Context
Reading John Barth
Charles Harris
Postmodernist fiction: what is/was it? Come and gone, according to Ron Sukenick and Larry McCaffery, morphing as we speak into something not quite so, well, twentieth-century. Never here to begin with, weighs in Michael Bérubé, who contends in the Chronicle of Higher Education that "there’s nothing uniquely postmodern about most of the experiments conducted in contemporary experimental fiction." As for me, I subscribe to John Barth’s Tragic View of Categories: "Terms like Romanticism, Modernism, and Postmodernism are more or less useful and necessary fictions: roughly approximate maps, more likely to lead us to something like a destination if we don’t confuse them with what they’re meant to be maps of."
A self-described nominalist in such matters, Barth maintains that the actual fictions we designate as—or, as the case may be, maintain are something other than—postmodernist, "have ontological primacy . . . over the category Post-modernist fiction." In other words, "whether a particular novel . . . is Late Modernist, Postmodernist, Post-Post-modernist, or none of the above, while it’s not an unworthy question, is of less importance—at least it ought to be so—than the question Is it terrific?" The main reason I’ve continued to read Barth’s fiction since I discovered it in the mid-1960s is because it’s terrific. But it’s also exemplary, providing what seems to me to be the best example we have of postmodernist fiction, which, tragic-view-wise, remains a useful—I would say, an indispensable—category.
When the proverbial "general" reader asks me what kind of books Barth writes, I say that he writes love stories (about which more later). But I tell my students that Barth is a postmodern novelist. When the uninitiated among them asks me what that means, I like to quote the following passage from Barth’s 1988 essay "Post-modernism Revisited," first published in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, collected in Further Fridays, and the source of my previous quotations: "Postmodern, I tell myself serenely, is what I am; ergo, Postmodernism is whatever I do." In short, if you want to understand what postmodernist fiction is and how it’s developed over the past several decades, read that terrific novelist John Barth.
With his next publication, books by Barth will have appeared in each of the last six decades, the time span covering what we have come to call the postmodern era. The trajectory of those works resembles an ongoing postmodernist critique, recurrently exposing the linguistic and philosophical grounds on which our conceptual castles unsteadily sit. An opposite-sex twin whose novels also tend to come in pairs, Barth almost always problematizes in the second novel of the pair whatever philosophical position he seems to have arrived at in the first. For example, The Floating Opera apparently makes a case for ethical subjectivism. After concluding that in a world without absolutes suicide is no more rationally defensible than choosing to live, Todd Andrews further considers 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." In The End of the Road, by contrast, Barth first attributes Todd’s conclusion to Joe Morgan, then has Jake Horner "undo that position," as Barth explains in a 1960 interview, by carrying "all non-mystical value-thinking to the end of the road." Values, Barth seems to say in this novel, lie outside the province of rational discourse. The Sot-Weed Factor, the first of Barth’s pair of "gigantistic"—purposely inflated—novels, questions the possibility of attaining transcendental unity represented by Eben’s quixotic quest for ideal Beauty and Henry’s desire for coalescence. By contrast, Giles Goat-Boy, The Sot-Weed Factor’s companion novel and opposite-sex twin, permits its protagonist, George the goat-boy, to transcend categories, perceiving at once, in no time, universal unity.
As pointed out by Barth in a 1966 interview, his books are novels of ideas only insofar as they "dramatize alternatives to philosophical positions." Barth’s philosophical skepticism is rooted in the belief that "reality" is our ideas about "reality" hypostatized. As a brief glance at intellectual history demonstrates, such hypostatizations last briefly, as one world view, one episteme, inevitably gives way to its successor. By interrogating in one book a position he seems to have upheld in a prior book, Barth creates a metaphor for this ineluctable process. Taken collectively, his books achieve the effect of a constant grasping for meaning, on the one hand, balanced by the realization that all meaning is projected—constructed rather than discovered and therefore radically historical and contingent—on the other. Yet Barth’s desire to imagine alternatives to "reality" affirms the value of such imaginings. In PoMo terms, we might say that Barth shares the incredulity toward metanarratives Lyotard identifies as postmodernism’s signature; at the same time, he celebrates the narrative urge, which is really the urge to construct meaning. The trick, Barth is fond of saying, is to have it both ways, converting paralyzing contradiction into "fruitful paradox" that "does real work, accomplishes real things in the real world."
To reinforce this idea, Barth’s work draws attention to its own artificiality, then re-angles that reflexivity back to the "real" world. In Lost in the Funhouse, for example, metafictions such as "Title," "Autobiography," and "Life-Story" seem to focus insistently on their status as narrative, but the entire volume, especially stories such as "Frame Tale" and "Menelaiad," suggests that "reality" itself is similarly enmeshed in layers of narrative. As Barth writes in Chimera, "the truth of fiction is that Fact is fantasy; the made-up story is a model of the world." In works such as Sabbatical and On With the Story, reflexiveness is absorbed into the work’s narrative flow. Each work is conarrated by couples acutely aware of the problems they are having composing the narratives we are reading. Since the writing process forms a central element in the novel’s plot, references to that process, which in another context would constitute foregrounding, become wholly appropriate to the work’s "realistic" base. Once again, however, these works are more than mere writing-about-writing. Narrative difficulties parallel unresolved difficulties in the personal lives of each couple. These parallels, moreover, are more than metaphoric; in both books, the stories the couples struggle to compose contain the resolutions to their personal crises. "We tell stories and listen to them because we live stories and live in them," Barth writes in "Tales Within Tales Within Tales," a 1981 essay collected in The Friday Book; "Narrative equals language equals life. To cease to narrate, as the capital example of Scheherazade reminds us, is to die. . . . One might add that if this is true, then not only is all fiction fiction about fiction, but all fiction about fiction is in fact fiction about life."
Despite their attention to their own structural and formal qualities, Barth’s fictions resist hermeticism, self-consciously situating themselves within the history of the genre they exemplify and extend. The Tidewater Tales, for example, recycles and "updates" four classic works—A Thousand and One Nights, The Odyssey, Don Quixote, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—which Barth says have most influenced his own writing. In its imitation of the conventions of the eighteenth-century novel, The Sot-Weed Factor allows Barth to draw analogies between the age that produced the first novels and our own milieu, also a time of transition, out of which postmodernist texts such as The Sot-Weed Factor have risen. LETTERS, perhaps Barth’s most ambitious book, traces the relationship between Lady Amherst, who represents the Great Tradition of Western Literature, and Ambrose Mensch, whose career as a writer replicates the novel’s historical progress from realism through Modernism to the sterile arch-formalism of High Modernism. Ambrose wishes to get Lady Amherst "one final time with child"; but she is menopausal, he the victim of an exhausted silence. To escape his aesthetic dilemma, Ambrose must find a form that neither repudiates the past nor slavishly imitates it. Whereas premodernism overemphasizes the world of objective reality, thereby blinding itself to human participation in the construction of "reality," and whereas modernism overemphasizes the ordering properties of the human mind, thereby blinding itself to the ontological "thereness" of the world of physical fact, Ambrose must strive for a middle ground between these apparent oppositions, thereby achieving a postmodernist synthesis of both. Such is the postmodernist "program" Barth outlines in his important 1979 essay "The Literature of Replenishment" (collected in The Friday Book), reaffirms in "Postmodernism Revisited," and embodies in LETTERS. An encyclopedic reorchestration of characters and themes from Barth’s first six books and a history of the novel from its origins through postmodernism, LETTERS confirms its relationship to the cultural past while simultaneously recontextualizing that past in postmodernist fashion, implying the discontinuous, a-teleological nature of cultural and literary history.
For almost half a century, Barth has continued to break new ground, and his work epitomizes the stylistic hallmarks of postmodernism. But his books are never merely virtuoso performances. "My feeling about technique in art," he told an interviewer in 1968, "is that it has about the same value as technique in love-making. That is to say, on the one hand, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and, on the other hand, so does heartless skill; but what you want is passionate virtuosity." Barth’s fiction continually strives to relate the complex realities and historical processes of the postmodernist era to the individual lives and intellectual concerns of his characters.
Sabbatical, for example, traces the struggles of Fenwick and Susan Turner to settle certain personal questions their nine-month sabbatical cruise, now in its final days, was intended to resolve. The reason the Turners cannot resolve their personal dilemmas—chief among which is whether they should have a child or even continue their marriage—is because they are unable to reconcile their personal lives with the pressures of contemporary material reality, represented in the novel by a backdrop of social and political atrocities, the result, in most cases, of the American government’s hegemonic attempt to impose its technological world view. The "background question" of Sabbatical, Barth points out in The Friday Book, "is whether the world will end before the novel does." In confronting this apocalyptic question, Barth reorchestrates and subverts conventions of literary realism freighted with the ideological baggage of the nineteenth century, an ideology that, having persisted to the novel’s present time, informs the Battle of the World Views currently endangering the planet. In ways too complex to do more than suggest here, Fen and Susan solve their problems by stepping back from what Heidegger calls "representational thinking," which fractures mind from matter, objectifying the world into a collection of inert matter subject to calculation and quantification—in a word, to control. A bravura exercise in exposing and eclipsing binary thinking in its manifold manifestations, Sabbatical participates in one of the vital intellectual endeavors of our time, the critique of logocentric metaphysics. At its still-human heart, however, are a man and woman in love.
Barth’s assertion in Funhouse that "what goes on" between a man and a woman is "not only the most interesting but the most important thing in the bloody murderous world," may serve as a kind of thematic credo. All of his fictions, their expansive range of concerns notwithstanding, qualify as love stories. In the early works, Barth tended to focus on love triangles; since Sabbatical, his focus has narrowed to married couples, usually of the May-December variety, embarked more often than not on sailing voyages, seeking orientation in a disoriented world by exchanging stories.
On With the Story, Barth’s most recent book to date, is such a tale, a rich meditation on change and loss that unfolds like a novel through twelve interrelated short fictions. In his early fiction, Barth’s primary source of metaphors was classical mythology, ancient tale cycles such as A Thousand and One Nights, and myth (e.g., Joseph Campbell, Lord Raglan); at mid-career, he turned to systems theory and, to a lesser extent, literary theory. On With the Story reflects Barth’s recent reading in chaos theory and quantum mechanics, undertaken, according to his 1991 Stuttgart lecture "Chaos Theory" (reprinted in Further Fridays), to renew his "stock of metaphors." In the collection, a middle-aged couple, having discovered three decades into their marriage that the wife suffers from terminal cancer, sail to an oceanside resort—mordantly described as their "last resort"—where the husband, Scheherazade-like, tries to delay the inevitable (his wife hints at suicide) by telling her bedtime stories. The story of our life may be dramaturgically prolonged (and the collection contains a textbook’s worth of "incremental perturbations"), but the "story of our life," the couple realize, "is not our life; it is our story." Similarly, in the infinitely subdivisible world of Zeno’s paradoxes, particle physics, and fractal geometry, all of which are evoked in the volume, Achilles will never overtake the tortoise. "In non-narrated life, alas, it is a different story, as in the world of actual tortoises, times, and coastlines." Quantum mechanics allows the story-telling couple to entertain the possibility that Schrödinger’s famous cat is simultaneously dead and alive in that box until our looking inside determines its fate—or even that the cat, like our theoretical quantum selves, occupies multiple universes, dead in some, in others alive. But "in this universe," the wife lovingly tells her teller in the story’s final tale, stories may be indefinitely suspended but lives must end.
Like all of Barth’s work, On With the Story is terrific in every sense of the term, including its root sense: causing terror or great fear. Once again, Barth demonstrates the validity of the genie’s assessment of art’s role in Chimera: the "treasure of art, which if it [can]not redeem the barbarities of history or spare us the horrors of living and dying," can at least sustain, refresh, expand, ennoble, and enrich "our spirits along the painful way." Past Master of "fruitful paradox," John Barth is a weaver of intricate postmodernist tapestries who tells simple love stories, a comic genius who refuses to laugh away the terrors of contingent human existence, a leavener of virtuosity with passion, purveyor of algebra and fire. I read John Barth because he’s terrific—and because his work provides the best index I know to the temper of our time.
