirts with both little hands in that special way, and the devoted Negress
shaking her head on the upper landing. The Menninger Foundation, a psychiatric clinic, just for the heck
of it. A patch of beautifully eroded clay; and yucca blossoms, so pure, so waxy, but lousy with creeping
white flies. Independence, Missouri, the starting point of the Old Oregon Trail; and Abiliene, Kansas, the
home of the Wild Bill Something Rodeo. Distant mountains. Near mountains. More mountains; bluish
beauties never attainable, or ever turning into inhabited hill after hill; south-eastern ranges, altitudinal
failures as alps go; heart and sky-piercing snow-veined gray colossi of stone, relentless peaks appearing
from nowhere at a turn of the highway; timbered enormities, with a system of neatly overlapping dark

firs, interrupted in places by pale puffs of aspen; pink and lilac formations, Pharaonic, phallic, too
prehistoric for words (blas Lo); buttes of black lava; early spring mountains with young-elephant
lanugo along their spines; end-of-the -summer mountains, all hunched up, their heavy Egyptian limbs
folded under folds of tawny moth-eaten plush; oatmeal hills, flecked with green round oaks; a last
rufous mountain with a rich rug of lucerne at its foot.
End of the novel

When I started, fifty-six days ago, to write Lolita, first in the psychopathic ward for
observation, and then in this well-heated, albeit tombal, seclusion, I thought I would use these
notes in toto at my trial, to save not my head, of course, but my soul. In mind-composition,
however, I realized that I could not parade living Lolita. I still may use parts of this memoir in
hermetic sessions, but publication is to be deferred. For reasons that may appear more
obvious than they really are, I am opposed to capital punishment; this attitude will be, I trust,
shared by the sentencing judge. Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at
least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges. But even so, Dolly
Schiller will probably survive me by many years. The following decision I make with all the
legal impact and support of a signed testament: I wish this memoir to be published only when
Lolita is no longer alive. Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while
the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as
I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other
fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a
boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter
shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve.
And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist
at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later
generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic
sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

3. John Barth, The Floating Opera (1956), Life Story (1968)

The Floating Opera (1956)
Beginning of the novel
Tuning my Piano
To someone like myself, whose literary activities have been confined since 1920 mainly to legal
briefs and Inquiry-writing, the hardest thing about the task at hand -- viz., the explanation of a day
in 1937 when I changed my mind -- is getting into it. I've never tried my hand at this sort of thing
before, but I know enough about myself to realize that once the ice is broken the pages will flow all
too easily, for I'm not naturally a reticent fellow, and the problem then will be to stick to the story
and finally to shut myself up. I've no doubts on that score: I can predict myself correctly almost
every time, because opinion here in Cambridge to the contrary, my behavior is actually quite
consistent. If other people (my friend Harrison Mack, for instance, or his wife Jane) think I'm
eccentric and unpredictable, it is because my actions and opinions are inconsistent with their
principles, if they have any; I assure you that they're quite consistent with mine. And although my
principles might change now and then -- this book, remember, concerns one such change -nevertheless I always have them a-plenty, more than I can handily use, and they usually hang all in
a piece, so that my life is never less logical simply for its being unorthodox. Also, I get things done,
as a rule.
For example, I've got this book started now, and though we're probably a good way from the
story yet, at least we're headed toward it, and I for one have learned to content myself with that.
Perhaps when I've finished describing that particular day I mentioned before -- I believe it was about
June 21, 1937 -- perhaps when I reach the bedtime of that day, if ever, I'll come back and destroy
these pages of piano-tuning. Or perhaps not: I intend directly to introduce myself, caution you
against certain possible interpretations of my name, explain the significance of this book's title, and
do several other gracious things for you, like a host fussing over a guest, to make you as

comfortable as possible and to dunk you gently into the meandering stream of my story -- useful
activities better preserved than scrapped.
[]Todd Andrews, then. Now, watch how I can move when I really care to: I'm fifty-four years old
and six feet tall, but weigh only 145. I look like what I think Gregory Peck, the movie actor, will look
like when he's fifty-four, except that I keep my hair cut short enough not to have to comb it, and I
don't shave every day. (The comparison to Mr. Peck isn't intended as self-praise, only as description.
Were I God, creating the face of either Todd Andrews or Gregory Peck, I'd change it just a trifle here
and there.) I'm well off, by most standards: I'm a partner in the law firm of Andrews, Bishop &
Andrews -- the second Andrews is me -- and the practice nets me as much as I want it to, up to
perhaps ten thousand dollars a year, maybe nine, although I've never pushed it far enough to find
out. I live and work in Cambridge, the seat of Dorchester County, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
It's my home town and my father's -- Andrews is an old Dorchester name -- and I've never lived
anywhere else except for the years I spent in the Army during the First World War and the years I
spent in Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland Law School afterwards. I'm a
bachelor. I live in a single room in the Dorset Hotel, just across High Street from the courthouse, and
my office is in "Lawyers' Row" on Court Lane, one block away. Although my law practice pays my
hotel bill, I consider it no more my career than a hundred other things: sailing, drinking, walking the
streets, writing my Inquiry, staring at walls, hunting ducks and 'coons, reading, playing politics. I'm
interested in any number of things, enthusiastic about nothing. I wear rather expensive clothing. I
smoke Robert Burns cigars. My drink is Sherbrook rye and ginger ale. I read often and
unsystematically -- that is, I have my own system, but it's unorthodox. I am in no hurry. In short, I
live my life -- or have lived it, at least, since 1937 -- in much the same manner as I'm writing this
first chapter of The Floating Opera.
()
Why The Floating Opera? I could explain until Judgment Day, and still not explain completely. I think
that to understand any one thing entirely, no matter how minute, requires the understanding of
every other thing in the world. That's why I throw up my hands sometimes at the simplest things;
it's also why I don't mind spending a lifetime getting ready to begin my Inquiry. Well, The Floating
Opera. That's part of the name of a showboat that used to travel around the Virginia and Maryland
tidewater areas: Adonis Original & Unparalleled Floating Opera; Jacob R. Adam, owner and captain;
admissions 20, 35, and 50 cents. The Floating Opera was tied up at Long Wharf on the day I
changed my mind, in 1937, and some of this book happens aboard it. That's reason enough to use it
as a title. But there's a better reason. It always seemed a fine idea to me to build a showboat with
just one big flat open deck on it, and to keep a play going continuously. The boat wouldn't be
moored, but would drift up and down the river on the tide, and the audience would sit along both
banks. They could catch whatever part of the plot happened to unfold as the boat floated past, and
then they'd have to wait until the tide ran back again to catch another snatch of it, if they still
happened to be sitting there. To fill in the gaps they'd have to use their imaginations, or ask more
attentive neighbors, or hear the word passed along from upriver or downriver. Most times they
wouldn't understand what was going on at all, or they'd think they knew, when actually they didn't.
Lots of times they'd be able to see the actors, but not hear them. I needn't explain that that's how
much of life works: our friends float past; we become involved with them; they float on, and we
must rely on hearsay or lose track of them completely; they float back again, and we either renew
our friendship -- catch up to date -- or find that they and we don't comprehend each other any
more. And that's how this book will work, I'm sure. It's a floating opera, friend, fraught with
curiosities, melodrama, spectacle, instruction, and entertainment, but it floats willy-nilly on the tide
of my vagrant prose: you'll catch sight of it, lose it, spy it again; and it may require the best efforts
of your attention and imagination -- together with some patience, if you're an average fellow -- to
keep track of the plot as it sails in and out of view.
()
End of the Novel
The Floating Opera
That's about what it amounted to, this change of mind in 1937: a simple matter of carrying out my
premises completely to their conclusions. For the sake of convention I'd like to end the show with an
emotional flourish, but though the progress of my reasoning from 1919 to 1937 was in many ways
turbulent, it was of the essence of my conclusion that no emotion was necessarily involved in it. To
realize that nothing makes any final difference is overwhelming; but if one goes no farther and

becomes a saint, a cynic, or a suicide on principle, one hasn't reasoned completely. The truth is that
nothing makes any difference, including that truth. Hamlet's question is, absolutely, meaningless.
While finishing my cigar I made a few more idle notes for my Inquiry, which was, you understand,
open again. They are of small interest here -- which is to say, they are of some interest. It occurred
to me, for example, that faced with an infinitude of possible directions and having no ultimate
reason to choose one over another, I would in all probability, though not at all necessarily, go on
behaving much as I had thitherto, as a rabbit shot on the run keeps running in the same direction
until death overtakes him. Possibly I would on some future occasion endeavor once again to blow up
the Floating Opera, my good neighbors and associates, and/or my mere self; most probably I would
not. I and my townsmen would play that percentage in my case as, for that matter, we did in each
of theirs. I considered too whether, in the real absence of absolutes, values less than absolute
mightn't be regarded as in no way inferior and even be lived by. But that's another inquiry, and
another story.
Also reopened were the Letter to My Father and that third peach basket, the investigation of myself,
for if I was ever to explain to myself why Dad committed suicide, I must explain to him why I did
not. The project would take time. I reflected that Marvin Rose's report on my heart would reach me
in the next day's mail after all, and smiled: never before had the uncertainty of that organ seemed
of less moment. It was beside the point now whether endocarditis was still among my infirmities:
the problem was the same either way, the "solution" also. At least for the time being; at least for
me.
I would take a good long careful time, then, to tell Dad the story of The Floating Opera. Perhaps I
would expire before ending it; perhaps the task was endless, like its fellows. No matter. Even if I
died before ending my cigar, I had all the time there was.
This clear, I made a note to intercept my note to Jimmy Andrews, stubbed out (after all) my cigar,
undressed, went to bed in enormous soothing solitude, and slept fairly well despite the absurd
thunderstorm that soon afterwards broke all around.
Life Story (1968)
Beginning
Without discarding what he had already written he began his story afresh in a somewhat different
manner. Whereas his earlier version had opened in a straightforward documentary fashion and then
degenerated or at least modulated intentionally into irrealism and dissonance he decided this time
to tell the tale from start to finish in a conservative, realistic, un-selfconscious way. He being by
vocation an author of novels and stories it was perhaps inevitable that that one afternoon the
possibility would occur to the writer of these lines that his own life might be a fiction, in which he
was the leading or an accessory character. He happened at the time [Barths note: 9:00 AM,
Monday, June 20, 1966] to be in his study attempting to draft the opening pages of a new short
story; its general idea had preoccupied him for some months along with other general ideas, but
certain elements of the conceit, without which he could scarcely proceed, remained unclear. More
specifically: narrative plots may be imagined as consisting of a gound situation (Sheherazade
desires not to die) focused and dramatized by a vehicle situation (Sheherezade beguiles the King
with endless stories), the several incidents which of which have their final value in terms of their
bearing upon the ground-situation. In our authors case it was the vehicle that had vouchsafed
itself, first as a germinal proposition in his commonplace book D comes to suspect that the world
is a novel, himself a fictional personage subsequently as an articulated conceit explored over
several pages of the workbook in which he had elaborated more systematically his casual
inspirations: since D is writing a fictional account of this conviction he has indisputably a fictional
existence in his own account, replicating what he suspects to be his own situation. Moreover E, hero
of Ds account, is said to be writing a similar account, and so the replication is in both ontological
directions, et cetera. But the ground situation some state of affairs on Ds part which would give
dramatic resonance to his attempts prove himself factual, assuming he made such attempts
obstinately withheld itself from his imagination. As is commonly the case the question reduced to
one of stakes: what were to be the consequences of Ds and finally Es disproving or verifying his
suspicion, and why should a reader be interested?
()
End of story

To what conclusion will he come? Hed been about to append to his own tale inasmuch as the old
analogy between Author and God, novel and world, can no longer be employed unless deliberately
as a false analogy, certain things follow: 1) fiction must acknowledge its fictiousness and
metaphoric invalidity or 2) choose to ignore the question or deny it relevance or 3) establish some
other, acceptable relation between itself, its author, its reader. Just as he finished doing so however
his real wife and imaginary mistress entered his study: Its a little past midnight she announced
with a smile ;do you know what that means?
Though shed come into his story unannounced at a critical moment he did not describe her, for
even as he recollected that hes seen his first light just thirty-six years before the night incumbent
he saw his last: that he could not afterall be a character in a work of fiction inasmuch as such a
fiction would be of an entirely different character from what he thought of as fiction. Fiction
consisted of such moments of the imagination as Cutlers Morganfield, RiboudsTales within Tales,
his own creations: fact of such as for example read those fictions. More, he could demonstrate by
syllogism that the story of his life was a story was a work of fact: though assaults upon the
boundary between life and art, reality and dream, were undeniably a staple of his own and his
centurys literature as theyd been of Shakespeares and Cervantess, yet it was a fact that in the
corpus of fiction as far as he knew no fictional character had become convinced as he had that he
was a character in a work of fiction. This being the case and he having in fact becoming thus
convinced it followed that his conviction was false. Happy birthday, and his wife et cetera, kissing
him et cetera to obstruct his view of the end of the sentence he was nearing the end of, playfully
refusing to be nay-said so that in fact he did at last as he did his fictional character end his ending
story endless by interruption, cap his pen.

4. Philip Roth, Defender of the Faith (1959)

Beginning
IN MAY OF 1945, ONLY A FEW WEEKS AFTER the fighting had ended in Europe, I was rotated back to the
States, where I spent the remainder of the war with a training company at Camp Crowder, Missouri.
Along with the rest of the Ninth Army, I had been racing across Germany so swiftly during the late
winter and spring that when I boarded the plane, I couldn't believe its destination lay to the west. My
mind might inform me otherwise, but there was an inertia of the spirit that told me we were flying to a
new front, where we would disembark and continue our push eastward-eastward until we'd circled the
globe, marching through villages along whose twisting, cobbled streets crowds of the enemy would
watch us take possession of what, up till then, they'd considered their own. I had changed enough in
two years not to mind the trembling of old people, the crying of the very young, the uncertainty and
fear in the eyes of the once arrogant. I had been fortunate enough to develop an infantryman's heart,
which, like his feet, at first aches and swells but finally grows horny enough for him to travel the
weirdest paths without feeling a thing.
()
"O.K., then," he said. He turned to the others. "Double time, march!" They started off, but ten feet away
Grossbart spun around and, running backward, called to me "Good shabbus, sir!" And then the three of
them were swallowed into the alien Missouri dusk. Even after they had disappeared over the parade
ground, whose green was now a deep blue, I could hear Grossbart singing the doubletime cadence, and
as it grew dimmer and dimmer, it suddenly touched a deep memoryas-as did the slant of the light-and I
was remembering the shrill sounds of a Bronx playground where, years ago, beside the Grand
Concourse, I had played on long spring evenings such as this. ...It was a pleasant memory for a young
man so far from peace and home, and it brought so many recollections with it that I began to grow
exceedingly tender about myself. In fact, I indulged myself in a reverie so strong that I felt as though a
hand were reaching down inside me. It had to reach so very far to touch me! It had to reach past those
days in the forests of Belgium, and past the dying I'd refused to weep over; past the nights in German
farmhouses whose books we'd burned to warm us; past endless stretches when I had shut off all
softness I might feel for my fellows, and had managed even to deny myself the posture of a conquerorthe swagger that I, as a Jew, might well have worn as my boots whacked against the rubble of Wesel,
Munster, and Braunschweig, and finally Berlin.
But now one night noise, one rumor of home and time past, and memory plunged down through all I
had anesthetized, and came to what I suddenly remembered was myself. So itwas not altogether

curious that, in search of more of me, I found myself following Grossbart's tracks to Chapel No. 3, where
the Jewish services were being held.
()