The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor
By John Barth
Little, Brown
The Arabian Nights is a text with a history as confused as one of its own tales. Over the centuries, it has been the subject of numerous re-writings, revisions and augmentations. It is, after all, a story about the telling of stories, and one that arose from a tradition of oral storytelling. Since it cannot be attributed to any one author, The Arabian Nights seems to invite new generations of authors to try their hands at it, to make the Nights their own.
American author John Barth has made considerable use of The Nights as an archetype for the weaving of complex narrative structures through the interpolation of tales, and has parodied and borrowed from it in several of his works. His latest novel, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, follows in this vein by blending a parodic re-writing of the story of Sinbad the Sailor with the life story of an American journalist from Maryland.
Barth’s novel begins with the end: Death himself, “The Destroyer of Delights,” has finally come for Scheherazade. Where once she strove to keep him at bay through the telling of stories, she now longs for Death, who has already taken away her friends and family. But in an amusing inversion, Death demands from her one last tale before he will take her away, a “virgin” tale and not one of the dog-eared tales from The Nights. Thus she begins The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor.
The story of Sheherazade is told by “Simon William Behler, a.k.a. ‘Baylor’ the once-sort-of-famous ‘New Journalist,’” to a nurse in a mental hospital. In his tale Behler casts himself as both himself and as that other Sinbad from The Arabian Nights, the like-named porter outside the famed sailor’s palace who is invited in to hear of his adventures. Somebody is “that other, self-styled Sinbad, that nobody whom folks called (for convenience sake) the Landsman.” For “Somebody took that name because then and there, at the time we tell of, he was a streetwise castaway from the Here and Now who happened to know a thing or two about S. the So-Called Sailor, this wealthy Baghdaddy.”
Night after night in Sinbad’s palace, “Somebody” (Behler) and Sinbad batch each other story for story before the sailor’s guests. Barth’s brief re-telling of Sinbad’s stories are hilarious, full of absurd detail and farce. In Sinbad’s escape from the valley of gemstones and serpents, for instance, the famed sailor gives a gruesomely “realistic” account of how he tied himself to a piece of meat and was carried to safety by a vulture looking for food:
Alas, this particular side of mutton
had been so many times recycled in the
heat of the day that it now dripped
and stank like carrion … I scanned the
cliff top, hoping for a fresher
vehicle … [there being none]
nevertheless, breathing gingerly, I
trussed myself under the rotten meal
in hope of retrieval, and there spent
the most disgusting hour of my story
thus far. No rocs appeared — rocs
don’t eat carrion — but so many flies
swarmed down that with any
organization at all, they alone could
have carried us off … I praised Allah
the Tireless Schoolmaster, who deigns
to teach us lessons even when we’re
pat applying them.
The biography of Behler the American journalist is narrated in the first person in a conventional “realist” style. There is, however, a prominent use of symbols that undermines this realism and works effectively to bring an overall unity to these chapters. Behler’s wristwatches, for instance, serve as markers of the passing stages in his life. For the most part, Barth’s evocation of an American boyhood is charming and at times beautiful in its Proustian recollection of the pains and joys of early experience. Behler as an adult, however, is often such an unsavoury character that it is often hard to feel any concern for him (and we are apparently meant to). Barth slips into embarrassingly dated and at times offensive descriptions of Behler and his sex life with some regularity. We are told of how he “fucked his brains out” with one woman, had a (wince) time-transcending fuck” with another, and how he has the urge on a couple of occasions to punch out his wife. In this last instance, for example, after Behler’s violent thoughts his wife is depicted as more and more of a monster in what seems to be an attempt to justify this impulse. Sure, he never carries it out, but you really have to wonder what Barth is up to.
On a purely formal level the book is, as might be expected of Barth, structurally dazzling. These two story-telling Sinbads, the famed Arabian adventurer and the American journalist, become woven into each others’ tales. From opposite points they come to merge as almost a single character, Behler’s sensitive realist narrative becomes more fantastic, as Sinbad’s own fabulous story becomes more plain and realistic.
Barth does not, however, let the intricacies of structure interfere with spinning a good yarn. The prime idea he seems to have taken from The Arabian Nights is that a storyteller’s ultimate responsibility is to entertain. Chock full of sex (some of it of questionable interest, as mentioned), romance, intrigue and adventure, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, like its Arabian predecessor, is able to keep the “Destroyer of Delights” at bay just a little longer.
