John Barth

 BY PETER KURTH

From The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors (2000)

 

BARTH, JOHN

1930-

b. Dorchester County, Maryland 

FICTION: The Floating Opera (1956), The End of the Road (1958), The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Giles, Goat-Boy; or The Revised New Syllabus (1966); Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (Stories, 1968); *Chimera (1972), LETTERS (1979), Sabbatical: A Romance (1982), The Tidewater Tales: A Novel (1987), The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991), Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera (1994), On with the Story (stories, 1996)

NONFICTION: The Literature of Exhaustion, and the Literature of Replenishment (1982), The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction (1984), Don't Count on It: A Note on the Number of the 1001 Nights (1984), Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction 1984-1994 (1995)

 

As the doyen of "postmodern" novelists in America, John Barth has typically enjoyed two discrete followings. The first are academics, who have found in Barth's playful, wildly-convoluted fictions a permanent gold mine for analysis and criticism. The second are college students, who identify romantically with Barth's existential heroes and his vision of the world as a random, madcap, menacing place, where nothing is what it seems to be and truth is just a construct, a fiction in itself. There are no answers to anything in the Barthian universe, and no solace beyond stories, legends, and narrative invention.

"Intellectual and spiritual disorientation is the family disease of all my main characters," Barth has said. "We tell stories and listen to them because we live stories and live in them. Narrative equals language equeals life: to cease to narrate . . . is to die." As a writer, barth's model and muse is Scheherazade, of the Thousand and One Arabian Nights, who spun stories for the sultan every evening to escape execution. Generally, Barth's novels are huge, labyrinthine affairs, shot through with comedy, fantasy, ribaldry, wordplay, allegory, literary allusion, and structural culs-de-sac. Just when you think you've grasped Barth's point, rest assured—you haven't. There is always something else behind the door. Barth undercuts himself at every turn, tells you straight out that he can't be trusted, and begs you only to enjoy the ride—the "funhouse," as he constructs it fresh from book to book. 

Barth grew up in the Tidewater region of Maryland, and most if not all of his novels are set there. He was one of a set of fraternal twins, and became a write in adulthood, he thinks, "in part because I no longer had my twin to be wordless with"—hence his fascination with the mechanics of language. His first three novels, all of them comedies "dealing with the problem of nihilism," were conceived as a piece and written in quick succession. Todd Andrews, the hero of The Floating Opera, recognizes that nothing has meaning and decides to commit suicide, only to realize before the deed is done that his vision of reality is neither more nor less significant than anyone else's, and that suicide is just as meaningless as staying alive. The theme is repeated in The End of the Road, with the exception that the hero's object lesson is far more terrible and utterly closed to humor. And in The Sot-Weed Factor, written in the style of an eighteenth-century hero quest, innocence is lost completely when Ebenezer Cooke, first Poet Laureate of Maryland, is subjected to every indignity the nascent colony and its inhabitants can heap upon him.

Giles, Goat Boy, Lost in the Funhouse, and Chimera, for which Barth wrote the National Book Award in 1973, are all difficult, willfully self-conscious fictions that seek to extend the traditional boundaries of the novel, a goal Barth sets for himself in his famous 1967 essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion," More recently, Barth has doubled back, spewing out "prefaces," "postscripts," mock treatises, and windy explanations for all his books to date. The unreadable LETTERS finds characters from Barth's earlier novels corresponding with him in the hope of justifying themselves. Sabbatical, The Tidewater Tales, and The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor are all set in boats on Chesapeake Bay, where fables of life, love, death, sex, fiction, meaning, and the lack of it are traded back and forth among characters old and new. The Tidewater Tales is the best in this series, or at least the best contained; readers can be forgiven for tiring of the game by the time they've finished all three. A collection of autobiographical pieces, as illusory and open-ended as any of Barth's fiction, appeared in 1994 as Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera, bringing Barth's work full circle and further blurring whatever "truth" the reader can perceive. As always, Barth is obsessed with narration, myths, and the ultimate futility of words. 

For many years, Barth has taught at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he is currently professor emeritus in the Writing Seminars. He remains the academic's dream novelist, his work arbitrarily challenging in structure and form but redeemed by inventiveness, huge erudition, humor, and an unquenchable sense of adventure.

See Also: Barth accepts the postmodernist label while remaining sui generis, linked at least in flights of fancy with Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Saul Bellow, and Thomas Pynchon. 

 

 

Watching Nothing: Postmodernity in Prose

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