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Earth's the End of the Road - an Allegory of the Fictional Creation

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EN IO JOSÉ DITTERICH Earth's The End of the Road - an Allegory of the fictional Creation Dissertação apresentada ao Curso de Pós- Graduação em Letras do Setor de Ciên- cias Humanas, Letras e Artes da Universi- dade Federal do Paraná para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Letras na área de Lite- raturas de Língua Inglesa. Orientadora: Prof.a Dr.a Brunilda Tempel, Reichmann CURITIBA Ï" 9 9 0 Dedico este trabalho a todos aqueles que, de alguma forma, con- tribuíram para sua consecução bem como a todos que se sentiram "rouba- dos" durante a sua realização, espe- cialmente Cida, Rafael e Wagner. AGRADECIMENTOS A Deus por mais um "talento" e a força de vontade em desenvolvö-1 o. - A orientadora, Profa. Dra. Bruni Ida Tempel Reichmann, pela amizade, apoio, orientação e bibliografia. - Aos professores de Curso de Pós-Graduação em Letras da UFPRj, e em especial à F'rofa. Dra. Sigrid Paula Rénaux pelos valiosos livros emprestados e á Profa. Dra. Anna Stegh Camatti pela prestatividade constante. - A Profa. Putin Buffara, pelo incentivo e bibliografia. - Ao Centro Federal de Educação Tecnológica do Paraná pela colaboração na realização do Curso. - Ao CNPq por seis meses de bolsa. ABSTRACT Through the present thesis we intend to demonstrate how the North-American writer John BARTH uses his fiction as a vehicle for his aesthetic and literary doctrines as well as his philosophical and moral interpretation of modern society. The .introduction provides a background of the post-war panorama in the United States of America, emphasising the changes that were happening, mainly in the literary field, where the nihilistic as well as existentialist doctrines would influence most young writers, including John BARTH. Next we make a summary of Barth's literary production from 1956 to 1979, showing a possible project the author had in mind while writing his books, stressing his scholar/wr.iter characteristics. Then we concentrate more and more in Barth's nove1 The End of the Road, which is the core of this work. Interpreting the novel as an allegory of the fictional creation we analyse it as part of that project, where the author uses it in order to demonstrate the opposite tendencies in North-American literature during the 50's, with one group looking backwards and still developing neo- realistic novels, while another one was looking forwards, trying to find out new alternatives which would form the basis for Post-Modernism. Analyzing the characters in more details, we try, then, to prove their possible use by the author as his own avatars as well as representatives of the current theories, while the plot is shown as art allegory of the struggle between the opposite currents. In the conclusion we stress John Barth's theory that the traditional literary genres are exhausted and the modern writer should face the fact that he can only use them in a farcical way, through conscious imitation, a technique which demands knowledge, research, capacity and craftsmanship. ii RSBUMÖ A presente tese pretende demonstrar o uso que o escritor norte-americano John Barth fas da ficção como veiculo de propagação de seus principios estéticd- J. i terários, bem como de sua interpretação filosófico-moral da sociedade con temporánea. A .introdução apresenta as transformações ocorridas no panorama intelectual norte-americano de pós- guerra, mormente no plano literário, onde? as doutrinas niilistas e existencialistas exerceriam grande influência, delineando o arcabouço filosófico do escritor e pensador. A seguir, faz-se um apanhado geral da obra de BARTH, mostrando um possível projeto do autor ao escrever seus livros; destaca-se aí a dualidade pensador/escritor, concentrando-se cada vez mais na obra The Ein d of the Road, que ê a base da tese. Interpret.ando-se esse romance como uma alegoria da criação ficcional, analisa-se a mesma como parte de um projeto maior, tendo-se o autor utilizado dela com o fito de confrontar as tendências antagônicas da .literatura norte americana dos anos 50, onde duas correntes se destacam: uma voltada para a ficção neo-realista já existente e outra, onde BARTH se inclui, buscando novas alternativas, que formariam as bases do Pôs-Modernismo. Através da análise» especifica das personagens, procura-se, então, comprovar sua possível utilização pelo autor como porta-vozes das correntes vigentes e servindo a trama do romance? como uma alegoria do conflito tanto externo quanto interno entre as duas tendências dominantes. Conclui-se enfatizando a teoria de BARTH de que os gêneros literários tradicionais estariam exauridos, restando ao escritor moderno uma reutilização - ou "revisita" - das formas existentes, uma imitação conscient e, ou paródia, como solução, o que requer conhecimento, pesquisa, capacidade e perícia por parte daqueles que se dispuserem a aceitar o desafio. i. i. i CONTENTS Abstract i i Resumo . » . i i i I. INTRODUCTION Ol 1. Historical Background 02 1.1 In Search of New Values - the New Theories. 04 1.2 Reflections in American Society ...... 06 2. The Influence of the New Theories on Fiction. 08 2.1 Some Examples 12 3. Fiction at the Crossroad. 14 3.1 A New Foregrounding for Language 18 3.2 Formal Character i sti 20 4. John Barth - Scholar and Writer 22 II THE END OF THE ROAD - THE NOVEL AS A THEORETICAL VEHICLE 27 1. Exploring Form for Theoretical Purposes .... 27 2. Naming or Baptizing his Characters? ...... 37 3. Sex and Writing: Acts of Creation ....... 45 4. The End of the Road -- Different Levels of Reading 57 iv III - THE CHARACTERS AS LITERARY AVATARS .1 . Jacob Horner - a Hero with Many Masks and Tasks . .l.*l The Writer as the Hero. 1.2 The Hero inside his Furihouse 1.3 Jacob Horner A Rebel who Admires Discipline . 1.4 The Hero under the Law of Cyclology . 2. Joseph Morgan - a "Don Quixote" of Traditional Fiction ........ 2.1 The Attraction of the Op pos i tes ....... 2.2 Joseph Morgan an Idol with Feet of Clay . 2.3 Demanding Authenticity in a World of Phoniness . 3. Rennie Morgan - the Disputed Literature . 3.1 From Domina tor to Domines 3.2 Rennie's Death The Phoenix Fiebern . 4. The Doctor - the Personification of Knowledge . CONCLUSION ........ BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERMCES V biblioteca Ünivwâtfisíâe rade? I . INTRODUCTION History is a bloody business, after all. As one character observes, the twentieth century may be turning out to be a disaster, but the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries were horrors too. And the other centuries hardly compare f svorabl y » The panorama in American fiction during the last four decades is so puzzling that even today many books and articles are being written trying to clarify such a cloudy and certainly stormy period. John Barth, a worldwide expressive name of Postmodernism, twenty-four years after the publication of his first novel, TheFloatingOpera (1956), published a widely known article, "The Literature of Replenishment", where he presents a historical background that sends the reader as far back as Cervantes' DonQuixote in order to clear up the complex evolution of the postmodernist novel, as well as to rectify some misunder- standings of one of his most polemic articles, "The Literature of Exhaustion", published in 1967,, lhe impact of that article was so strong that John BARTH has been questioned about it until today and tie gives a historical justification for it: "It was a time that invited thinking. I wrote the essay in 1967 in Buffalo, in the middle? of a very apocalyptic time in the history of our republic."-^ In fact, to,understand the turbulent transitional literary scene in which the postmodern novel was incubated or to place any fictional production of the time, especially John Barth's works, it is necessary to recur to History. 1. Historical Background On e thi n k s .i. m m eel i a t e 1 y o f Marx's famous observation that important events .in History tend to occur twice s the first as a tragedy, the second time as a farce,^ We shall not go too far back in our hi s tor .1 ca .1 research, otherwise we may discover that Postmodernist is riot., so "post" at all*. Let us observe the recent historical background that prepared the so.il for the new current that was arising. The World War I, by its cruelties and absurdities against human kind, destroyed not only half of the civilized eastern world, b ut also f a i t: h in human beings . Not. o n 1 y t. h e noble rules of chivalry had been broken, but also the elementary christian and human principles had not been respected. For the young generations, part of which had been forced to participate of those cruelties arid part that had run away from the.war, the old world had fallen and with it the blind faith in archaic absolute principles that might still exist in Politics, Art and Literature. There was no room for ideologies like Positivism, Determinism or an "exhausted" academic art, since they represented .imposed values from a decadent: social structure. A climate of rebellion against any kind of imposed t If one observes the history of Nestern Literature, he discovers that he is entering a labyrinth of either conscious or unconscious iisitation of already used literary structures, Like and endless chain, even the up-to-datest novels of John Barth show influences of Sterne's Trist ran Shandy (1759), which reminds us of Don Quixote (1605), which echoes fliaadls de Gaula (XIV century) and so on... Good references can be found in BOOTH, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicaqo, The University ot Chicago Press, 1975, values swept the Continent in search of new a .1 terna tí ves that should substitute the principles of a world that had proven itself rotten.
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  • Ana-Maria DELIU Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, Romania Anamdeliu@Gmail.Com

    Ana-Maria DELIU Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, Romania [email protected]

    Ana-Maria DELIU Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, Romania [email protected] TRANSGRESSIVE METAFICTION: DECONSTRUCTING WORLDS IN JOYCE’S ULYSSES AND BARTH’S LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE Abstract: The question “to what degree does metafiction construct and deconstruct worlds” generates a conceptual and paradigmatic rethinking of metafiction, based on the theoretical tools of possible worlds theory, especially fictional worlds. More specifically, to what degree does metafiction succeed in constructing a verisimilar possible world or, on the contrary, undress it of materiality and illusion of reality, turning rather to itself as a text (metafiction is self-conscious, auto-referential fiction, drawing attention to its mechanisms and its status as an artifact while a possible world is a world which is credible, ontologically different from ours only in being non-actualised). Moreover, in metafictions like James Joyce‟s Ulysses, or John Barth‟s Lost in the funhouse, deconstructing worlds means not only de-materialising worlds, turning to form in an extremely overt way, and moving from mimesis of product to mimesis of process, but also the French deconstruction praxis of denouncing structuralist dichotomy signified-signifier, thus loosing oneself in a network of signifiers which ultimately destroy the metaphysics of the signified. After poststructuralism murders the author, the latter revives as a practical fiction in a textual world of indecidables. Key words: fiction theory, transgressive metafiction, deconstruction, practical fiction, James Joyce, John Barth Dematerialisation and Deconstruction Firstly, I would like to mention that I wrote this study in relationship with another one published in the first issue of Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory (50-60).