John Barth (Routledge Revivals)

Heide Ziegler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317570400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

John Barth represents most completely what has been termed postmodernism, not because his work comprises more postmodernist features than other contemporary writers but because, for Barth, "life" and "art" are two sides of the same coin.

In this brief study, first published in 1987, Heide Ziegler examines all Barth's novels. She argues that each pair of novels first "exhausts" and then "replenishes" those literary genres that hinge on a particular world view: the existentialist novel, the Bildungsroman, the Kunstlerroman, or the realistic novel. Through the division of labour between character and author Barth manages to develop a new mode of literary parody which projects itself beyond the mocked literary model and even self-parody into the realm of future fiction.

This book is ideal for students of literature and postmodern studies.

1

INTRODUCTION: THE SENSE OF AN ENDING

John Simmons Barth, Jr., was born on 27 May 1930, in Cambridge, Maryland. He has remained deeply rooted in the traditions of this rural southern corner of the Old Line State, and the familiar Tidewater Maryland setting provides the background for most of his novels. In fact, Barth could be called the twentieth-century laureate of Maryland, if Ebenezer Cooke, the eighteenth-century poet laureate of Maryland, author of The Sot-Weed Factor: A Voyage to Maryland, A Satyr (1708), who was to become the hero of Barth’s third novel, were not a necessary yet too obscure comparison for an author of Barth’s significance. After attending Cambridge High School, Barth in the summer of 1947 entered the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, where he studied harmony and orchestration for a few months. Later in 1947 he entered Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he took a BA in 1951 and an MA in 1952. His master’s thesis was an as yet unpublished novel entitled “Shirt of Nessus.” From 1953 to 1972 Barth taught at Pennsylvania State University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and at Boston University. In 1973 he accepted the post of professor in the graduate writing seminars at Johns Hopkins, thus returning both to his Alma Mater and to Maryland. He lives in Baltimore and has a summer home on the Eastern Shore, often sailing on the waters of Chesapeake Bay which lie between, riding the tides between public and private realms in much the same fashion as his novels, up to his novel-in-progress, The Tidewater Tales, ride the tides between art and life.

The sequence of the novels of John Barth displays his own development as an artist of the later twentieth century, but it also – in Romantic fashion – can be seen as representative of the development of twentieth-century narrative modes as such. While writing his first two novels, The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, in 1955, Barth, like other fledgling contemporary writers, was influenced by the existentialist discussion which dominated the American intellectual stage of the 1950s. These early novels were written in the wake of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, the fiction of Samuel Beckett, and such American works as Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man (1944), Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), which showed strong existentialist influence. Today Barth’s attitude toward his early narrative efforts and to existentialist philosophy in general has become rather aloof – despite his willingness to resurrect the protagonists from these early novels in LETTERS (1979) and thus to acknowledge his own literary past. Barth thus rejects neither the plot nor the characters of The Floating Opera or The End of the Road, but he probably now feels uneasy about not having yet found his own authorial voice in these works – the self-questioning voice that, teasing at the very role of author, was to become an unmistakable literary trademark in his subsequent fictions.

It is with the writing of his novels of the early 1960s, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) and Giles Goat-Boy or, The Revised New Syllabus (1966) that Barth leaves the throng of his contemporaries and learns, not his trade (that he had already mastered), but an understanding of his vocation: to draw from the ontological, perhaps metaphysical, rupture between art and life the energy for his own life and art by variously exploiting the impossibility of their reconciliation. The Sot-Weed Factor is an historical, Giles Goat-Boy a mythical novel, which proceed from eighteenth-century notions of the dynamic picaresque on the one hand and static allegory on the other. The irreconcilability of these two narrative modes serves to represent the impossibility for any latter-day author to conceive of another Bildungsroman (or novel of character development). As an artist, however, Barth can sustain the attempt to reconcile art and life, not ever sacrificing one to the other, and thus deny the consequences of the rupture between them for at least the span of his own life. And since this is the most any artist can do, Barth as author will at least come to represent the possibility of Bildung.

If in The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy Barth thus sets out to acquire the Bildung he needs for his life as an artist, he complements and extends this task in Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (1968) and Chimera (1972) by demonstrating how this life can then become art. Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera move into the genre of Künstlerroman, the artist’s self-reflexive version of the Bildungsroman. However, parodying the very premises of the Künstlerroman by unravelling the plot in the process of its being woven, as it were, both novels undermine the idea of the artist’s personal development, and the genre itself. Significantly, Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera can just as well be called two series of short fictions (and are designated as such by the author) rather than novels. Still, even the parodic exhaustion of the Bildungsroman and the Künstlerroman requires the adoption of mentors or spiritual fathers. In order to find his own path, Barth at first chose not to listen to his immediate literary predecessors, the modernists; instead, while writing The Sot-Weed Factor, he turned to his literary great-grandparents, so to speak, to those writers who represent the beginnings of the novel, especially the English novel: Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and particularly Laurence Sterne. However, being a twentieth-century pupil of the eighteenth-century masters, Barth had to deal with the contemporary precariousness of the genre those masters had established as the novel. This explains the simultaneous influence on Barth of yet earlier writers, from Boccaccio and Rabelais to Cervantes. His choice of literary mentors for The Sot-Weed Factor thus made Barth a genuine heir of the European literary tradition – but this was a position which, once acquired, he soon felt he had to transcend.

In Giles Goat-Boy, the novelist attempts to recreate the world as his own fiction. This is an undertaking of mythical proportions, and Barth – abetted in his endeavors by a scholarly interest in comparative mythology in the 1960s – accordingly studied mythic patterns and structures, particularly the career of the mythic hero as developed by Carl Gustav Jung, Lord Raglan, and Joseph Campbell. These studies helped Barth to broaden his Bildung as artist through a transcendence of the notion of individual development. His interests were no longer defined by historical time sequences, but extended into the realm of “timeless” myth. However, in order not to confuse myth and existential experience, Barth the artist maintained a rational attitude toward myth as mysticism which he had gleaned from William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and which accounts for the tone of Giles Goat-Boy; it is, like all Barth’s fiction, a comic work. Giles Goat-Boy not only imitates but also parodies myth. Its hero is none the less tragic, since after his trials and ordeals his mystical experience cannot be translated into real work in the real world. This “Tragic View” reflects the tragic posture of the artist, who cannot put what is constructed through language to work in the world.

The next logical step for Barth to take in order to overcome what, after the exhaustion of the existentialist novel, appeared as a further dead end was to fictionalize his position as an artist severed from life. Thus in Lost in the Funhouse Barth was finally free to acknowledge, or rather establish, James Joyce as his one most influential literary “father.” Lost in the Funhouse is a parody of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1915); Barth’s present project, The Tidewater Tales: A Novel, may turn out to be a parody of Ulysses (1922) (or an echo of the Odyssey); and perhaps after another detour, Barth may ultimately come up with his own ironic version of Finnegans Wake (1939). But if Lost in the Funhouse is still the parody of a Künstlerroman, it is not, unlike Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, also a parody of a Bildungsroman. Since the Künstlerroman is often regarded as a subgenre of the Bildungsroman, with the hero whose development we follow simply happening to be an artist, Barth had to evolve a strategy that would allow him to dissociate those two genres. He achieved this end deviously, by undermining, in both Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera, the whole convention of plot development in the novel. Turning once more to Boccaccio, but this time with a more formalistic intention (the American intellectual scene had by the 1970s generally begun to respond to the literary criticism of the Russian formalists and the structuralists), he began to study the structures of frame-tale literature, applying his insights into the relationship between framed stories and their frames to his own version of the Künstlerroman. In addition to Boccaccio’s Decameron, the Arabian stories of The Thousand and One Nights – the classic frame tale of them all – had long drawn Barth’s particular interest. Scheherazade represents Barth’s exemplary model for the relevance of the frame tale for the artist: like the artist, she tells all the stories, at the same time becoming the story-teller in the text. The framing device in Lost in the Funhouse, a Moebius strip, is still purely formalistic; but in Chimera the notion that the three novellas which comprise the book resemble the tripartite mythic monster is complemented by the chimera’s appearance in the “Bellerophoniad” – in other words, by the intrusion of a framing character into one of the framed stories. Whereas in Lost in the Funhouse the character of the fledgling artist, Ambrose Mensch, had to give way to characters who, like Menelaus, are not artists, but become their own stories, in Chimera Barth manages to reintegrate the person of the artist into the mainstream if not of life, then at least of literature, by having himself as an author meeting Scheherazade in the “Dunyazadiad” in a timeless realm of story-telling.

The story “Echo” – the tale of how Narcissus dies of self-love and the nymph Echo begins to echo his story – appears as the central tale of Lost in the Funhouse and is the turning-point of Barth’s fiction. Up to this point the author had implicitly described his development and gradual transformation into an artist. Now the introduction of the character of Author with a capital A, whose role resembles that of the nymph Echo, left Barth himself free to return to life. The two novels that follow, LETTERS (1979) and Sabbatical: A Romance (1982), return toward realism – despite their titles. LETTERS is a realistic novel about imaginary characters culled from the sum of Barth’s own writing, but juxtaposed to the actual author. In a sense, they too have become actual; this presupposes that the author might, in a sense, become fictional. Drawing on the tradition of the epistolary novel, Barth thus first defines and then unites the split personalities of author and Author – just as letters define and unite writer and reader. Although the mode in LETTERS is realistic – in the sense of emphasizing not fiction’s power of falsehood but its capacity to acquaint us with realities – its epistolary method is as far removed from contemporary narrative norms as possible. Again Barth goes back to the eighteenth century, and above all to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748), in order to create the possibility of echoes – for echoes, in the form of re-enactment, recycling, and revolution, are the theme of the book. Echoes are real, but distorted, because of the time-lag between the speaking and the hearing of the identical voice. So the epistolary novel can defamiliarize the reality Barth offers to give us; but it can also permit it.

LETTERS supposedly is the child of the author’s alter ego and the Author’s Muse; Sabbatical presents us with the story as the child of the Author, but derived from the conjoined male-and-female narrative point of view of the alter egos of the author and his wife. The novel is not autobiographical in the sense of translating the facts of Barth’s life directly into art, but it echoes personal life while defamiliarizing it. The distorting allusion here is to the American tradition of the romance novel, and perhaps especially to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous explanation of it in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables (1851), where he says that a romance, while it must keep to “the truth of the human heart – has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.”¹ It is in much this way that the lives of the author and his wife relate to the lives of the protagonists, who together serve as Author. Edgar Allan Poe, and especially his Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), represents the true literary source of the “sabbatical” cruise, but Poe in turn cannot be merely seen as a “literary” father. Ancestor of one of the protagonists, he becomes a “literal” part of the novel.

Barth’s novels come in pairs – or, as he would prefer to call them, “twins.” Each pair of novels functions according to the same principle: the first “exhausts” a particular genre, the second transcends or “replenishes” it – to draw on the terminology of Barth’s two best-known literary essays, “The Literature of Exhaustion” and “The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction.”² A further principle can be detected that has determined the sequence of the genres the author chooses first to exhaust and then to replenish. Up to the middle of Lost in the Funhouse the genres taken – the existentialist novel, then the Bildungsroman, then the Künstlerroman – focus ever more narrowly on the author’s development as an artist; from then on they seem to broaden again in order to identify or frame, in widening circles, the relationship between author and Author or, in the Romantic sense, to define the artist as a representative of mankind. Although ambitious, this claim is essentially aesthetic. Barth does not pose as the moral teacher of humanity. The underlying career his work proposes is that of the self-discovery of the artist who believes, none the less, in life’s fundamental energies, reconciling the challenges of the self and those of mankind by retelling life’s stories. Each book he has written generically seems to convey the sense of an ending; each, however, seems to offer the author the personal possibility of a new start. Thus Barth’s sequence of fictions gives the paradoxical impression of recurrence as well as of continuance – just like the Moebius strip, the image which may well become the framing device for Barth’s whole oeuvre, particularly since in Lost in the Funhouse the Moebius strip to be cut out and pasted together reads continuously: “Once upon a time there was a story that began …”

2

THE SUPRA-EXISTENTIALIST NOVEL: “THE FLOATING OPERA” AND “THE END OF THE ROAD”

When Bantam Books produced in 1967 a paperback of the second edition of Barth’s first novel, The Floating Opera, which he had written in 1955 when he was twenty-four, the cover blurb read: “Now! Presenting the complete text with ‘the original and correct ending to the story’ … The Floating Opera is indisputably a novel by John Barth.” In the prefatory note the author informed the reader of the Bantam edition that the revision of the novel did indeed consist of the restoration of its original form, which he had changed at the request of the first publisher – Appleton, Century Crofts. Bantam Books – with the approval and even support of the author himself – decided to broadcast the fact that two versions of the novel existed and that theirs was the “right” one, no doubt to boost sales. The author, however, in a clever play upon the notion of dubious authorship, was acknowledging the initial weakness of his own authorial authority, only in the end to “indisputably” reaffirm it. Barth was doing no less than changing the artistic meaning of his novel.

This play with the nature of authorship points to a recurring motif in Barth’s fiction: the precarious meaning carried by any author/text or father/son relationship. An existential, and probably personal, theme in The Floating Opera, this motif develops gradually through Barth’s work, ultimately to become a principle informing the author’s paradoxical view of history as Revolution: at once repetition and revolt – as demonstrated in LETTERS. By the time Barth came to revise The Floating Opera, the father/son relationship had evidently become for him a metaphor for “intertextuality,” and dubious authorship had become its expression. So in Giles Goat-Boy, published in 1966, one year before the revision of The Floating Opera, the father of the protagonist is conceived of as a computer, and this same computer is also the means through which the protagonist spells out his message, which has become identical with the story of his life. In other words, it is doubtful who is the author of whom or what: the computer that “fathers” a son, or the son who instrumentalizes his “father” in order to tell his ow...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A note on the texts
• 1 Introduction: The sense of an ending
• 2 The supra-existentialist novel: The Floating Opera and The End of the Road
• 3 The supra-Bildungsroman: The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy
• 4 The supra-Künstlerroman: Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera
• 5 The supra-realistic novel: LETTERS and Sabbatical
• 6 Conclusion: The sense of a beginning
• Notes
• Bibliography