How tempting it has been, through the years of this monumental labor, to settle scores with that father-who-was-no-father — perhaps by repeating in parlous detail my mother's still-festering grievances from the latter years of their "mis-marriage," as she calls it, when she in her way like I in mine was sacrificed to his obsession with The Fates! Or by dwelling, in three-volume detail, upon the undeniable literary shortcomings of that trilogy, whose "controversial" aspects include more than its relentless, hyperbolical, ultimately tiresome eroticism! Or even to make the case that the work's real authorship should be credited (or debited) more to Grace Mason Forester than to M. F. Dickson Sr. — a man so lost in his preoccupations that it is arguably more a matter of his having perversely inspired her (a would-be novelist of sorts like her daughter, perhaps, but obliged to conceal her virtual authorship of The Fates lest her scandalized husband divorce her, as subsequently he did on lesser grounds) than vice versa!
Or even…(words fail me, as at the unended end of Atropos they failed its author-up-to-that-point)…to take the most sweepingly "Oedipal" revenge of all, by publishing this "appended" tape transcript and its appended Editor's Note separately from the three-volume critical corpus whose (vermiform!) Appendix it was meant to be — indeed, perhaps by publishing it instead of that obese, yet-to-be-completed corpus — and planting in it the seed (or worm) of insinuation that "my father," "Manfred F. Dickson" ("Sr."), and "his" trilogy The Fates are in fact finally fictions, the score-settling invention of a justly aggrieved virtual orphan whose lifelong, single-minded, but altogether futile endeavor to follow in his "father" 's footsteps has deprived him of any "meaningful" companionship except — take this, damned Dad! — playing King Oedipus indeed to a certain long-discarded Queen Jocasta, in a secret, Sphinx-guarded Thebes of our own devising!
Ha! There is no Clotho, Reader! No Lachesis! No Atropos! No Arundel or Mason-Dixon University, Severn Day School, or Bernbridge Manor! Nor any "Agatha/Aglaia," "Thelma/Thalia," or "Grace Mason Forester"! There is not, nor was there ever, any "M. F. Dickson Senior," nor (ipso facto) any M-F Junior! Figments all! Hollow, pathetic fictions!
There is only…
THE END
No: There is not even that. Not even that!
As I was saying…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN BARTH is the author of numerous works of fiction, including The Sot-Weed Factor, Lost in the Funhouse, The Book of Ten Nights and a Night, and the National Book Award winner Chimera. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, an F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Fiction, and a PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, among other honors. He taught for many years in the writing program at Johns Hopkins University.
* Just as I've shifted here, with "Izzy"'s indulgence, from Author to Teller du soir (it being now evening) of "Fred"'s Part Four.
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* A dedication that remains puzzling despite my having identified the (decidedly un-)"Gracious Masons" and included in this appendix their characteristically ribald perversion of the phrase "their ears," since on the evidence of their testimony it was my father who eagerly lent his ears to their naughty glosses on, e.g., lambda, upsilon, and trivium.
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