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University Microfilms International 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 USA St. John's Road, Tyler's Green High Wycombe, Bucks, England HP10 8HR - 78-5901 OSHINS, Joseph Henry, 1946- THEORY IN PRACTICE: A STUDY OF 'S DEVELOPMENT OF A "NEW" . The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1977 , modern

University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, Michigan48ioe

© Copyright by Joseph Henry Oshins 1977 NOVEL THEORY IN PRACTICE:

A STUDY OF JOHN BARTH'S DEVELOPMENT OF A "NEW" FICTION

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University

By Joseph Henry Oshins, B.A., M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University 1977

Reading Committee: Approved By Professor John M. Muste, Chairman Professor Daniel Barnes Professor James Battersby

John M. Muste Department of English I dedicate this dissertation to my wonderful mother and father. VITA

EDUCATION 1972-1977 Ohio State University Major: Modern British and American Literature Minor: American Literature to 1900; 18th-century English Literature, the Novel 1969-1970, 73 M.A., Indiana University Major: Creative Writing 1969-1971 George Washington University, School of Law 1964-1968 B.A., University of Missouri

TEACHING EXPERIENCE 1977 Visiting Assistant Professor, Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio 1977 Lecturer, Ohio State University 1973-1976 Teaching Associate, Ohio State University

PUBLICATIONS "Money," The Ohio Journal, V, 1 (Fall, 1977) 11-16.

": A Review" accepted for publication in The Ohio Journal V, 2 (Winter, 1977-1978).

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page DEDICATION ii VITA iii INTRODUCTION 1 Notes 24 Chapter I. THE FLOATING OPERA . . 27 Notes 41- II. 43 Notes 64 III. THE SOT-WEED FACTOR 66 Notes 98 IV. GILES GOAT-BOY 100 Notes 137 V- LOST IN 139 Notes 177 VI. 179 Notes 210 BIBLIOGRAPHY 213

iv INTRODUCTION

The most crucial assumption this dissertation will make in dis­ cussing the works of John Barth is one which requires continual qualification and the justification of which is the purpose of this chapter: that the dozen or so works discussed can be viewed as an organic and coherent whole. I make this assumption in part because Barth views his own work in this manner, and in part because I am interested in this analysis in "development"--of Barth's aesthetic theories, predominant themes and novelistic skill—and such a study requires an imputed relationship to exist across the boundaries be­ tween his books and articles.

The idea that Barth's works comprise a whole is, of course, a fiction, but how appropriate in a study of a man who is in a sense the supreme fictionist! Barth's own for his work are revealing here. At one point he calls his work a "gnomon," that geometric pattern of parrallelograms continually expanding from a common corner; in several places he uses the image of a whelk shell, a snail that "makes his shell as he goes along out of whatever he comes across...[carrying] his history on his back, living in it, 2 adding new and larger spirals to it from the present as he grows."

Perhaps the most popular image for his writings is that of a "funhouse" where, from a central switchboard, the operator pushes

1 pushes buttons to affect the growing maze around him. Implicit in these images is the idea of control and order emanating from some center, and this too I will view as a necessary fiction. Each book j[s_ a distinct entity with its own formal, social, and historical integrity, and its author does not for a moment claim that from his early twenties he had the developmental control which, for my purposes, I will occasionally impute to him. Rather, I will be taking an historical view, one that makes sense of individual acts and their relations to preceding and subsequent acts, one that dis­ covers one or several of the dramatic patterns that those individual events conform to. The fact that somewhere along the line Barth began to shape his own history is an important point I will discuss later, but for now it is well to make a qualification, for as Barth has said, novelists do "work to a large degree by hunch and intuition," and that when we talk about them we do so retrospectively, "sometimes giv[ing] the impression that we're all terribly theoretical when we sit down at the desk, which of course we aren't."^

In viewing Barth this way I am really only echoing a critical stance made famous in T.S. Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent, that the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from , and with it the whole of the literature of his own coun­ try has a simultaneous existence and composes a simul­ taneous order.5

Eliot's idea here, that literature comes from literature and grows upon itself; that a modern work can in fact affect our understanding 3 of an older work; finally that one can view all of literature as having a simultaneous but dynamic order, seems to me equally necessary for a critic as for a writer, at least if the critic is interested in getting at certain issues with which close readings of texts only are not compatible. I don't suppose that Eliot's approach here is "right" or true," only that it is a useful way to talk about devel­ opment, which is otherwise difficult to express. The fact that this critical approach contains a clearly implied theory of the nature of literature and history is also significant, as I hope to show later, to the degree that it corresponds to Barth's theories about his own literature and history.

"If you are a novelist of a certain temperament," Barth says, "then what you want to do is re-invent the world," including, he goes on to say, the history of philosophy or literature.6 This thinking, it seems to me, is right in line with Eliot. In Barth's he shows himself to be acutely aware of such things as the history of liter­ ature (including his own literature), and each of his books uses that awareness to revise, re-define, or simply "re-invent" the reader's and his own relationship to what has come before. Part of the impact of Eliot's essay comes from the recognition that many works achieve a reorganization of all the literature from Homer on down without their authors being aware of that body of literature or of the potential effect of that body on their own. In Barth's (and Eliot's) case, what had been to many writers an unconscious effect is seen as a tension that can be used to his own purposes, so that 4 the more one knows about Barth's books or all books, the more Barth can use the tension created by his and our awareness to layer his fictions with ideas dramatically relevant to both his and the reader's world. I dwell on this theoretical subject because I don't think its importance in regard to studying Barth can be overstated. While there are certainly other ways to look into Barth's fictive world, it seems to me that when dealing with an author who continually in­ sists on such statements as "the medium is the message," or "the form o is the content," and whose fiction continually attempts to demon­ strate those dicta, one ought to take them to heart, and that the formulative critical principles one uses, for instance, should be appropriate to their subject. By examining my critical approach, in other words, I should be able at the same time to say something about Barth, and in a very real sense the form of this study should be its q content ("more or less"). One way to see Barth's affinity for my approach is to take a long view of the pattern of his public statements. After his first two books he publishes an article which in several ways illuminates what he had in mind while writing those books and also points to what we can expect from his third novel. After The Sot-Weed Factor he publishes an article that does much the same thing and the pattern becomes entrenched: Barth writes a novel (which in part discusses its own processes and his past works), then writes an article or interview which looks back at what he has done as well as ahead to what is coming next, then produces that next book (which discusses 5 itself.and his past works), then another article or interview, et cetera. While one is well advised to be wary of an author's statements about his own work (Barth makes this warning himself, albeit ironical­ ly), in the case of Barth the warning cannot apply precisely because of the difficulty in distinguishing between the and the statements about them. Barth's essay "The Literature of Exhaustion" comes immediately to mind, an essay in which he praises J.L. Borges for the "ingenious" device of creating literature by writing "real" commentaries about imagined novels. Given Barth's attraction to this practice one can see Barth's commentaries as literature also--the only difference between him and Borges being that Barth comments on imagined novels that are his own and happen to exist. Just as one can't dissociate Borges' imagined novels from his comments about them, one ultimately can't dissociate Barth's com­ mentaries on his novels from the novels themselves. The fact that this notion is demonstrated by Barth in a commentary not only on his work but also on another man's work takes us to the final stage of this disturbing process. One is forced to acknowledge that Borges' real commentaries are "fiction" or "literature" or what have you; that Barth's comments on Borges are also "fictional"; and finally, most unnervingly, that this dissertation is a fiction too.

This dissertation will attempt to discover of Barth's aesthetic theory as stated in and manifested by Chimera by paying close attention to what he has to say about aesthetics, and by observing what he aesthetically does. The difficulty is that 6 12 Barth's universe is a "seamless universe," one in which questions of aesthetics are intricately bound up with questions of innocence, identity, the mortal quest for immortality, epistemology and ethics, love--in short with all the major themes Barth explores. A study of aesthetics can therefore expand to a study of these related subjects; at the same time I hope to show how it can contract to that which underlies all fiction--a study of language. In order to understand Barth in this way, it is first necessary to see how he views the state of novelistic art and its history. Since I will be working in part in a chronological study of Barth's development, and in part retrospectively, I'd like to first define the problem facing a modern novelist as Barth sees it, being con­ stantly aware that if "the medium is the message, more or less," then the manner in which Barth states the case should itself be a key to the solutions he arrives at.

In simple terms, then, Barth is dealing head on with that old saw, that the novel is dead, dying, or both, a hypothesis that can be tested for its validity, or a statement of fact which gives rise to the issue of what a "novelist" can do in its wake. Is the novel dead in the same way that, say, the steamboat is dead, and if so how do we account for all those craft today which, if more technically refined, still float on water? Clearly steamboats are dead, but boats as a medium are very much alive and puttering, and as yet no one has envisioned a world where the need to cross water is eliminated. In much the same way one can view the novel as a craft, part of an evolutionary chain of inventions man has been continually refining 7 to cross its figurative oceans—whether to span the gulf of communi­ cation, understanding, or simply the "Ocean of Story" we can't seem to do without. In this vein Barth comments that It doesn't finally matter at all to the art of literature whether historically this particular little genre fades away. After all, literature got along very well without the novel for most of its history. It comes into existence at a particular time because of particular social and technological conditions; if they no longer obtain and the novel as we know it passes out of literary history—there is no great tragedy for anybody. It doesn't mean the end of literature, certainly. It doesn't mean the end of .^

Barth makes this statement in reference to the "apocalyptic ambience" he finds himself writing in—a time when not only his genre seems to be used up but his own urge to storytelling seems blocked as well. One of the arguments concerning the death of the novel—the one he is responding to above—is that "this particular little genre" no longer serves the dual function, in Leslie Fiedler's terms, of achieving a significant artistic integrity while at the same time 14 appealing to most people. By calling the novel "this particular little genre" Barth is surely glossing over the enormous success the novel has had as a serious art form with mass appeal, a goal he him­ self strives for, but he is glossing this aspect of the novel's power in order to emphasize the possibility of alternatives and that other aspect of "apocalyptic ambience" which he finds more troubling—the personal one of how to go on telling stories.

One need only look at the state of , narrative poetry in particular, to see its analogy to the novel. Like the novel it too 8 has since divided itself into more or less high- and low-brow camps and "died" in the sense I'm using for viability. Serious poets still write narrative poetry, but the rare kind of synthesis of high and low achieved by, say, Longfellow or Byron is notably absent as early as E.A. Robinson. On the other hand one can argue that the "low" form of narrative poetry—pop music—has in some cases managed to achieve that synthesis, and that this particular little genre has not faded 15 away but been replaced. The constant, in the case of both the novel and narrative poetry, is not the form used, but rather the need for some form that can artistically manage to appeal to people and still get stories told. Writing in 1972, Barth speaks blithely as if the question of the novel's viability were beside the point—the point, that is, of the larger issue of whether or not one can continue to tell stories in an original and agreeable way—and he suggests that he, at least, can. Before reaching this optimistic and confident position, however, Barth examined both questions seriously, reviewing in his way the history of narrative art, including the novel. Through this review, as much from the process of the review as from what he "learned" from it, Barth claims to have found a way out of what he sees as the modern dilemma, and a way into what he caTls "a treasure trove of new fiction." I would like now to turn to that review and look at it chronologically, to trace Barth's study of "the roots of the novel"17 and "the well springs of narrative art" in order to more clearly understand the "something new" he claims to have brought back with him. 9 Before getting started, it must be acknowledged that a compre­ hensive summary of narrative art from a critical point of view, especially from my_ critical point of view, is a pretentious and futile affair. What is significant here is that the point of view taken is not one of general inquiry, but rather the specific point of view of a writer with specific problems and prejudices, and speci­ fic goals. Even though Barth eventually arrives at theories that comprehend a wide range of general concerns, one must not lose sight of the fact that he starts, specifically, to solve the problems of a writer. Barth does not study narrative history in the slow, thorough way our narrative historians have, their humility showing through every footnote; instead he arrogantly leaps from modernism to , makes sweeping assumptions about complex fields like history and technology, and footnotes almost nothing. What I hope to show are the implications of his point of view, the prejudices and goals that derive from the method of his study, and the confident position he eventually comes to. The fact, for instance, that he approaches this subject at all, especially in the arrogant way he does it, is in itself a key comment on the subject he is pursuing. It clearly implies the assumption that the bewildering complex of narrative art and narrative artists for thousands of years can be talked about meaningfully, understood, synthesized to general principles. It implies that human works and human nature are not random, or at least that one can find useful patterns in the comings and goings of man­ kind if one looks for them. By the time Barth writes Chimera, those implicit assumptions become the backbone of his aesthetic theory, so 10 that the study here is not an inquiry but in a sense a tautology. The form of the questions asked shapes the answers to them, and what is important is not the validity of the study, but the usefulness for Barth as a novelist and a modern man of the answers.

It is clear from a knowledge of Barth's biography that the study I am referring to had no firm starting place and most likely isn't over, although with some basis in fact and for convenience's sake it can be viewed in four more or less distinct phases concomitant with his emergence and maturation as a writer. Perhaps the best starting point, not a phase itself, more likely a continuous trait, is Barth's constant love for and immersion in story. In typical dramatic fashion for him, Barth pictures himself as "an illiterate undergraduate" working in the library stacks at Johns Hopkins where he "[got] lost for hours in that splendrous labyrinth and, intoxicate, engorg[ed] himself with story." In this way he became something of an expert on the great Oriental tale-cycles and collections: Somadeva's Ocean of Story in ten huge volumes, Burton's Thousand

Nights and a_ Night in twelve, the Panchatantra, the Gesta Romanorum, 19 the Novellini, and the Pent- Hept- and Decameron." With this and an otherwise unexceptional background, Barth entered the first stage of his study and writing, a study of the English novel. During this period he produced three novels, The

Floating Opera, The End of the Road, and The Sot-Weed Factor which, in various ways, display their distinct connection with the English novel, particularly the eighteenth-century novel; and each reveals to some extent what Barth has learned from those early books. In 11 addition he published an afterword to an edition of Smollett's Roderick Random which further reveals both the depth of Barth's inter­ est in the beginnings of the novel and the kinds of things he has discovered from them.

Stepping back a moment, one can see that the dominant charac­ teristics of the Oriental tale-cycles, at least as far as Barth is concerned, are their aspects of and structure and the dramatic relevance of their frame tales to the they enclose and the world outside their narratives. Thus, Scheherazade is Barth's first and constant model because in her role of narrator she is tech­ nically ingenious, and in her role of character she represents what is to him the storyteller's figurative dilemma—how to come up with something new or die. While this is a I will dwell on when I come to , its relevance here is to show Barth's progression to the eighteenth-century English novel as a natural one. Consider Henry Fielding and his book, Tom Jones, for instance, which at once combines fantastic technique in the way of plot and structure with dramatic interest in the character of its narrator who views himself, figuratively, as forced to come up with a new way to tell stories—at an end-point of a literary tradition where his continued existence as a storyteller depends on his inven­ tiveness.

In these first three novels, which Barth claims to be a series,^ I hope to show how the author's interest in the English novel mani­ fests itself not only in the matter of influence or imitation (i.e. in the resemblance between Todd Andrews' "Inquiry" and Tristram Shandy, 12 or the adventures of Eben Cook and Tom Jones), but also in the matter of theme, technique and experimentation. Characteristic of this first phase are the dominant aspects of invention and discovery running throughout or, to use terms more congenial with what I'll have to say about'the later novels, the emphasis on the creation of story and on innocence. I will show how in the first instance the three novels depend on the invention of story, from the tangled legal case of the pickle jars in The Floating Opera, to The End of the Road where Jake Horner must invent the story of his life so that he can live it, to the fantastic contrivance of The Sot-Weed Factor. In the second instance I'll discuss the way in which these novels, often 21 called nihilistic, in fact do issue in some hope--the sense of what their author says when he states that he "thought he was writing 22 about values, but discovered he was writing about innocence." Barth has called these books his "more or less realistic 23 novels," and I will examine the way in which this author, who later come to regard realism as "a kind of aberration"24 began at an early age to dissemble with the realistic dogma of his literary tradition and to experiment with other forms. I will show, for instance, how 25 the first novel begins with all the trappings of "formal realism" and ends with the conviction that an imitation of life is a mistaken and hopeless enterprise; how the second novel begins much the same way but eventually despairs of imitation, discarding it intermit­ tently; and how the third, based initially on the imitation of a real life, becomes, as the author puts it, not an imitation of life at all, 13 but an imitation of an imitation: "an imitation of the form of a novel by an author imitating the role of an author."26 By examining these four related aspects of his work—influence, plot, technique and subject—I hope to discover and elucidate Barth's development in the first phase of his career and, through comparison with his treatment of these factors in succeeding phases, come to terms with the views he presently professes.

The transition from The Sot-Weed Factor to Barth's fourth book, Giles Goat-Boy, took six years during which time the author's studies took a turn. In an interview issued between the two books,27 Barth relates the story of how a reviewer noted that the vicissitudes of Ebenezer Cooke followed to an uncanny degree the pattern of an hero set down by Joseph Campbell, Lord Raglan, and other comparative mythologists. Barth's considered response was that although he was unaware of such a pattern to heroic literature, now that he grasped it Eben's compliance to the pattern seemed to him inevitable. Barth then set out, he tells us, on an unsystematic study of these compara­ tive mythologists, producing finally a novel which attempts, among other things, to have its hero conform to all twenty-six requirements of the pattern.

In a sense, therefore, one can see this study of Barth's and Giles Goat-Boy, the novel that came out of it, as a separate stage but a natural progression. Barth began with a study of the roots of the English novel, ending that study with the completion of The Sot- Weed Factor, a novel that puts a contemporary consciousness in a seventeenth-century world narrated from an eighteenth-century point 14 of view. Now he moves his study backward and his world forward, an enlargement if you will, with Giles Goat-Boy. Thus Barth's fourth novel looks beyond the beginnings of the novel in England to a study of narrative in general, narrative from all cultures and histories, and his technique moves backward as well, from imitation/ to /satire. At the same time the allegorical and futuristic world he creates moves forward, and its hero, rather than representing only a contemporary consciousness, moves in his growth from an older, pastoral world view, through dis­ tinct phases of western cultural development, to an ultra-modern conception of the universe.

The creation of story in the first stage of his career is now followed by an adherence to story, to the pattern; the technique of imitation/satire is supplanted by the technique of allegory/satire; the theme of individual innocence is enlarged to cultural innocence. In short, the author and his interests have been modified.

One way to look at this change, the way in which I hope to show that it is a natural progression, is to consider it in the light of Spielman's Law as set down in Giles Goat-Boy: ontology recapitulates po cosmogeny. As I have already suggested, George Giles in the novel affirms this principle as we observe the development of his conscious­ ness as compared to the author's view of the history of his culture. In much the same way we can view Barth's progression, starting in phase one with the (relatively) short-sighted ebullience of youthful imitation and ejaculation of story, to the more mature, more worldly productions of post adolescence where the youthful energies are 15 modified, restrained, enlarged, developed. If one continues with this argument—that Barth's career, like that of George Giles, corresponds to Spielman's Law—then what should we expect to follow? The next stage, roughly speaking, is the on­ slaught of middle-age, that time when most humans, and, as the argu­ ment here goes, most cultures start with an expectation of security, sureness of direction, confidence, clear purpose...and sadly discover much to the contrary. Who has not experienced or at least observed this phenomenon in themselves, their friends, or the Roman Empire, to name a few examples, where what we had mistaken for security shows itself to be mere routine, where the endpoint of so much early effort seems hollow, where the values we had not the time to consider, but only strive for, seem vacuous to our new-found contemplation—Chimeras if you will, empty dreams. And so we vacillate between the hopeless­ ness of nothing left worth doing and the despair of our accomplish­ ments which once had meant so much; we experiment, languor, turn inside ourselves in desperation—at once doleful, at once frantic— for a pathway out.

Now what I'd like to argue here is not only the inevitability of a smooth career like Barth's coming to such a pass, but also, viewed this way, the inevitability of the English novel, from Barth's point of view, coming to a similar point. In "The Literature of Exhaustion," Lost in the Funhouse, and an interview subsequent to Lost in the Funhouse, I find Barth picturing the novel much as he has been picturing himself—middle-aged and stuck. How better des­ cribe the beginnings of the novel in England than with 16 Donald Greene's title The Age of Exuberance29 or characterize the nineteenth-century novel than as forming a "great tradition?" How better explain the efforts of Joyce, Faulkner, Kafka, Robbe-Grillet than as more or less desperate attempts to escape or avoid the road­ block in the life of their genre?

Returning to Barth we find him at the publication of Lost in the on Funhouse thirty-six years old, "at the mid-point of [his] life." He has moved from being a struggling writer to something of a celebrity, his last novel a widely promoted hit, his position and future secured. Furthermore, he had endeavored in that last novel to create an entire allegorical world, to write what one critic has called a "last novel,"01 another "a sacred book." What shall he do next, write another last novel, another sacred book? At the same time Barth's reading has aged, at least in the sim­ plified way in which I'm viewing it. During his first stage he talked about the eighteenth-century novel and published an afterword to Smollett's Roderick Random; in the next stage he talked about his research into comparative mythology. Now we find him writing an essay about a contemporary, Jorge Luis Borges, and in so doing dis­ cussing the work of Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, and the other major modernists—in short his reading has caught up with him and the pro­ blem becomes "not how to succeed Joyce, Faulkner and Kafka, but how to succeed those who have already succeeded them and are in the evenings of their own careers." ° The result of all this is that the author sees not only his own life and his own career in a crisis, but, viewed in this kind of 17 historical perspective, his genre, his country, and his culture as well.

So far I have been discussing this crisis as one of, in general terms, middle age. Another way to look at it and another way to see its connection to Barth's earlier novels is in philosophical terms. I would like to argue that at the heart of the first four novels, in varying forms, is a problem best expressed by the narrator of The Sot-Weed Factor: how one can retain that "great sense of the arbi­ trariness of the particular real world [as well as be endowed] with a corresponding realization of its finality."0^ This is the issue that haunts Todd Andrews throughout his life and eventually resolves his suicide plans; that forces Jacob Horner into catatonia and in and out of mythotherapy; that gives Henry Burlingame and Eben Cooke their respective feelings of wonder at and estrangement from the rest of the world; that leads George Giles to see himself as goat, man, and saviour, but never truly one of those things. What we talk of in a positive way as an author's, in his maturity, "finding his own voice," is, in Barth's ease, this same , not finding a voice but in a real sense having to find a voice among all those possibili­ ties that is in some sense final; not an "imitation of the role of an author," but truly becoming if he can, the one author he can be.

Perhaps it is best to back up here and consider the "voices" of the first four novels so that I can compare them to what I find in Lost in the Funhouse. The first two novels have been characterized as smug, condescending, flippant in some way, show-offish.35 The third and fourth, despite their many successes, were still touched 18 by the charges of being complex academic jokes or, worse, some form OC of authorial cop-out. Like his heroes Jake Horner, Todd Andrews, Eben Cooke and George Giles, the author has been playing roles, playing in the sense of both acting and "funning," and not surpris­ ingly some reviewers found that despite the obvious virtues of those books and those roles, they were still waiting for the real author to emerge. With Lost in the Funhouse I believe his emergence begins. The voices in this fifth novel are dazzlingly various, but in no sense are they any longer "playing" their roles. When the speaker of "Title" asks "can nothing be made meaningful," or complains that 37 "everything's been said already," he is echoing statements that appear throughout the collection and which bear directly on the author's conception of himself, his genre, his country and his culture. We may not yet discover John Barth's voice among these, but certainly we see him searching for it along with us. The third stage, then, seems to me another distinct as well as natural progression for Barth, a stage where he turns both to his contemporaries and within himself for a way out of his dilemma. On the one hand he imitates Joyce, Borges, Beckett, Nabokov to see where he can go with their different approaches and techniques. On the other hand he turns inward with a self-consciousness far different from that of his early narrators. He experiments with technique trying to find new dramatic potential in point of view, style, sub­ ject, even silence. He examines realism and its premises only to reject it once more. He narrows his subject from the myriad topics of Giles Goat-Boy to just two, aesthetics and love. He tries tapes, 19 live voice, combinations of the two like "printed voice," and finally, in my view, finds a pathway out through structural mythology. Is Lost in the Funhouse the literature of exhaustion, whatever that means, and is it a way out? Certainly that essay did as much to obscure Barth's position as to clarify it. Even one of his most

ardent supporters, Robert Scholes, for example, found this book and 38 Chimera, which followed it, hard to take. Barth appears to feel the necessity of clearing away the clutter of his whole literary tradition before getting down to what he does best—telling stories, as if his awareness of his difficulties demands, to many readers' dissatisfaction, that he let us know he knows about them. The "Literature of Exhaustion" does suggest what Barth means by its title, and one can see its application in most of the stories in the book, but how does it account for "Menelaiad" or "Anonymiad," and what has

the Perseid in common with "Ambrose His Mark" or any but the last two sections of Lost in the Funhouse? It is my contention that the literature of exhaustion ended when the "Menelaiad" began, and that the voice of Menelaus (all there is of him) is Barth's voice found at last. What is it that Menelaus finally does, who tells us how he could accept the possibility of Helen loving anyone else, but not the finality of her choosing him? What he does, what gives him life, makes him a real person in the end, is finally accepting that finality. No doubt the cost was great (all that's left of him is his voice), but for the first time in this tangled skein of voices it is his voice and no other's. 20 To explain what I mean by structuralism here—by Barth's version of structural ism—I'd like first to take another step backward. So far I have attempted to trace Barth's progression from stage one, where in the dogma of the characters struggled with the lack of ultimate value in their worlds, to his discovery in stage two of some pattern to heroic adventure. The author then took that pattern and attempted to use it in Giles Goat-Boy, building up theories of human development like Spielman's Law based on the ulti­ mate existence of such patterns in human affairs. Following that book he found himself caught in a pattern, perhaps I should say aware that he was in a pattern, and now, with its double-edged truths brought close to home, tried desperately to escape it and go on with his work. It follows naturally, it seems to me, that after first using the pattern and then struggling to escape the pattern the only real alternative left him is accepting it—not a way out but never­ theless a way forward. Therefore I will argue that beginning with the "Menelaid" and culminating with Chimera, Barth found a way to go be­ yond the rut in which he saw himself and his genre mired, and that way is a form of structuralism.

In the interview that coincided with the publication of Chimera and several times in the novel itself, Barth makes claims of having seen through his writer's block and discovered, by examining "the wellsprings of narrative," a "treasure trove of new fiction." As I have attempted to show, that examination of the wellsprings of narrative had actually been going on in one form or another through­ out his career. At the time of the publication of Chimera Barth was 21 forty years old and his career was summed up by the character who, copying , begins with a list of his accom­ plishments through youth, follows with a dramatic rendering of the crisis of middle-age, and concludes with the desperate "I am forty."3 Perseus goes on, however, to achieve his "qualified immortality," and the age of forty is the time when he moves through his crisis to the stars.

Is Barth's career still following Perseus here, and what is this treasure trove of fiction he claims to have discovered? On the sur­ face at least, there seems nothing new about it. In fact if Chimera is that new fiction, how do we account for the plot other than by calling it a rehashing of an old myth, or the technique other than by seeing it as another dimension of self-consciousness of which the author tells us "nothing is more loathsome than the self-conscious 40 loathings of a self one loathes?" The characters are no more than a collection of recognizable odd-balls and stereotypes; the themes he explores such dazzlingly original subjects as love, marriage, art, impotence and immortality; the style an alliterative jangle of purple prose; the structure the same old story-within-a-story stolen from Scheherazade. Where's all the newness? One answer, of course, is that there is none—that, as one critic has put it, Barth has written the best/worst novel of modern times, a conscious attempt for some perverse reason to do everything 41 wrong at once. If, however, this really is the "new" fiction Barth has talked about, then perhaps the traditional realistic stan­ dards of what is right and wrong in a novel don't quite apply. 22 With this view we must search for the reason Barth did what he did, but we have a sure starting place with that critic's realization that he did "everything" at the same time. Since one of the characteristics of this book is its constant authorial intrusion, we don't have to look far to see what the author is trying to do. He tells us himself, in the form of a lecture, of the principle of metaphoric means, by which I intend the investiture by the writer of as many elements and aspects of his fiction as possible with emblematic as well as dramatic value.. .42

From this it is a relatively simple chore to consider as many elements and aspects of this fiction as possible and what emblematic or ­ tic value they have. We can test this book according to its own working principles and not those of older fiction. To simplify the situation, for instance, we can compare the effects of an intru­ sive narrator in this novel not in the Jamesian sense of how it interferes with the "illusion of life," but how emblematically and dramatically it adds to or detracts from the quite different effect this novel strives for—not the illusion of life through art but the relatedness of life and art.

Returning now to the framework in which I've briefly examined the previous novels, one can see a drastic change in Chimera. Where the first three stages can each be identified with certain precursors or syllabi, this novel has as precursors only the author's own earlier life and work. Another way to put this, of course, is that by synthesizing his own work Barth is synthesizing his precursors. 23 The aspect of plot, which in the past had variously been created, filled in, or convoluted, now has found the scope to reverberate in two directions at once—backwards, to our own oral tradition and the fundaments of language, and forwards, through the present and beyond the book itself. The technique is simply first-person and the sub­ ject as I have stated above, is the relatedness of a host of human concerns.

In a general way, what Barth has managed to do here is to take the realization of a pattern and "have it both ways," i.e., take the implicit idea of this pattern that it proves all human beings or books or cultures are alike, and merge it with the conflicting impli­ cit idea that it is this very pattern against which we see our differences. The "dramatic" and the "emblematic" become one.

It is in Chimera, then, that Barth's separate novels and separate stages take on the kind of unity suggested by the Eliot quote in the beginning of this chapter, and the justification, I hope, for such a lengthy preamble backwards. Continuing in the spirit of that quotation I would like now to examine Barth's writings in detail both as they constitute those stages and as they modify each other and in turn are modified by the whole dramatic entity they comprise. NOTES Introduction

Israel Shenker, '"Complicated Simple Things,' An Interview with John Barth," New York Times Book Review (Sept. 24, 1972), p. 35. 2 John Barth, Chimera (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 10, 61. 3 John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse (New York: and Co., 1968), pp. 69-74. 4 John Barth and Joe David Bellamy, "Having it Both Ways," New American Review, 15 (Spring, 1972), 135. c T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," The Major Critics, ed. S. Holmes et al_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), p. 294. John Barth and John L. Enck, "John Barth: An Interview," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 6 (1965), 3. 7 Barth, "Having it Both Ways," p. 143. "The process is the content, more or less." 8 John Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion," Atlantic, 220 (Aug., 1967), 32. Barth almost always makes this qualification to his theoretical statements. See note 7. The works that compose the sequence, in order, are: The Floating Opera (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1956). The End of the Road (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1958). "Landscape: The Eastern Shore," The Kenyon Review, 22 (1960), 104-110. The Sot-Weed Factor (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1960). "Afterword," in The Adventures of Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett (New York: New American Library, 1964), pp. 469-479.

24 25 "John Barth: An Interview," 1965. "Muse, Spare Me," Book Week (Sept. 26, 1965), pp. 28-29. Giles Goat-Boy (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1966). "The Literature of Exhaustion," 1967. Lost in the Funhouse (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1968).

"Having it Both Ways," 1972. Chimera (New York: Random House, 1972). "'Buffalo's Funhouse Revisited:' An interview with John Barth and David Strack," Buffalo Courier Express Sunday Magazine (Sept. 12, 1976), pp. 1-3. 11 "John Barth: An Interview," p. 9. The Sot-Weed Factor, p. 526. 13 "Having it Both Ways," pp. 139-140. '4 Leslie Fiedler, "The Death and Rebirth of the Novel," in The Theory of the Novel: New Essays, ed. John Halperin (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 189-209. 1 5 See, for example, Richard Poirier, The Performing Self (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 112-143. 16 Chimera, p. 11. 17 "Having it Both Ways," p. 139. Chimera, p. 11. 18 Chimera, p. 10. 19 "Muse, Spare Me," pp. 1-2. 20 See: Beverly Gross, "The Anti-Novels of John Barth," Chicago Review, 20 (November, 1968), 95-109. Richard W. Roland, "John Barth and the Novel of Comic Nihil­ ism," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 7 (1966), 239-257. 21 "John Barth: An Interview," p. 11. 22 "John Barth: An Interview," p. 11. 23 "Having it Both Ways," p. 39. 24 "Having it Both Ways," p. 136. 25 See: Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1959). 26 "The Literature of Exhaustion," p. 33.

27 "John Barth: An Interview," p. 12. 28 Giles Goat-Boy, p. 43. As I will demonstrate in Chapter IV, cosmogeny becomes equivalent to culture. 29 Donald Greene, The Age of Exuberance (New York: Random House, 1970). 30 Chimera, p. 143. Ol Irving H. Buchen, "The Aesthetics of the Supra-Novel," The Theory of the Novel: New Essays, pp. 91-108. 32 Robert Scholes, The Fabulators (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 135. 33 "The Literature of Exhaustion," p. 30. 34 OH The Sot-Weed Factor, p. 18. 35 See: Robert Garis, "What Happened to John Barth?", Commentary, 42, No. 4 (1966), 189-195. See, for instance, Tony Tanner, "The Hoax that Joke Bilked," Partison Review, 34 (1967), 102-109. Richard Poirier, "The Politics of Self-Parody," Partison Review, 35 (1968), 339-353. 37 Lost in the Funhouse, pp. 102-110. 38 Robert Scholes, "The Allegory of Exhaustion," Fiction Inter­ national, 1 (Fall, 1973), 106-108. 39 Chimera, p. 199. 40 "Having it Both Ways," p. 144. 41 Andre Deutsch, "The Narrative Springs," TLS (July 26, 1974), p. 783.

42 Chimera, p. 203. CHAPTER ONE The Floating Opera

One of the most distinctive characteristics of Barth as a novelist is his awareness of the history of the novel and traditional novel technique. Is is an awareness not only discoverable in his - fiction, but insisted upon in the fiction itself, and from the first page of his first book length fiction, The Floating Opera , the narrator addresses the reader regarding novel writing, continuing in the first chapter to clear the air of questions about literary assumptions before getting on with his story.

We are told by Todd Andrews that this is his first venture into novel writing, but that he has studied up on the art (1); that he knows what is expected of him and will try to conform to those ex­ pectations within the limits of his own eccentricities (3, 15); that his book will, in the traditional sense, be "a pleasure dip and not a baptism" (2); and that, if we read carefully, we will find instruc­ tion (3). The narrator then takes pains to assure our belief, saying "were I God, creating of...Todd Andrews... I'd change it just a trifle here and there" (3). Since he does not change the descrip­ tion, we are tentatively led to believe him. Shortly afterwards, having digressed apparently through lack of self control, he promises that it will not happen again, and that he will "simply stick to the facts" (6). He ends the introductory chapter telling us how his book

27 28 will work, then gets down to business as promised in the next chap­ ter with a realistic description of his room and actions on the morning of his story.

We soon learn, however, that The Floating Opera is not a con­ ventional book, and that either the narrator has set up these expec­ tations in the reader in order to use them to show his own cleverness, or that the author has had his narrator go astray to show ironically, Todd Andrews' limitations. To the extent that The Floating Opera is a book about writing a book, its conflict lies in the tension between these two extremes. The interest in this aspect of the novel is fur­ thered, in my opinion, by a larger perspective of the situation, for not only do we have a narrator purporting to write his first novel with a condescending cleverness about novel history and theory, but we also have a real first author, brazenly attempting to do the same thing. We are not far into the book before we begin to question the narrator's reliability, and because Barth has set things up this way, we can question the author's reliability as well.

I realize, of course, that the question of authorial reliability, stated as such, is perhaps an impossible one to analyze, and that any comments regarding such a phrase must be limited to judgments about the author's skill or the success of the book as we come to under­ stand its intentions. Todd Andrews' intentions are clearly stated, but to what extent does John Barth share them, if at all? More specific­ ally, if the book is attempting, through the problems of its nar­ rator, to show us the difficulties of writers of first novels, then 29 how does our awareness of those difficulties and pretensions affect our judgment of the real first novelist orchestrating the attempts of the fictional one? When Todd Andrews asks in despair "how does one write a novel?" (2), are we to see a sympathy between author and nar­ rator or a condescending smugness on the author's part, implying that he, at least, knows how? Todd Andrews does succeed in establishing how very difficult his task is, but for Barth the question is even more complicated. We might ask for him how does one write a novel with an , the ostensible subjects of which are novel writing and the meaning of life, that is limited to the confines of one uneventful day in a small town? It is like trying to swim the channel before you have wet your feet.

The title combines two images which will accompany Barth in his later fictions and which serve as symbols for the book's structure. It is to be an opera, an orchestrated showpiece, that floats on a craft back and forth with the tides while the shorebound reader catches bits and pieces of the show. It is a for imperfect communication, one of the subjects of Todd's Inquiry, but is under­ cut shortly after its introduction by the narrator's promise that "when the commences, the boat will be floating just in front of you and you shan't miss a thing" (16). The metaphor is not gratuitous, however, for it functions as an excuse to cover up the narrator's sloppiness. When he wants it to, the opera becomes a podium, and not a craft at all. The metaphor has other difficulties as well. For part of the book it functions as it is intended to, with 30 the reader passively catching glimpses of Todd Andrews' life, but it is this very passiveness that does the opera in. The glimpses we do get call for interaction between the reader and the story, not passivity, so that a curious switch takes place. Before long, if he has not quit reading, the reader finds himself on board the boat and Todd Andrews isolated on the shore. The communication is imperfect because the narrator is not communicating. The opera has not sunk, it has floated by.

From the outset, Todd's is doomed to failure. He titles the first chapter "tuning my piano," and proceeds to describe his clubbed fingers. Well, clubbed fingers may suffice for tuning, but the accompaniment for any opera played with those fingers seems certain to be merely noise. On the first page he brags about how he "gets things done, as a rule" (1), so that we will have confidence in his novel writing ability, but then he tells us this is a story about a day when he failed to get done what he set out to do. He calls his ostensibly true story a novel, then lets us know that it is, in fact, a small part of his "Inquiry" into why his father hanged himself which is itself a small part of the letter to his father he has been composing since his father's death—in fact, not a novel at all.

Todd's contradictions fill the pages of his book, and the reader spends a great deal of time noting how on one page Todd claims that he "never characterizes others in a word or phrase and rarely passes judgments on them at all" (67), and then does just the opposite. In the same way, Todd preaches against symbolizing from nature and then goes on to symbolize from nature.3 He claims at one time that 31 "everything is rediculous" (40), and at other times that he is a free agent (163) who can live rationally in the world (212). One of the chief goals of his life appears to be a desire not to be consis­ tent, and yet the reader sees the consistently cold responses in every action Todd takes. Even on the most obvious level Todd can't seem to see through his own rationalizations, as, for instance, when he claims his heart problem is a secret that even his doctor does not know about when his clubbed fingers give it away to any layman. He wants to think that Jeanine Mack, the blond child of her blond father, might be his child. The very end of his story, his failure in a suicide attempt, is seen by Todd as not a failure, but a change of mind.

Todd is not only inconsistent, contradictory, and occassionally impossible, but his character as presented, aside from his actions, is also somewhat absurd. He would have us believe that he is a perfect symbol of modern man with a heart ailment such that "each soft beat... might be my...last" (48); with a prostate problem rendering him virtually impotent (5); and with so much control of his body that even on the hottest days, he never sweats (167). If this is not neat enough, he tells us with a straight face that he has experienced strong emotion five times in his life, serially, like on an outline (220). At the same time he tries to appear pathetic and wise, the vic­ tim of random circumstance and the result of orderly development. He lies often to his acquaintances and takes pleasure in their con­ fusion, even from their pain.4 He adopts "stances" throughout 32 his story that are clearly false, then condemns others for doing the same thing. In the long run we cannot believe a feeling he purports to have, or a word he says.

The result of these observations is that the reader questions each of Todd's statements and stances, including what he straight­ forwardly claims the book is about—how, through logical extensions of his thoughts on the meaning of life, he decided not to blow up the showboat killing himself and some seven hundred of his neighbors. Although Todd claims several times that he is no philosopher, only a thinker "after the fact" (43). he spends a great deal of his time speculrting about his approach to the world. Starting with what he calls "the great fact of my life" (48), his weak heart, he goes on to make this physical imperfection the basis for a rational system which demands, among other things, that he pay his hotel bill each morning. Like his outline of the Mack's marriage (35-37), his version of his five emotional experiences, and his orderly "Inquiry," the system makes sense within its own framework, but the framework is woefully shortsighted. Proofs of these lapses in thought abound: the Macks fail to follow the diagram he designed for them; the list of emotions is missing love and anger, and in several places we see Todd having emotions that he tries to hide; the communication with his father is imperfect not only because the father is dead and like the floating opera metaphor the communication is one way, but also be­ cause the entire inquiry system is no real communication at all--only a kind of verbal stroking attempt to give meaning to a life shut off from real people, real emotion, real communication. 33 Todd would have us believe that the day in question, when he changed his mind, was a routine day like any other (16), and that his decision to kill himself arose logically from his insight that morning that "nothing has intrinsic value" (165). The reader dis­ covers, however, that the day was anything but routine. It began with Todd's fifth experience of emotion, despair, as he sweated and shivered foetally in bed beside Jane while she slept. Upon arising he determined to kill himself, living out his last day ordinarily, but The Floating Opera was in town and broke the routine. Among other things that day saw the conclusion of the Mack will litigation, something that had been going on for years, a check-up with the doc­ tor (another first), the emotional as well as financial independence of the Macks' coming to the surface, and the unsuccessful suicide of Mr. Haecker.

In regard to each of these events Todd experiences confusion and tries to dismiss that confusion rationally. The showboat reminds him of his youth, and he has to force down a feeling of anticipation for the evening performance. The will settlement leaves him undecided about whether or not he should in the Macks' behalf, and he de­ cides first by flipping a coin and then by acting against the flip (212). The Haecker suicide, together with the day's speculation with Haecker and Captain Osborn about old age and death, leave him angry and upset with Haecker, who has attempted what Todd had earlier suggested he ought to do (160-165). The Macks' independence confuses him utterly, as he says "in fact, I no longer knew how to feel about the Macks at all," and shortly after "I had no feeling about 34 them at all" (211). It is not hard to see that Todd's problem is incorrectly stated in the rational terms he uses, and that his insistence on neat meta­ physical outlines is an inadequate approach to living a life. Todd tells Harrison that "psychology doesn't interest me" (97), but Harrison, as well as the reader, is aware that psychology is the neglected side of Todd's life, and that his disavowal is just another stance or lie. One need only look at the inquiry to see this clearly. Todd begins it by trying to understand why his father committed suicide after having been presented with a suicide note providing a rational answer—because of money. Todd, however, will not accept this answer, and his inquiry is, in effect, nothing more or less than a psychological study of his father's act.

Throughout the book Todd attempts to portray himself as a com­ pletely unemotional person. Not only does he not feel, but he also 7 never sweats. He works on his boat in his business clothes without dirtying them. He makes love infrequently and like a mechanic, and he views strength as the ability to deny feelings. He has great dif­ ficulty with everything physical, and his five experiences of strong emotion can all be seen as embodying physical facts of life. What he calls "mirth" (120-121) with Betty June arises from his first sexual encounter and the view of his and her naked bodies in a mirror. The trouble with calling it mirth is that the scene is not funny. Certainly Betty June does not laugh, and Todd's laughter is so excessive and out of place as to deny any humor at all. The emotion he calls fear comes from his incident in the foxhole with the German 35 soldier, but it is the physical and emotional intimacy with the German that affected him most strongly, and the physical sound and feeling of the puncture wound as he killed the German that he most clearly recalls (67). When Todd tells us about discovering his father hanging in the basement, he labels the feeling "frustration" (220), a clearly inappropriate and inadequate word, and we see that it is once again the physical—in this case the sight of his father and the literal feeling of loosening the noose and closing the eyes, that rivet his attention (179, 180). As for surprise, his fourth emotion, it occurs when Jane Mack seduces him at Harrison's insistence, but once again his memory of this incident is not what he has labeled it, but rather a recollection of the physical appeal of Jane—her smell and skin texture and taste. What he calls despair, the last in a list of emotions that leaves out, notably, love and anger, comes again with Jane in bed, and although by now we are willing to grant that Todd ought to despair, it is not despair but insecurity that curls him in a ball and has him appalled at the ability of his body to sweat, tremble, and react to the lifeless rationality he has forced upon it.

It is significant that in Todd's rational system he attempts to account for the physical and the emotional. We hear him dis­ coursing on his secretary's passing gas (101), and we see the note he makes for his inquiry on toenail sniffing (202), so that, intel­ lectually at least, Todd thinks he has himself covered. One gets the feeling, however, that his very insistence on the normalcy of these bodily functions gives him away. He insists too strongly for the 36 reader to believe that Todd sees them as normal. In this same regard he accomodates Jane's cutting off their affair with the hollow state­ ment that "she satisfied me" (157), so that he will not have to feel the loss. Todd Andrews describes himself as a person so cold and aescetic that he doesn't sweat in the "terrific heat" (194) like everyone else, and who has no feelings. One could rightly suspect that he has no bodily functions at all if Todd had not crudely ex­ cused himself from narration, presumably to go to the men's room (149).

Turning again to that narration, one sees that Todd is as con­ fused about how to tell a story, about the communicative and human base of literature, as he is about most other things. What begins as an attempt at traditional realistic narration changes quickly to an uneven and presumably uncontrolled mixture of description, digres­ sion, asides, outright addresses to the reader, cute gratuitous remarks, preaching, and so forth. In his introductory chapter Todd sets up the floating opera metaphor and describes how his book will work, floating "willy-nilly on the tide of my vagrant prose" (7). He says that if the reader is attentive, he will catch glimpses of the story as it floats in and out of view. As I mentioned above, this metaphor insists on passive readership. It is egocentric and life­ less, like Todd.

The second chapter begins with realistic description, a techni­ que Todd will use and then drop as he sees fit. The most striking instance occurs in Chapter VI where we get a lengthy and flowery description of High Street in Cambridge, ended abruptly with "The rest of Cambridge is rather unattractive" (53). What follows is a 37 section in which the narrator tells instead of shows us the habits of his life. One gets the impression that Todd tries writing for the reader's sake but gets bored with it and returns to writing for his own. Perhaps the most striking (because the most obnoxious) of Todd's narrative techniques are his addresses to the reader. Appar­ ently copying Tristram Shandy, he goes into a long digression, then digresses on digressions, and picks up the narration again, noting for the unattentive reader's sake that he is still holding his glass of rye and that Captain Osborn is still stranded on the steps (43). Todd's early discourse on the significance of his name (3) is, of course, also reminiscent of Tristram Shandy. He titles one chapter "A note, a warning" (Chapter VIII), and at what must surely be a low point in this or any narration he directly tells the reader how to read and think:

If the notion of homosexuality enters your head, you're normal, I think. If you judge either the German sargeant or myself to have been homosexual, you're stupid. (64) At another point he begins a chapter with "if you're still with me" (18), clearly implying that he really doesn't care if we are. One of the blatant of Todd's narration is that it comes out so uneven and uncontrolled despite the great lengths and years that went into its preparation. He ends the chapter "A note, 8 a warning," trying to take back what he said, as if the book were spontaneous instead of the great feat of organization he earlier bragged about (6). In the chapter "A mirror up to life," he closes 38 with "I can't finish, reader, can't hold my pen fast to the line: I am convulsed; I am weeping tears of laughter on the very page!" (121). Later in the book he tells us that his "prose is a plodding, graceless thing, and I've no comprehension of stylistic tricks" (168), and then goes into a planned stylistic trick of simultaneous narrative columns on the same page. As he concludes his story he acknowledges "the formal requirements of storytelling," but once again insists that "this is my opera" (241), so that he can disregard them.

One can conclude that there is a consistency here—that this confused, deluded character writes in a confused and even schizo­ phrenic way, but eventually one looks for signs in the narration for what to make of it beyond the rather obvious point that confused narrators write confusedly. It seems clear that Barth has set his narrator up so that the reader can put Todd down, but where do we go from there? What are the book's intentions beyond that? Where is the author's skill?

Earlier I raised the question as to what extent the author shared the narrator's habits and assumptions about the world. If, for instance, we view Todd Andrews as a representative of Barth's thought, then the author comes off rather badly, the ideas expressed being, in Gerhard Joseph's words, clearly "rudimentary" and 9 derivative." On the other hand, the narrator up as a is not only pretentious, but in the long run, it seems to me, merely an exercise in pot shooting. We might ask at this point if there is anything admirable in Todd, or instructive. Why, for instance, do the likeable characters, the Macks and Captain Osborne, like him? 39 Richard Schickel argues that "our knowledge that beneath this rather sophomoric cynicism Todd harbors a great deal of rather chivalric 10 romanticism saves him from monstrousness in our eyes," yet presents no real evidence for this position and in fact goes on to point out that one section of the book is "a parody of romantic attitudes." It seems to me that the Macks labor through much of their relation­ ship with Todd believing him to be romantic beneath his various stances, but leave him when they discover that in fact he has become the lifeless embodiment of his most recent stance, no longer a stance at all. Gerhard Joseph argues that Todd's saving grace is the "comically controlled revulsion against man, the riotously copu­ lating. Caliban, the drooling animal with twisted fingers in his 12 mudhole," but here too there are difficulties. For one thing, it has been shown that Todd is not in control of his narrative. For 13 another, the riotous laugh of Joseph's Todd/Caliban "rings false."

Todd may yery well be trying to make the point that man is first a beast, but it seems clear that Todd's reaction to his own physi­ cal ity—his withdrawal from sex and human contact—takes him to the other extreme. Todd gives us the bestiality of man, but Barth, in setting Todd up, insures against our seeing physical withdrawal as the fitting response to that realization.

Such is the case, I would like to argue, with most of the book.

Todd's only charm comes from his very deficiencies—his limited point of view discovers limited aspects of the truth that other points of view often miss, and by recognizing Todd's limitations, the reader is able to use Todd's unique observations about life and round them 40 out beyond his simplified (because limited) dogma. We thus see, perhaps uniquely, that man is bestial, society superficial, values arbitrary, and writing mechanical, but we are also able to add the mitigating observations of our own experience implied by Todd's deficiencies. When Todd realizes in the concluding paragraph that perhaps one can live on artibrary values (246-247), he is doing explicitly what the reader has been forced to do all along. It is not the idea here that is significant for Todd, but the process, the enlarging point of view he finally glimpses, that is his one hope for the future.

The Floating Opera is not a happy book but neither is it the nihilistic one many critics have taken it for. The Macks' rejection of Todd leaves them secure and happy in the ending. Captain Osborne leers and leches for the physical joys of life and lives happily in his old age. Only Mr. Haecker ends badly, and it is through his 15 similarities with Todd that we can dismiss him as a representative of the book. His and Todd's is true enough as far as it goes, but the novel insists that we must go further. NOTES Chapter One

John Barth, The Floating Opera. Rev. ed (New York: Bantam, 1967). All page references from this edition will appear in the text. 2 See, for example, Todd's first description of Harrison Mack, pp. 20-22; or p. 40 where he tells Harrison "You deserved that for expecting to hear it...," or p. 97 where he again judges Harrison, saying "You don't lack philosophy, you lack guts;" and finally, p. 98 when he tells his friend "You're not ready for three million bucks yet. You don't deserve it." 3 Todd makes this speech on pp. 106-107. We see him break his own rule on p. 148 where he tells us the "locusts rasped and whirred a parched dirge for my last high noon." On p. 28 he confesses that he asked Harrison "a loaded question." On p. 31 he lies to Jane, saying that their intercourse "was my first time." On p. 39 he lies to Harrison about his black client, and enjoys seeing his friend upset. On p. 41 he tells us how he "really relaxed. It was a pity: the Macks were agreeable people, and they would have a bad day." Later he comments that Jane"...is never lovelier or more desireable than when contrite" (p. 51).

5 Todd condemns Harrison for taking the stance of a saint (p. 22). Mr. Haecker is put down because "his anger was another of his wardrobe of masks" (p. 51). 6 Most notable are his reactions to the Opera handbill, and his child-like involvement in the show itself. His anger at the Macks' newfound independence is another example. This is a recurring in the book. On p. 148 Todd tells us that he was fully dressed in the ninety-five degree heat, but his "body was dry as a white bone in the desert, and I was entirely com­ fortable." Later he says that "everything was baking in the enor­ mous heat, which nevertheless drew not a bead of sweat from myself" (p. 166). On p. 194 he describes the "terrific heat," and on p. 201 is still dry as "the heat lingered at its greatest ."

41 42

8 "There is in my daily routine a great deal that legitimately implies my ideas about things, but you mustn't work from the wrong things or you'll go astray. Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned working on my boats in my good clothes " (p. 70). g Gerhard Joseph, John Barth, University of Minnesota Pamphlets on Modern Writers, 91 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1970), p. 13. 10 Richard Schickel, "The Floating Opera," Critique, 6, No. 2 (Fall, 1963), 59.

'^ Schickel, p. 61. 12 Joseph, p. 13. 13 Schickel, p. 61. '4 See: David Kerner, "Psychodrama in Eden," Chicago Review, 13 (Winter/Spring, 1969), 59-67. John C. Stubbs, "John Barth as a Novelist of Ideas: The Themes of Value and Identity," Critique, 8, No. 2 (Winter, 1965/66), 101-116. Richard Roland, "John Barth and the Novel of Comic Nihilism," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 7, No. 2 (Summer, 1968), 239-257. Beverly Gross, "The Anti-Novels of John Barth," Chicago Review, 20 (Nov., 1968), 95-109. ' Both men keep journals, both live alone in the hotel, and are coldly ascetic, both quote Hamlet frequently, both adopt masks, both attempt suicide and fail. CHAPTER TWO The End of the Road

Several critics have noted how The Floating Opera ends with Todd Andrews wondering "whether, in the real absence of absolute values, values less that absolute mightn't be regarded as in no way inferior and even lived by," and point out that when Todd says "that's another inquiry, and another story," he is referring to The End of the 2 3 Road. Barth's next novel, his "companion piece" to The Floating Opera, is thus veiwed as a further exploration of ethics, and in fact the ethical points of view represented by Jake Horner, Joe Morgan and the Doctor all share the assumption Todd leaves us with, "that nothing 4 has intrinsic value." The first person narrator of The End of the Road, however, is not the fifty-four year old Todd Andrews at the end of The Floating Opera. If anything he is a revised Todd, and although the second novel, unlike the first, is completely devoid of any mention of its narrator's history before his twenty-eighth year, there are enough similarities in setting, situation and character to indicate that Jake starts roughly where Todd did before donning the masks of "rake, cynic and saint." If we picture Todd in Baltimore just after his release from the hospital we see a young man with the foundations of his life . In the first novel he goes to the train station and for no particular reason heads home to 43 44 Cambridge. In the second novel he goes to the station and for no particular reason remains there. From this point the characters of the two narrators diverge, but the similarities they started with and the ways they diverge are important in understanding Barth's develop­ ment. The first narrator went through a series of masks toward a continuing rigidity of character until he became so emotionless and fixed that one insight nearly destroyed him. Along the way he ab­ stractedly engaged in a romantic triangle encouraged by his friend Harrison which resulted in a pregnancy of questionable paternity. Af­ ter his emotional and intellectual crisis, he wrote a book about it all.

The second narrator's rigidity takes a different form, and his donning of masks another dimension. Faced with several arbitrary alternatives, he does not adopt one and codify it until it no longer works as the first narrator did; instead he adopts nothing, his rigidity taking the physical form of paralysis. Where Todd had the ability to adopt masks for years and change them when forced to, Jake's talent in this direction is Protean, and he changes every day. The second narrator abstractly engages in a romantic triangle en­ couraged by his friend Joe which results in another pregnancy of questionable paternity, and he too writes a book about it all. The difference between the two books, therefore, is a difference in em­ phasis, and seeing them together helps us understand each of them more clearly.

The themes most directly explored in The Floating Opera are the question of suicide, the imperfect nature of communication, and the 45 difficulty of writing a novel. Todd discusses ethics at various times with his friend Harrison, but Todd has been seen to be so inconsis­ tent throughout that book that one has difficulty taking his ethical dimension seriously. In The End of The Road these same themes are manipulated, but with a considerably different emphasis. Here the menage a trois is at the heart of the story rather than being simply a peripheral event, and the question of suicide, to the extent it exists at all in The End of the Road, only appears because it is one alternative to the ethical problem Jake, Joe, and Rennie are involved with. In place of the healthy Harrison Mack we now have the health- nut Joe Morgan, and rather than being the passive tutee of the nar­ rator, as Harrison was to Todd, Joe is the most active and energetic force in the novel. The addition of the Doctor to this triangular set-up complicates the ethical discourse.

Barth has said that he never was very good at developing real­ istic characters,6 and we have seen that to be the case with Todd Andrews. Joe Morgan as a character is equally unrealistic. He beats his wife because she apologizes, sets up a situation so that she will be unfaithful, insists that she discover why she was unfaithful by regularly continuing the adultery, refuses to intercede in her suicide attempt because he says he loves her, and unchangingly reacts to her horrible death as if it were just another variable in his ethical experiment. David Kerner has pointed out that only as an in­ tellectual position can Joe be taken seriously, not as a person, and, with qualifications, the same can be said of Jake, Rennie, and the Doctor. One way to look at the question of ethics in this book, 46

then, is to see what intellectual position each of these characters stands for. Joe is certainly the most outspoken on the subject:

Four things I'm not impressed by...are unity, harmony, eternality and universality. In my ethics the most a man can do is be right from his point of view; there's no general reason why he should even bother to defend it, much less expect anybody else to accept it, but the only thing he can do is operate by it, because there's nothing else. (46)

Joe has already explained that he derived his position from the fact that "nothing matters one way or another ultimately," but that "one shouldn't consider a value less real just because it isn't ab­ solute, since less-than-absolutes are all we've got" (42-43). He therefore has devised an ethic based on what he calls "subjective ends...in the nature of psychological givens" (40). He claims that these are not logical but can form the basis for a logical system that makes sense for him alone. "That's one reason why I don't apologize for things It's because I've no right to expect you or anybody to accept anything I do or say, but I can always explain what I do or say" (47-emphasis added). In concluding this for Jakes Horner, he tells him that "the only demonstrable index to a man's desires is his acts, when you're speaking of past time: What a man did is what he wanted to do" (49). Joe calls his philosophy "American pragmatism" (49) and dis­ tinguishes it from French existentialism because it takes so much more energy. The reader quickly sees that Jake, who at times lacks energy to the point of paralysis, is appropriately the represen­ tative of French existentialism as it is understood by Barth. It is 47 Jake who is stuck with a "recognition of the fact that when one is faced with such a multitude of desirable choices, no one choice seems satisfactory for very long by comparison with the aggregate desira­ bility of all the rest, thought compared to any one. of the others it would not be found inferior" (3). He says that "as a metaphor, it is the story of my life in a sentence" (3), and we later see that the affliction he calls "cosmopsis" is simply an extension of this view­ point. Before Jake's first paralysis he saw that there was no reason to do any one thing instead of another, and with his eyes "sightless gazing on eternity, fixed on ultimacy...there was no reason to do anything—even to change the focus of one's eyes" (74). To a certain extent, Jake takes the Doctor's advice and "become[s] sn existential­ ist" (85). Certainly Jake's ability to see other points of view as relatively valid and his inability to adopt any for himself are part of this philosophy.

The Doctor, whom Jake calls a "super-pragmatist" (84) represents a third view, most closely alligned, I think, with . Like Joe, the Doctor believes that a person's acts are an index to his personality, but unlike Joe, he does not believe in cause. During his sessions with Jake he insists on the relative and illusory nature of truth of any kind other than practical Access to the truth, Jacob, even belief that there is such a thing, is itself therapeutic or antitherapeutic, depending on the problem. The reality of your problem is all that you can be sure of. (79-80)

Shortly afterwards he says "there is no such thing as paralysis, Jacob. There is only paralyzed Jacob Horner" (81). 48 Another sense in which the Doctor's position differs from Joe's is in its rejection of logic. The Doctor asks Jake if he knows the reason why Cleveland stadium does not hold more people than it does. Jake replies that he does not, and the Doctor goes on to explain him­ self.

As far as reason is concerned its seating capacity could be almost anything. Logic will never give you the answer to my question. Only Knowledge of the World will answer it. There's no ultimate reason at all why the Cleveland stadium should seat exactly seventy-seven thousand, seven hundred people, but it happens that it does. There's no reason in the long run why Italy shouldn't be shaped like a sausage instead of a boot, but that doesn't happen to be the case. The world is everything that is the case, and what the case is is not a matter of logic. (81-82J]

I could go on, but the point I want to make is that Barth has set up these three characters, superficially at least, to represent three modern schools of ethical belief, and that the novel appears to be a battleground to see which of these will emerge the stronger or more compelling. In furtherance of this goal, he has also appeared to make each of the characters, in their own way, strong. Joe attempts to adopt his views with all his sincerity and strength, regardless of the consequences. Jake, whose self-consciousness forces him to see alter­ natives but will not let him choose one, is not only consistently but insistently arbitrary in this way. The Doctor is no less insistent than the other two. The point, however, is that the battle never comes off—that despite the apparent strength of characters and clarity of issues, none of the philosophies succeeds or fails, only the people do. Starting again with Joe, we see that only in a perverted sense is he really true to his beliefs. Although we are led to take ser­ iously, if not admire, his determination in searching out the causes of Rennie's infidelity, we see from early on that Joe's search is tainted with something other than a consistent philosophic motive. For one thing, he attempts to force both Rennie and Jake to accept his point of view, even though he has said earlier that he had no right to expect anyone to do so. For another, it appears that his acceptance of "psychological givens" only applies to himself, for in the case of Rennie and Jake he finds their givens unacceptable and refuses to take them as an explanation for the affair. The affair itself, rather than being the true and meaningful testing ground that Joe wants it to be, is in fact a perverse manipulation of his own testing. During his first dinner with Jake, Joe suggests in a hy­ pothetical way the exact situation that comes about, then encourages its fruition considerably by first insisting that Rennie and Jake go riding together, and later that she repeat the adultery. The entire tableau reveals more about Joe's psychological peculiarities than it does about the success of his ethical position. After the eavesdropping scene, in which Joe is discovered marching like a tin soldier, making faces at himself in the mirror and simultaneously masturbating and picking his nose (70-71), the reader wonders how Joe could "explain" those actions. When Jake sums things up by say­ ing that Joe is "fixed in the delusion that intelligence will solve all problems" (123), we see quite clearly Joe's deficiencies as a representative for an ethical viewpoint.

Even though Jake's case of cosmopsis is so extensive as to be unbelievable, it too is not quite as consistent a representation of a philosophy as it appears. For one thing we see that in many cases he does have the ability to choose, and rather than being completely neutral, he has a fair share of prejudices which he acts on consis­ tently. His skill at letter writing and his pickiness about choosing lodgings are two early cases that come to mind, as well as his first tryst with Peggy Ranking, which occurs before he meets Joe whom he will later mimic with Peggy. Most significant, of course, are Jake's actions in regard to Rennie's abortion when we see him acting pur­ posely and with committment for an extended period, his self-con­ sciousness, for the time being, forgotten. Jake appears to be in­ credibly cold and emotionally withdrawn in many places in the book, but at other times we see him frantically and unself-consciously involved. During his most active stage in searching for a solution to Rennie's pregnancy and imminent suicide, he states his ethical beliefs sincerely and to the point. "It seems to me that the most important thing about wounds is healing them, no matter how" (146).

The Doctor's position is more difficult to analyze because we see so little of him in the book, and because, as he points out to Jake, "you've no way of knowing whether anything I've said or will say is the truth, or just a part of my gerneral therapy" (79). Never­ theless, he makes one statement at a key position in the book that is revealing. Just after Rennie dies, the Doctor extorts a promise from Jake to continue his therapy. Then, in response to Jake's 51 sincere grief, tells him that, ""This thing was everybody's fault, Horner. Let it be everybody's lesson" (192). It is a statement that sounds like an ethical summation of the book, yet it comes from one who had earlier told Jake to "forget about causes; I'm no psycho­ analyst" (78).

It seems to me safe to conclude from all this that the ethical theme of the book is undermined by the characters in it, and, in light of Barth's statements about his development of character and the earlier assertion that the characters are only acceptable as intellectual positions, it is also ironic. Fortunately, the ethical matter in this novel is not restricted to the relative consistency of intellectual positions. By looking at Jake and the Morgans and how they interact, we see a separate ethical theme which seems to me at the heart of the matter. When Joe first meets Jake he admonishes him about poking fun at the Boy Scouts, summarizing his argument with the statement "that's too easy" (19). Shortly afterward, in response to Rennie's first aggressive phone call, Jake picks up the theme. "Great heavens, Morgans, the world's not that easy!" (23). At their first dinner Rennie tells Jake that "it's too easy to sneer at an argument. I feel that way a lot about you, Jake" (38), and Jake immediately resolves "not to let Mrs. Morgan make me uncom­ fortable again. That was too easy" (38). During Rennie's trauma about the adultery, she tells Jake that Joe had explained the dynam­ ics of their situation by an allegory of Joe as God and Jake as the Devil. He responds by saying that "This- Devil business is too easy. It lets you get rid of me on false pretenses"(68). When Joe insists on going on with his relentless inquiry, he explains to Jake that none of the possible solutions are good ones, "so it's not that I'm trying to solve the problem by passing the buck" (118). Later, in a discussion about whether or not Rennie should have the baby, Joe tells Jake that "making it a practical problem, like a money problem, is too easy. I'd be a lot happier if you'd take on your share of responsibility. You don't have to take any shit off of me. That's too easy too" (151).

The point I am documenting here, of course, is that the real ethic in this book, the one that comes out in the actions of these characters, has nothing to do with intellectual positions but in­ stead is grounded in the puritan ethic in American history. Certain­ ly hard work is as important to Joe's beliefs as any of his more sophisticated philosophical constructs, and for much of the book Jake and Rennie share this view. Only later, when Jakes sees him­ self faced with the real life and death issue of Rennie's possible suicide, does he come up with an ethic of his own, and it is the anti-puritanical statement given above, that "the most important thing about wounds is healing them, no matter how" (146).

The theme of imperfect communication that was at the heart of Todd Andrews' "Inquiry" in The Floating Opera is also found in The End of the Road, but with a different emphasis. At first there seems to be a distinct similarity between the "Inquiry" and Joe Morgan's relentless search into the causes of Rennie's infidelity. I have maintained that the limitations of Todd Andrews as a character and 53 a narrator undercut any of his attempts at true communication, and likewise, I believe, is Joe's investigation undercut by our knowledge of his role in the adultery and his peculiar shortcomings. Instead of these two faulty and futile inquiries into understanding—Todd's "Inquiry" and Joe's ethical investigation—Barth has modified his subject, taken it back a step, and transformed it into an issue of identity.

Todd Andrews sought to learn all he could about his father so that he could understand their imperfect communication—he tried to reduce the amount of subjectivity inherent in that communication so that he could eventually have an objective understanding of why his father killed himself. Jake, on the other hand, realizes that before one can communicate there must be a self to do the communicating, that "subjectivism doesn't really become intelligible until one finally locates the subject" (142). From this perspective we can view The End of the Road as a therapeutic attempt by Jake to find his own identity, the novel being a qualification and explanation of its opening line, "In a sense, I am Jacob Horner" (1).

Looking at the theme of identity, we see among the four major characters a clear dividing point between those who have an identity o and those who do not. Joe and the Doctor have one, Rennie and Jake do no, and it is in this regard that the subject of mythotherapy, 9 so often discussed in this book, comes into . As the Doctor explains it, "Mythotherapy is based on two assump­ tions: that human existence precedes human essence, if either of the 54 two terms really signifies anything; and that a man is free not only to choose his own essence but to change it at will" (88). He goes on tr present the theory that people have a sense of their own iden­ tity by taking a dramatic view of the world, by seeing themselves as major or minor characters in some drama, and that "a man's integ­ rity consists in being faithful to the script he's written for hims- self" (90). He tells Jake that on the bench at the train station Jake was neither a major or minor character, but no character at all; that "ego means I, and I means ego, and the ego by definition is a mask" (90).

This method of achieving identity is most applicable to Joe Morgan. Rennie tells Jake at one point that Joe always knows who he is (137) and implicit in Joe's whole treatment of the adultery and just about everything else he does is his egotism. The intellectual position he attempts to manifest starts with the assumption of psycho­ logical givens, but unlike Jake and Rennie, Joe has no difficulty whatever in believing he knows what his own givens are. More to the point is the religious allegory Joes gives Rennie in regard to the triangle of which they are a part. Rennie tells Jake how "when Joe saw how it was, he told me that the Devil wasn't real, and that he had conjured up the Devil out of his own strength, just as God might do" (68). Clearly this is an example of Joe practicing mythotherapy, in this case for Rennie's sake, but it is not accidental that he assigns himself the role of God in the drama. 55 Another way we see this in Joe is through his relationship with Rennie, one which he claims to be so equal that he would not prevent her from shooting herself in order to maintain her freedom of action, but which Jake and the reader see to be one of teacher and pupil. During Jake's first visit with the Morgans, he watched as Rennie remarked on various weeds, bugs, and so forth as they walked. "Joe confirmed her identifications" (43). Just before that, Jake de­ scribed Joe listening to Rennie by saying that "his attention was that of a tutor listening to his favorite protege" (37). Later Jake tells Joe that Joe talks to Rennie "as if she were a patient of yours" (44), and, apparently unaware that he is documenting that accusation, Joe tells Jake about the two times he "gave her her medi­ cine" by popping her on the nose (47).

We see more of this relationship when Rennie tells Jake about how she met Joe and came to marry him. She starts this incredible confession by attempting to deny her past altogether: "You know, I lived in a complete fog from the day I was born until after I met Joe" (57). She goes on to explain how Joe told her she was "shallow as hell" (57), and how, in order to please him, "I think I completely erased myself" (62). Joe, of course, had maintained that throughout this procedure Rennie was free to choose and "could walk out any time" (46), but Jake clearly sees that like his own freedom of choice with the Doctor in the Progress and Advice room, it was an illusion of choice only. Jake asks her about her individuality, and she res­ ponds with a Morganism that reveals the extent to which Joe is 56

caught up in his own ego, in spite of his own theories about ethics. First of all, suppose everyone's personality is^ unique. Does it follow that because a thing is. unique it's valuable? You're saying that it's better to be a real Rennie MacMahon than an imitation Joe Morgan, but that's not self-evident, Jake; not at all. It's just romantic. I'd rather be a lousy Joe Morgan than a first-rate Rennie Mac­ Mahon. To hell with pride. This unique-personality business is another thing that's no absolute. (62-63)

Apparently Joe has forgotten or neglected to tell his pupil that according to his theory one is made up of psychological givens. By forcing Rennie to adopt his own givens (whatever they are) he makes it impossible for her to ever understand her own, and "exist" in the sense that Joes exists. Rennie is therefore trapped in the hopeless paradox of trying ti imitate someone when the very things necessary for that imitation, Joe's psychological givens, are mysterious to her, and when her own psychological givens must be erased or ignored. It is no wonder that she feels incompetent to imitate Joe, and that her own psycho­ logical make-up emerges time after time when Joe embarrasses her, or she lies to Joe or feels like apologizing for things so that they can be gotten out of the way.

I have said earlier that the novel can be viewed as a qualif­ ication of its opening line, and to the extent this is true, then the Morgans' questions of identity serve the structural purpose of standing in comparison to Jake's. What we see in the Morgans are two extremes—egotism and self-effacement—and for a time Jake vacillates between them. I have already commented on Jake's Protean capacities of imitation, and we see them clearly when he assumes Joe's personality during his second visit with Peggy Rankin, or during several of his conversations with Rennie, when she remarks that in many ways Jake is just like Joe. On the other hand, he tells us early in the book that "although I admired the ability to lose one­ self in oneself, I was far too conscious of my surroundings, as a rule, ever to manage it" (25). At several times Joe accuses Jake of having Jake's own brand of egotism, saying, for instance, that "you refuse to forget yourself even for a minute" (115). In short, Jake can be as egotistical as Joe and as imitative as Rennie', and neither stance is more or less the real Jocab Horner than the other.

Jake's story begins with his paralysis at the train station where, in the Doctor's words, he had become "no character at all" (89). Jake tells us that the disease "cosmopsis" is not new to him, and that often he feels "weatherless," having no and "no per­ sonality at all" (36). During a conversation with Rennie, she tells Jake that he is neither weak nor strong, "You're nothing" (66). At another point she says that she had concluded that Jake didn't exist (68). Late in the novel Rennie says to Jake that "Idon't recognize myself anymore," and Jake replies, "That's nothing, I almost never do" (137).

The Doctor treats Jake's problem by mythotherapy, and by ex- olaining it as a problem in decision making. "Choosing is exist­ ence," he says, and "to the extent that you don't choose, you don't exist" (83). Jake has trouble choosing because he sees several sides to every issue and no real reason why one action is better than another. The Doctor responds by giving him the principles of 58

Antecedence, Sinistrality, and Alphabetical Priority (85) in order to facilitate Jake's choosing and to de-emphasize the reasons behind any specific choice. We are reminded of Todd Andrews who flipped a coin that would determine the fate of the Mack fortune, then did the opposite of what the coin indicated because he would rather be a creature of free will than of chance. Jake attempts to follow the Doctor's advice, but his awareness makes it impossible for him to succeed. Mythotherapy fails, he realizes, ...because one is compelled to recognize the inadequacy of any role one assigns. Existence not only precedes essence: in the case of human beings it rather defies essence. And as soon as one knows a person well enough to hold contradictory opinions about him, mythotherapy goes out the window. (128)

As to Antecedence, Sinistrality, and Alphabetical Priority, Jake realizes that these guidelines work only insofar as one doesn't care what he is doing. When Jake is moved to action in the book, trying to arrange an abortion so that Rennie won't kill herself, he does not do so because abortion has alphabetical priority over suicide, nor does he do it because he can logically prove that abortion is superior to suicide. He does it because he cares about Rennie, a motivation that easily displaces the artificial motivations the Doc­ tor and Joe prescribe.

If we view this book as Daniel Madjiak^0 has done, as an exer­ cise in Scriptotherapy carried on at the Remobilization Farm's new location, then it seems to me that Jake arrives at three illuminat­ ing thoughts in regard to identity. The first is to see identity as a question of personal unity, something Jake admits that he always 59 lacked.

Indeed, the conflict between individual points of view that Joe admitted lay close to the heart of his sub­ jectivism I should carry even further, for subjectivism implies a self, and where one feels a plurality of selves, one is subject to the same conflict on an intensely intra­ mural level, each of one's several selves claiming the same irrefutable validity for its special point of view that, in Joe's system, individuals and institutions may claim. In other words, judging from my clearest picture of myself, the individual is not individual after all, any more than the is really atomistic: he can be divided further, and subjectivism doesn't really become intelligible until one finally locates the subject. (142)

The second occurs when he takes Rennie to the Doctor for the abor­ tion and sees in her, ...the fundamental, last-analysis loneliness of all human beings in crucial situations. It is never entirely true, but it's more apparent at some times than at others, and just then I was \iery much aware of her as apart from Joe, myself, values, motives, the world, or history—a solitary animal in a tight spot. (187)

The third insight follows an encounter with Joe which leaves Joe dis­ gusted by Jake's ability to maintain contrary opinions at the same time. Rather than feeling guilty, however, Jake is exhilarated from the exchange with Joe. Articulation! There, by Joe, was niy_ absolute if I could be said to have one. At any rate it is the only thing I can think of about which I ever had, with any frequency at all, the feelings one usually has for one's absolutes. To turn experience into speech—that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it—is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking. (119) Can these ideas be reconciled? How can we be in the last analy­ sis individual lonely animals and at the same time a plurality of 60 selves? Which of the selves turn experience into speech? Which one feels alive and kicking? Which one follows this exuberant quotation with a reminder of the opening line? "In other senses, of course, I don't believe that at all" (119).

Interestingly, each of these observations is made by Jake in exposition, not as an actor in the novel but rather as its narrator, and the implications of this pertain to his concept of literature as well as identity. What has happened is that Jake the character, who views his physical self moving about in the world detached from the viewing self, has now legitimized the operation by stepping back into a more conventional role. The viewer becomes the narrator and the actor (or non-actor in Jake's case) the character. Most important, the shifts also, from other characters or Jake's self-consciousnesses, to outside the story. Even before he was introduced to mythotherapy, the character Jacob Horner found him­ self serving the roles of author, actor and audience and was unable to find any "personal unity" among these selves. By stepping back and switching to "Scriptotherapy" he sheds two of those selves, and the result is an articulated, coherent narrative that is in distinct opposition to the schizophrenic Jake Horner it describes.

It is as a narrator, then, that Jake appears most legitimate and, through the subtleness and success of his narrative, that we find an alternative to the nihilism and lack of identity suggested by the actions he describes. Todd Andrews was writing about writing, and as I have shown, he fiddled with the conventions of novel writing in his own smart-ass 61 way. Todd tried to be glaringly "clever" and the result, to my mind, was a narration which was so unreliable that his tricks with fictional conventions became an index to his character. At the risk of redun­ dancy, we see that Barth has essentially reversed the narrative situation in the two books. First he gave us an unreliable disinte­ grating narrator who as a character appeared to be identifiable. Then he tried the opposite. Todd the narrator shifted voices, times, points-of-view, mixed metaphors and so forth much as Jake the charac­ ter does, but the narration of The End of the Road is one voice and the only real identity that emerges from the novel.

An analysis of Jake's narration, then, ought to resolve the theme of identity. Fortunately, Daniel Majdiak has done this analy­ sis, and I need only summarize his work. Majdiak points out the various ways in which Jake parodies fictional conventions. Starting with the obvious parody of the "naming-convention," Jake Horner is seen to be a double reference to the "childish rationalizer of the nursery rhyme and the wife seducer common to literature." Instead of the name providing a particular identity, Majdiak points out how in this case it emphasizes his lack of one. Next Majdiak shows how the treatment of setting serves not to identify the characters, as conventional treatment of setting would, but, in Jake's case, to 12 show him to be "separate from, in fact alien to, his setting." The use of Laocoon as the one conventional symbol in the novel is also seen to be parodic. It is symbolic of Jake's predicament, but "unlike the objects in a novel which add authenticity to its world, Laocoon puts emphasis on the artifice in The End of the 62

Road."13

Majdiak goes on to show how the book parodies "the novel's serious treatment of time" by overly precise specification; how the final word "terminal" mocks the conventions of ending; how the frag­ mented chapter headings mock the convention stated by Fielding that chapter headings ought to inform the reader what he may expect. "It is as if Horner, unable to maintain a sense of personal unity, must begin again with each chapter, in the hope that the narrative will 1 5 provide him an identity."

What Majdiak has done is "to look at Barth's earlier works from his perspective," specifically, from the essay "The Literature of Exhaustion," and the Wisconsin interview in which Barth says that ...a different way to come to terms with the descrepancy between art and the Real Thing...is to affirm the arti­ ficial element in art (you can't get rid of it anyhow), and make the artifice a part of your point."!7 Thus Majdiak summarizes what Jake has been doing: "...to talk about experience in order to create a self is to transform it into a fiction and that is the only possibility left for Horner To be a writer is what Horner tries to realize by means of his confession."^8 He concludes that Scriptotherapy avoids the "nihilistic impasse" of Mythotherapy because "while Mythotherapy deals with people and at­ tempts to control their lives, Scriptotherapy deals solely with form, with fiction." In Jake's exuberant praise of articulation, he in­ sisted that turning experience into speech was a betrayal and falsi­ fication of experience, "but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all" (119). What Barth has done in this book is the first 63 successful example of a position he modifies yet maintains throughout his career. Jake is able "to comment on reality by dealing with the problems of fiction." We will see a great deal more of this in Barth's later work. NOTES Chapter Two

See, for example, Tony Tanner, "The Hoax that Joke Bilked," Partisan Review, 34 (Winter, 1967), 103. John C. Stubbs, "John Barth as a Novelist of Ideas: The Themes of Value and Identity," Critique, 8, No. 2 (Winter, 1966), 244.

Jean E. Kennard, "Imitations of Imitations," Mosaic, 3 (Winter, 1970), 121. Richard W. Roland, "John Barth and the Novel of Comic Nihilism," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 7, No. 2 (Summer, 1966), 244.

Gerhard Joseph, John Barth (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press: 1970), p. 17. 2 Barth, The Floating Opera, pp. 246-247.

John Barth, The End of the Road (New York: Bantam, 1972). All page references for this edition will appear in the text of this chapter. o See the Author's Prefatory Note to the revised edition to The Floating Opera, p. iii. 4 Barth, The Floating Opera, p. 165. 5 Barth, The Floating Opera, p. 219. c "John Barth: An Interview" with John L. Enck, Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 6 (1965), 11. David Kerner, "Psychodrama in Eden," Chicago Review, 13 (Winter/Spring, 1969), 59-67. 8 It is interesting that the Doctor has no name, only a title. Nevertheless, he exhibits a clear sense of personal identity through­ out the book. 9 Virtually everyone who comments on this book discusses mytho­ therapy. See the bibliography for a complete list.

64 65 10 Daniel Majdiak, "Barth and the Representation of Life," Criticism, 12 (1970), 51-67. 11 Majdiak, p. 60. 12 Majdiak, p. 62.

13 Majdiak, p. 63. 14 Majdiak, p. 63. 15 Majdiak, p. 65 16 Majdiak, p. 51. 17 John Barth, "An Interview," p. 6. 18 Majdiak, p. 65. 19 Majdiak, p. 66. 20 Majdiak, p. 66. CHAPTER THREE The Sot-Weed Factor

The chief difficulty in writing about Barth's third book, The Sot-Weed Factor, is that the universe of that book is "a seamless universe" (526). Certainly the reader is confronted with a multitude of characters, events and themes, but when he sits down to discuss any one of them, he soon discovers that the discussion leads on, eventually, to all of them. A clearly important theme in the book, for instance, is the meaning of history, but it is treated in such a way that in order to understand it we must simultaneously deal with subjects of identity, innocence, mythology, epistemology and so forth, and that in order to do that we must talk about the individual characters whose very individuality is for the same reasons, problematical. As Henry Burlingame says, 'Tis but a grossness of perception, is't not, that lets us speak of Thames and Tigris, or even France and England, but especially me and thee as though what went by those names or others in time past hath some con­ nection with the present object? I'faith, for that matter how is't we speak of objects if not that our coarse vision fails to note their change? The world's indeed a flux, as Heraclitus declared: the very universe is naught but change and motion. (140)

Nothing stands alone in the book, clear and separately definable. The characters, and there are over a hundred, take on their identities only by relationships and comparisons with each other. The plots, and there are dozens, are intricately interdependent.

66 67 We are reminded of Todd Andrews' proliferating inquiry, the problem of which was that "to understand any one thing entirely...requires the understanding of every other thing in the world." Given this kind of universe, one could simply throw up his hands in confusion, as Todd did, or lapse into paralysis like Jake, but The Sot-Weed Factor insists we go beyond that kind of response. Indeed, all of the major characters are prone to "cosmopsis," but in the novel it doesn't stop them, in fact it can't stop them, from doing things. As noted above, "The very universe is naught but change and motion," and if anything, it is "the strange and terrible energy" (114) of the book that is its dominant force. What the characters in the novel are forced to do is to recognize this seam­ less universe as it is, and paradoxically, to go on to make signifi­ cant actions with their lives. Ebenezer Cooke's hard education leads him to the shuddering vision that "there is no dome of Heaven" (366), and that he can "know naught immutable and pure" (145), and that paradoxically, only through these realizations can he dis­ cover his identity and take responsible action.

This same paradox is stated in other terms at the outset of the novel as a fundamental characteristic of Eben. We are told of his early education and how "his great imagination and enthusiasm for the world...had led him to a great sense of the arbitrariness of the particular real world, but did not endow him with a corresponding realization of its finality" (18). ...he knew very well, for instance, that 'France is shaped like a teapot,' but he could scarcely accept the fact that there was actually in existence at that instant 68

such a place as France, where people were speaking French and eating snails whether he thought about them or not, and that despite the virtual infinitude of imaginable shapes, this France would have to go on resembling a teapot forever. (18-19)

In yery general terms, Eben's education throughout the book is an attempt to resolve that paradox between the arbitrariness of the world and its finality, and in the course of his adventures we see the same paradox restated in terms of other general themes. The theme of identity for both Eben and Henry, for instance, involves the search for one final identity among the infinitude of choices. In the same way appearance and reality can be seen as this same paradox: things (or people, or political movements) have any number of appearances and at the same time one final reality. Innocence and experience are at the same time seamless and finally separable, as Eben discovers; history is demonstrated to be a fiction, and yet is "man's link to the past" (42). This fusion of paradoxical themes is accomplished in the book by following the shifting yet related quests of Ebenezer Cooke and his one-time tutor and friend Henry Burlingame III, and by looking at those quests and the way they shift, we can hope to come to some aggregate understanding of the way Barth relates the multitude of ideas and events in the book to each other, and to see how he resolves these paradoxes.

Eben's first difficulty is Jake Horner's disease, cosmopsis— the inability to make choices that leads to paralysis. After Eben's father sends him to Cambridge, Henry appears in Eben's room following several years' absence to find Eben in danger of "mossing 69 over where he sat" (22), and Eben explains that the "moment I grow sensible that I must choose, I see such virtues in each alternative that none outshines the rest" (23). He is speaking at the time of choosing a vocation, and at Henry's suggestion Eben abandons his studies so that he can experiment with several vocations. He takes Henry's advice3 and becomes a tutor like Henry until Eben's father learns of his leaving the university and commands him to work in a planter's warehouse to learn the plantation business.

This chain of events has significance for Henry Burlingame as well. During his reunion with Eben at Cambridge, Henry tells him that he too shares Eben's disease, and recounts his life up to that point—from his orphanage to his sojourn as the Cooke's tutor- as a series of arbitrary attempts to find his place in the world. When Eben succumbs to his father's wishes, however, Henry gets angry, urging Eben to flee his father and strike out on his own. Eben and his twin sister Anna argue with Henry, who contends that Eben is avoiding his responsibility to himself. They claim that "a man's father is his link to the past" (42), and that Eben has a responsibility to that. "Then again I thank Heaven I'm quit of mine," said Burlingame, "It leaves me free and unencumbered" (42). The three separate, but as we learn later, the argument had an effect on Henry, who sets out on a quest to discover his parentage.

In this way we are first introduced to the paradox of history in the novel. Henry Burlingame III, whose name implies a history, is a man without a past, an orphan, and he paradoxically represents the consequences of pastlessness while fervently seeking the secret 70 of his identity. Barbara Ewell points out how Henry's life and situation are accurately reflected in R.W.B. Lewis's description of the American hero: ...an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources.4

I am reminded, of course, of Barth's tactic in The End of the Road, where he gave us Jake Horner without a past or future, and Henry, significantly, is denied a biological link to the future himself because of his unusual (and ironically congential) impotence. Henry leaves Anna and Eben and goes to America where his pastlessness provides him with a unique freedom that he simultaneously embraces and seeks to avoid. During a later conversation with Eben, Henry refutes the validity of memory as a link to the past, arguing further that even the facts of history are ultimately unreliable and indeterminable. At another point he pictures his pastlessness in a way that lets him assume the role of a god. I am Suitor of Totality, Embraced of Contradictories, Husband to all Creation, the Cosmic Lover...I have no parentage to give me place and aim in Nature's order: very well —I am outside Her, and shall be Her lord and spouse! (526) On the other hand, however, Henry finds his pastlessness a great loss and the knowledge of his parentage necessary to his ful­ fillment. He complains to Eben "What a burden and despair to be a stranger to the world at large, and have no link with history!...what a loneliness it is" (145)! Added to this is the fact that Henry 71 discovers that only through finding his ancestry can he find the secret of the sacred eggplant necessary for his potency—that only through discovering his past can he have a biological future.

Ms. Ewell's excellent essay on the theme of history in The_ Sot-Weed Factor clearly identifies the paradox that Henry is trapped in, for not only are his arguments as to the indeterminancy of the past valid, but all his experience and the experiences of those he encounters serve to solidify his point. Most notable in this regard is THE SECRET HISTORIE OF JOHN SMITH, a document he discovers in fragments which refutes the "official" version of his­ tory which the world had long since accepted as true. Having already demonstrated logically that to accept the past requires a leap of faith, we now see that the truth of this assertion is grounded not only in logic but also in the peculiarities of those who act out history and record it. Eben argues with Henry that "it's not in the deeds that greatness lies, but in their telling" (86), a notion Henry readily accepts, adding later the question "who knows what manner of sloven huts the real Troy was composed of, or cares to know? ...Tis the genius of the poet to transcend his material" (407). We see from this kind of argument one way in which Barth makes the themes of his book related: to talk about the past or history involves a discussion of the role of the artist and the meaning of art. At the same time, for Henry Burlingame the meaning of history is intricately linked to his own sense of identity.

Without a past Henry has had to accept the world as the "seamless universe" he sees it as being, and moving from 72

epistemology to ethics, he, like Eben later, is forced to find a way to live in such a world. During the scene in which he convinces Eben that "there is no Dome of Heaven yonder" (366), he also presents -the one course of action he sees as possible where access to truth, valid facts, even the nature of reality, is denied him: Why is't you set such store by innocence and rhyming, and I by searching out my father and battling Coode? One must needs make and seize his soul, and then cleave fast to't, or go babbling in the corner; one must choose his gods and devils on the run, quill his own name upon the universe and declare, 'Tis I_, and the world stands such-a-way! One must assert, assert, assert, or go screaming mad. What other course remains?" (365)

By searching for his parentage, Henry is in the act of doing precisely what Eben cannot—seeing the infinitude of arbitrary possibilities of the world (in this case who his parents are) and accepting at the same time its finality (for surely, amongst all those possiblities, he was born of some particular woman and some particular man).

In many ways Henry and Eben stand in opposition throughout the book, from their physical differences (Eben is tall and thin, Henry short and compact) to their race (white man and Indian) to their range of experiences (Eben is a virgin, Henry the Cosmic Lover of just about everything, including "the barky boles of trees" (348) ) to their respective searches. Eben, for instance, begins with a clear lineage and an absurdly romantic but neverthe­ less strong assertion that he is, by his essence, a poet. When he leaves for he has no goal in mind other than writing his Marylandiad, but, as we see, his adventures gain him, after much 73 unhappiness the one thing he most lacked—knowledge of the world. Henry, on the other hand, was never an innocent, and in effect he begins with knowledge of the world but no history, no identity. When Henry discovers his parentage, a discovery itself based on cir­ cumstantial evidence only, and requiring an act of faith to "believe" in, he immediately abandons the freedom inherent in his pastlessness, leaving the woman he loves to return to his tribe and the responsibi­ lities that go with the decision.

As I've already suggested, however, there are also crucial ways in which Eben and Henry are alike, particularly when Henry tells Eben that "I, too, suffer from your disease, and have since childhood" (24). We see that same disease in one of Henry's brothers, Charlie Mattissin, who leaves the world of the Indian to discover one "which, while 'twas splendid here and there...he could not but loathe for having been the case" (438). Although we have many instances of Henry tutoring Eben in the indeterminancy of the world, we have equally as many where he points out to him that "the world does not operate in that wise" (33), or "that is not the case" (33). Henry has accepted the finality of the world where Eben has yet to do so.

Returning to Eben where we had left him, we see that at his father's insistence he took a job at Peter Paggen's planting house where he continues to suffer from cosmopsis. At one point, faced with making a decision in a tavern, he "starches up" (62), and after his evening with Joan Toast and his subsequent absence from the tavern, his friends tell him that they feared he "was ossified for good and all" (109). At this point in his life, Eben is so ignorant 74 of the ways of the world and its finality that an idle encounter with an ant serves as his introduction to "the unalterable laws of the universe." Sitting at his desk at Paggen's, unable to pay attention to his work, Eben plays a game with an ant that happens onto his page. He arbitrarily decides that every time the ant "trod un­ wittingly on a 3 or a 9, Ebenezer would close his eyes and tap the page thrice, smartly and randomly with the point of his quill." He soon became caught up in the game, "unequivocally on the side of the ant: with an effort that brought sweat to his brow he tried by force of thought to steer the hapless creature from dangerous numbers."

The game was profoundly exciting. After some ten or fifteen minutes the ant had the bad luck to be struck by a drop of ink Flailing blindly, he inked a tiny trail back to the 9 again, and this time...he was smitten squarely Ebenezer looked down to find him curled and dying in the loop of the digit. Tears of compas­ sion, tempered with vast understanding and acceptance of the totality of life and the unalterable laws of the universe welled in his eyes; his genital stiffened. (54)

Shortly after this passage, the narrator sums up Eben's character and the changes he was going through at the time as "one day cocksure, one day timorous; one day fearless, one day crave; now the natty courtier, now the rumpled poet." and concludes that "this Ebenezer

Cooke was no man at all" (55). With all this as preface, "our story begins" (55) when Eben wins the right to an evening with Joan Toast. During this evening and its immediate issue, we once again see Barth blending the various themes of his novel. Eben's question of identity, for instance, is 75

solved, albeit incorrectly, by his assertion that he is a poet and a virgin, a sense of self he doggedly keeps for much of the book. In order to make this identification, he must completely ignore the reality of Joan and his own situation. During this same scene John McEvoy tells him that he "knows naught of the world" (74), a message Eben receives from different characters throughout the book. By making a virtue of his innocence, Eben insures that he will remain innocent, and by identifying with his innocence, calling it his essence, he sets himself up as a symbol that must inevitably be des­ troyed .

At the same time, we see the theme of history carried forward as Eben attempts to deny Joan her history and his own as well. He tells Joan that "as I come to thee pure and undefiled, so in my mind you come to me: whate'er hath gone before speak not of it" (66). Shortly after this he tells his friends in the tavern that his old self has "perished in childbirth," delivering "full-grown" (110) the new man before them. In his first poem as a "poet," Eben unwitting­ ly dissociates himself from everything essentially human. The poem ends with:

Preserv'd, my Innocence preserveth me From Life, from Time, from Death, from History; Without it I must breathe Man's mortal Breath: Commence a Life—and thus commence my Death! (71) The one correction he makes to the poem, as several critics have noted, is to change the only concrete reference, "Joan," to "Heart" (72), a revision that indeed makes the poem "Perfect," as Eben says, 5 for now it is a "perfect abstraction" that not only isolates Eben from the real world but, as Henry points out, changes the sense of the poem appropriately, to self love. From this point the action of the novel speeds up and Eben begins an education that inevitably must destroy his misguided con­ ceptions of the world. To recount all his lessons in detail would take nearly as many pages as the novel. Instead I am forced to sum­ marize, repeating the warning that it is a "seamless universe," but that only through my "coarseness of vision" can I-discuss it at all.

Starting with the theme of history, we have already seen through Henry and THE SECRET HISTORYE OF JOHN SMITH the sense in which his­ tory is a fiction and yet a necessity. This idea is further suppor­ ted by Eben's adventures and his involvement with the "history" be­ ing made at the time. When Henry, disguised as Lord Baltimore, re­ counts for Eben the history of Maryland, Eben sees the dominant feature of that history as an intricately bewildering composition of plots, and, as Alan Holder has demonstrated, "the word 'plot' appears Q again and again in the book." Among the more noteworthy events that have to do with history is the courtroom scene, where Eben un­ wittingly gives away his estate to become, as Henry says, "landless like myself" (423), a condition Eben is unable to take advantage of. At another point we see him bemoaning the loss of his "ancient home" (463), here an overstatement and yet another example of his failure to understand what the concept of history entails. As the book goes on, however, Eben slowly begins to learn. Upon his reunion with Bertram late in the novel, he apparently has a 77

better understanding of history, since he tells his servant to "pass o'er the history and commence thy fabrication" (535). If this is an example of Eben accepting the arbitrary, fictional nature of history, shortly afterward we see him beginning to understand its finality. As a prisoner of the Indians on Bloodsworth Island he sees that: ...the whole history of his twenty-eight years it was that had brought him to the present place at the present time Was he not, in short, bound to his post not merely by the sum of human history, but even by the history of the entire universe, as by a chain of numberless links no one of which was more culpable than any other? It seemed to Eben that he was (579)

His Marylandiad is another case in point. It started out to be

"an epic to out-epic epics: the history of the princely house of Charles Calvert...relating the heroic founding of that province and the transformation of it to an earthly paradise" (87, emphasis added). Instead he wrote The Sot-Weed Factor, a biting satire on his experiences in the province. Eben eventually sees that neither view was correct, the first a without the benefit of knowledge, the second, as Harvey Russecks points out, an overstatement. Ebenezer's cheels tingled, and not alone because he felt that he had in fact overstated his indictment with a fervid, adolescent sort of righteousness. (644) Eben's cheeks also tingled because of the second part of his insight,

one that shows his paradoxical acceptance of the finality of the world: "Time passes for the living," it seemed to say, "and alters things. Only for the dead do circumstances never change." And this observation implied a judgment on the past, its relation to and importance in the present, a judgment to which he currently half assented—but only half! (645) 78 Indeed, at this point Eben has assented to Burlingame's notion that "what the saint calls cynicism, the worldly man calls sense" (510), but he only half assents, for he has now learned how to juggle the paradoxes of life. After recounting to Mrs. Russecks the story of his innocence, he states his understanding of the contradictory as­ pects of mankind:

What doth the story hold? Is't that the universe is vain? The chaste and consecrated life a hollow madness? Or is't that what the cosmos lacks we must ourselves supply? My brave assault on Maryland--this knight-errantry of In­ nocence and Art—sure, I see now 'twas an edifice raised not e'en on sand but on the black and vasty zephyrs of the Pit. Wherefore a voice in me cries, "Down with't, then!" while another stands in awe before the enterprise; sees in the vain construction all nobleness allowed to fallen men. 'Tis no mere castle in the air, this second voice says, but a temple of the mind, Athene's shrine, where the Intellect seeks refuge from Furies more terrific that e'er beset Orestes in the play (670)

As this shows, Eben has come to a recognition not only of the meaning of history, but also of his innocence. When Governor Nichol­ son asks him if his views on innocence have changed, he responds "Yes" (772), but to reach this understanding he has had to go through some eight hundred pages of "the hard text of life" (139).

Eben's innocence takes two forms in the novel: one of carnal innocence and virginity, the other of knowledge of the world. The former he defines as his "essence" (172), but we see by his accident­ al escapes from becoming a rapist on board the Cyprian or with Joan Toast at Maiden, that he is deluded. Eben's lack of knowledge of carnality is gone long before his technical loss of chastity. Mrs. Russecks comments that "this precious Innocence you cling to hath been picked at and pecked at till you've scarce a meager tit-bit 79 of it left," adn Eben replies, significantly, "I must own that is the case..." (670, emphasis added). Eben's attempted rapes and vision of the Cyprian, his encounters with Henry "The Cosmic Lover," and his convalescence at Maiden which has been transformed, in effect, into a school of sin for Eben, all add to his carnal understanding. As to his knowledge of the world, almost all his experiences show that he begins with none and gains it painfully. As I have men­ tioned earlier, several characters blatantly point out to him that he knows nothing of the world, and the many cases where "reality failed to live up to his expectations" (229) are rationalized away. Perhaps the most blatant (and certainly the most comical) example of his lack of knowledge of the real world comes in the corn-crib at Plymouth where Eben has befouled himself and searches his learn-:., ing for a solution to the practical problem of cleaning himself. First he goes through what he knows of history, concluding that it speaks "not to man, but mankind" (188). Next he tries philosophy, and finding no help wonders if "they all shat syllogisms, that have nor stench nor stain?" (189). "Literature too, he concluded...did not, except accidentally, afford solutions to practical problems" (189-190). Discouraged, he admits that McEvoy was right about his ignorance, but .that thought is abolished and the day saved by his notebook, from which the poet used "two fresh and virgin sheets" (190-191) to solve his problem, but completely misunderstood its im­ port. The exact nature of Eben s lack of knowledge of the world is revealed in an argument he has with Burlingame in which Henry claims that innocence is ignorance. Consistent to his poem on Innocence, Eben responds that "the surest thing about Justice, Truth, and Beauty is that they live not in the world, but as transcendent entit­ ies, noumenal and pure" (408). Thus, once again Eben claims to be outside the world of man, and his ignorance of that world a virtue.

Eventually, however, Eben's views change, and the best way to see this transformation is through the references to Adam and Eve that occur throughout the book. From his childhood days with Anna, where they played at Adam and Eve, until the end of the book, Eben sees himself in terms of the . At first his view of the Adam and Eve story is concerned with its effect on others. Self- righteously seeing himself as Adam before the fall, he tells Henry how the unfallen "are neither good nor vicious...but only envied... by the fallen" (170). After Eben loses his estate, Henry tells him "'tis Adam's story thou'rt re-enacting" (423), going on to argue that the loss of his estate is like Adam's loss of Eden, and that Eben should gain from the knowledge of his fall. Eben responds, how­ ever, that Adam's sin was knowledge and experience, and "ere he took his sinful bite he was immortal as the beasts, that learn little from experience and know not death" (424). He argues that it was carnal knowledge that caused man's fall. "If I am Adam, I am Eveless, and Adam Eveless is immortal and unfallen. In fine, sir, my estate is lost, but I am not..." (424). Once again Eben is attempting to 81 place himself outside the world of man.

Later, however, his views begin to change as he changes his un­ derstanding of the Adam fable. He tells McEvoy that "innocence is like youth...which is vouchsafed us only to expend and takes its

very meaning from its loss. Tis beyond me what it proves," Ebenezer said. "I know only that the case is so" (674, emphasis added). At another point, when Eben returns to Maiden after being made to walk the plank, he falls by his mother's grave, unable to move to save himself from exposure. Eben says that were it not for him, that woman would still be alive, and McEvoy, to comfort him, says "'tis like the sin o' Father Adam, that we all have on our heads; we ne'er asked for't, but there it is, and do we choose to live, why we must needs live with't" (741). Eben, however, has seen a deeper lesson of responsibility, and does not move. "McEvoy re­ leased his arm angrily. 'Still the virgin,' he cried, 'with no thought for any wight's loss save his own!'" (742).

Ebenezer shook his head: he wanted to explain to his injured companion that he suffered not from his loss alone, as did McEvoy, but from McEvoy's loss as well...and that the pain of loss, however great, was as nothing beside the pain of responsibility for loss. The fallen suffer from Adam's fall, he wanted to explain; but in that knowledge—which the Fall itself vouchsafed him—how more must Adam have suf­ fered! (742)

By the end of the book Eben's understanding has been completed. Surrounded by Henry and his family, Eben tells them that "'tis atone­ ment I crave: redemption for my sins against the girl, against my father, against Anna, e'en against you, Henry " Anna interrupts, saying that of all men on the planet, Eben, thour't freest from sin Thou'rt the yery spirit of Innocence." 'That is the crime I stand indicted for,' her brother replied: 'the crime of innocence, whereof the Knowledged must bear the burthen. There's the true Orignial Sin our souls are born in: not that Adam learned, but that he had to learn—in short, that he was innocent.' (788)

With this knowledge Eben goes on the have intercourse with Joan Toast, knowingly contracting her disease in the process but attain­ ing some measure of the atonement that he seeks. Because Eben tries to make an identity from his innocence, and because we see from Henry Burlingame that absolute knowledge and even self-knowledge are impossible in the world, the theme of ident­ ity so important in The End of the Road is carried forward in The Sot-Weed Factor, inseparable from the themes of history, innocence, and epistemology. It is in regard to identity that we most clearly see that the world in this book is "indeed a flux," for the number of impersonations, mistaken identifications, and actual changes of identity are staggering. Henry Burlingame is, of course, the master of all three, and in the course of the novel we see him assume the identities of Lord Baltimore, John Coode, Governor Nicholson, Monsieur Casteen, Eben, Bertram, Tim Mitchell, Peter Sayer, and Nicholas Lowe. Bertram poses as Eben, and Eben as Bertram and, at another point, as Sir Benjamin Oliver. McEvoy poses as Eben, Tom Taylor, and Sir Jonathan McEvoy the King's Commissioner. Andrew Cooke poses as a traveler; Anna Cooke poses as Meg Bromly, and then, when Cowhunkprets makes the stunning and almost immediate 83 transformation from a savage to the English gentleman Billy Rumbly, Anna goes in the other direction to actually become a savage squaw. John Coode, whom we never see in the novel, is famous for his dis­ guises and changes of character. All this impersonation serves to back up Burlingame's statements that "all assertions of thee and me, e'en to oneself, are acts of faith, impossible to verify" (143), and that the "true and constant Burlingame lives only in your fancy" (349). As I've already shown, Burlingame reacts to the other side of this paradox by making the leap of faith in "finding" his parentage, and in his declaration that "one must quill his own name upon the universe, and declare ''Tis I_ ' One must assert, assert, assert, or go screaming mad" (365). From this point of view we see that Eben's identification of himself as a poet with innocence as his essence, is a form of asser­ tion. It fails to establish an identity for him, however, for unlike Burlingame's assertions, Eben's is made without knowledge of the world and fails to account for the paradox of life. As noted earlier, Eben's assertion of identity, from his childhood poem through his identification with Adam before the fall places him outside the world of mankind. It is with this pose, significantly, that he runs from Maiden and his promise to Joan when he hears of his father's imminent arrival, rationalizing his flight by saying that he is responding to the responsibilities of art:

The poet may play at lover, or learning, or money- getting, or government—aye, even at or metaphysics—so long as he recalls 'tis but a game played for the sport oft, and for failure or success alike cares not a fart. I am a poet and no creature else; a virgin priest of verse. I shall feel con­ science only for my art, and there's an end on't! (501) Here we may think of Henry Burlingame, who played at lover, scholar, and politics like a game but, upon asserting a link with the past, accepted the responsibility of that identity. It is just after this speech by Eben, however, that he too begins to act responsibly, first with Ben Spurdance and then on Bloodsworth Island, where he takes charge of his fellow inmates, and eventually, through his responsible action, averts the massacre "of every white-skinned human being in Maryland" (561). Responsible action, in both Eben and Henry's cases, seems a necessary adjunct to identity. Although Eben and Henry are surely the dominant forces in The Sot-Weed Factor, several other characters have important roles in advancing the various themes of the book. Through Drepacca, Quaaapelagh and Burlingame's brothers, for instance, we see the development, of the theme of cultural guilt discussed by Brian M. Dibbie. Andrew and Anna Cooke both figure significantly in the novel's treatment of sex and incest. Bertrand is at different times a romantic and a cynic embodying the paradox which Eben eventually comes to accept, if not overcome. The two that stand out as most significant, however, are Joan Toast and John McEvoy.

As an active force in the novel, of course, next to Eben, Joan is paramount. It is because of Joan that Eben mistakenly assumes the identity of virgin and poet, setting into action a course of events that brings Anna, Andrew, Bertrand and McEvoy across the Atlantic to Maryland. During the and denouement of the 85 story, it is Joan who controls things, providing Henry with the Secret of the Sacred Eggplant, and Eben with final possession of Maiden. In the chaotic world of this novel, Joan is "its very sign and emblem" (495); McEvoy describes her as "no woman, but Womankind!" (566)

That Joan can embody the contradictory symbols of the harsh­ ness of the world and the essence of womankind is in keeping with the paradoxical nature of the novel. Her transformation from the pert and practical whore of London to the pox and opium ravaged dreamer in the final scene is the opposite movement from Eben's. Near her death she holds not only the title to Maiden and the Secret of the Sacred Eggplant, but also the key to the salvation of the province. She withholds it for the sake of her sex, saying "woman's lot is wretched enough at best; d'ye think I'll pass on that murtherous recipe to make it worse?" (784), but then does surrender the recipe when her terms are met. She tells McEvoy that "'ye may ask a whore her price, but not her reasons'" (785), and the reader is left with the ambiguous task of deciphering those reasons. On the one hand she extracts a form of revenge on Eben by giving him the pox; on the other we see her capitulation as a final romantic gesture of the love that has cost her so dearly.

John McEvoy is significant for the ways in which he resembles Henry Burlingame. When McEvoy tells his story on Bloodsworth Island we learn that like Henry he was an orphan; like Henry he became a singer for his meals and later a whore; like Henry he was never an innocent. It is McEvoy who echoes Henry by telling Eben 86 he "knows naught of the world," and McEvoy who reminds us of Henry by such phrasings as "we swim in an ocean of story, but a tumblerful slakes our thirst" (572). In his adventures en route to America and his facility for disguise and cunning, he is like Henry. His energy and love of life are Henry's as well.

McEvoy's significance, however, comes from the one way in which he differs from Henry. In many ways, Burlingame is the spokesman in this novel. Surely he is the most remarkable character. A genius and virtuoso in the arts of love, politics, imitation, —he even appears to invent shorthand (762)—he stands out as the character we look at for some cornerstone of value. As most critics point out, however, for all his talents and knowledge, Burlingame has only marginal success in the novel. He appears to prevent the attack on the province, but he is denied anything but a fleeting idyll at Maiden with Anna and Eben. While he stands in contrast to Eben because of his knowledge of the world, like Eben he shares the inability to embrace comfortably the paradoxes of life. Although both Eben and Henry eventually do come to terms with those paradoxes, all their actions can be seen as painful struggles to do so. Surely there is no "happy ending" for either of them. They come to a compromise with the world, but for Eben the price is a large degree of cynicism and a lifetime of pox. For Henry it is the hard committment to responsibility that forces him to leave his loved ones for an anonymous future.

McEvoy, however, can be seen to accept the central paradox of the novel from the outset. He sees Joan as the archetypal woman, 87 one who contained the infinity of possibilities:

She was the soul of worldliness: ill-tutored as I was, she made me think of ancient Rome, or or realms more ancient still; she was fresh and full of spirit as a blooded colt, but her eyes were old as the world, and in her gestures was the history of the race. (566)

Shortly after this statement he tells Eben that "I'd no more have quarreled with her arrangements than I'd quarrel with the sum o'history, or cavil at the patterns of the stars" (567). As I've already shown, what Eben and Henry struggle with throughout the novel is precisely what McEvoy accepts from the outset. The sum of history and the patterns of the stars are the case, however arbitrary. By accepting the case and at the same time embracing the paradox of Joan, McEvoy represents the brightest glimmer of hope we see in the novel. It is no accident that McEvoy, of all the participants, has the happiest ending. In this highly intellectual novel, he arrives at a successful position not through ignorance, for he is wise to the ways of the world, but without an ordered pattern of intellect. I am reminded of Joe Morgan, who was "fixed in the delu- Q sion that intelligence will solve all problems." McEvoy's intelli­ gence is not the rational kind. We do not see him as a guide to accepting paradox, but as a sign that somehow it can be done. Before I leave this subject, it is worth noting that McEvoy is not the only representative of what I can only term "common sense" intelligence, and that the view he represents is not so much anti-intellectual as other-than-intellectual. Certainly Eben and Henry tackle the vicissitudes of life with an intellectual bias, 88 but that seems to me to be presented more as a fact of their charac­ ters than as weakness. Indeed, much of what they have to say strikes me as wise or true, and the point I am getting at is perhaps the simple one of the often repeated proverb in the novel, "there are more ways to the woods than one" (66). McEvoy's wisdom is of a different kind thatn Henry's or Eben's. Joan Toast has a profound non-intellectual understanding of sex and the plight of women. Harvey Russecks, another uneducated commoner, makes the wisest statements in the novel about civilization and literature, while Henrietta Russecks augments Harvey with profundities of her own. Even Bertrand seems to have come upon a way to the woods, which we see as he tells Eben that The difference here 'twixt simple and witty folk, if the truth be known, is that your plain man cares much for what stand ye take and not a fart for why ye take it, while your smart wight leaves ye whate'er stand ye will, sobeit ye defend it cleverly. Add to which, what any valet can tell ye, most things men speak of have but two sides to their name, and at every rung on the ladder of wit ye hear one held forth as gospel, with the other above and below. (236)

We are left with the conclusion that there are many ways to wisdom, each having its advantages and disadvantages, and that, as the cen­ tral paradox of the novel has maintained all along, in order to choose we must acknowledge the arbitrary possibilities and accept the finality of one of them. In The Floating Opera the importance of style was blatant and, I hope I've shown, clearly part of the message of that novel. Barth's debt to the eighteenth-century novel was particularly manifested in his direct imitations of Tristram Shandy, and one way 89 to measure Todd Andrews' limitations and lack of control was against the standard set by Sterne. In The End of the Road Jake Horner's manipulations of traditional novel technique were seen to be the key to his rehabilitation as he sought an understanding of life through art. In The Sot-Weed Factor the style plays an equally important role and, together with the theme of the meaning and place of art in the world, provides us, because of its scope, with the final and most significant index to the novel's blend of values.

Both before and after all the talk about characters and themes

in this book, the artifice of the book itself is apparent, and eyery reader surely wonders why the author would go to the trouble of writing an 800 page book in eighteenth-century prose. We might just as well wonder why a twentieth-century poet would choose to write a sonnet, and certainly, as in this case, simple technical challenge is part of the answer. The other part involves a discus­ sion of the significance of form in a work of art, and to facilitate that discussion, I will start with a description of the style of The Sot-Weed Factor.

The language of the book is rigidly consistent with an eighteenth-century educated American vocabulary—in fact consistent with an eighteenth-century lay vocabulary as well. To my knowledge, it is entirely free of anachronisms, including the Elizabethan sections of The Privy Journal and The Secret Historie, and, of course, the flavor of the period is caught as much by the dominant use of contractions and eighteenth-century idioms as by the hundreds of classical and biblical allusions throughout. The sentences of 90 the novel are also consistent with the period, particularly in their balance and parallelism, which reflect both the leisure and rational­ ism of the time. The plot, as Barth said, is an attempt to out-do Fielding, and is so rigorously controlled and tied together that nothing in the book appears to be incidental to it. It represents, in fact, Barth's view of the eighteenth century in general as an age that believed in a plotted universe. The book is made up of some twenty-one separate monologues told in the first person and presented with the observations and transitions of a Fielding-like narrator. It appears, in fact, that Barth has deliberately attempted to acknowledge the masters of the eighteenth-century novel. The narrator and plot pay homage to Fielding, the structure and excre- mental and sexual emphasis to Smollett. Andrew Cooke places great emphasis on his son's name of Ebenezer and tells him how a "Mrs. Twigg has oft maintained that English babies ne'er should take French tit, and lays as the root o' your prodigality the pull and tug of French milk with English blood" (43), surely a tribute to Tristram Shandy. Ebenezer's dressing scene before he visits Lord Baltimore is both a parody and acknowledgement of Richardson.

The significance of this rigidly controlled form is shown most clearly by its contrast with the world and the consciousness of the novel. Although it strikes me as a bit presumptuous, it can be maintained that despite the eighteenth-century language, the ideas expressed, in fact the paradoxes explored, are uniquely (perhaps pertinently) those of the twentieth-century man. In contrast to the mannered balance of the sentence construction is the chaos of 91 the world depicted in the novel, that "blind rock careening through space" (36), that Burlingame describes. In contrast to the leisure of that style is the frenetic energy displayed by almost all of the actors. Although rigidly plotted, surely this book does not-imply a belief in a plotted universe, and when Ebenezer wishes for "a god on wheels" (477) to come from offstage to save him, it is a wish made in the bitterly ironic realization that there is no such god lurking behind the scenes. Although nothing is incidental to the plot, there is a distinct lack of the happy ending one expects from such a design; in fact, the narrator makes his apology in this regard, not to fact, but to form, telling us that "when the liti­ gant's claims are formal, rather than substantial, they pose a dilemma from which few tale-tellers escape without a goring" (793). As I pointed out in my discussion of history in the novel, the emphasis on plots serves to enforce the idea that history is a fiction. In much the same way, the structure of the book does also, with every character in turn telling their tales, in an artistic, that is, plotted way.

One explanation of this relationship of style to subject has been made by Russell H. Miller, who sees in the disparity be­ tween the elevated language of the narrator and the lowness of the action, the "traditional" mock-epic form. Earl Rovit sees "the 1 ? novel as parody." Barth himself calls the book a novel "which imitates the form of a novel, by an author who imitates the role of 13 the Author." Certainly the disparity between style and subject that Miller sees is evident, but he oversimplifies and understates 92 the case. As I've shown above, the disparity is not only between the elevated language and low actions, but it is also between the actions of one century, the style of another and the consciousness of a third. Since Rovit's view is encompassed by Miller's it is even less satisfactory, and it appears that of those who have com­ mented on the style of the book Barth in his cryptic comment is closest to the mark.

In the context of the essay it appears in, Barth's comment emphasizes the artificiality of The Sot-Weed Factor. He makes the argument that novels in general, particularly eighteenth-century novels, presumed to imitate not life directly, but the documents of life. Thus, Tom Jones is called a history, Pamela or Clarissa col­ lections of , Tristram Shandy an autobiography, and so forth. Of course, all those imitations of documents in the real world be­ come themselves documents in the real world, and what Barth is presuming to do here is to eliminate the middle-man. The disparity between style and subject in The Sot-Weed Factor is so great that at no point can we confuse either with reality as we know it or recog­ nize it in our literature—in fact all our knowledge of reality adds to our sense of the artifice of the book. In short, the style and subject of The Sot-Weed Factor are a kind of objective correla­ tive for the theme: the latter insists on the infinite and arbitrary possibilities of the world, while the former is a symbol of its finality. In this way we see how fixed form is paradoxically a necessary aspect of freedom of expression, which, like the "supporting central cedar pole" in Robert Frost's sonnet, "The 93

Silken Tent" emphasizes at once the freedom of the woman and "the 15 countless ties of love and thought" that bind her to the earth. If the form of the novel emphasizes its artifice, so too do the characters who spend an inordinate amount of time discussing how to read, the role of the artist, and the significance of fiction. Before commencing with his story to Ebenezer, Henry first must "tune his strings" (152), as Todd Andrews did, and he tells Eben, who is anxious to find out what happened, to "attend the how oft" (148), which he deems more important than the events themselves. Much later in the book, Henrietta Russecks echoes this theme, asking Eben "what matters if you've heard the plot,already?" (715). Along these same lines Henry chides Ebenezer for being disappointed with the subject for his Marylandiad: "Who knows what manner of sloven huts, the real Troy was composed of, or cares to know?... Tis the genius of the poet to transcend his material" (407). This emphasis on the telling of a tale as opposed to its realism is best ex­ pressed by Harvey Russecks who appears to be the author's spokesman in this regard:

And what matter if your folk are drawn from life? 'Tis not likely I'll ha' met 'em, or know 'em from your telling if e'er I should! Call 'em what names ye will: in a tale they're less than themselves, and more. Besides which, if ye have the art to make 'em live— 'sheart!—thou'rt nowise liable for what the rascals do, no more than God Almighty for the lot of us. As for length, fie on't!...A bad tale's long though it want but a single eyeblink for the telling, and a good tale short though it takes from St. Switchin's to Michaelmas to have done with't. Ha! and the plot is tangled, d'ye say? Is't more knotful or bewildered than the skein o' life itself, that a good tale tangles the better to unsnarl?...A tale well wrought is the gossip o' the gods, that see the heart and hidden point o' life on earth; the seamless web o' the world; the Warp and the Woof...I'Christ, I do love a story, sirs! Tell away! (625)

Harvey's speech applies, of course, to none other than The Sot-Weed Factor, and his reference to the "hidden point o' life," and "the seamless web o' the world," identifies the central paradox for Eben, Henry, and the book in full. If the reader has missed the point, however, Harvey won't be the one to show it to him, saying shortly afterword "'Tis a great mistake for a tale-teller to philo­ sophize and tell us what his story means; haply it doth not mean what he thinks at all, at least to the rest of us" (628).

The critical view Harvey expresses is the same view held by Barth, and we will see it expounded at length in his later novels. In the meantime, he has Eben try out other schools of criticism. In a dialogue with Henry, for instance, Eben proposes the New Criticism, saying "But will ye not judge the man by the child? 'Tis the present poem alone, methinks, that matters, not its origins, and it must stand or fall on's own merits, apart from maker and age" (137). Henry responds with biographical criticism, arguing that "certainly your Hymn to Innocence is of greater interest to one who knows not a bean of the circumstances that gave it birth." Eben, missing the point, acknowledges it, confessing that "it repels me to own the muse sings clearest to professors" (137), but Henry cor­ rects him, saying that

Human experience is what I mean: knowledge of the world both as stored in books and learnt from the hard text of life Everything we meet is a spring, is't not? That the bigger the cup we bring to't, the more we fetch away, 95

and the more springs we drink from, the bigger grows our cup. (137-138)

In a later scene Eben has a delirious dream in which he climbs Mount Parnassus, and looking down sees the folly of his pretensions to being a poet. On the pinnacle of the mountain he singles out "one of the oldest and wisest-looking, who was engaged in paring his toenails," and asks him which mountain is which. The old man, who is surely James Joyce's vision of the unobtrusive narrator of realis- 1 fi tic fiction, replies that he doesn't know. Eben then asks him how he got there. 'Ah, that was no chore at all,' the old man said. 'I was here when the mountain grew, me and my cronies, and we went up with it. They.'11 never knock us_ down—but they might raise us up so high they can't see us any more.' (480-481) This vision, of course, corresponds to Barth's view of the realistic novel. He delivers his final blow to realism when he has the old man say "there's really naught in in [sic] the world up here but clever music; ye'll take pleasure in't if ye've been reared to like that sort of thing" (481). Eben initially views his role as a poet as one that places him outside mankind. This view changes, as does his Marylandiad, and he ends up writing The Sot-Weed Factor which, as a bitter satire, is the opposite extreme of his former plans. Eventually he sees that the "Sot-Weed Factor" is also biased and misinformed, and he finds the of that poem's success and his subsequent Laureatship the occasion of a mere smile and shrug of his head. It is after he stops viewing himself as a poet, however, that Eben begins to learn 96 the truth about life from art. Thinking his death imminent, Eben considers the plight of heroes, who in part he sees as "drunkards or madmen:"

Yet the very un-Naturalness, the vanity, the hubris as it . were, of heroism in general and martyrdom in particular were their most appealing qualities; granted that the Earth, as Burlingame was fond of pointing out, is 'a dust-mote whirling through the night,' there was some­ thing brave, defiantly human, about the passengers on this dust-mote who perished for some dream of Value In a word, their behavior was quixotic: to die, to risk death, even to raise a finger for any Cause was to pennon one's lance with the riband of Purpose, so the poet judged, and had about it the same high lunacy of a tilt with Manchegan windmills. (732)

In a scene that looks ahead to "The Menelaid" Henry admits to Eben that he has never seen either Lord Baltimore or John Coode in person. It may be they are all that rumor swears: devils and demigods, whichever's which; or it may be they're simple clotpools like ourselves, that have been 'd out of reasonable dimension; or it may be they're naught but the rumors and tales themselves. (753)

To this Eben replies: If that last is so...Heav'n knows 'twere a potent life enough! When I reflect on the wight and power of such fictions beside my own poor shade of a self, that hath been so much disguised and counterfeited, methinks they have tenfold my substance. (Emphasis added.)

Burlingame listens, then "smiles approval. 'My lad hath gone to school with a better tutor than his old one!'" (753-754). Having learned the power of fiction and the truth about life through art, Eben follows this scene with realizations about inno­ cence and the lesson of Adam's Fall. It is left to the narrator to sum things up, and he does so by again blending the various themes 97 of the novel in defense of his book: Be it remembered..., that we all invent our pasts, more or less, as we go along...the happenings of former times are a clay in the present moment that will-we, nill-we, the lot of us must sculpt. He goes on to say that if, despite this, he is accused of forcing the muse beyond reality, "such a charge does honor to artist and artifact alike" (793). NOTES Chapter Three

1 John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1960). All page references to this edition will appear in the text. 2 Barth, The Floating Opera, p. 6. 3 It is worth noting that this advice is quite like that given by the Doctor to Jake Horner in The End of the Road, pp. 183-190. 4 Barbara C. Ewell, "The Artist of History," SLJ_, 5, No. 2 (Spring, 1973), 34. Ewell, p. 37. See also, Gerhard Joseph, John Barth (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1970), p. 28. Alan Holder, "'What Marvelous Plot...Was Afoot:' History in Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor," American Quarterly, 20 (1968), 597-598. Brian W. Dippie, '"His Visage Wild; His Form Exotick:' Indian Themes and Cultural Guilt in John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor," American Quarterly, 21 (1969), 113-121. o See, for example, Dippie, p. 120; or Holder, p. 602. 9 Barth, The End of the Road, p. 123. For the comment on Fielding, see "John Barth: An Interview," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 6 (1965), 7. Barth discusses plot and the eighteenth-century in "Having it Both Ways," New American Review, 15 (Spring, 1972), 147. 11 Russel Miller, "The Sot-Weed Factor: A Contemporary Mock- Epic," Critique, 8, No. 2 (Winter 65/66), 88-100. 1 o Earl Rovit, "The Novel as Parody: John Barth," Critique, 6, No. 2 (Fall, 1963), 77-85. 13 John Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion," Atlantic, 220 (August, 1967), 33. 14 Robert Frost, "The Silken Tent," Selected Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), p. 220, 1.5.

98 99 15 Frost, "The Silken Tent," 1.10. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a_ Young Man, ed. Chester G. Anderson TNew York: The Viking Critical Library, 1968), p. 215.

'' John Barth, "Menelaiad," Lost in the Funhouse (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1968). CHAPTER FOUR Giles Goat-Boy

In my introductory chapter I argued that Giles Goat-Boy marked a separate stage in Barth's career in which the range and direction of his interests changed. As with most issues concerning Barth, however, our understanding of this change is necessarily paradoxical. Barth has said, for instance, that "the permanent changes in fic­ tion...more often have been, and are likely to be, modifications of sensibility and attitude rather than dramatic innovations in form and technique." Discussing modern fiction in 1972, he goes on to state that even among those who have experimented with form and technique (Borges and Nabokov, for example) "the important difference from their predecessors is more a matter of sensibility and attitude than of means."2 In regard to Barth's own work this view is para­ doxical, for, as I have already noted, the most distinguishing characteristic of The Sot-Weed Factor is its artifice, and in Gi1es Goat-Boy the emphasis on form and technique is even more striking. How can we understand these shifts in sensibility and attitude with­ out attending to the changing means of his fiction, or, conversely, how can we account for what some reviewers have called "the elaborate 3 literary joke" of his novel without understanding the "more or less fantastical...view of reality"4 that informs it?

100 101 Most of the criticism written about Giles Goat-Boy deals not with the "important difference...of sensibility and attitude," that distinguishes it from Us_ predecessors, but with the matter of its form and technique. Several excellent articles discuss the frame of the novel, the pattern that structures the novel,6 the allegory,7 o or the rhetoric, but each of these only tangentially deals with the ways in which the themes of innocence, identity, the nature of reality, and art have been modified by the author from one novel to the next. While I would also like to reserve the right to discuss these matters of technique, for the most part in this chapter I will attempt to fill the gap in the criticism of Barth by attending to his changing sensibility and attitude as embodied by the way Giles Goat-Boy9 treats the above-mentioned themes. In an interview published before the release of Giles Goat-Boy, Barth discussed his career up to that date, calling his three pre­ vious books an intended "series of three nihilistic amusing novels." He says, however, that "I had thought I was writing about values and it turned out I was writing about innocence Now I'm tiring of writing about innocence and would prefer to write about experience. But I haven't got any."' Since innocence and experience are two sides of the same coin, the difference here is primarily one of em­ phasis, and we can see in detail this shift by a comparison of Ebenezer Cooke and George Giles. Eben's innocence, discussed at length in the previous chapter, involved both a lack of knowledge of the world and carnal knowledge, and reached its peak in his final understanding of Adam's lesson: "not that Adam learned, but that he had to learn—in short, that he was innocent."11 In a sense, George Giles begins at this point. Al­ though his first fourteen years as a goat would seem to place him at a starting point of innocence much more pronounced than Eben's, his goathood in fact provides him with several kinds of experiences Eben never had. His knowledge of carnality, for instance, came from natural interaction with the goats, and as a goat George was both as primally innocent as an animal and at the same time as sexually experienced as one. Up until his fourteenth year, George was ignor­ ant of mankind, but beginning with puberty, he lost Eben's kind of innocence quickly. He had experience watching the human sex act at an early age, and though both characters were driven by their lust to attempt rape, for Geroge it was a "natural" response. Whereas Eben's technical chastity was not relinquished until he was thirty, and then only once, George has an active sex life throughout the book.

One way to see the difference in the innocence of these two characters is in terms of the they are associated with. Eben is figured throughout The Sot-Weed Factor as an Adam figure, but George's role aligns him with that famous fornicator, him­ self. Indeed, the Oedipus myth plays an important part in George's character and the structure of the novel (Robert Scholes has done a 12 thorough analysis of this) but as mythic representatives of in­ nocence, Adam and Oedipus are quite different. Generally, in the 103 Adamic myth the character starts with something and loses it—a view which places a value on innocence that the Greek myth does not. Eben says, for instance, that "innocence is like youth...which is vouchsafed us only to expend, and takes its very meaning from its 13 loss." For Oedipus, of course, his innocence is his ignorance. This difference is seen in the way both books treat the sub­ ject of innocence versus ignorance. In The Sot-Weed Factor, Henry claims that innocence is ignorance, but Eben responds in a way that places him outside humanity. At the conclusion of the book Eben finally admits that his innocence was in fact a liability, but not before some seven hundred pages of trying it the other way. In Giles Goat-Boy, the same debate of innocence versus ignorance is carried on, but in this case the principal character simply listens as Max and Dr. Sear carry on the discussion. It occurs, significantly, right before the performance of Taliped Decanus () and the emphasis in wholly on the pejorative aspects of innocence. Max, who is concerned only with practical results, has no patience for Eben's kind of innocence which places him outside humanity, and says simply "Innocence, bah," and "Pfui on innocence" (307). Sear (who is naturally related to Tiresias in the Oedipal correspondences in the novel) goes even further:

...ignorance is illusion; and Commencement, while it certainly is a metaphor, is no illusion. Commencement's for the disallusioned, not for the innocent. (307) If we apply Sear's view to Adam, we see that his fall is necessary to his salvation. 104

Of course, George is not only an Oedipus figure; he is also an Adam figure himself, at least in the beginning, and because he is a Grand-Tutor, he is a Christ figure as well. In terms of the latter, Geroge is, as Stoker says, "An Enos Enoch with balls" (233), and the difference between George and Christ is further under­ scored by George's role as a goat and goat-herd in contrast to Christ the Shepherd. Thus George is dissociated from both the vir­ ginity of Christ and the ignorance of Adam. He is more experienced than both of them.

If we examine George's childhood, we can see the sense in which he begins where Eben left off. Although he spent fourteen years com­ pletely ignorant of the ways of mankind, in the course of only one year he learns almost all of the essentials. He learns about car­ nality while watching Chickie in the buckwheat (66-67), and by tricking himself he discovers his first fundamental human character­ istic (47). He understands laughter after he falls down and the people by the fence 1 aught at him; then he pees on his best friend to prove his knowledge (47-48). He becomes acquainted with genuine grief (51), then "made friends that spring with restlessness" (52), as well as insomnia and tears. The suddenness and import of this season of learning is best summed up by George, who describes his simple animal morality and the "afternoons of blowsy bliss and dreamless nights" (45) that they gave him:

Thirteen years they fenced my soul's pasture; I romped without a care. In the fourteenth I slipped their gate- as I have since many another—looked over my shoulder, and saw that what I'd said bye-bye to was my happiness. (45) 105 What follows from this year is George's education, for Max sees that if George is to be a man instead of a goat, he has to learn about the world. At one point George recounts a dream to Max, who ex­ plains it in Freudian (Oedipal) terms, and George responds angrily. "Flunk this psychology of yours!...Can't anything I do be just in­ nocent?" (120). Max does not even have to respond, for George im­ mediately sees that it cannot.

The other characters who represent innocence in Giles Goat-Boy also display a different emphasis from that in The Sot-Weed Factor. Anastasia is certainly an innocent in her thinking, but sexually, at least, she is the most experienced character in the book. She appears to have a certain innocent wisdom (she is the only one who understands Stoker, for instance) but for the most part her innocence is presented ambiguously. She is described at first as looking like and being in the role of a Siren (155), certainly not an image of innocence, yet shortly afterward she is depicted as the essence of those innocent damsels George has read about in the Tales of the Trustees (161). When she tells George and Max the story of her seduction at the hands of her uncle, it is strikingly similar to Joan Toast's story about her uncle, but whereas Joan, because of the hardships of experience, became "the world's very sign and emblem,"16 Anastasia continually appears to be amazed by the meanness and per­ versity of those around her. Her character, as George comes to see, is both simple and complex, embracing a host of contradicitions, from innocence and experience to shyness and promiscuity. When George tells Peter Greene that there are actually two Anastasias—twin 106 sisters—we are aware that she in fact has had no trouble acting out either role.

Peter Greene is another character who appears to be an innocent, but he too must in the last analysis be viewed ambiguously. His name suggest both carnal and natural innocence, yet the name of his com­ pany, Greene Timber and Plastics, implies an odd combination of basic nature and artificiality. He is at various times in the novel clearly portrayed as Huck Finn, Daniel Boone, Abe Lincoln, Will Rogers and Billy Graham, or as a combination of the five, and yet the homespun innocent wisdom associated with the first four of those figures is continually undercut by revelations of his defloration of the wilderness, crooked and cutthroat business dealings, sexual perversity, and so forth. That he is associated in the end with Billy Graham suggest to me the political and financial sophistication of the man who has most successfully made a business and a power base out of evangelism. Greene's self-styled philosophy, contained in the single statement "I'm Okay, and what the heck anyhow" (265), serves as both an example of the delusions of innocence Sear addres­ sed, and as the tip of an iceberg of rationalizations that Greene has compounded to make up for his clear history of unscrupulous business dealings, adultery, rape, alcoholism and so on. Greene's counterpart in the novel, Leonid Andreyovitch, displays the same im­ pulsive enthusiasm and wide mood shifts as Greene does, yet he is at the same time East Campus's most sophisticated espionage agent. Both of these characters eventually blind themselves, like Oedipus, 107 when they acquire knowledge, but their blindings are paradoxically impusive, and, in a sense, innocent acts, especially since we see that the knowledge they acquire is not final. Croaker is a fourth character representative of innocence, in his case the animal innocence that George once knew. Incapable of speech and responsive to only blunt commands, he appears to be the embodiment of innocence as ignorance. Even for Croaker, however, there is a considerable sophistication which serves to make his character as an innocent ambiguous, and this is seen, significantly, in his art. Although I will have more to say on this later, for now it is enough to note that Croaker's art of whittling (with his teeth, no less) is sophisticated beyond the comprehension of even Max, and that the artifact he produces is at the same time a work of art, a walking stick, and a means of communication. Croaker's sexuality is but another case of Barth's mingling the traditionally western symbol of experience with the character of an innocent.

The final character to consider in this regard is Virginia Hec­ tor (aka Lady Creamhair) who, while technically a virgin, became impregnated and gave birth to George. She is the only character among this large group of innocents who is both carnally and exper- ientially innocent, and, significantly, she is crazy. Although she appears to have at times what I can only call motherly wisdom, for the most part she babbles incoherently. As the character most trad­ itionally "innocent" in the book, she is nevertheless one of the least important, a victim of forces too great for her to assimilate, so that while the result is unambiguous, it is nevertheless without 108 meaning.

All of these qualified innocents in Giles Goat-Boy have their counterparts in the characters who represent experience, both sexual­ ly and in terms of knowledge of the world. In The Sot-Weed Factor the chief character of experience was Henry Burlingame (who was technically a virgin until the climax of the novel) with John McEvoy, Joan Toast, and occasional characters like Harvey Russecks serving to echo the theme. In that book, however, Eben held center stage with these other characters serving the various roles of tutor, foil, companion, and model for him. In Giles Goat-Boy, the characters of experience have proportionately greater weight.

Chief among these is Max Speilman, who serves Burlingame's role as tutor for the young George, and who represents knowledge of the world. Max is already an old man at the outset of the novel, and his history includes expertise in several fields, ranging from goat-keeping to computer technology and warfare. It is Max, for instance, who is known as "the father of WESCAC" (95), and who pushed the EAT button that killed thousands of people during the second . We learn that Max knows "more about herohood than anybody" (126), and that his general theory of Cyclology eventually comes to solve "the riddle of the Sphincters" (42).

Certainly Max is a man of experience, and yet he still retains a qualify of innocence that makes him an easy mark for people like Maurice Stoker who recognize it. Max's entire life has been dedi­ cated to alleviating human suffering, but he knows that he will be remembered as one who by pressing the EAT button, caused a great 109

deal of it. His retirement to the goat farm is an attempt to get back to a condition of innocence by forsaking the world of experience.

He tells George why he chose the goats over the men: On one side, the Nine Symphonies and the Twelve-Term Riot; Enos Enoch and the Bonnifacists! On the other side, Brickett Ranunculus eating his mash and not even knowing there's such a thing as knowledge. (106-107) It is a cynical view, and for the most part Max sticks to his cyni­ cism, offering "Maxims" such as "Self-knowledge is always bad news" (121), or his prayer at George's "maximism," "let suffering make him smart" (111). Max continually insists that his participa­ tion in George's attempt at Grand-Tutorhood is done for practical reasons, and that his only interest in hero-work is the practical one of improving the human condition, and has nothing to do with innocent illusions of romance. He agrees with Sear that "it's just simple-mindedness, this business of having principles" (306), and tells George that he "likes life more than poetry" (99).

Nevertheless, Barth has also gone to the trouble of making Max's position ambiguous in regard to innocence. Telling Anastasia about his interest in George and heroes, he speaks of their "profound and transcendently powerful simplicity, which the flunked sophistication of modern intelligences might confused [sic] with naivete" (181). In attempting to guide George, he urges him to be celibate, and it is not accidental that we learn that Max himself has been celibate because of an EAT wave accident since he was a young man. As the book progresses, we see more and more how Max's hope for George goes beyond his cynical rationalism, and how no his insistence on practicality is undercut by his romantic desire to martyr himself. Just before his death he tells George that he has "found out now what my life's work is," which is "to die...in studentdom's behalf, selfish or not, and even if it don't make sense" (725). He had lived his life as one who "hates hate" but in the end he says, "Na, I don't hate hate any more. But I love love more than I don't hate hate" (735). He went to his death, like Jesus, "bent under the weight of a block-and-tackle rig, he moved with difficulty, but his face was alight" (750). Dr. Sear is another man of experience in the novel, and he, too, ends up in a position which shows the "innocence" he has re­ tained despite a life devoted to uncovering the unpleasant truths of experience. Sear expresses what he calls "the tragic view," which is to him the lesson of Taliped Decanus, namely, that one can learn all the answers not despite, but only because of his perver­ sions (400). He tells George that "Graduation is knowledge," and that "if there's such a thing as Graduation, it's not for the inno­ cent; we've got to rid ourselves of every trace of innocence!" (353). It is Sear who argues most vehemently that innocence is ignorance, and, in his role as a psychiatrist, who tells George that "the only sane heroes are tragic heroes" (311). Echoing Todd Andrews, he asks "how can we understand anything without understanding everything?" (401), and in an extreme statement of the self-conscious experiential view, he says "I can't take anybody seriously who doesn't loathe himself" (524). In explaining this view he claims that "'total experience,' while ruinous, is requisite to Understanding" (524-525). Ill

In a statement that speaks to the theme of identity as well as inno­ cence, he tells George that "he had always rather let experience write upon him than play the role of author" (526).

Sear is the very embodiment of modern sophistication in the novel, and yet all his sophistication does not provide him with the Answer. In a typical example of his self-conscious rationalism, he responds to Max's criticism of one of his intellectual positions by conceding at once "that he didn't really believe anything of the sort, though he certainly did admire spontaneity and animal inno­ cence above all human qualities, despite his contempt for them" (307). Describing his marriage to George, he sounds remarkably like Joe Morgan, whose distinguishing characteristic turned out to be, despite himself, his naivete:

It's the only authentic and menaingful kind of marriage, for educated people in modern terms, because it's based on freedom, frankness, equality, and no illusions what­ ever. It may not work, but even if it turns out to be impossible, nothing else is worth trying. (523) It is George, in fact, who most clearly sees "how much of illusion and innocence could still be said to be in [Sear's] thinking, self-decption in his confessions, and pride in his self-loathing" (525). Significantly, despite his sophistication (or because of it), Sear is also incapable of normal sexual intercourse, resorting to various perversions with a fluoroscope and other forms of voyeurism, and when George suggests to him that he take his wife to a motel room and try to go back to the basics, he is both shocked and titilated with the idea. During the final scene, we learn how Sear became blinded (like 112

Tiresias) by Stoker and the effect that knowledge had on him. Seeing his wife attacked (an event which in the past he would have merely observed, and thought interesting) "Dr. Sear had leaped—spontan- eously, instantly, one could only say heroically—to her defense..." (747). He tells George:

...that what he'd never seen 'till Croaker hit him, even though he thought he's seen everything, was that a certain kind of spiritedness was absolutely good, no matter what a person's other Answers are. It doesn't have anything to do with education...and it's the most valuable thing in the University. (748)

It is left to George to point out that "his attitude is certainly sentimental" (748). The two other major characters of experience, Maurice Stoker and Lucious Rexford, also show, in various ways, how their deeply founded "knowledge of the world" is undercut by qualities of inno­ cence. Both of them are reminiscent of Henry Burlingame, but Stoker, in his inability to have intercourse with his wife and in his transformation to a moon-struck lover, and Rexford, with his "boyish" smile and the impulsiveness despite his stand on "reasonable­ ness," echo the theme of ambiguity established by the examination of the other major characters.

It is up to George, finally, to resolve the issue, and he does so, as he does all issues in the book, by seeing innocence and ex­ perience as part of the novel's central paradox between differentia­ tion and synthesis. As I've already pointed out, George's position as an innocent is itself paradoxical, and it is George who most often sees the innocent qualities in the experienced characters and 113 vice versa. In his final analysis of Peter Green, for instance, he sees him as "neither innocent nor simple except to sentimental eyes; only ingenuous as he had been, was yet, and doubtless ever would be" (621). In his short (and temporary) of insight in the Belly, George sees and accepts all the paradoxes of life in the novel, including that of innocence and experience. He sees, as I hope my discussion above has shown, that the qualities associated with innocence—simplicity, hope, chastity, belief—and their counter­ parts—sophistication, knowledge, carnality, cynicism—are at the same time distinct and inseparable, differentiate and part of the "seamless university" (731). What distinguishes this resolution from that in The Sot-Weed Factor is George's acceptance of "Spielman's Law of Cyclic Correspondence" (43), and to that I will turn next.

History in The Sot-Weed Factor was treated paradoxically. On the one hand the novel demonstrated the fictionality of history, and the impossibility of knowing, or deriving meaning from facts. On the other hand it demonstrated the necessity of imposing a history, which, like imposing an identity, required a leap of faith. The resolution of that paradox by Eben Cooke was a qualified one—he accepted the paradox because he had no other choice, and lived contentedly, but not happily, afterward.

After the publication of The Sot-Weed Factor, Barth stated that several reviewers had noted how the events in the life of Eben cor­ responded to a striking degree to the pattern of mythic herohood Ifi set down separately by Lord Raglan, Joseph Campbell and others, and the result, as I've noted in my introduction, was a study by 114 Barth of these comparative mythologists and the implications of their work to the problems of fiction. As Barth has said: What I did in the case of the Goat-Goy novel was to try to abstract the patterns, and then write a novel which would consciously, even self-consciously, follow the patterns, satirize the patterns, but with good luck tran­ scend the satire a little bit in ordec to say some of the serious things I had in mind to say.

If we assume that one of the things Barth wanted to say had to do with his shift in emphasis from innocence to experience, we can see the sense in which The Sot-Weed Factor, with its emphasis on past­ lessness, represented innocence, whereas the Goat-Boy, which empha­ sizes and affirms a cyclic view of history, is a novel about ex­ perience. Spielman's Law is a statement of the view of history that Giles Goat-Boy presupposes, and an understanding of it is necessary in order to see not only the shift in emphasis between Barth's two large novels, but to see also the nature of the resolutions regard­ ing innocence and experience, identity, and the function of art which are the subjects about which Barth wants to say "some of the serious things...."

We are introduced to Spielman's Law in the first chapter of the novel proper, but it is stated cryptically and requires restating at several points in the book before it is clarified.

Ontogeny recapitulates cosmogeny—what is it but to say that proctoscopy repeats hagiography? That our Founder on Founder's Hill and the rawest freshman on his first mons veneris are father and son? That my day, my year, my life, and the history of West Campus are wheels with­ in wheels? (43) At this stage, of course, Spielman's Law appears to be only lin­ guistic confusion, although his "theory of cyclic correspondence," 115 which George mentions immediately after the above quotation, does suggest the kind of comparative mythology that Barth has been study­ ing. Later, as George grows and Max begins to suspect that there is something unusual about him, we learn that Max himself has made a study of the comparative mythology of heroes, and has abstracted a pattern from the (not facts) which is part of his theory of cyclic correspondence.

It is not until the middle of the novel that we get a more cogent explanation of Spielman's Law, and its relation to the pattern of mythic hero-hood. Max explains the difference between his views and other cyclical theories: Yet however it seemed at times that men got nowhere, but only repeated class by class the mistakes of their predecessors, two crucial facts about them were at once their hope and the limitation of their possibility One was their historicity: the campus was young, the student race even younger, and by contrast with the whole of past time, the great collegiate cultures had been born only yesterday. The other had to do with his comparative cyclology, a field of systematic speculation...whose present relevance lay in the correspondence he held to obtain between the life-history of individuals and the history of studentdom in general. As the embryologists maintained that ontogeny repeats phylogeny, so, Max claimed, the race itself—and on a smaller scale, West Campus cul­ ture—followed demonstrably—in capital letters, as it were, or slow motion--the life pattern of its least new freshman. (299-300)

Shortly after this we get an explanation of the role of the hero in Max's theory. Again, paralleling the embryologists, Max views heroes as "not destined to save studentdom, but very possibly designed for that task..." (309-310). It's a neutral thing: some people are red-haired, some are hump-backed, some are 'heroes.' And what everyone 116

went through for himself...more or less profoundly de­ pending on one's character, Grand-Tutors went through on the level of the whole student body.

He goes on to explain that Cyclological theory was founded on such correspondences as that between the celestial and psychic day, the seasons of the year, the stages of ordinary human life, the growth and decline of individual colleges, the evolution and history of studentdom as a whole, the ultimate fate of the university, and what had we. The rhythm of all these was repeated literally and emblematically in the life of the hero, whose function...was the important but prosaic one of helping a college grow up or get out of a particular bind: mare than that he denied. (309)

By stating his principle as "ontogeny recapitulates cosmogeny," Max is choosing the limits of his view, limits which, as we see from the above, include everything under the sun. Thus we can see the ways in which George's life, for instance, both follows the pattern for mythic hero-hood and repeats the growth of West-Campus and his culture, or, as I have maintained in my introduction, the way in which Barth's career repeats the growth of the history of the novel. In Giles Goat-Boy we see examples of cyclology going on. When Peter Greene tells his story to Max and George it can be taken as a short history of West-Campus, from its rough beginnings in rebellion to its expansion through the wilderness, its industrializ­ ation, emerging power and abuse of that power by colonization, through its middle-aged crises and forboding of decline. Max him­ self has pictured his culture as just past adolescence, reviewing the history of the novel's allegorical equivalents of Greece, Rome, China, and so forth in terms of human sexual and psychic develop­ ment (301). George admits that he recognizes some of these stages 117 in his own recent past.

The significance of this view is that, unlike The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy resolves paradox with the possibility of hope. As Max says, many adolescents never make it through that stage and end up killing themselves, but most do make it. When George reaches his highest moment in the book, he also reaches his clearest under­ standing of Spielman's Law. Emerging from the Belly for the third time, he blesses Anastasia without whom his passage were impossible.

Calm of heart, I kissed her thrice: once on the brow, in gratitude for her having been to me Truth's vessel, and declared her Passed; once on the navel, sign of that lightless place where I had seen, become myself, issued from to my Mount of Love where I'd Commenced, and upon whose counterpart I'd one day meet my end. The Cyclological Hypothesis, Spielman's Law.: at last I understood it, as Max perhaps could never, and kissed its sign. (732)

The hope is~for mankind, however, not for man, and George is forced to see his perfect communion with Anastasia and his moment of under­ standing as one-time events. He is allowed a revelation of maturity, but his culture is still in adolescence and his work must get done.

George's accpetance of his role and his inevitable fate (to fol­ low Max to the shaft) are also resolutions of the theme of identity. He comes to understand Cyclology through communion with Anastasia, and he sees her mons veneris as the symbol of that cyclology. Max has found his life's work in his final committment to "love love," and it is on love's mountain that George learns finally who and what he is. In The Sot-Weed Factor Barth presented a hero who "was I o no man at all," but made the assertion that he was a poet and virgin, only to discover after much suffering that he was neither, 118 just another man among men. In Giles, the hero is literally no man at all, but a goat, and for him the first question of identity, as Max tells him, is "not who you are, but what you are" (85). Starting with the first words of his narrative, "George is my name..." (41), we see the theme of identity and its thorny am­ biguities. Echoing both Moby Dick and The_ End of the Road, which begins "In a sense I am Jacob Horner," the statement has the para­ doxical suggestiveness of both an assertion of identity and the superficiality of names as signs of identity. The opening paragraph goes on to identify the speaker by his deeds, suggesting authenticity by the fact that they "were recorded in the Journal of Experimental Psychology" (41), mentions another name he had been called, and concludes with the general identification of the speaker as "a horned human student" (41). George's first crisis of identity is specific, for by the age of fourteen he is forced to choose between becoming a man or remain­ ing a goat, and, as with most of Barth's characters we have encount­ ered by now, making a choice is nearly impossible. When Max presents him with the question of whether he wants to be man or goat, George tellsus that "neither option seemed desirable" (60). Unlike Ebenezer Cooke's, however, George's character has a certain decisive­ ness about it, and he does decide, albeit for the spurious reason that "there were no goats in sight" (60), to be a man.

This decision is followed by seven years of education, at the conclusion of which George is forced to choose what he will be. It is toward the end of his tutelage that he begins to have the common 119 identity problems, seeing himself as separate from Max for the first time, who "existed as something other than myself" (123), as well as separate from the goats, who Max has told us, "never have to wonder who they are" (106-107). In order to help himself choose, George asks Max about his own history and learns about his mysterious past and the truth of the "maxim" that "self-knowledge is always bad news" (121). In a moment of insight, he responds to Max's list of possible careers with the assertion "I'm going to be a hero" (125). Unlike Eben's assertion of identity which was eventually dis­ carded as false, George's turns out to be correct. Like Eben, how­ ever, he first must traverse some seven hundred pages of mistakes and misfortunes before he knows the truth about his identity. During the course of his first two stages of tutoring and first two descents into the Belly, George's identity undergoes many of the same kinds of transformations and impersonations we saw in The Sot-Weed Factor. He reads a newspaper announcing the imminent arrival of a new Grand- Tutor on campus, thinking it refers to himself, but soon discovers that the news is about The Living Sakhyan. He hears a radio report of the arrival of the Grand-Tutor, again thinks it refers to himself, and then learns about the existence of Harold Bray to whom the re­ port actually refers. On his first two descents into the Belly he wears masks of Harold Bray, and, several times Bray disguises himself as George. Through the wonders of ink- his ID card variously proclaims him as Ira Hector, George Giles, and at one point, "nobody" (679). 120 The first time he is in the Belly and must answer WESCAC's questions, he does so convinced of the principle of differentiation, answering in the affirmative to the questions asked. The second time, believing in synthesis, he responds negatively. During the former stage, he answers as a man and is greeted by a disastrous failure. The second time he believes the principle of synthesis makes him a goat as well as a man, and he refuses to recognize the computer's right to question him, rejecting as well any identity other than one he gives himself. To WESCAC's request for his creden­ tials, he responds:

I was not born George; I was not born anything: I had invented myself as I'd elected my name, and it was to myself I'd present my card...when I had passed by the finals. (693) This attempt meets with failure more disastrous than the first. It is not until the third descent into the Belly that George sees who he is—Giles, son of WESCAC—and, that he is for better or worse, a Grand-Tutor. As I have already suggested, this knowledge comes hand in hand with an understanding of Spielman's Law and his sexual communion with Anastasia. "Seeing through his Ladyship," as his assignment cryptically demands, is a process that eventually allows George to know his own identity. First he misinterprets the command as a psychological one and attempts to understand Anastasia's most obvious psychological characteristics. When this fails he again misinterprets the task as seeing through the ladyship in himself, and when this fails he tries to take the order literally, and with the aid of the Sears' calipers and fluoroscope undertakes a minute 121

examination of her body. Just before the examination, he tells her

in despair that "I'm not anybody," but Anastasia replies in a way that gives him an identity with lasting import: "You're the person I love" (672). George is astounded by the notion. She squeezed more tightly: I felt the blood-muscle pumping behind her teat, through no governance of Anastasia. My penis rose, unbid by George; was it a George of its own? A quarter billion beasties were set to swarm therefrom and thrash like salmon up the mucous of her womb; were they little Georges all? 19 I groaned. 'I don't understand anything!'

In this confused state George seizes upon the principle of syn­ thesis and goes to meet his final failure in the Belly. In Main Detention afterwards, however, he begins the process of insight which leads to his Grand-Tutorhood. Caught in the crisis of paradox, George thought "surely my mind must crack" (708). Then:

I gave myself up utterly to that which bound, possessed and bore me. I let go, I let all go; relief went through me like a purge...my eyes were opened; I was delivered. (709) By giving himself up to his role as Grand-Tutor, George is half way to realizing it. On his way to the Belly for the final time he tells us that this recognition of what he was was made clear to him, and that "of these things I no longer held opinions; I knew them to be the case, as I'd been given in that instant to know much else" (726). Nevertheless, this certainty of identity is only half clear, for ...in all this clarity...one shadow remained. I de­ tected it most plainly in the pupils of Anastasia's eyes, and inferred therefore that what it shrouded was myself. (727)

He goes on to tell us that "my nature and function...I understood quite clearly and disinterestedly" (728), but he still could not 122

understand this thing called love which Anastasia insisted on. "Love me? I didn't love myself!" (728). Here, however, George finally sees through his ladyship. She opened to me her fine clear eyes. They gave back my image, luminous, and another shadow disappeared—the last but one.20 Then they go into the Belly where a communion of love is achieved in

which paradox is encompassed. "I and My Ladyship, all were one"

(731). Of course, what exactly it is that George sees in his moment of insight is withheld from us as "unspeakable," and "unteachable," and we must wonder, as the book suggests we do, whether in fact he has been "eaten" in the Belly and is crazy. This level of uncertainty is built into the novel in several ways, from its frame to its allegory, and taken in full is a comment on the nature of reality. I will address this issue now, and then conclude with the related issue of the nature of art suggested by the novel.

One of the several functions of the frame of Giles Goat-Boy is, satirically, to cast doubt on the authenticity of the manuscript it encloses. John L. McDonald has examined this function in detail, noting how Barth has deliberately confused the authorship of The Revised New Syllabus so that it conforms in this regard with other "sacred" books.21 Thus we see that the publishing house edited the book before releasing it (xx); that J.B. edited it (xxxvi) and, with the inadvertent assistance of a janitor, got it hopelessly mixed in with another manuscript that J.B. had been working on (xxxiv); that 123 Giles Stoker or Stoker Giles edited it before he brought it to J.B. (xxx); and that even that manuscript was a compilation by WESCAC of the tapes George fed into it and "considerable original material" stored in its files. If that is not enough, we learn in the "Post- tape" that George was not exactly telling the truth in his long narrative, and that he claims only the "Posttape" to be his original, untampered voice. Then the yery authenticity of the "Posttape" is questioned by J.B., who offers considerable textual and other evid­ ence that it is spurious; and in the final "Footnote to the Post­ script to the Posttape," the editor-in-chief casts doubt on the authenticity of either of J.B.'s contributions to the frame.' If we add to this the very real possibility that George has been "Eaten," either at birth or during one of his three other trips to the Belly, or that WESCAC is broken—the result of George plugging its input into its output—then we see clearly how the existence of this book and everything in it is an unsolvable mystery, and our acceptance of it, a matter of faith.

We get an exact correspondence to the dilemma in the novel by way of The Founder's Scrolls, which are themselves "sacred books" whose authenticity, authorship, and finally yery meaning are questionable. At first we learn of the difficulty New Tammany lib­ rarians have in determining "whether the precious relic should be classified under Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Archaeology, Art or History" (530), and were Giles not so clearly a fiction, we would also have that difficulty with it.9? Unable to decide what 124 The Founder's Scrolls are, George suggests that the Scrolls are sui generis, and at his suggestion, WESCAC goes ahead and files every book in the library as sui generis. After WESCAC finally coughs the Scrolls up in shreds, the library scholars undertake the task of putting them back together, but since they must do it at all, they attempt to do it correctly. They tell George that "all the texts are corrupt, you know..., copies of copies of copies, full of errata and lacunae," and that the present scroll is "actually several scrolls, overlapping, redundant, descrepant" (721). Their task is further complicated by "a practical question about the translation of a single sentence—a mere two words..." (722), upon which question they judge the entire meaning of all the scrolls to depend. The similarity to the RNS is, I think, obvious, and the point made is that we cannot ever know anything for certain. We get another glimpse of this same idea when George listens to lecture-tape com­ plete with the ability to gloss each sentence, each gloss, each gloss on a gloss and so on. The result is not further clarity, but compounded confusion.

The nature of the allegory of Giles also serves to undercut any conceptions we may have about knowing reality. As Gerhard Joseph has shown, the world of the novel is not one that allegori- 23 cally corresponds to the real world. It is in fact an alternative to the real world, and rather than presenting allegorical figures that line up neatly with things we know, the book presents layers of correspondences that are only suggestive of things we know. Some characters, Lucious Rexford for example, appear to represent 125 individuals like John Kennedy but, on closer examination can also be seen to correspond to Henry Burlingame or to other characters in Giles. Pete Greene is a compendium of various characters out of life, myth and art; WESCAC is a pure scientific fiction, and so on. As I will attempt to show later, the entire structure of the allegory does not so much point up to reality as to art. If anything, it supersedes reality.

Several characters and incidents in the book further illustrate the impossibility of knowing reality, chief among these being the ra­ tional scientist Eblis Eirkopf. At the complete and perfect egghead, Eirkopf constructs finer and finer systems of measure in order to "know" reality. Expounding what he calls the "scientific view" (378-380) which is that all things are measurable, he nevertheless tries "to take nature by surprise" (378), and his failure is a demon­ stration in miniature of Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty. His most dramatic and futile attempt involves "the infinite divisor" (481-482) by which he tries to distinguish "tick from tock," and he naturally fails. His enormous treatise on eggs is ended by a severe case of cosmopsos when he fails to answer the proverbial question of which came first, the egg or the chicken.

Perhaps the most pervasive symbol for the inability to know reality in the book are the many kinds of lenses we see. Eirkopf is the master of lenses, using telescopes and microscopes in his futile plan to take nature by surprise. As George points out to him, however, the accuracy of his lenses must always be in question, for if inaccurate they will distort the very reality he hopes to see more clearly, and Eirkopfs only response to this is that he knows the 126 lenses to be accurate, QED. In short, only by a leap of faith can he trust his lenses, and Eirkopf's scientific view does not contain leaps of faith.

Lenses also play an important role in the lives of Peter Greene and Leonid, as well as in that of Dr. Sear, whose killing cancer comes, ironically, from the weight of his glasses on the bridge of his nose. Sear's perversions with the fluoroscope are, naturally, lens directed, and Greene and Leonid both have a paranoid fear of mirrors. All three of these characters end up blind, their ultimate lenses failing them. George, too, uses lenses throughout the book, from those attached by Erikopf to George's walking staff to the lenses of his and Anastasia's eyes. When he finally receives his vision and his "eyes are opened" what he sees in Anastasia's eyes in the reflection of his own re­ flecting hers and so on to infinity. His final understanding comes both from using the lenses of his eyes as lenses and as mirrors, and the resolution of that paradox which he is briefly allowed is part of the ultimate resolution of all paradoxes in the novel. In a conversa­ tion that leads nicely into the theme of art in the novel, Max, George and Peter Greene discuss lenses and mirrors. George says "put a mirror up to life and you get a double distortion," and Max adds "quadruple...on account of the image is also backwards" (622). If this traditionally realistic view will not allow us to see reality, and Eirkopfs scientific view fails also, we are left to consider 24 what Barth has called the "fantastical view of reality." In addition to the purpose discussed above, the frame of Giles Goat-Boy also serves as a preparation for the theme of art to follow 127

and as a mini-view of the effect of art. By presenting four different readings of his novel, Barth is able to emphasize both the ways in which it differs from "traditional" fiction and the possibility of its power. From the outset, the Editor-in-chief calls our attention to what J.B. has termed "necessary artifices" (xi), a concept which is meant to convey a practical purpose, but which in the long run sums up the point of the artistic theme, i.e. that artifice is necessary to knowing reality. The different editors who respond to the RNS^are, of course, at a disadvantage, since so much of the point of the novel, which includes their responses, comes from their responses. Believing that the book in question is the RNS only, and not a compendium of the frame and the RNS, they are trapped into giving away their artistic prejudices, unaware of the danger. Editor A presents the traditional view of realistic fiction, emphasizing morality and imitation, but the reader knows by its ironic that this view is one that will be satirized. Editor B takes a less moral and more businesslike approach, but not without first presenting the view that notions of plot are anachronistic, and that "the best language is that which disappears in the telling" (xv-xvi). He notes the author's "affinity for lies," and the author's declaration that "language js_ the matter of his books," and although the editor is astounded by the idea that the author "embraces artifice," he votes to publish the RNS for "ornamental or write-off value" (xiv-xvi). Editor C votes not to publish after noting that the characters "are drawn with small regard for realism," and that "there is no psychology in it" (xvi). He says that the prose style "is admittedly contagious...; even more so is syphilis" (xvii). 128 Finally he concludes with a projection of the author's future which is significantly suggestive of Spielman's Law. The effect of all this is to prepare the reader for the book to follow. We know, for instance, that it will not be realistic or conventional in any way, but more important, we see, from these same reactions, that the book can have tremendous effect.

Editor D, who we learn is the Editor-in-chiefs son, reads the book, becomes a Gilesian, and concludes that "my judgment is not upon the book but upon myself" (xix). The effect on editor A is strong moral outrage and anger. Editor C notes how even his fellow editors imitate the book by talking like the narrator. The story of this small segment in the life of a publishing house is presented as the direct result of reading the RNS, and with one editor running off and the other three fighting, we see that the place will never be the same.

Following the "Publisher's Disclaimer" is J.B.'s "Cover-letter to the Editors and Publisher," and this document also serves the double purpose described above. J.B. tells us that it doesn't matter if the RNS is fact or fiction and insists that instead we attend to the story of how it came to him. In his claim that "the prophet validates the prophecy" and that "authenticity comes from his manner and bearing" (xxvii-xxix), he is setting us up for the emphasis in the novel on style, and the de-emphasis on fact. George himself expresses this view several times. In addition, the "Cover-letter" describes the effect the book had on J.B.--an enormous one in which he abandoned his own novel-in-progress, resigned his position, and went off to teach the RNS. 129 In a sense we can see how this frame serves a fourth and separate function from the others mentioned, namely to shake-up, question, or re-align the relationhsip between the author, his art, and his audience. Both the authenticity of the author and the book are made to appear questionable, and so are the readers' motivations and the prejudices that they bring to it. The result, it seems to me is the subtle presentation of the view that those three factors are inseparable. The totality of the book Giles Goat-Boy is made up of the intricate relationship of author, book, and audience, and none of those factors can be separated from its interraction with the other two. In effect, this three-way relationship is a model for the para­ doxes the book presents. WESCAC, a computer operating binarily, asks George a series of true-false questions which represent paradox, and George finally comes to answer them by seeing them as multiple choice. The alternatives are not simple A or B, but A, B, A and B, or all of the above. In the same way the relationship between author and book, book and audience, and author and audience is not a question of A or B, but a complex of all the possibilities.

This view also helps to resolve some of the crucial confusion caused by the "Post-tape" which claims to be the unedited voice of George. Several critics, including J.B., have noted that the George in the post-tape presents a gloomier, more cynical view than the George that ends the RNS proper, a view in fact which undercuts his achievements as Grand-Tutor, and takes away the hope that the book presents by his achievement. J.B., one of th.e possible "authors" of the RNS, says the post-tape is spurious because it suggests a 130 reading of the story that does not meld with his own. If we see the book as the complex relationship I have suggested above, however, there is no need to debate the authenticity of the author of the post-tape, for even if it is George, it is a George changed by the years, and his views on his own Grand-Tutoring are only one part of that complex relationship. The speaker in the post-tape presents a view of cyclology that is clearly not the same view George had when he emerged from the Belly the final time. He says ...the pans remain balanced, for better and worse Nay, rather, for worse, always for worse. Late or soon, we lose. Sudden or slow, we lose. The bank exacts its charge for each redistribution of our funds. There is an entropy to time, a tax on change (763) and we see that while this does suggest a view of cosmogeny in which entropy is the final law, it ignores Max's hope that the universe is young and can mature.

At one point in the novel, Maurice Stoker meets George and puns on his aspiration to be a Grand-Tutor, calling him instead, a grand-tooter. It is in this role, significantly, that George is most successful. His tutoring was at best misunderstood, but his tootering—the narrative before us—is perhaps his greatest achieve­ ment. Seen as an artist rather than as a hero, George has a consider­ able body of development for us to trace. His first teacher, for one thing, is Max, a man who claims to prefer life to poetry but who has written poems in numbers (42). George's early experience with literature is much like Eben's—he sees stories as realer than life, and, like the editors in the disclaimer, he takes on some of the linguistic properties of the stories he is reading. One of his first 131 "human" characteristics he learns from literature, when taking my cue from that soul of invention, Wee Willie Gruff, I said bye-bye to fourteen years of perfect candor—and dissembled with Max Spielman. (56) George's encounter with the "prevaricating art" (xxiv) is quite like the experience Barth describes as a young man poring over the "Ocean of Story" in the Johns Hopkins library. 6 George grows up with "a fantastical view of reality," reading the Encyclopedia as if each entry began "Once upon a time..." (117) and possessing the same inability as Eben Cooke to acknowledge the possibilities of the world and yet accept the case. A fact, in short, even an autobiographical fact, was not something I perceived and acknowledged, but a detail of the general Conceit, to be accepted or rejected. Nothing for me was simply the case forever and aye, only 'this case.' Spectator, critic, and occasional member of the Troupe, I approached the script...in a spirit of utter freedom (117)

This subject, which I have identified as the central paradox of The Sot-Weed Factor, is also under debate in Giles, and we see it on several occasions. In the "Editor's Disclaimer," one of the editors claims that the author "turns his back on what is the case" (xvi). Stoker Giles tells J.B. in the "Cover-letter" that You've never finally owned to the fact of things. If I should suddenly pinch you now and you woke and saw that all of it was gone, that none of the things and people you'd known had been actually the case—you wouldn't be very much surprised, (xxix) Lucious Rexford is the character in the novel who most discusses reality in terms of the case, and he does so by reference to cartoons where a character walks over the edge of a cliff but doesn't fall until he sees that he is standing on nothing (412). He tells 132

George that in Taliped Decanus

The playwrite cheats by pretending that a flunking situation can exist without anyone's knowing it, and then choosing one that everybody in the theater knows about except the characters in the play! (493)

The implication is that a flunking situation cannot exist without anyone's knowing about it, and that the case is not so much a matter of fact but a matter of acknowledgement. The key to seeing the difference between this treatment of the theme and that in The Sot-Weed Factor has to do with the same author/art/audience relationship I have been referring to. When George first discusses the case, he does so in the role of "spectator, critic, and occasional member of the Troupe." Rexford is concerned with the case as regards his authorship of a plan to survive the Quiet Riot. George initially sees his role of Grand-Tutor as analogous to that of an author with his script: In truth the doer did not define the deed nor did the deed the doer; their relation (in the case at least of Grand Tutors and Grand-Tutoring) was first of all that of artists, say, to their art As the poet might transcend the conventions of his art and with his talent make beautiful what in lesser hands would be ugly, so the Grand Tutor in His passedness, stood beyond ordinary Truth and Falsehood. (250-251) Later, however, after his enlightenment, he sees his role as essen­ tially that of an actor, the script being inviolable: Marriage was not for such as I, nor any amorous relation­ ship; the bonds of desire, the ties of wife, mistress, children, like eyery other bond, I would cast off Of these things I no longer held opinions; I knew them to be the case (726-727) In the "Posttape," entropy is the case, but here George has gone back to the role of critic or spectator. With each shift of roles the emphasis on the theme shifts also, so that the end result is a list 133 of possibilities dependent on point-of-view and the viewer's relation to the other roles. When George stands up for the first time, he is not only changing from a goat to a man, but is literally getting a new point-of-view. In relation to his former stance, it is a world as seen from a height. Perhaps the clearest example of this relationship occurs at a crucial point in George's story. Unable to find a way past the guards to get to the Belly, he and Anastasia come upon a nondescript woman reading a book, and although they both know for certain that there is no exit from their situation, they ask her if she knows of one. It turns out that the book she is reading is Giles Goat-Boy, and that she is reading at precisely the point where George and Anastasia ask a nondescript woman for a way out. ...she looked over her spectacles from the large novel she was involved in and said with careful clarity—as if that question, from a fleeced goat-boy at just that moment, were exactly what she'd expected—Yes

All the while she marked with her finger her place in the book, to which she returned at once upon delivering her line. (724) As actors in the story, George and Anastasia are helpless, for they know the case to be that there is no way out, and as an actor in their story, the woman delivers her line on cue to provide one. As a reader, of course, she knows that there must be a way out, for the book continues, and she is too absorbed in the fiction to notice the incredible inversion of life and fiction that is taking place. The scene is a prelude to the "Dunyazadiad" where Scheherazade tells her little sister that if only they can imagine a story like their own, 134 with a solution that can be put into words, then they too can arrive at those words and therefore the solution. ' Of all the possible ways out of this dilemma of plot, Barth chose the most clearly im­ possible one, at once being able to inject subtly the theme of cyclo­ logy, and through this inversion make h,is point about the relationship of life and art.

A final illustration of this theme can be seen in Croaker's art, its function and his relation to it. Using his teeth to whittle on a stick, he creates "a kind of hierarchic psychronology of lust whereof the ingenuity, combined with the art of the composi­ tion, suggested that Croaker was working in some tradition more sophis­ ticated than myself" (248). I have already commented on how this art was "functional as well as decorative" (248), serving as a work of art, a walking stick, and a means of communication. What I'd like to emphasize now is that its use, its meaning if you will, is entirely dependent on point-of-view. George appreciates it as decorative and glimpses its communicative function, but for the most part doesn't understand either. In any event, he needs a walking stick, and for him that's what it is. Dr. Sear sees it as a unique representative of a primitive culture, a view which accommodates his voyeruism. Croaker, for all we know, thinks of it as merely something to chew on, and when he finds its communicative function (as a sexual invitation) disregarded, he loses interest in it. The artist's intent in this case is seen to be as meaningless or meaningful, depending on your point-of-view, as the fact of the artifact itself and the needs of its audience. All three are necessary for a complete picture. 135 The one subject on which I have not spent much time in this chapter is the pattern of mythic hero-hood which Barth has followed, parodied and satirized. I have neglected it first because it has 28 been treated admirably by other critics, and second because I will have a great deal to say about it when discussing Barth's next two novels. What I would like to comment on, however, is Harold Bray, the Adversary figure in the pattern and the one character who I believe has been neglected or confused by other critics.

One of the themes of this novel, of course, is about scapegoats, and George both serves as one and has a necessity for one himself. In his case it is Harold Bray, the name suggestive of a donkey. By this , then, Barth is taking the Christian of passive sheep and active goats and substituting for it one of his own in which active goats and stubborn donkeys are placed against each other. Rather than a paradigm between passive and active, it is a meeting between an irresistible force and an immovable object. Another way to see the relationship of the two is in terms of sounds, George re­ presenting melody as a "tooter," Bray the harshness that his name suggests. A third way to see the two of them is as brothers, for surely Bray is a product of WESCAC and is either all or part machine. Viewed this way we see that like the other brother combinations in the book—the two Hectors and Stoker/Rexford, George and Bray are complimentary opposites. George tells us in the "Posttape" that he and Bray were "not only contrary and interdependent, but finally undifferentiate" (759). Each of these views seems to me legitimate and in keeping with the other relationships in the novel which 136 constantly shift between pagan, Christian, and Barthian mythology. I believe there is a fourth interpretation as well, and that it unites Bray with the theme of art that adds its own structure to the novel.

"Bray" is also a printer's term, a verb meaning to spread ink thinly over a surface, and this is suggestive not only of Bray's character, which is always superficial, but also of writing, which, from a certain point of view, is the act of spreading ink thinly over a surface. Bray's superficiality is the first thing we know about him. Eirkopf calls him a fake and a mountebank, and we learn by his history that he has played many different roles. When Gebrge pulls off Bray's mask on the way to the Belly the first time, he discovers another mask under that, and beneath that still a third. Viewed as a writer, Bray is also in opposition to George, and to me reminiscent of Barth himself, who like Bray claims to be an author 29 "who imitates the role of author." In this final identification, which is admittedly a questionable one, we can see Barth as the ulti­ mate for George—in fact the one who replaces Bray after he has been vanquished, by insinuating the "Posttape" into the folds of the manuscript, and who literally has the last word in the "Post­ script to the Posttape." Having already suggested the similarities between George and Barth, the set up is complete and the paradox resolved. George and Bray are and brothers; in the long run both are Barth himself, "not only contrary and interdependent, but finally undifferentiate" (759). NOTES Chapter Four

1 John Barth, "Having it Both Ways," New American Review, 15 (Spring, 1972), 136. 2 Barth, "Having it Both Ways," p. 136. 3 James C. McDonald, "Barth's Syllabus: The Frame of Giles Goat-Boy," Critique, 8, No. 3 (1972), 6.

Also see: Robert Garis, "What Happended to John Barth," Commentary (Oct.,1966), 89-90, 92, 94-95. 4 Barth, "Having it Both Ways," p. 136. 5 McDonald, pp. 5-10.

6 Campbell Tatham, "The Gilesian Monomyth: Some Remarks on the Structure of Giles Goat-Boy," Genre, 3, No. 4 (Dec, 1966), 364-375. Robert Scholes, The Fabulators (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 145-173. Q Peter Mercer, "The Rhetoric of Giles Goat-Boy," Novel, 4 (Winter, 1971), 147-158. q John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy, or, The Revised New Syllabus (New York: Fawcett, Crest, 1966). All page references to this edition will appear in the text. 10 John Barth, "An Interview," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 6 (1965), 10-11. 11 John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor, p. 788. 12 Scholes, The Fabulators, pp. 135-173. 13 Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor, p. 647. 14 See The Sot-Weed Factor, p. 408. 15 Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor, p. 495. 16 Barth, "An Interview," p. 12. 137 138 17 Barth, "Having it Both Ways," p. 146. 18 Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor, p. 55. 19 p. 672. Note how this idea gives birth to the sperm/narrator of "Night-Sea Journey" in Barth's next book, Lost in the Funhouse. 20 p. 728, This presentation of the eyes as mirrors as well as lenses is developed further in the Perseid section of Chimera. 21 McDonald, p. 5. 22 See: Gerhard Joseph, John Barth (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minn. Press, 1970), p. 32. 23 Joseph, p. 33. 24 Barth, "Having it Both Ways," p. 136. 26 See, for example, Joseph, pp. 36-37; or Scott Byrd, "Giles Goat-Boy Visited," Critique, 9, No. 1 (1966), 112. 26 John Barth, "Muse, Spare Me," Book Week, 26 (Sept., 1965), 28. py John Barth, Chimera (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 8. Barth discusses a similar incident in "The Literature of Ex­ haustion," Atlantic, 220 (Aug., 1967) where he presents Borges' claim of finding a text of Burton's 1001 Nights in which the tale of the 601st night is, mistakenly, the same as the frame-tale for the whole cycle. The result is that the characters in the mis-printed edition never get beyond the 601st night, for each time they get to it they must start over again. 28 See especially: Scholes, The Fabulators, pp. 167-173; and Tatham, "The Gilesian Monomyth," pp. 364-375. 29 Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion," p. 33. CHAPTER FIVE Lost in the Funhouse

The aspect of Barth's fifth book, Lost in the Funhouse, that has received the most critical attention is the problem implicitly posed by Barth in the first paragraph of his "Author's Note" (ix). He states that the book is "a series...meant to be received 'all at once,'" and several critics have attempted to explain this apparent paradox. Beverly Bienstock sees the book as being held together by the evolution and resolution of several themes, including brotherly rivalry, a quest for personal manhood, a consideration of an author's role in regard to his work and his life, and, most important, a search for identity. She argues that these themes are presented serially, but that their resolution involves seeing them simultane­ ously—that the problem of the author's role becomes equivalent to 2 the search for identity. Michael Hinden argues that, like the first selection, "Frame Tale," the book is circular. Its structure, he claims, is a parody of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and that the first seven pieces are concerned with the problem of the artist as an individual, and the last seven with the problem o of the artist and his relation to his art. Robert Kiernan also sees the book as circular, arguing that serially it takes the form of a

Kunstlerroman involving Ambrose's growth to a vocation in art marked by his stylistic evolution, but resolving itself in a return to where 139 140 it started. Carol Kyle calls the book an anatomy, structured by an "anatomy of prose fiction."6 Since almost half of the stories in the book were published individually over a five year period prior to the appearance of Lost in the Funhouse, we might also argue that the serial nature of this book is at least partially organic, and that Barth's subsequent use of these stories in a series meant to be re­ ceived "all at once" is an immediate example of how later works can be seen to affect our and their author's understanding of earlier works.

Fortunately, Barth has provided us with a way to encompass all of these views of the book. In "Seven Additional Author's Notes" he tells us that: the regnant idea is the unpretentious one of turning as many aspects of the fiction as possible—the structure, the narrative viewpoint, the means of presentation, in some instances the process of listening—into dramatically relevant emblems of the theme, (x)

In this early formulation of what Barth will later develop into "The Principle of Metaphoric Means," we see that all of the relation­ ships we can find between the stories, styles and subjects of this book are legitimate, in fact necessary to our proper reading of the book. Finding these relationships is the first rule of the game, and to the extent that this game is founded in the metaphor of its title, Lost in the Funhouse, we are encouraged to look for not only the metaphor's "obvious 'first order' relevance to the thing it des­ cribes" (71), but also to its

second order of significance: it may be drawn from the milieu of the action, for example, or be particularly appropriate to the sensibility of the narrator, even 141

hinting to the reader things of which the narrator is unaware; or it may cast further and subtler lights upon the things it describes, sometimes ironically qualifying the more evident sense of the comparison. (71) Like the "seamless universe" of The Sot-Weed Factor, and "the seamless university" of Giles Goat-Boy the themes and techniques of this book reverberate along the seamless moebius strip of its frame.

Before getting started on an analysis of the themes and rela­ tionships woven into the fourteen stories in this book, I would like first to discuss the overall frame that contains them. In my intro­ ductory chapter I outlined Barth's history from the publication of Giles Goat-Boy to Lost in the Funhouse, attempting to show that that history established a point of departure for his work. The first frame we encounter in the book itself is its title, and understanding its first and second orders of significance enables us to establish cru­ cial limits to the range of the book. We immediately perceive, of course, that the title combines the fearful situation of being "lost" with the otherwise agreeable situation of being in a "funhouse," and these two facts considerably aid in defining the theme of the book. We are warned that either we will get lost, or the author has, or both, but that place where we will wander is an artificial construction designed specifically for our pleasure. As the narrator of the story "Lost in the Funhouse" reminds us, the "important thing to remember, after all, is that it's meant to be a funhouse, that is, a place of amusement" (87). In that story, "funhouse" is used literally; as a metaphor it applies to art, primarily, and only in a secondary and qualified way to "life." The qualification is that 142 we can never forget the artificial aspect of the funhouse, so that when we see the world surrounding Ambrose, or Menelaus, or the narrator of "Anonymiad," we must remember that the "life" recalled by these characters is, metaphorically at least, as artificial a construction as the book that contains them.

The second frame we encounter is the Moebius strip called "Frame-Tale" (1-2), consisting of an unending cycle of "Once upon a time there was a story that began Once upon a time...," etc., and as Michael Hinden has noted, this "suggests aesthetic circularity. ..of major thematic significance." Not only does it announce that the structure of the book is circular, but when viewed alongside some of the ostensible subjects of the fictions—autobiography, journeys, myth—we see that the treatment of history and time will be circular as well. The use of the fairy-tale opening serves to reinforce the artificial aspects of the fiction, and by naming this frame-tale "Frame-Tale," Barth has successfully blended its essence with its function. In addition to these frames, the book also contains an "Author's Note" and "Seven Additional Author's Notes" which help direct our responses to the fictions that follow. I have already discussed the first section of the "Author's Note" where we are told that the series is "meant to be received all at once." In the rest of the note, the author goes on to explain the different methods of media presentation for the pieces in the book. Some of this is clearly meant to be taken seriously, especially insofar as the discussion .of media sug­ gests Barth's serious commitment to experimentation in this book. At the same time, the "Note" is clearly a joke on the reader and on the experiments of that same author. We are told, for instance, that "Echo" is "intended for monophonic authorial recording, either disc or tape" (ix), as if the difference between disc and tape were at all significant; and the discussion of "Title," which gives us a choice of "live ditto in dialogue with monophonic ditto aforementioned," and "live ditto interlocutory with stereophonic et cetera...," is an ex­ ample of refining to absurdity the distinctions of presentation. What this note also accomplishes is the "exhaustion of possibilities," and it is therefore an example of the type of literature Barth discussed in the essay "The Literature of Exhaustion" which appeared shortly before Lost in the Funhouse. One can picture the author surrounded by his soft-ware gadgetry going through these absurd variations and, as in the case of Borges's hypothetical novels and the "notes" he writes about them, the author need only write the notes and imagine the rest.

The "Seven Additional Author's Notes" are all concerned with various aspects of the relationship between teller, tale and told which plays such a key part in the book. Like the first note, these notes are also serious and satiric, providing useful information for reading some of the stories and, in the case of "Glossolalia," for example, pedantically making fun of certain reviewers.

Following "Frame-Tale" in the book is the first lengthy selec­ tion, "Night-Sea Journey," and in it we can see a continuation of several of the themes that concerned Barth in his previous books as 144 well as an introduction to those subjects that will be emphasized in succeeding sections. The problem of identity is reintroduced as the narrator wonders what he is, speculating at one point that "perhaps I am my drowned friend" (9). He encounters and resolves the question of suicide much as Todd Andrews did in The Floating Opera, finding it "no meaningfuller to drown myself than to go on swimming" (4). Like the major characters in each of Barth's books, the sperm lacks con­ viction and has difficulty making choices, and, like those other major characters, he confronts the meaning of his history, seeing it finally as a system of "cycles within cycles" (8). In a speculation reminis­ cent of The End of the Road, he wonders whether "only utterest nay- sayers survive the night" (12) and, with a greater emphasis than in the preceding novels, brings up the themes of art, heroism, immortal­ ity and love.

What is markedly different and difficult about this story, apart from its thematic emphasis, is its style. The reader is immediately set to the task of figuring out who is talking to whom, and how, and although we eventually recognize that the speaker is a sperm, the means and object of his speech remain obscure. The story begins with "One way or another...it's myself I address" (3), and ends with the plea to "You who I may be about to become.. .to whom, through whom I speak" (11-12), suggesting that what we are reading is a "reflection of these reflections" (12) told or written by the future combination of the sperm and egg. Only later in the volume do we have enough in­ formation to surmise that this person is Ambrose, and that as the 145 author of "Night-Sea Journey" he is attempting an experiment in authorial effacement. In addition, we are warned that what we are hearing is not only a "reflection," but also a "garbled and radical translation" (12), so that the verisimilitude of the monologue is questionable.

Later in the book, one of the narrators will suggest that the only real alternative left to the modern writer of fiction trying to create a work of art is for his fiction to "establish some other, acceptable relation between itself, its author, its reader" (125), and in this first story we can see an experiment of that sort going on. The narrator of "Night-Sea Journey" wonders how he can "be both vessel and contents" (3), and we see that by talking to himself, through himself (or some mutation of himself) and about himself, he has man­ aged to make.the teller, tale, and told inseparable. Solipsism of this and other forms is a subject which is grappled with throughout the book as Ambrose struggles to find his proper stance as a writer, but in this case the solipsism is Ambrose's, not Barth's. Ambrose may have achieved a story that blurs the distinctions between teller, tale, and told, but Ambrose is only the fictional author and audience. The relation between Barth, his story, and his reader remains un­ changed.

The other notable stylistic aspect of this story is the Borgesian way in which it economically attempts to exhaust the possibilities of its ground situation. Rather than writing a lengthy manuscript in which he dramatizes the history of this sperm, Barth 146 instead has the sperm speculate on the significance of those actions. Through attributions to the friend he sometimes mistakes himself for, the sperm is able to provide a catalogue of possible explanations of the "night," the "sea," the "maker," the purpose of the journey, and the "SHE" at journey's end. In addition we are given a brief but nevertheless exhaustive account of other sperms' actions and attitudes, so that, in effect, we have before us a totality of the possible dramatic situations inherent in a ground situation based on the assumption of cognitive spermatozoa. The genre of what I will call "contemplative sperm stories," not unlike the related genre of beast fables, is simultaneously invented and its possibilities exhausted.

The Borgesian approach of this story is, of course, not g accidental. Carol A. Kyle has called Borges Barth's "mentor," and the first avowed purpose of the essay "The Literature of Exhaustion" was to recognize and praise Borges's work. Barth's decision to write short fiction (he had earlier said "I don't write short- stories")1 is a clear indication of Borges's influence, and I hope to show how several of the pieces in this collection are experimental imitations of Borges's technique. "Night-Sea Journey" is an example of one aspect of "the literature of exhaustion," but only by looking at this story from its frame can we see the other, which involves

turn[ing] ultimacy, exhaustion, paralyzing self-con sciousness and the adjective weight of accumulated history...against itself to make something new and valid, the essence whereof would be the impossibility of making something new. (106) The narrator of "Night-Sea Journey" is able to continue only by 147 talking about his inability to continue. In "Autobiography," "Lost in the Funhouse," "Title," and "Life-Story" we will see how the "authors" of those pieces do much the same thing.

Earlier in this chapter I alluded to the themes of "Night-Sea Journey" which receive special emphasis, and I would like now to underscore those themes and the way in which this story introduces them and prepares us for their treatment in the pieces to come. The subject of art and the artist's role in the world is presented by the style of the story and by the narrator's consideration of his own role as "tale-bearer of a generation" (9). As he considers this role and the increasingly likely prospect that out of the billions that started out, he, alone, will reach "the shore," he introduces the sub­ jects of immortality and heroism that are thematically important throughout the book. As he approaches "SHE" and her song of love, he comes to see his role of tale-bearer as a moral one. His tale will be "a private legacy of awful recollection and negative resolve" (11) designed to "terminate this aimless, brutal business!" (12). He im­ plores his audience to "hate love" (12), which earlier he denied was what drove and sustained him, but rather was "our ignorance of what whips us" (4). He ends his tale, however, unable to withstand her force, "deny[ing] myself, plung[ing] into her who summons, singing... 'Love! Love! Love!" (12).

After rejecting heroism and denying that it is love that sus­ tains him, we see him nevertheless being sustained by his heroic hopes and succumbing to the power he opposes but does not understand. 148 The "SHE" in the story is at first a contradiction of him, his only understanding of her coming in terms of opposites to himself. Even­ tually, "SHE" is elevated to the level of paradox by his suspicion that they are complementary (10). Finally he sees that only by em­ bracing that paradox can he overcome it: that "SHE" is "the death of us, yet our salvation and resurrection; simultaneously our journey's end, mid-point, and commencement" (10). This set-up, much like Menelaus's acceptance of love at the end of his story, is also anal­ ogous to "The Literature of Exhaustion" where Barth argues that only ' 12 by embracing the paradox of "felt ultimacy" can he hope to go beyond it. The story that follows "Night-Sea Journey" is the first of three progessively less realistic stories about the youth and adolescence of Ambrose M , and although "Ambrose His Mark," "Water-Message," and "Lost in the Funhouse" are interrupted by "Autobiography" and "Petition," I will first discuss the three as a sequence. In "Ambrose His Mark" a first-person narrator, who we later are given enough infor­ mation to go back and assume is Ambrose, discusses the circumstances of his birth and naming, and since this immediately follows the apotheosis of the sperm-narrator of "Night-Sea Journey," we may assume that the connection between the stories is biological.

Ambrose recounts the incident that led to his naming in conven­ tionally realistic, dramatic fashion, supplying realistic details, building characters and so forth, in a traditional way. We are told that through an accident related to the machinations of his 149 grandfather, a swarm of bees landed on the infant Ambrose's face; and how, through a cataloguing of people in The Book of Knowledge to whom similar events occurred, it was decided to call him Ambrose in honor fo the Saint. Ambrose was chosen after Plato, , and Xeno- phon were rejected by the mother. We are told that Saint Ambrose had a swarm of bees land on his mouth and, like the others just men­ tioned, he became a great speaker. Our Ambrose, however, had "the bees...more on [his] eyes and ears than on his mouth" (31). Uncle Konrad employs this difference saying "so he'll grow up to see things clear" (31). To the reader the difference is a significant one. In­ deed, so much of the succeeding stories in the book depends on our eyes and ears for clarity that the distinction is a key to how we regard the "author" of most of the book.

All this attention to naming also recalls Todd Andrews of The Floating Opera, especially as we have a reference to Hector, Ambrose's father, as being a "tuner of pianos" (15). Ambrose's artistic genealogy is further suggested by the fact tha Uncle Konrad made his living as a writer of gravestones, and by the character of his mother, a solipsistic woman who spent her time reading and at the theater. Barth's first novel, with its plea against symbolizing from nature, also comes to mind when we consider the "port-wine stain" (18) near Ambrose's eye and ear that, until the bee incident, had been amorphous, but immediately afterward was seen by the family as clearly resembling a honeybee. The ending of the story, with the narrator's assertion that "I and my sign are neither one nor quite two" (32), and his 150 fascination with himself, "that beast, ungraspable, most queer, prick­ ed up in my soul's crannies" (32) is reminiscent of the predominant theme of identity carried forward in all the early novels. The last quotation, in" particular, is our first indication of the changing style of Ambrose the artist.

"Water-Message" is told in the third-person and recounts a key incident in Ambrose's adolescence involving his exclusion from older brother Peter's "Occult Order of the Sphinx" (44), his first gleanings about sex, and his eventual discovery of a bottle with a note inside. We quickly surmise that the omniscient narrator of this story is also Ambrose, but in this case his style has changed considerably. In "Ambrose His Mark" Greek allusions were limited to the choice of names, but here they become predominant, with the narrator Ambrose having the character Ambrose running through a series of Homeric . In addition, the narrator of "Water-Message" relies heavily on the use of italics in order to emphasize the strangeness of several experiences that Ambrose has. We have incidents, for instance, when Ambrose can­ not speak, and thinks to himself that "this is what they mean when they say they have a lump in their throat" (40), emphasizing, at the same time, the beginnings of a crippling self-consciousness, and an example of a character who understands life through his associations with art.

The Ambrose of this story is romantic, as well as self-conscious, and we see him naming a particularly dangerous street corner Scylla and Charybdis (39) or transforming a romp in the woods into a journey 151

through a "jungle" made "mysterious by a labyrinth of intersecting footpaths" (46). Like previous Barth characters, he is amazed by the distinciton between the imaginary possibilities of the world and "the case with facts" (40), and, like Eben Cooke particularly, sees himself as "no man at all" (42). Looking back to the discussion of heroes in "Night-Sea Journey," and ahead to that discussion in the

rest of the book, he imagines situations in which he is heroic that end with him feeling "washed of shame, washed of fear; nothing was but sweetest knowledge" (50). The climax of the story comes when Ambrose, excluded from his brother's club and the sexual secrets they have discovered, sees "a perfectly amazing thing" (52), a bottle washed ashore with a note in it. We are told that "the world had wandered willy-nilly to his threshold" (52), and after he reads the note, consisting of only "TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN" at the top of the page and "YOURS TRULY" (53) at the bottom, we are told that "Ambrose's spirit bore new and subtle burdens" (53). It is at this point that Ambrose begins to see the world differently, his "marked" eyes noticing that those shiny bits in the paper's texture were splinters of wood pulp. Often as he'd seen them in the leaves of cheap tablets, he had not thitherto embraced that fact. (54) This, then, can be seen as the beginning of Ambrose's writing career as filtered to us through an older Ambrose's recollection. The story of the bottle, that "perfectly amazing thing," strongly suggests that narrator/Ambrose has embellished his youth in order to achieve the story's implied significance. The observation about the paper, while 152 pointing out Ambrose's special eyes, also serves as an example of an otherwise blank medium nevertheless implying a message—here that the paper is made from wood pulp.

The sequence of Ambrose stories ends with the book's title story, "Lost in the Funhouse," where an adolescent Ambrose goes on a family outing during World War II to Ocean City and gets lost in the funhouse there. From the outset of the story we see that the first- and third- person narrators of the two previous Ambrose stories are both present, and that the development of Ambrose's style has reached a point of deterioration so that he slips back and forth between what Edgar H. Knapp has called "at least six bands of mental formulation...randomly mixed." We have a realistic account of the present action, a re­ collection of past events, a "conscious contrivance of a reasonable future," uncontrolled contrivances of fantastic futures, self-con­ sciousness as to the process of composition, and "a recollection of 13 sections from a handbook for creative writers." This disintegration of style and self that goes on in the story is naturally reflective of the nature of funhouses, where the multi­ farious twisted mirrors and secret passages are designed precisely for amusing disorientation. Ambrose's trouble is that despite his recognition that "the important thing to remember is that it's meant to be a fun house" (87), he sees his passage through the literal fun­ house, through the funhouse of sexual initiation, and through the funhouse of literature (including the story in the process of com­ position), as deadly.serious. Another way for us to look at Ambrose's problems is to see them as similar to the themes of love and sexual 153 identity, personal sense of self, and identity as a writer that have been carried forward by the previous stories, and we should naturally expect by now that in Barth's funhouse, these themes will merge.

The theme of love and sex in the story is introduced by the recollection of the drive to Ocean City where we are presented with Magda, the slightly older neighbor girl, who had three years previous­ ly given Ambrose his first taste of sex. We see the three themes merging in Ambrose's memory of that event as he reflects that he "seem­ ed unable to forget the least detail of his life" (74), including Mag- da on her knees,- the sense of himself watching himself "impersonally" (74), and the details of an El Producto cigar box which, like Keats's Grecian Urn, defied the passage of time. The sexual emphasis in the story is carried through the drive down to Ocean City and, once there, through the various images of loves on and under the boardwalk, of the women whose dresses are blown up by air pipes, of Fat May screaming, and all of Ambrose's fantasies of women that occur once his is lost inside. It reaches its peak as Ambrose realizes that "the whole point ...of the entire funhouse" (85) is sexual;

that all that normally showed, like restaurants and dance halls and clothing and test-ybur-strength machines, was merely preparation and intermission. (86) The theme of personal identity also begins in the car en route to Ocean City where Ambrose feels separate from the rest of the family. He merges the theme with sex and authorship as he,imagines his ancestry from the time when five hundred twelve women...of every class and character, received into themselves men, ditto...to conceive the five hundred twelve ancestors of the two hundred fifty-six 154 ancestors of the et cetera et cetera et cetera...of the author, the narrator, of this story, Lost in the Funhouse. (76) Like the characters in each of the previous stories, he considers suicide, wishing there were "a button you could press to end your life without pain" (86), and toward the end of the story, he sees "once again...how readily he deceived himself into supposing he was a person" (90).

The problem of identity is most often merged in the story with Ambrose's analysis of and confusion about fiction, and his failure to come to terms with conventional realism can be seen to stem from his inability to accept reality, including his own. The story fre­ quently comments on its own processes and its failure to "be" a real story despite the help of the creative writing guide to which Ambrose frequently refers. The story begins, in fact, with his observation that conventional realistic technique only serves to "enhance the illusion of reality" (68), pointing out that "it is an illusion that is being enhanced, by purely artificial means" (69-70). In one of the first of Ambrose's imaginative visions about the funhouse, he imagines himself sneaking up on Magda and her boyfriend and slipping away with her. He realizes that in the house of illusion, "She'd think he_ did it" (79), but then "It would be better to be the boyfriend and act outraged, and tear the funhouse apart Not act, be_!" (79).

Ambrose is unable to "be" because he has no sense of self. He tells us that "you think you're yourself, but there are other persons in you" (81), and we see him watching himself watch himself both in 155 the barn with Magda and as narrator of the story. He makes several observations about that apply equally to self-identity. He tells us, for instance, that "in the funhouse mirror room, you can't see yourself go on forever, because no matter how you stand, your head gets in the way" (81-82); or that "in a perfect funhouse [as in an integrated self] you'd be able to go only one way" (82). He wonders "is there really such a person as Ambrose, or is he a figment of the author's imagination" (84), and in a self-conscious reflection on his own musings, if there is "anything more tiresome, in fiction, than the problems of sensitive adolescents" (88). In flights of fan­ cy he sees himself in literary images, struggling "like Ulysses" (83) to get out of the funhouse; or being found in skeleton form by a later expedition to the funhouse and being mistaken "for part of the entertainment" (91-92). He pictures himself as one who "died telling stories to himself in the dark" (92), and he speculates that he may well be like children who see themselves as heroes, when the case might be that they are villains (87). In a thought reminiscent of Eben Cooke, he recalls a fleeting moment when he saw that

the grass was alive! The town, the river, himself, were not imaginary; time roared in his ears like wind; the world was going on! (85) At another point he dreams of someone in the world who has the under­ standing to "see him entire, like a poem or story" (88), and who will see his apprehensions as "the very things that made him precious to her...and to Western Civilization" (88). Perhaps his most crucial statement on this subject comes when "he lost himself in the reflection 156 that the necessity for an observer makes perfect observation imposs­ ible" (90). While all this is going on, Ambrose is also judging his story in progress by the guidelines of conventional fiction, and despondent­ ly admitting its failures. He sees that

the plot doesn't rise by meaningful steps but winds upon itself, digresses, retreats, hesitates, sighs, collapses, expires. The climax of the story must be its 's discovery of a way to get through the funhouse. But he has found none, may have ceased to search. (92)

This thought is followed by a dream of a funhouse "vaster by far than any yet constructed" (93) and the fact that (like the novel, perhaps?) "by then they may be out of fashion, like steamboats and excursion trains" (93). He then has his final vision of "a truly astonishing funhouse, incredibly complex yet utterly controlled from a great cen­ tral switchboard" (93) with himself as operator. He ends the story with a statement that again merges the three themes he has dealt with:

He wished he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he's not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator--though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed. (94) This decision to be a writer comes mid-way through the book and we now see that the preceding pieces, and presumably those to follow, are precisely various rooms of that "truly astonishing funhouse" Ambrose has dreamed about. Once it is established that Ambrose is the operator of the fun­ house of this book, then the relationship between the stories becomes clearer. I have already noted their biological connection, and now a second way to see these stories are as continuing experiments of the 157 developing writer. A third, related way, is to see them as an attempt by Barth to exhaust the alternatives of style and structure available to a modern writer in order, once again, to "make something new." Al­ though the Ambrose stories were broken up by their arrangement, treat­ ing them as a series has been helpful in seeing the direction this book is going. By treating the other stories as experiments by Am­ brose, we can also see several series emerging. Thus, "petition," "Two Meditations," and "Glossolalia," can be seen as related exper­ iments in authorial effacement and sound; "Autobiography," "Title," and "Life-Story," as related by theme and by their respective em­ phasis on the story, the author, and the reader—and ultimately the relationships among them. "Echo," "Menelaiad," and "Anonymiad" use mythic materials and continue the experiment with a new relation­ ship between teller, tale and told. Because the series beginning with "Autobiography" is so illuminative of the other directions the book is taking, I will turn to it next.

"Autobiography" is the first radical experiment we encounter in the book, and beginning with the odd spacing of its first line, we see the stylistic emphasis on eye and ear. You who listen give me life in a manner of speaking. (33) By listening instead of looking, and allowing our ears to supply the pronunciation, we get "Yoohoo, listen! Give me life? (in a manner of speaking)." This kind of punning continues throughout the story as this "Self-Recorded Fiction".(33) goes about the business of its own night-sea journey, trying to be born; and, like the narrator in that 158 story, this one also "continues the tale of my forebears" (35). Although we have a story instead of a person, we still find the

Barthian, perhaps in this case, Ambroseian, self-doubt and despair. The speaker hopes "I'm a fiction without real hope" (33), describes himself as "contentless form" (33); accurately but ironically tells us "Look, I'm writing. No, listen, I'm nothing but talk" (33); and concludes with a statement that is an example of what the sentence itself denies: I particularly scorn my fondness of paradox. I despise pessimism, narcissism, solipsism, truculence, word-play, and pusillanimity, my chiefer inclinations; loathe self-loathers ergo me; have no pity for self-pity and so am free of that sweet baseness. I doubt I am. Being me's no joke. (35)

The story struggles in its attempt to get born, and, like several of the attempts we see in the book, it has a qualified success, its last words being literally, its "last words" (37). Before that partial success the story explains its problems to us, pointing out that "I'mdad's bloody mirror which is to say, upon reflection I reverse and distort him" (34). We see a further facet of his relation with "dad," the author, as the story tries to "turn myself off," and can't The reader, the "You" in the first line who is "my link with the world" (33), could also "turn him off," but does not. Just before the ending, the story says "perhaps I'll have a posthumous cautionary value" (36), and it is here that we see its significance to Ambrose and/or Barth's attempts. As an experiment in point of view the story is, if not a failure, at least a one-time event whose possibilities have been exhausted. We are also cautioned 159 that the relationship between teller, tale and told is a difficult one to tamper with. "Title" shifts the emphasis from the story to the author, ad­ dressing itself:

simultaneously to three matters: the 'Author's' difficul­ ties with his companion, his analogous difficulties with the story he's in the process of composing, and the not dissimilar straits in which, I think mistakenly, he imagines his culture and its literature to be. (x-xi)

This tendency to see an analogy between the author, his art, and his culture is a working form of Spielman's Law from Giles Goat-Boy, and in this story the author develops it, arguing that Love affairs, literary genres, third item in exemplary series, fourth—everything blossoms and decays, does it not, from the primitive and classical through the mannered and baroque to the abstract, stylized, dehu­ manized, unintelligible, blank. (105)

The problem and its symptoms for the author, art, culture or what have you, are stated throughout the story. We are told that "everything's been said already" (102), that notions of plot and theme are no longer valid but "as yet not successfully succeeded" (102), that our "historicity and self awareness...are fatal to innocence and spontane- 14 ity" (106), and, implying the "apocalyptic ambience" Barth discussed in "The Literature of Exhaustion," that "one has no idea...how close the end may be, nor will one necessarily be aware of it when it occurs" (104). In response to these facts, the author asks, "can we possibly continue" (102), and states that "the final question is, Can nothing be made meaningful? Isn't that the final question?" (102). Of course we see that the question about the question comes after it, so that, technically at least, there never is a final question. The 160 "final test—to fill in the blank" (102) is next proposed, and at this point one wonders exactly what goal this author/person/cultural repre­ sentative has in mind.

After telling us that "the narrator has narrated himself into a corner" (108), and that "words are artificial to begin with" (109), he finally states his goal: The fact is...that people still lead lives, and people still have characters and motives that we divine more or less inaccurately from their appearance still fall in love, and out...and they do these things in a con­ ventionally dramatic fashion...and what goes on between them is still not only the most interesting but the most important thing in the bloody murderous world And that my dear is what writers have got to find ways to write about. (109)

Unfortunately, the solutions to the problem are few and confusing. We are given three possibilities: "The first is rejuvenation" where narration "may rise neoprimitively from its own ashes. A tiresome prospect" (105). The second, "scarcely likely at this ad­ vanced date, is that...the end of one road might be the beginning of another" (105-106). The third is "a temporary expedient" (106), and is, in fact, a restatement of the principle behind "The Literature of Exhaustion"

to turn ultimacy, exhaustion, paralyzing self-consciousness and the adjective weight of accumulated history Go on. Go on. To turn ultimacy against itself to make something new and valid, the essence whereof would be the impos­ sibility of making something new. (106) Seyeral pages later, this is stated again We must make something out of nothing Not only turn contradiction into paradox, but employ it, to go on living and working. (108) After stating the paradoxical fact that "self-defeat implies a 161 victor" (107), the author sums up his thinking on the subject, saying that "the storyteller's alternatives are a series of last words or actual blank" (108). It is clear, however, that this story, while it may employ the alternatives set forth by the author, fails to solve the problem he poses. It calls itself a "necessary story" (110), but it literally ends with a blank the author has been unable to fill. It has been "necessary," one supposes, because the alternatives mentioned had to be attempted and exhausted before others could be tried.

In "Title" the author asked the reader to "acknowledge your complicity" (107), and in "Life-Story," the final story in this series, attention is turned from the author to that reader. In his note on this story, Barth tells us that "the deuteragonist of 'Life-Story,' antecedent of the second-person pronoun, is you" (xi). The story, then, is a direct address to the reader concerning, among other things, the reader's complicity in the problems of modern literature.

The ostensible ground situation of the story is that its author suspects he is himself a character in someone else's fiction, that his_ author is also, and so on—an idea originally suggested by Ambrose in "Lost in the Funhouse." This implicitly self-conscious idea is rendered in a style that is itself archly self-conscious, and both style and subject are consciously despised by its author: another story about a writer writing a story. Who doesn't prefer art that at least overtly imitates something other than its own processes. That doesn't continually proclaim 'don't forget I'm an artifice!' That takes for granted its mimetic nature instead of asserting it in order (not so slyly after all) to deny it, or vice-versa? (114) 162 If we see this story, as I think we should, as another failed attempt- in this case a failure to follow suggestion number three in "Title"-- then the author is back where he started, with even the "temporary expedient" of "The Literature of Exhaustion" used up.

"Life-Story" recapitulates the problems set forth in "Title," by the narrator's positing once again that his medium, his society, and he are in similar straits, "moribund if not already dead" (118). The narrator tells us what he wants in a story instead of the "avant- garde preciousness" (116) he has been composing: I want passion and bravura action in my plot, heroes I can admire, heroines I can love, memorable speeches, colorful accessory characters, poetical language. It doesn't matter to me how naively linear the anecdote is; never mind modernity! (116)

He sums up the difficulty of accomplishing this rather neatly, telling us that he tells B :

Not for an instant to throw out the baby while eyery instant discarding the bathwater is perhaps a chief task of civilized people at this hour of the world. (116) The story progresses while the story he is attempting to write stagnates, until his self-consciousness reaches its peak in an address to the reader calculated to reach, but not go beyond, the extreme limit of tolerance. He realizes that what he is doing is "as more likely to annoy than to engage." The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don't go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to mind when I speak of amorous ad­ vances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where's your shame? (123) 163 We are reminded of "Autobiography," when the story addressed its author/father in similar terms, begging him to turn it off. Shortly after the speech above, the narrator tells the reader that "his life is in your hands" (124) and continues his diatribe aimed at getting the reader to turn him off: But as he longs to die and can't without your help you force him on, force him on. Will you deny you've read this sentence? This? To get away with murder doesn't appeal to you, is that it? As if your hands weren't inky with other dyings! As if he'd know you'd killed him! Come on. He dares you. (124) Having established the reader's complicity in what can no longer be considered solipsistic, but is nevertheless "precious" fiction, the narrator once again tries to offer alternatives to what is now a com­ mon problem. In regard to style, he suggests that perhaps fiction should pay more attention to the "non-visual" aspect of life which "the visual dramatic media couldn't handle easily" (117). As to sub­ ject, he "imagines that any number of interior might be being played out in the actor's or character's minds" (117) which would correspond to the "non-visual."

The most powerful thrust of his argument, however, has to do with the relationship between teller, tale, and told that he has been establishing throughout the three pieces in this series. He notes that the three aspects of literature are "each dependent on the other two, but not in the same ways" (118), and wonders whether "his character as reader [which was] not the same as his character as author...might be turned to account" (119-120). Finally, he argues that "the old analogy between Author and God, novel and world, can no longer be 164 employed unless deliberately as a false analogy" (125), and that certain things must follow from this observation. They are presented, as in "Title," as a set of alternatives. The first, that "fiction must acknowledge its fictitiousness and metaphoric invalidity" (125), has already been attempted by the author and denied in the opening section of "Life-Story." The second, that we can "choose to ignore the question or deny its relevance" (125), recalls the realistic attempts of the Ambrose stories and their resultant failure, or to the section in "Life-Story" where the author tries realism once again and again discards it (115). The third alternative, however, is indeed a new one; for fiction to "establish some other, acceptable relation between itself, its author, its reader" (125). The author says that "this new fiction would be entirely different" (125), and then ends what he calls his "ending story" (126).

In what sense is this an "ending story?" To be sure, it is about endings, or supposed endings, and is also the end of the series I have been discussing, but it seems to me that the phrase has more significance than these suggestions carry. I see it as an ending to the "temporary expedient" of the "literature of exhaustion," and as the beginning of an attempt by Barth to create fiction that employs the "new relation" between tale, teller, and told that "Life-Story" proposes. Before turning to the three mythic stories in the book in order to see if they accomplish the end proposed, I will briefly discuss the three remaining "failures," "Petition," "Two Meditations," and "Glossolalia." 165 Since it follows directly from "Water-Message," and consists of an unsigned letter, it is natural, I think, to see "Petition" as Ambrose's attempt to "fill in the blank" of that message he had re­ ceived in a bottle. The story itself involves the personal and sexual identity crisis of a Siamese twin who sees the difference between him­ self and his brother as essentially one of mind and body. Thus, the brother is "incoherent but vocal; I'm articulate and mute" (59); or the brother has "filthy personal habits," whereas, in a statement reminiscent of Todd Andrews, "I neither perspire nor defecate, but merely emit a discreet vapor, of neutral scent, and tiny puffs of what could pass for talc" (59).

Other familiar themes are also recalled in this story, for instance the emphasis in the first two novels on their respective menage a trois is brought to mind by the nightclub act these twins perform called "The Eternal Triangle" (63). As in almost all the stories in this book the narrator wishes he could kill himself, but does not. The Sot-Weed Factor with its emphasis on identity and the unique problems of twinship, is reflected in the story's ending:

To be one, paradise! To be two: bliss! But to be both and neither is unspeakable. (68) As we see particularly in the story "Lost in the Funhouse," brotherly rivalry is a moving issue for the young Ambrose, so it is not hard to see this fantastic story as his allegorical way of treating tHe subject. We should also note the "painful schooling in •detachment" (61) that the narrator undergoes and the way in which this irony sets us up for other failed experiments in narrative detachment 166 later in the book. Robert Kiernan explains the inclusion of "Two Meditations," as Ambrose's ultimate experiment in narrative detachment, referring to the "grub fact" (191) which the narrator of "Anonymiad" rejects. He sees the first meditation as a series of "bizarre correspondences" and the second as a series of "bizarre consequences," which, without any 15 narrative intrusion, are the basic stuff of stories. While this explanation fits into the general structure of experimentation going on, it does not account for the puns in the two titles and the thematic relevance of the two pieces. "Niagara Falls" gives us (significantly) 1 c seven examples of the Marxist doctrine that Todd Andrews held dear in The Floating Opera: that quantitative changes become qualitative changes over time. "Lake Erie" consists of seven examples of its first line: "The wisdom to recognize and halt follows the know-how to pollute past rescue" (101), which I see as a statement suggestive of the self-conscious, stylistic "pollution" of Ambrose's art. Both meditations suggest the "apocalyptic ambience" Barth discussed in "The Literature of Exhaustion." "Glossolalia" is the final experiment in form and sound that we find in the book. In his note on the selection, Barth points out for each piece that "their don't understand what they're talking about" (xi), and that they each correspond metrically to The Lord's Prayer. This speaking with tongues is a failed attempt at achieving the meaning of "Glossolalia's" last line: "The senselessest babble, could we ken it, might disclose a dark message, or prayer" (112). The reader sees, however, that from this example, the reverse is also 167 true, namely, that the darkest message or prayer might, in fact, be senseless babble. In the general framework of desperate experimenta­ tion going on, this series of "prayers" is the final and most futile attempt. "Echo" is the first of the three mythic stories in the book, and, like, "Night-Sea Journey" it attempts to blur the distinctions between teller, tale and told. In his note Barth tells us that the words of "Echo"...may be regarded validly as hers, Narcissus's, Tiresias's, mine, or any combination of the four of us's. Inasmuch as the three mythical principals are all more or less immortal, and Tiresias moreover can see backward and forward in time, the events recounted may be already past, foreseen for the future, or in pro­ cess of occurring as narrated, (x) By blending the three elements of the story with a confusion of time, we can see the sense of the story's final line: "our story's finished before it starts" (100).

Having identified himself with each of the three mythic charac­ ters whom we can't tell apart, Barth establishes an interesting description of the artist. He is at the same time the imitative "Echo," the solipsistic Narcissus, and the Seer Tiresias. In the story we see this interdependence as we are told that "it was never himself Narcissus loved, but his reflection" (99). In the same way, "Echo never, as popularly held, repeats all, like gossip or mirror. She edits, heightens, mutes, turns others' work to her end" (97). Tiresias, who like Proteus in "Menelaiad" can "see fore and aft, but not amid­ ships" (140), cannot find himself because he is belabored by "other's histories" (95). Thus all three "linger forever on the autognostic verge" (99), like Todd Andrews, Eben Cooke, George Giles, and all the 168 Ambroses that have come before them. For each of them, individually, identity is still a problem. For the author of the story, the afflic­ tion is analogous, and he has yet to find a voice. All the indications, it seems to me, point to the fact that in the "Menelaiad" he finds his voice, and "Menelaiad" is the beginning of the new fiction Barth has been struggling toward, and the way out of the funhouse. It follows directly from his "ending story," begins and resolves itself into one sure voice, and, among other things, is the first story in the collection narrated by someone who doesn't attempt suicide.18 Furthermore, "Menelaiad" contains what the narrator of "Life-Story" wanted in a story: "passion and bravura action..., heroes I can admire...memorable speeches, colorful accessory characters, poetical language" (116). Its subject matter consists, as "Life-Story" suggested, of "any number of interior dramas...being played out in the actor's or character's minds (117). It rearranges the metaphor of author as God to author as mortal, and by having Menelaus be the audience and story as well as the speaker, it presents the relationship between teller, tale, and told in a new way. Finally, distinct from "Night-Sea Journey" and "Echo"—the two stories that also rearrange the teller/tale/told relationship—"Menelaiad" is about people who fall in love and "what goes on between them" which is "the most important thing in the bloody murderous world" (109). At the out­ set we are told that "this isn't the voice of Menelaus; this voice is_ Menelaus" (127) which, when "switched on" like a recording machine, tells its tale—"How Menelaus Became Immortal" (127). The.author's note tells us that the story has been composed for "printed voice" (ix), 169 a combination of Ambrose's special eyes and ears.

The tale begins with Menelaus talking to the reader, continues in the next frame as he tells Telemachus and Peisi stratus the tale of how he regained Helen; goes on in the next frame to explain how he answered Helen about he he caught Proteus, which in the next frame is interrupted by his explanation to Proteus of why he caught him; which involves in the next frame the story of how Menelaus captured Eidothea; which in turn moves to the sixth frame where Eidothea demands to know the ending of the Trojan war. In the seventh frame Menelaus asks himself why they went to war in the first place, and the rest of the story works its way backwards, frame by frame, to its conclusion.19

Throughout this tangled skein of voices among voices and stories- within-stories, the proliferation of punctuation shows us Menelaus's achievement, his eventual identification of self. Like almost every Barth character, Menelaus began without a sense of identity and reality. At one point, he tells us, he thought that "everyone is imaginary, and he alone, ungraspable, real" (148). When Helen chose him, his lack of identity surfaced: [H]ow hold Menelaus? To love is easy, to be loved, as if one were real, or of the order of others, fearsome mystery, unbearable responsibility! (151) In addition, his encounter with Proteus on the beach at Pharos stripped him of what little self he had. Nevertheless, he still clings to something, even after the recognition that immortality is a dream: It was himself grasped undeceived Menelaus, solely, imper­ fectly When I understood that Proteus somewhere on the beach became Menelaus holding the Old Man of the Sea, Menelaus ceased. Then I understood how Proteus thus also was as such no more, being as possibly Menelaus's attempt 170 to hold him, the tale of that vain attempt, the voice that tells it. (161) Even when the voice "loses its magnetism" (161) and goes, Menelaus will be around, for "he'll turn tale...whenever, how-, by whom- recounted" (162). What we have here is the final resolution of identity for Menelaus as well as Barth. In the recognition that Menelaus becomes, in fact remains his story, "how-, by whom-recounted," we see as Beverly Bienstock has suggested the way in which author 20 becomes work of art becomes reader becomes work of art, etc. In this view the medium is the message, and the author and reader are the medium. We no longer have a distinct John Barth telling a distinct reader about a distinct Menelaus through print. Instead we have a set-up whereby John Barth who is Menelaus tells a reader who is also Menelaus, a story about Menelaus through a medium which, by the com­ plicity of both author and reader, js_ the story.

The end of the story resolves several other themes, however improbably, as well. The subject of love, which can be seen to weave its way through each of the pieces in Lost in the Funhouse, and which is presented as the ultimate mystery for Menelaus, becomes his and Proteus's "terrifying last disguise" (162). Menelaus becomes "the absurd, unending possibility of love" (162), or, to put it another way, even .after the story is gone, the possibility of love remains, unending. In a statement that encompasses the unreality of his own identity, history, and the funhouse of his life and of fiction, Menelaus gives us

the senseless answer to our riddle woo, mad history's secret, base-fact and footer to the fiction crazy-house 171

our life: imp-slayer love, terrific as the sun! Love! Love! (159) In Menelaus's case, his acceptance of love seems at first to be simply absurd. When he accepts Helen's preposterous story that she never went to Troy at all, "he sacrifices his curiosity and common sense" (156) to do so. We are reminded of the narrator of "Night- Sea Journey" who speculated on some of the absurd possibilities of love, attempted to deny them, then nevertheless went toward the egg singing "Love! Love! Love!" (12), unable to resist. Also like Mene­ laus, that sperm "turned tale" before succumbing, and it is in this relationship between love and fiction that I think the resolution of Barth's theme lies. Although it is demonstrated more clearly in Chimera, the new relation between teller, tale, and told becomes a sexual one. Storytelling becomes an act of love with the reader, and the story itself is the place of and means by which that act is per­ formed. Ambrose, who, in "Lost in the Funhouse," decides to be a writer, but "would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed" (94), finally has his wish fulfilled by seeing the two as one.

Viewed in this way, the series of stories in Lost in the Fun­ house has a new significance. "Autobiography" is an "argument for an interrupted pregnancy" (36); "Lost in the Funhouse" is a form of mas­ turbation; "Menelaiad" a seduction; "Life-Story" a rape, and so on. With this in mind, I will turn to "Anonymiad," the "continuing, strange love letter" (193) that ends the book. 172

"Anonymiad" recaptitulates the preceding stories in Lost in the Funhouse as wll as Barth's life work, and goes beyond them; and it stands in my mind as the climactic triumph of the book. The basis of the story is that a stranded minstrel, down to his last goat-skin on which to write, attempts to overcome the limitations of his situation by simultaneously "end[ing] his life Commenc[ing] his masterpiece.. ..Returning] to sleep Invok[ing] his muse" (163). Significantly,

he pictures his relationship with the muses as both an artistic and sexual one. Once upon a time I composed in witty rhyme And poured libations to the muse Erato. Merope would croon, 'Minstrel mine, a lay! A tune!' 'From bed to verse,' I'd answer; 'that's my motto.' Stranded by my foes, Nowadays I write in prose, Forsaking measure, rhyme, and honeyed ; Amphora's my muse: When I finish off the booze, I hump the jug and fill her up with fiction. (164) The story he actually does write is not the one he planned to write, but it nevertheless achieves his aims. In order to understand those aims we must follow the story which recounts the minstrel's life, his plans for the story, and his reaction to what he, in fact, accomplish­ es. We are told that, like the other Barth characters, this one "couldn't take seriously the pretensions of reality" (166); nor, be­ cause of "the fearsomeness of the facts of life" (166) could he take 173 himself seriously. As a pastoral goat-herd he had a lover, but he wondered "what was she, that claimed to love me" (166-167), who was "realer than myself, twice my dreams..., ardent fact..., undeniable and incredible" (168). He found himself "aswoon at the strangeness of the world" (167), and "the contrary of solipsistic" (168), for he thought that everything was real but himself. Like Eben Cooke he held an "acting chief-minstrelship" which he mistakenly viewed as "his passport out of history" (175). Like Eben, he was "put down by the sheer energy" (180) of the people he knew, and, in response to a Henry Burlingame-1ike Aegisthus who tells him "the world's a bloody dare" and to "grab hold" (183) of it, he "[stands] transfixed, unable to choose" (183). When Merope tells him "I love you," he responds "Therefore I am" (168). The minstrel leaves the goats for town and court, and there he begins to get into trouble. Although he started out as the contrary of solipsistic, we see him buy Merope a ring but misfigure the size, so that he wears it himself. After success at court, he realizes that "his corresponding professional sophistication" is "at the expense of his former naive energy," which he then tries to render "as a dramat­ ical correlative to the attrition of his potency with Merope" (173). The reader sees, of course, that this corresponds to Barth's situation at the beginning of this book, and this correspondence is furthered as we are told that "his songs, he fears, are growing in some in­ stances merely tricksy, in others crankish and obscure" (173), and that "thus far he's contrived a precarious integrity by satirizing his own dilemma" (173). 174

It is in this desperate situation that he agrees to go off with

Aegisthus, and gets marooned. Once marooned, cut off from life, we

see him develop as a writer and eventually find a way out of his

isolation. On the rocky island, he invents writing by first pissing 21 on the sand, ' and then he refines his technique by using a feather and ink (186). Thus equipped, he proceeds to re-align the relation between tale, teller, and told that had obtained in minstrel ballad­ ry. Instead of composing in verse, memorizing it, and performing to a live audience, he found

that by pretending that things had happened which in fact had not, and that people existed who didn't, I could achieve a lovely truth which actuality obscures—especially when I learned to abandon myth and pattern my fabrications on actual people and events: Menelaus, Helen, the Trojan War. It was as_ if there were this minstrel and this milk­ maid, et cetera; one could I believe draw a whole philosophy from that as_ rf. (186)

He goes on to fill seven amphorae with fiction that roughly corres­ pond to what we know as the history of fiction. Thus, "two vessels I cargoed with rehearsals of traditional minstrelsy A third I freighted with imagined versions...of what was going on at Troy" (186- 187). He continues with great success, until

By the seventh jug, after effusions of religious narrative, ribald tale-cycles, verse-dramas, comedies of manners, and what-all, I had begun to run out of world and material — though not of ambition. (187)

From this point we see by analogy Barth's career brought up to date. His first four novels are summarized as the minstrel tells us

I found strength to fill two more amphorae: the seventh with long prose fictions of the realistical, the romantical. and the fantastical kind (188) Lost in the Funhouse itself seems to have comprised the eighth: 175 with comic histories of my spirit, such of its little victories, defeats, insights, blindnesses, et cetera as I deemed might have impersonal resonation or pertinence to the world (188)

He wondered "was there any new thing to say, new way to say the old?" (188), and he tells us that his "last interest in that subject I ex­ hausted with the dregs of Thalia, my eighth muse..." (188, emphasis added).

With one amphora remaining, he has lapsed into silence and "couldn't care enough to shrug" (189) when another amphora bobs in from the sea. Like the message in "Water-Message" it is blank in parts and its ink is run, and the minstrel is affected in the same profound way that Ambrose was. I had thought myself the only stranded spirit, and had survived by sending messages to whom they might concern; now I began to imagine that the world contained another like myself. (189) This thought transforms him from a solipsist to one who makes of his last amphora a "continuing, strange love letter" (193), for he has finally grasped the relationship of art to love.

He goes on to plan his "new work, hopefully surpassing, in any case completing what I'd done theretofore" (191). It is to com­ bine tragedy and satire, and it would be "no Orphic celebration of the unknowable....Yet neither would it be a mere discourse or logic preach­ ment" (191). These statements seem to me to apply to several of the attempts in Lost in the Funhouse. Thus we see that "whimsic fantasy" ("Petition"), "grub fact" ("Two Meditations") and "pure senseless music" ("Glossolalia")—"none in itself would do; to embody all and 176 rise above each...that was my calm ambition" (191) What he is de­ scribing, of course, is a work composed according to the "Principle of Metaphoric Means" hinted at in the "Seven Additional Author's Notes" and elaborated in Chimera. In order to do so, he rejects the advice of Tiresias, given in "Echo," that "one does well to speak in the third person" (95), for he no longer needs that "cure for self- absorption" (95). Instead he will use his "only valid point of view, first person anonymous" (192).

Reflecting on what he has accomplished, he realizes that it was not what he set out to achieve, but nevertheless, he has found a way to continue. It was my wish to elevate maroonment into a minstrel masterpiece; instead, I see now, I've spent my last re­ sources contrariwise, reducing the masterpiece to a chronicle of minstrel misery. Even so, much is left unsaid, much must be blank. (193, emphasis addedj"

He then dedicates the story to Merope as a love letter, and, returning us to "Night-Sea Journey" he tells Merope that if "some night your voice recalls me" (193) he will embark on that journey himself. He ends with a paragraph meant, I think, for us to see how Am­ brose has become not only a writer and lover, but a hero as well. In spite of the obstacles, and this book has gone to great lengths to make them clear, he is able to wonder about its success, and to make his one proud claim. Will anyone have learnt its name? Will everyone? No matter. Upon this noontime of his wasting day, between the night past and the long night to come, a noon beautiful enough to break the heart, on a lorn fair shore a nameless minstrel Wrote it. (194) NOTES Chapter Five

John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse (New York: Bantam, 1969). All page references to this edition will appear in the text. 2 Beverly Gray Bienstock, "'Lingering on the Autognostic Verge:' John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse. MFS. 19, No. 1 (Spring, 1973), 69-78. 3 Michael Hinden, "Lost in the Funhouse: Barth's use of the re­ cent past," Twentieth Century Literature, 19, No. 2 (1973), 107-118.

Robert F. Kiernan, "John Barth's Artist in the Funhouse," SSJF, 10, No. 4 (Fall, 1973), 373-381. c Carol A. Kyle, "The Unity of Anatomy: The Structure of Barth's Lost in the Funhouse," Critique, 8, No. 3 (1972), 32. 6 John Barth, Chimera (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 203. 7 Hinden, p. Ill. 8 John Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion," Atlantic, 220 (Aug., 1967), 29-34. g Bienstock, p. 73. Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion," p. 29. Note, for instance, the clearly conscious similarity between the title of Barth's book, and Borges's Labyrinths. John Barth, "An Interview," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 6 (1965), 7. 12 Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion," p. 30. 13 Edgar H. Knapp, "Found in the Barthhouse: Novelist as Savior," MFS, 14, No. 4, 449. Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion," p. 33 15 Kiernan, p. 376.

177 178 Seven is clearly the structural number used in the book. It consists of fourteen stories, the title story being number seven. Menelaus's story goes through seven frames and back from there to the beginning. See: Barth, The Floating Opera, p. 166. 1 o 1 I am indebted to the essay by Michael Hinden, pp. 115-116 for this observation. 19 This is the framework worked out by Michael Hinden, p. 117.

20 Bienstock, p. 78. 21 This first, most basic link between the sexual tool and the writing tool is clearly intentional. CHAPTER SIX

Chimera

Barth's sixth book, Chimera, can be seen as the resolution of his thinking on the subjects of art, love, and immortality, as well as a personal triumph over the problems facing a modern writer which I have discussed in the previous chapter. I have argued that the ques­ tions raised in Lost in the Funhouse were resolved in the final two stories by a re-arrangement of the relationship between tale, teller, and told, and that Barth's new metaphor for the relationship was based on an analogy between the story-telling process and lovemaking. Each of the three in Chimera raises and resolves the same questions that Lost in the Funhouse does, and in Barth's last book to date, we can see that through this new relationship, through the adoption of 2 "a philosophy of as if," and through the use of myth, he has indeed discovered the "treasure house of new fiction" that he had been seeking. 3 Barth has said that "Scheherazade is my avant-gardiste," and the first of the three novellas, Dunyazadiad, is about the situation she and her little sister are in. Barth has admired Scheherazade because she stood as "the profoundest image he knew of the storyteller's situation" (16), for her very life depended, each night, on her ability to come up with a new tale. This is, of course, analogous to Barth's position as outlined in Lost in the Funhouse. Scheherazade's approach to her problem, as Barth describes it, is also similar to the genie/ 179 180 Barth's approach: to go "forward by going back to the very roots and springs of stories" (28). While Scheherazade is a sympathetic figure, it is her little sister, Dunyazade, whom Barth finds even more clearly symbolic of his and his genre's problem. Scheherazade, after all, has already accomplished her labor, but in the genie's real-time narrative, the question "Dunyazade! Who can tell your story?" (33) is the more pressing. Like the modern author, Dunyazade has "had the whole literary tradition transmitted to [her]—and the whole erotic tradition, too!" (32). Her problem is analogous to Barth's, as he puts it, not how "to succeed Joyce and Kafka, but those who've succeeded Joyce and 4 Kafka and are now in the evenings of their own careers." As we will see shortly, Dunyazade's solution to her problem in­ volves going back and re-examining hers and her sister's entire history from a new perspective, much like J.B. Bray in Bellerophoniad who resolves to "become as a kindergartner again" (248). Indeed, Bellerophon's problem is related to Dunyazade's and is a direct echo of the lament made by the narrator of "Title,"--how to "fill in the blank."5 He asks Polyeidus to "fill in the blank" for him (159), for he sees himself stuck behind:

The tradition of the mad genius in literature. The tradition of the double in literature. The tradition of the story within a story, the tradition of the mad editor of the text, the tradition of the unreliable narrator. (150)

Belerophon's story is itself an echo of the Perseid, and we find

Perseus in a similar position. His heroic labors already accomplished, he feels that unless he can.come up with something new he will petrify. In a statement reminiscent of Dunyazadiad, he tells us that: 181 somewhere along the way I'd lost something, took a wrong turn, forgot some knack, I don't know; it seemed to me that if I kept going over it carefully enough I might see the pattern, find the key. (72-73)

His resolve to "overtake my present paragraph as it were by examining my paged past, and thus pointed, proceed serene to my future's sentence" (81), is repeated by Bellerophon (176), and is the same impulse as Barth's—"to sort of go to the roots of the novel, and see whether I could bring back something new."

The solution to the problems of Dunyazade, Perseus, Bellerophon, and Barth all have to do with seeing the stories of their lives in the new relationship of tale to teller to told, and in adopting "the philosophy of 'as if" that that view implies. Chimera continues these ideas from Lost in the Funhouse, referring at one point directly to the author of "Anonymaid" who invented writing while "pissing in the sand of a deserted Aegean isle, making up endings to the Trojan was" (16). The relation between story telling and lovemaking is dis­ cussed at some length in Dunyazadiad, beginning with the analogy of the relation between framed and framing tales Sherry and the genie consider. Dunyazade, however, has little patience for their interest, which she likens to the fascination Sherry and Shahryar have with "the pacing of their nightly pleasures...instead of the degree and quality of their love" (23). Sherry responds to this objection, telling her that "making love and telling stories both take good technique—but it's only the technique we can talk about" (23-24). The genie elaborates on this analogy, pointing out that in his time and place

there were scientists who maintained that language itself... originated in 'infantile pregenital erotic exuberance, 182 polymorphously perverse,' and that conscious attention... was a 'libidinal hyperthexis'—by which magic phrases they seemed to mean that writing and reading, or telling and listening,-were literally ways of making love. (24) Dunyazade goes on to tell Shah Zaman how by this analogy they accounted thereby for the similarity between conventional —its exposition, rising action, climax, denouement—and the rhythm of sexual intercourse from foreplay through coitus to orgasm and release. (24-25) Scheherazade and the genie continue to point out examples of this relationship in literature, noting the Odyssey and Decameron as tales in which a story is told after lovemaking; and the genie refers to Sherry's story, as "the best illustration of all that the very relation between teller and told was by nature erotic" (25). Here he and Sherry argue about the gender of the various roles, the genie claiming that "the teller's role...was essentially masculine, the listener's or reader's feminine, and the tale was the medium of their intercourse" (25-26). He points out, however, that "a good reader of cunning tales worked in her way as busily as their author" (26), and that Narrative, in short...was a love relation, not a rape: its success depended upon the reader's consent and cooperation, which she could withhold or at any moment withdraw; also upon her own combination of experience and talent for the enterprise, and the author's ability to arouse, sustain, and satisfy her interest—an ability on which his figurative life hung as surely as Scheherazade's literal. (26)

Later in the story, lamenting the lack of fulfillment in his personal love life, the genie refers to lovemaking with new partners as

"endless exposition" (52). All of this discussion also serves a dramatic purpose in Dunyazadiad, for it prepares us for the reversals of roles that follow. 183 After the genie leaves and the two sisters are about to go to their respective husbands, Sherry tells Doony of her plan of revenge, one aspect of which "was the reversal not only of the genders of teller and told...but of their circumstances, the latter now being at the former's mercy" (39). Her plan is to tell Shahyrar a story before" making love, then tie him up and emasculate him as she continues the story of her sex's suffering at his account. Doony is to do the same with Shah Zaman, but what happens serves only to emphasize the genie's point. The Shah lets himself be bound, and then in a position in which his life depends on his narrative inventiveness—a position in which his sexual organ is literally held against a razor—he tells Doony a story that eventually frees him, and presumably leads to real lovemaking.-

In Dunyazadiad the genie talks about finding the key to a "golden shower of fiction" (19), and as we turn to the next , Perseid, we see an immediate relation through this image between art and love. Perseus recounts his begetting as "Zeus, in golden- showerhood rained in upon [Danae]..., jack-potting her with me" (61). Calyxa is the chronicler of Perseus's career, and also his lover, and the interior frame of the story is based on the two of them making love and then telling tales. It is significant that actual success in their nightly love comes simultaneously with the first climax of Perseus' story (111) and that Perseus' ability as a lover parallels his development on the way to the stars. Thus, he first sees both his hero role and his sexual role in terms of performance; the former resulting in premature petrifaction, the latter in premature 184 ejaculation. It is only when he comes to see himself as bound up in a relationship with another that he has any success at all. The Bellerophoniad, that imperfect imitation of the Perseid, also attempts to maintain the analogy between lovemaking and storytelling, but, as in most things, Bellerophon goes wrong. The "conventional dramatic structure" (24) that the genie referred to in Dunyazadiad— Freitag's triangle—is printed in Bellerophoniad (251), and at one point Bellerophon, like Shah Zaman, has to make up a story fast because his sexual organ is being held against a razor (275). Bellerophon writes his story after making love with Melanippe, although, as we will see, his relationship with the Amazon is problematical. Perhaps the clearest indication of how Bellerophon confuses the analogy is by his repeated use of his own analogy for the story telling process. At three different points we are told that "I re­ solved instead like a cunning wrestler to turn my adversary's strength to my advantage" (242). It is obvious that Bellerophon's analogy for the relation between teller and told is a distorted view o of the genie's.

In "Anonymiad," the narrator's initial re-alignment of the tale, teller, told relationship (the invention of written fiction) was followed directly by his speculations on "as_ rf," and he told us that the philosophy the stranded minstrel imagined is developed. We first see this idea as Sherry tells Doony that they should "pretend this whole situation is the plot of a story we're reading" (8). If they do so, she goes on to say, then surely that story will have a way out of their dilemma which, even if magical, would come down to particular 185 words in the story.

This is the key, Doony! And the treasure too, if we can only get our hands on it! It's as if—as if the key to the treasure 21 the treasure. (8) We see that for Sherry's story this approach is successful, for immediately after muttering those words the genie appears to "supply [her] from the future with...stories from the past" (15).

Following Sherry's and the genie's analogy between fiction and lovemaking, Doony tells us that "whether this was in fact the case, neither he nor Sherry cared at all; yet they liked to speak as if it were (their favorite words)...." (24). As I've pointed out above, Doony does not share their view, being more concerned with the practi­ cal than the theoretical questions at hand. When she finally hears the genie's plan for helping them, she "prayed to Allah it was not another of their as ifs" (26-27). Sherry says that the plan cannot last, and the genie responds with a statement that anticipates "The Tragic View" expressed throughout the book and that is a corollary to the philosophy of "as if:" "Neither did Athens. Neither did Rome. Neither did all of Jimshid's glories. But we must live as if it can and will" (27). Once again, "Doony objects to the philosophy, adding her consent to the plan "without reservations or as ifs" (27).

It is up to Shah Zaman, finally, to convince Doony of this philosophy, and it is the Shah who best presents it to the reader. He combines "the tragic view" with "as if" in his all out effort to win her partnership and love. He tells her that: Scheherazade was right to think love ephemeral. But life itself was scarcely less so, and both were sweet for just that reason—sweeter yet when enjoyed as if they might endure. (39) 186 He then recounts the story of his relationship with his wife and mis­ tresses; how he missed his wife "as if I were cut in two" (46, em­ phasis added), and how he finally was advised to resolve his problem "by the magic words as if...which, to a person satisfied with seeming, are more potent than all the genii in the tales" (48). All this talk leads to his final confrontation with Doony, in which he attempts to convince her to love him. She reacts to the in­ cidents of his story with incredulity, but he tells her "they're too important to be lies. Fictions, maybe—but truer than fact" (52-53). Doony responds in confusion, and he continues his plea.

Let's take the truly tragic view of love! Maybe it is_ a fiction, but it's the profoundest and best of all! Treasure me, Dunyazade, as I'll treasure you! (53) She objects, saying "it won't work" to which he responds, 'Nothingworks! But the enterprise is noble; it's full of joy and life, and the other ways are deathy. Let's make love l.ike passionate equals!' 'You mean as_ if we were equals,' Dunyazade said. 'You . know we're not. What you want is impossible.' 'Despite you heart's feelings?' pressed the king. 'Let it be as_ if.! Let's make a philosophy of that as if!' (53) Part Two of the story ends shortly thereafter, and the author speaks directly in Part Three, saying that "no man knows [its lesson] bet­ ter than Shah Zaman, to whom therefore the second half of his life will be sweeter than the first" (56). The philosophy of as if., that "some fictions...were so much more valuable than fact that in rare in­ stances their beauty made them real" (17), is the sense of the story. To be joyous in the full acceptance of this denouement is surely to possess a treasure, the key to which is the under­ standing that key and treasure are the same. There (with a kiss, little sister) is the sense of our story, Dunyazade: The key to the treasure is the treasure. (56) 187 This philosophy also permeates the other two novellas in the book. In Bellerophoniad, for instance, we are presented with "The Tragic View of Marriage and Parenthood" (148) which mirrors "The Tragic View of Sex and Temperament" (45) set forth in Dunyazadiad. Bellerophon's final understanding about his own life has to do with "the difference between lies and myth...; how the latter could be so much realer and more important than particular men" (295); and, at the conclusion, how "the story it tells isn't a lie, but something larger than fact..." (306). Perseus, who sees finally that his fate "is to be able only to imagine boundless beauty from my experience of bound­ less love (133), is left with the potentially agonizing question of whether he and Medusa have been turned into Gorgons, as they fear, or stars, as they hope. They resolve, through their "boundless imagin­ ation," to act as if their hopes have come true.

I have argued in my introduction that Barth's solution to the problems facing a critically aware modern writer—what he calls ir- realism—is a form of structuralism; and before examining Chimera in detail, I would like to pause for a moment to explain my use of these confusing labels and the way they fit in with the first part of this chpater. Perhaps the cardinal tenet of Barth's literary structuralism is his rejection of realism, and we have seen this rejection as a con­ stant factor in Barth's work, from The Floating Opera through Lost in the Funhouse. This view results from the observation, first made by linguists and anthropologists,10 that the sound and shape of linguist­ ic signs—phonemes, words, sentences—have only an arbitrary affinity 188 with their meaning. Levi-Strauss says that we should "...take instead as the basis of analysis the relationships between terms," and Barth shares this view. In Lost in the Funhouse our understanding of each of the stories was dependent on their relationship—both paradig- matically and syntagmatically-'to the other stories in that "series" 12 meant to be received "all at once;" and in Chimera we find a complex of relationships—between the characters, between the stories, between Chimera and Barth's past work—which demonstrates his structuralist beliefs. When the genie and Sherry discuss the relationship between framed and framing tales, Doony observes that "this relation...inter­ ested the two of them to no end" (23). Later, when Barth proposes the "Principle of Metaphoric Means," he implies that the emphasis on relationships need not be restricted to structural relationships, but can include

not only the 'form' of the story, the narrative view­ point, the tone, and such, but, where manageable, the particular genre, the and medium, the yery pro­ cess of narration—even the fact of the artifact itself. (203)

When Scheherazade searches for the solution to her country's problem, she hits on the ansv/er in a way that reflects Barth's view of language: It's in the words that the magic is—Abracadabra, Open Sesame and the rest—but the magic words in one story aren't magical in the next. The real magic is to dis­ cover why words work, and when, and for what; the trick is to learn the trick. (7)

She continues her hypothesis—that is her as_ if—by imagining that her situation is a story and that all that is needed is the right combina­ tion of words for her to find a happy ending. In short, she turns 189 away from life—her researches in Poly Sci, Psychology and the rest— and embraces art. This movement from life to art is part of the rejection of realism. To the objections of Robbe-Grillet—perhaps the most daring realist around—that plot, character, etc., are anachronistic notions l ^ and therefore unrealistic, Barth replies that we should "regard fiction as artifice in the first place [a]nd...acknowledge and embrace the artificial aspect of art, which you can't get rid of 14 anyv/ay " A story may well contain anachronistic notions and devices (Chimera surely does), but the process is appropriate, for, as we saw in Lost in the Funhouse: we still lead our lives by clock and calendar, for example, and though the seasons recur our mortal human time does not; we grow old and tired, we think of how things used to be or might have been and how they are now.16 ifi Barth later says that "the process is the content, more or less," another way of stressing the structuralist notion of looking for meaning in the relationships between signs rather than in the signs themselves. For his rejection of realism, Barth offers us, in Chimera, a dandy sophism to justify his position. It stands as a fine summary of the irrealist position. Inasmuch as concepts, including the concepts fiction and necessity, are more or less necessary fictions, fiction is more or less necessary. Butterflies exist in our imaginations, along with existence, imagination, and the rest. Archimedeses, we lever reality by conceiving our­ selves apart from its other things, them from one another, the whole from unreality. Thus Art is as natural an artifice as Nature; the truth of fiction is that Fact is fantasy; the made-up story is a model of the world. (246) 190 Barth's other characters follow the same path: Perseus as he sets out from Sarnos "to learn about life from art" (62); the genie, once again, who asserted that "some fictions., .were so much more valuable than fact that in rare instances their beauty made them "real" (17); Shah Zaman, once again, who says of the incidents in his plot that "they're too important to be lies. Fictions, maybe, but truer than fact" (53); and Dunyazade, who confuses life and art so much that, while watching Shahryar and her sister make love, she went "many nights before I fully realized that what I witnessed were not conjured illustrations from those texts, but things truly taking place" (22). The final blending of art and life occurs when Deliades turns into the Bellerophoniad, or when Perseus ends his story: 'So with this issue, our net estate: to have become, like the noted music of our tongue, these silent, visible signs; to be the tale I tell to those with eyes to see and under­ standing and to interpret ' (133-134) Barth's rejection of realism ("I tend to regard it as a kind of aberration ") leads him to an interest in myth. He begins using myth allegorically in Giles Goat-Boy, continues using it at the end of Lost in the Funhouse, and develops myth in Chimera. Barth's approach to myth is best expressed in Chimera, and is linked clearly to his objections to realism. Since myths themselves are among other things poetic distillations of our ordinary psychic experience, and therefore point always to daily reality, to write realistic fictions which point always to mythic archetypes is in my opinion to take the wrong end of the mythopoeic stick, however meritorious such fictions may be in other respects. Better to address the archetypes directly. (199) The function of myth, the "distillation of our ordinary psychic 191 experience," is quite similar to Levi-Strauss' conception of myth's function, which is viewed as a way of taking contradictory experiences or beliefs and putting them in a more familiar framework with rules and customs we can understand and handle—"to allow man to keep on 18 functioning." By studying all the versions of a myth and looking at the relationships between the variants, Levi-Strauss obviates the two greatest problems of mythological study—the problems of authorship and earliest version. "We define myth as consisting of all its ver­ sions."19 Barth expresses similar views in Chimera: A classical myth, however, is yawn excuse me infinitely retellable, and the connoisseur's pleasure is in those small variations, discrepancies and lacunae that invari­ ably yawn obtain among renditions. (168) Barth goes further in Chimera by not only telling the Bellerophoniad or Perseid several times and ways, but by also including versions of the Bellerophon myth by Robert Graves. As for authorship, Bellerophon wonders and then realizes that ...the author could be Antoninus Liberal is, for example, , Homer, Hyginus, Ovid, , Plutarch, the Scholiast on the , Tzetzes, Robert Graves, Edith Hamilton, Lord Raglan, Joseph Campbell, the author of the Perseid, someone imitating that author—anyone, in short, who has ever written or will write about the myth of Bellerophon and Chimera. (237)

In Chimera, Barth points out: ...the stylizing nature of the mythopoeic process itself, which simplified character and motive just as it com­ pressed time and space, so that one imagined Perseus to be speeding tirelessly and thoughtlessly from action to bravura action, when in fact he must have weeks of idleness, hours of indecision, et cetera. (209)

This is, of course, a development of the idea expressed in "Life- Story"—that "any number of interior dramas might be being played out 192 20 in the actors' or characters' minds." Barth is able to use the mythic logic in a contemporary Way by taking the received myths of Perseus, Bellerophon, and others and re-stylizing the stories, filling in those hours of indecision. Prerequisite to Barth's success is his belief that the power of myth is present today, and that "Whatever there is of the originally mythopoeic in your imagination is going to come 21 out somewhere else in that text " This belief answers the 22 objection, made first by Robert Scholes, that once a writer is conscious that he is using mythic materials, he loses his mythic power. Although Barth acknowledges part of this point in Chimera (Polyeidus, for example, loses a power as soon as he understands it, but the loss is replaced by another power he doesn't understand), the point is that mythic power, if we can talk about such a thing, is more or less constant and universal. As in Polyeidus' case, it can't be lost, only moved about. What Barth creates is a new version of the myth, and the problems it addresses are shown to be at once consistent with the classic, and quite contemporary.

Barth's structuralism has similarities with structuralists other than Levi-Strauss, who is working in the narrow field of primi­ tive myths, and not really the received classical myths Barth finds so appealing. Levi-Strauss rejects fairy tales and other advanced literature as being too fixed and rigid to discover sufficient variations for analysis. Others, Vladimir Propp, Joseph Campbell, Lord Raglan, and Northrop Frye, to name a few of Barth's favorites, have addressed genres of a more immediate literary character. 193 Propp's researches on fairy tales revealed four basic laws which coincide to a great degree with the researches of Lord Raglan in classical mythology and Joseph Campbell in the Ur-myth on a cross- cultural scale. Propp's laws are: 1) that functions of characters serve as stable constituents of a tale, independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled. They constitute the fundamental components of a tale; 2) the number of functions known to a is limited; 3) the sequence of functions is always identical; 4) all fairy tales are of one type in regard to their structure. Campbell's pattern of the Ur-myth (reproduced in Chimera, 261) and Lord Raglan's sequence of the mythic hero's career, although devised with different subjects and

somewhat dissimilar criteria for "functions," are strikingly similar 23 to Propp's findings. I have already noted the history of Barth's involvement with this subject, ending in Giles Goat-Boy which was "...the conscious and ironic orchestration of the Ur-myth which its predecessor had been represented as being" (198-199). In Chimera that history continues. Scheherazade tells about stories that everybody tells (13), and how she never invented any stories (12). Both statements imply that the world's stock of stories is limited and always has been. Barth takes this implication as a liberating concept. He no longer has to invent stories, only re­ stylize them in accordance with Propp's laws. Law number one states that the functions of characters are stable, independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled, and here lies Barth's field of play. In fact, it is here that Barth responds to the most frequent critics of 194 structuralism who accuse its practitioners of ignoring anything but large structure, neglecting the little details of life. By manip­ ulating the "how and by whom" (switching Deliades for Bellerophon, for example), by filling in the "weeks of idleness, the hours of inde­ cision," Barth is able to use the freedom of those structural laws to write about precisely those little details the critics find lacking. By simply recognizing and them employing mythical structures, he has freed his hands of the constraints that others, particularly the realists, struggle against.

Whereas Levi-Strauss goes back to primitive myth, Propp to fairy tales, and Campbell and Raglan to received myths, Northrop Frye attempts to classify the structures of our more immediate literary 24 tradition. Frye has called his Anatomy of Criticism an annotation to the following statement by T.S. Eliot. The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer, and with it the whole of the literature of his own country has a 25 simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.

The idea is that literature comes from literature—grows upon itself— and that, for criticism, the relationships between the various lit­ erary documents, like the relationships between signs, will tell us something that a study of the documents themselves will not. In Chimera, Barth presents a metaphor for Eliot's view. He gives us the image of a snail in the Maryland marshes to make a comment on the difficulties of his own literary progress.

[The snail] makes his shell as he goes along out of what­ ever he comes across, cementing it with his own juices, and at the same time makes his path instinctively toward 195 the best available material for his shell; he carries his history on his back, living in it, adding new and larger spirals as he grows. That snail's progress has become my —but I'm going in circles, following my own trail! (10)

This snail image, of course, becomes a metaphor for the structure of the Perseid, that "golden shower of fiction" the genie had promised in Dunyazadiad. The funhouse metaphor discussed in the last chap­ ter is another example of this view.

As an example of how a structuralist can have it both ways- resolving the paradox of how to emphasize both the structure and the detail—Barth gives us the splendid figure of the Amazon Melanippe, of whom even the phrase 'human being, female' puts her already in­ to two categories from which she feels more or less distinct; herself puts her into one. In any event, while certainly an Amazon and pleased to be, she feels herself to be by no means comprehended by that epithet. (217)

The narrator goes on to point out the Amazon custom of doing without surnames and having only a few given names in the society. [The custom]...is an actual clarification of identity. For distinct from her 'Melanippe-self,' immortal because imper­ sonal, Melanippe knows a private, uncategorizable self, im­ possible for her ever to confuse with the name Melanippe, as Perseus, she believes, confused himself with the mythic persona Perseus, Bellerophon Bellerophon. (238) The recognition of structures and our individual relationship to them again serves a liberating function, here in the form of a clarifica­ tion of identity for Melanippe. Confusing those structures, as almost all of Barth's characters at one time or another do, restricts and limits the actors. 196 Chimera serves as both an example and an exposition of Barth's notion of structuralism applied to literature, and is Barth's attempt at having it both ways; to talk about literature and in the talking to create literature as well. It is for this same accomplishment that he applauded Jorge Luis Borges in the essay "The Literature of Ex­ haustion."27 As usual, he states in Chimera what he intends to do (at the same time doing it), and his comments set a standard by which we can judge his work. In Dunyazadiad he tells us of a

...projected series of three novellas, longish tales which would take their sense from one another in several of the ways he and Sherry had discussed, and, if successful... manage to be seriously, even passionately, about some things as well. (128)

The discussion with Sherry was about the relationship of framed to framing tales-within-tales and how the genie and Sherry judged such "metaphorical construction[s]...more artful than the 'mere plot-func­ tion'..." (23).

This suggests that the genie is the author of Chimera, and that Dunyazadiad was composed last of the three novellas. Similarly, Bellerophon's lecture discusses a fictional personage from the future composing a book which clearly refers to the novella at hand. He tells us "I envisioned a companion piece of the Perseid" (202), surely the Bellerophoniad, and does so by setting aside for the moment "a larger project called Letters" (202) which turns out to be Barth's next book! Instead of Bellerophoniad, however, "what I composed was another story" (203), we suppose, the Dunyazadiad. At this point he presents the "Principle of Metaphoric Means" originally suggested in 197 Lost in the Funhouse, and quoted above.

Shortly after the lecture, Polyeidus gets into the act, telling Bellerophon that a passing prophet told him

I ought to try something in the myth way...three novellas in one volume, say: one about Perseus and Medusa, one about Bellerophon and the Chimera, one about-- (205) Later, when Bellerophon gets messages in a bottle from the future, he reads of J.B. Bray's attempts with a computer to create "scientific fiction" (247). Bray describes his "Bellerophonic Prospectus" as "the first genuinely scientific model of the genre; it will of necess­ ity contain nothing original whatever" (244). He programs his com­ puter and it

belches forth two remarkable observations: On the one hand, inasmuch as 'character,' 'plot,' and for that matter 'content,' 'subject,' and 'meaning,' are attributes of par­ ticular novels, the Revolutionary Novel NOTES is to dispense with all of them in order to transcend the limitations of particularity; ...it will represent nothing beyond itself, have no content except its own form, no subject but its own processes. Language itself it will perhaps eschew (in favor or what is not clear). (256) The second observation is even more startling than the first. ...at its 'Phi-point' ('point six one eight et cetera of the total length, as the navel is of the total height of human women') there is to occur a single anecdote, a perfect model of a text-within-the-text, a microcosm or paradigm of the work as a whole...a history of the Greek mythic hero Bellerophon (256)29 The Bellerophoniad will be "that exquisite stain on the pure nothing­ ness of NOTES; the crucial flaw which perfects my imitation of that imperfect genre the novel..." (257). At the end of the novella, as

Deliades and Polyeidus discuss their lives, Deliades comments on the Chimera in terms similar to the above, "...it's not a great invention: 198 there's nothing original in it; it neither hurt nor helped anyone..." (304-305). His voice ends telling Polyeidus that "It's not at all what I had in mind for Bellerophon. It's a beastly fiction, ill- proportioned, full of longueurs, lumps, lacunae, a kind of monstrous mixed metaphor--" (308). The result of all this confusing talk about authorship and the processes of the book we are reading, is that we can't be sure of either the order of composition or the order of presentation (the book ends with a blank we either fill in, or let the Dunyazadiad fill in, which takes us through the book again). As I've already suggested, the question of authorship of myths is immaterial. The confusion about the order of presentation is similar to the confusing narrative framework of each novella, in which, as Sherry and the genie dis­ cussed (23), each is framed from within.

In Dunyazadiad, for instance, we find five major tales-within- tales, and possibly a sixth. The outside frame which starts the story is Doony's tale told to Shah Zaman (number one) within which is Sherry's story (number two) of her pursuit of the solution to Shahryar's virgin-a-night vendetta. The story of the genie (number three) falls within that, and, to a limited extent, resolves Sherry's problem and, at the same time, resolves the genie's problem (his writer's block). When Doony's story stops with her ready to castrate Shah Zaman and then kill herself, the Shah's story (number four) takes over, introduces the story of the (number five) and ends leaving the resolution of Doony's story up in the air. The author, the genie of story number three, returns to announce the 199 resolution of stories one through four, including his own, and all (but the Amazons) are supposed to live happily ever after. Not until the Bellerophoniad do we learn what happens to the exiled women who founded Amazonia. Thus, from his discussion in the Dunyazadiad of the Perseid and Bellerophoniad (the two other "longish tales"), we are given the structural principle that is simultaneously working as we read that discussion. At the same time, the Bellerophoniad becomes a necessity in order to resolve the left-overs from the Dunyazadiad.

The Perseid, similarly, begins with its outer frame (Perseus talking to Calyxa) and moves progressively through the frames on the temple wall which recount the story of his story, until it finally works its way inward to the frame for the novella itself, the conver­ sation of Perseus and Medusa in constellation. In the Bellerophoniad, the frames are even more confused, for we are not sure who is narrating the tale, how, and when. As one of the narrators says, "A complete understanding of the Bellerophoniad's narrative process...difficult to acquire, is impossible to crave" (145).

All of this is understandable, it seems to me, only when viewed in light of the "Principle of Metaphoric Means...by which I intend the investiture by the writer of as many of the elements and aspects of his fiction as possible with emblematic as well as dramatic value..." (203). Coupled with the "philosophy of as if," we see that Barth's, intention is to cram every aspect of his book, from its struc­ ture to its language, with as much meaning as possible. What he creates "contains nothing original whatever" (244), because there is_ nothing new. Instead, through his "boundless imagination" he makes a self-contained fiction that reverberates meaning through the host of relationships it establishes. As Dante Cantrill has noted, "it is the chambered fiction containing everything that pertains to it within itself, for no real (as opposed to fictional) reference 30 exists." Thus, Cantrill goes on to argue, "since neither he nor we can escape the chamber of our creation it is best that we move beyond the fact by accepting it and by trying to share imaginative 31 experiences by making them our own." This, it seems to me, was Menelaus's triumph in Lost in the Funhouse—an acceptance of the unreality of the world that was lacking in Barth's characters up to that point. By "emblematic as well as dramatic value," I take Barth to mean what something stands for and what something does, and by looking at the various aspects of Chimera with these two views in mind, we should arrive at not only the "meaning" of the book, but the means to that meaning as well.

Surely the first and most significant aspect of the book is its title, that "beastly fiction...a kind of monstrous mixed metaphor" (308), which Barth has packed with as much meaning as he can. In its mythic sense it represents the monster the mythic Bellerophon killed, and its lion's head, goat's body, and serpent's tail seem to line up with the three parts of the book. Chimera also means a fiction of the mind, of course, which makes it emblematic of Barth's theme as well. Barth goes on, however, as he has Polyeidus confuse the words "chimera" for "kamara"—Greek for chamber, and that with the French chambre, meaning bedroom, so that the snail image of Dunyazadiad, which made up the structure of the Perseid, is related to the book's title. All three 201 tales are narrated in bedrooms. Finally, we see that Chimera/kamara/ chambre are etymologically related to the word "camera," and in this way we see another aspect of Barth's theme. A camera, like a mirror, produces an inverted reproduction of reality, and significantly, the title page of the book presents Chimera both upside down and backwards.

As Dante Cantrill has said, the result is that we have a picture of 32 reality "through the lens of myth." I have already noted the problem of order of presentation in this book, and this confusion of time is another of the unifying structural factors in Chimera. The narrative frameworks of the first two novellas, which invertedly work from the past presented as the present to the present presented as the future, are a clear structural link. Bellerophoniad takes this further, mixing past, present and future so that it is at times impossible to tell one from the other.

The clearest structural relationship in Chimera is between the Perseid and Bellerophoniad. In the latter, Barth points out that the the Bellerophoniad was composed: after the manner of the Perseid, but with the number five... rather than seven as the numerical basis of the structure, and a circle rather than a logarithmic spiral as its geo­ metric motif. I commenced, moreover, with an echo not only of Perseus' opening lines, but of its dramatic con­ struction as well; that is, not at the beginning of the hero's second series of adventures...but at their mid­ point.... (142-143)

Other obvious similarities are the functions of women (Andromeda, Medusa, Calyxa in the Perseid—Philone, Sibyl, Melanippe in Bellerophoniad), and the resolution of both stories by their heroes becoming signs that represent them (stars for Perseus, written words for Bellerophon). The relationships between the two stories (to take their sense from one another. When viewed as a model for Bellerophoniad, the Perseid attains a different meaning than it had when read alone, and its association with-the unattainable "ideal Bellerophoniad" (144) adds an ironic sense to its pretensions. Barth gives us the "ideal" Perseid and then counter-cuts it with the human attempt by Bellero­ phon; just as, in Dunyazadiad, he gives us the snail metaphor as an ideal for literature and then describes his own pace as not "adding new and larger spirals," but "going in circles, following my own trail" (10). We can draw the conclusion that one of the differences between the last two novellas is that Perseus is a real demigod, and Deliades a mere mortal.

The structural relationships between the three stories have em­ blematic value in the way they stand for structuralism in its larger sense (a belief in the structural unity of human life), and are part of the action and , as the structural affinity between the Perseid and Bellerophoniad has shown. (The Perseid becomes part of Bellerophon's motivation). We can also find significant relationships in the motifs used and themes explored, in the style and tone, and in the hundreds of references from one novella to another, or from Chimera to Barth's life and life work. I have already discussed at some length the analogy between storytelling and lovemaking, and the philosophy of "as if" presented in the book; and have suggested that Barth's constant attention to the theme of identity is more or less resolved by analogy with the character of Melanippe (see above). Another way to look at how this book treats identity is to see the theme shifted in emphasis to a quest for immortality which, together with the themes of love and 33 literature, constitutes the thematic framework of the novel. The quest for immortality, in one form or another, encompasses Barth, the genie (to add "some artful trinket or two, however small, to the general treasury of civilized delights..." (171)), Shah Zaman, Scheherazade, Perseus, Deliades, Polyeidus, and Anteia. Through con­ stellation, petrifaction, and literature, the quest is realized for eyery character in the book. It is significant that Deliades' final message addresses this subject bringing us back to the tragic view of life that winds throughout the book. He says "not mortal me, but immortality was the myth" (304), for he has understood Perseus's message.

Stories last longer than men, stones than stories, stars than stones. But even out stars' nights are numbered, and with them will pass this patterned tale to a long- deceased earth. (59)

The search for love, from Shah Zaman's "treasure me" to Sybil's open arms, is equally pervasive in the novel. The connection between the "Tragic View of Marriage and Parenthood" (148) and "The Tragic View of Sex and Temperament" (45) is but one of the more obvious thematic links between the Dunyazadiad and Bellerophoniad. It goes hand in hand with the treatment of the role of women in society that each novella discusses, and it is perhaps not simply coincidental that Barth sees the necessity for changing sex roles concurrently with seeing the necessity of changing literary roles. Sherry, the genie, Perseus, Calyxa, Medusa, Bellerophon, Polyei­ dus, Philonoe, Melanippe, and the author are all critics of the various they are a part of, so that the concern for lit­ erature is another chain, equal to those of immortality and love, which holds the three stories together. Going one step further, Medusa, who is emblematic of both love and death (and not a bad critic) links the three major thematic con­ cerns, as does the three-part freak Chimera, who can be construed as a lover (she is female, and roughly equivalent to Medusa, the monster in Perseid), a killer, and a critic (she eats manuscripts). Emblem­ atically she stands for the book's structure and themes; dramatically she is central to Bellerophon's story. At one point in Bellerophoniad, the author discusses his "pet motifs" (201), mentioning "the sibling rivalry, the hero's naivete, the accomplishment of labors by their transcension ...; the romantic triangle, et cetera" (201-202). We could add to this the key to the treasure motif, or the motif of discussing motifs (see Doony on this, p. 8, or Calyxa, 107, or J.B. Bray's mistress, 255), but the one I would like to discuss is the mirror motif that runs from the title page throughout the book. Keeping in mind Barth's constant warning, that a mirror is a double distortion of reality, we see it working in several places. In the Perseid, for instance, we are told that his method for the second half of his life was to be an inversion of his method for the first (93-94). When Perseus returns to the scene of his former glories and kills Danaus with a blow to the head from a bowl, he "remarked that the wound she wept on, intaglio'd in his 205 temple, was the image of his bowled foredropper" (123), meaning that

in his copy of his heroic fight-, Perseus killed a man with a bowl that left a copy of that former fight on the man's temple. The resolution of Perseus' story is bound up in the observation that "eyes are mir- ros" (131). He tells Medusa, in answer to her pressing question about what he saw in her eyes, that there were two things in instantaneous succession, reflected in yours: the first was a reasonably healthy, no longer heroic mortal The second, one second after, was the stars in your own eyes, reflected from mine and rereflected to infinity (132-133) The Bellerophoniad, of course, is an attempt to mirror the Perseid, and involves the story of twins who were, like mirror images, "look- alikes and inner opposites" (151). It reaches its resolution in Zeus' observation that "by imitating perfectly the Pattern of Mythic Heroism, your man Bellerophon has become a perfect imitation of a mythic hero" (297). The style and tone of the three stories provide other connec­ tions (it is not by accident that so many of the characters sound alike, written as they are "so help me, muse, in American" (301)). As shown earlier, the ironic tone of Bellerophoniad affects our contem­ plation of Perseid; if we lined up the various characters: Melanippe with Calyxa, Andromeda with Philonoe, Perseus with Bellerophon, for instance, we would find many other similarities of tone that add to the general cohesiveness of the book. The tone of Andromeda is em­ blematic of a certain kind of woman, known to us all. Her bitchiness also serves the dramatic purpose of getting Perseus moving. The contrasting tone of Philonoe, patient and accepting, is emblematic of a different kind of woman, but serves a related dramatic function—in this case it keeps Bellerophon from moving. Andromeda affects the way we read Philonoe and vice-versa. It is the relationships (here tonal and functional) between the two women that Barth exploits.

We can see numerous examples of phrasing copied from one story to another; for example, Dunyazade describes "the chains of orgasms that Shahryar could sometimes set my sister catenating" (24), and Perseus talks about Calyxa and "the chains of orgasms Ammon and one or two of her mortal partners could set her catenating" (70). The Bellerophoniad tries to "echo for a moment, if lamely, the prancing rhythms and alliterations of the Perseid" (140). Various critics in­ side the book comment on the alliteration, the mannered style, the plotting, and the structure, and, consistent with the intention of piling up layers of meaning wherever he can, Barth puns freely throughout. Perhaps the best example of punning is Polyeidus', who frequently mutters "dum dee dee" as if humming, but actually is commenting on and identifying the real nature of the hero of Beller- ophoniad—not Bellerophon, but his dumb brother Deliades. A fitting summary of these various levels of inter-connection can be seen by a look at one of Bellerophon's sentences, typically, a sentence that does what it talks about.

I looked for a tempest to wreck our ship as in that remark­ able sentence in Perseid where the t's of the approaching storm trip through the humming in's of inattention and are joined by the furious s's to strike the vessel as Perseus struck Andomeda. (262T The references from one story to another and from one story to Barth's other works and his life not only bring the stories in Chimera together, but also expand our apprehension of Barth, Chimera, Barth's other fictions, and life in general. I began this chapter by showing Chimera to be a development of several of the crucial ideas presented in Lost in the Funhouse, and now I would like to show briefly some of the ways Barth brings back his other works as well. In the Bellerophoniad, Deliades has a dream that contains a seduction (192) figured in almost exactly the same words as Todd Andrews' seduc­ tion by Jane Mack in The Floating Opera. Both Todd Andrews and Harrison Mack III are mentioned specifically in Chimera (245), the latter, significantly, in connection with a "Remobilization Farm" which now links Barth's first two books. Like Rennie in The End of the Road, Perseus apologizes for apologizing (76). Giles Goat-Boy is recalled by references to a "certified Spiel man" (168), a J.B. Bray (245) and a Harold Bray (307). Like George, Bellerophon is chastened with the idea that his goal of attaining herohood accomplished only "mere self-aggrandizement" (213). Chimera ends with Polyeidus' claim that he will turn into Harold Bray's "nonfictional counterpart" (307-308), an idea which reinforces my interpretation that Harold Bray in the Goat-Boy corresponds to Barth.

Several of the stories in Lost in the Funhouse are also re­ called in Chimera. I have already noted how Bellerophon urges Polyeidus, as in "Life-Story," to "fill in the blank" (159), and we see "Night-Sea Journey" mentioned twice (113, 168). The "Anonymiad" is referred to several times—as Polyeidus mentions writing invented 208 by a stranded minstrel "pissing in the sand..." (160); as Bellerophon gets messages in bottles (245); and by the mention of the name "Merope" (250). Bellerophon's statement that "my plot doesn't rise and fall in meaningful stages but winds upon itself...digresses, retreats, hesitates, groans from its utter et cetera, collapses, dies" (196), 34 is a direct copy from "Lost in the Funhouse." The Ambrose stories are brought up several times, the "water-message" (261) being the most obvious recollection. In addition, several of Ambrose's experiences are mirrored in Bellerophoniad. Thus, Bellerophon has an adventure in a forest much like the romantic Ambrose's adventure in "Water- Message" (161), and Bellerophon's first experience with sex (264) is a or copy of that described in "Lost in the Funhouse." The ending of that story is also echoed by Bellerophon: Bellerophon wishes he had never begun this story. But he began it. Then he wishes he were dead. But he's not. Therefore he reconstructs it painfully for his darling Amazon (170)

The key difference between the two versions of this idea is that Bellerophon reconstructs it for his "darling," transforming the solipsistic account by Ambrose into a love affair. The structure of "Menelaiad" is suggested in Dunyazadiad (24), and the Perseid not only refers to "the old man of the sea" (71) from that tale, but also pre­ sents the story of Cepheus and Cassopeia as being in precisely the same relationship as Menelaus and Helen were presented (114-115). Bellerophon's embrace of the Amazon Melanippe (215-216), who, like Proteus in "Menelaiad," goes through several fast metamorphoses, recalls both the Dunyazadiad and "Menelaiad." Finally, we see how this practice 209 of referring to previous works also can go forward, for the novel Letters mentioned in the Bellerophonaid (202) is the announced title oc of Barth's current novel in progress. Chimera is indeed a chambered fiction "containing nothing new whatever," but we see how by this process of relating everything he can to every other thing, Barth is able to provide the book with the power to rise beyond itself and be "seriously, passionately, about some things as well" (28). It is in this way that we make the movement from a mythic story to John Barth's story, to our own lives, and find Chimera not only a representation of life, but a part of life itself, "the fact of the artifact" (203). By viewing Barth's previous books as_ if they are themselves part of the long story leading up to Chimera and its adoption of "as if," we have, echoing the author of Dunyazadiad (55), not the story of John Barth, but the story of the story of his stories. NOTES Chapter Six

John Barth, Chimera (New York: Random House, 1972). All page references from this edition will appear in the text. 2 Barth, Lost in the Funhouse, p. 186. o J John Barth, "An Interview," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 6 (1965), 6. 4 John Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion," Atlantic, 220 (Aug., 1967), 30. 6 Barth, Lost in the Funhouse, p. 102. John Barth, "Having it Both Ways," New American Review, 15 (Spring, 1972), 139. Barth, Lost in the Funhouse, p. 186. 8 See also, Chimera, p. 298 and p. 299 where Bellerophon, sum­ ming up Part I of Bellerophoniad, claims that he and Melanippe "wrestle a lot," Melanippe begins Part II by objecting to his sum­ mary, claiming that all that wrestling has made her bored. 9 Barth, Lost in the Funhouse, p. 186. I am referring basically to De Saussure, Jakobsen, and Levi- Strauss. 11 Claude Levi-Struass, Structural Anthropology (New York and London: Basic Books, 1973), p. 33. 1 p ' Barth, Lost in the Funhouse, p. ix. 13 See: Alain Robbe-Grillet, "Dehumanizing Nature," The Modern Tradition, ed. Richard Ellman and Charles Feidelson, Jr.""[New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 361-378. Robbe-Grillet's position is also stated in the Barth interview "Having it Both Ways," and in Robert Scholes, The Fabulators (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967).

14 Barth, "Having it Both Ways," p. 148. 16 Barth, Lost in the Funhouse, p. 109. 210 211 16 Barth, "Having it Both Ways," p. 143. 17 Barth, "Having it Both Ways," p. 136. 18 Summarized by Geoffrey Hartman in "Structuralism: The Anglo- American Adventure," Structuralism, ed. Jaques Ehrmann (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1970), pp. 148-168.

19 Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. 216. 20 Barth, Lost in the Funhouse, p. 117. 21 Barth, "Having it Both Ways," p. 145. 22 Scholes, The Fabulators, p. 171. 23 My knowledge of these people comes almost entirely from Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1974). on Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (New York: Atheneum, 1963), p. 18. 25 T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," The Major Critics, ed. S. Holmes et a]_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), p. 294. Of. I should also note that the "underground" meaning of golden shower is urine, an image which connects us once again with the stranded minstrel who invented fiction by pissing in the sand. 27 Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion," p. 31. 28 "It's called Letters and it concerns itself with the three senses of that word: the epistles of the , but also with alphabetical characters, and the phenomenon of literature." John Barth, with David Strack, "Buffalo's Funhouse Revisited," The Courier-Express Magazine (Sept. 12, 1976), p. 3. 29 I must here note the ingenious discussion of the numerology of Chimera by Dante Cantrill, "'It's a Chimera': An Introduction to John Barth's Latest Fiction," Rendevous, 10. No. 2 (Winter, 1975), pp. 17-31. By playing around with the "Golden Ratio and Fibonacci Series" (Chimera, p. 250), Cantrill has demonstrated the precision by which Barth has attempted to make this a "scientific fiction." Cantrill shows, among other things, that the ratio of the three parts of the book fits exactly into the "Golden Ratio" of 2:3:5. 30 Cantrill, p. 28. Cantrill, p. 29. 212 32 Cantrill, p. 19.

33 Barth resolves the issue from the previous novels best stated in The Sot-Weed Factor where Eben Cooke's "great imagination and en­ thusiasm for the world...had led him to a great sense of the arbitrar­ iness of the particular real world, but did not endow him with a corresponding realization of its finality," by seeing this aspect of identity to be as out-moded as the author/God analogy for literature. We are told that "no one who sees entire the scope and variety of the world can rest content with a single form. Gods and seers have such sight; hence our propensity for metamorphosis" (Chimera, p. 296). The point seems to be that mortals don't have the God-like luxury of shifting selves. 34 See: Lost in the Funhouse, p. 92. 36 In Chimera, Deliades' music teacher, "a laureled, loose- toga'd lady...purchased clemency at a surprising price set by herself" (264). Compare this to "Lost in the Funhouse" when Ambrose tells us that Magda "purchased clemency at a surprising price set by herself," as he stared at an El Producto cigar box and the picture of a "laureled, loose-toga'd lady" on it (p. 74). In addition, in the Chimera sequence, "the bees droned," recalling the bee imagery in Lost in the Funhouse.

In "Buffalo's Funhouse Revisited" Barth not only discusses his novel-in-progress, but makes the claim that Chimera originally began as a small part of his current work. BIBLIOGRAPHY

BY JOHN BARTH: BOOKS The Floating Opera. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1956. The Floating Opera. Rev. ed. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and.Co., 1967. The End of the Road. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co., 1958. The Sot-Weed Factor. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co., 1960. Giles Goat-Boy; or, The Revised New Syllabus. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co., 1966. Lost in the Funhouse; Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co., 1968. Chimera. New York: Random House, 1972. SHORT FICTION "Landscape: The Eastern Shore." The Kenyon Review, 22 (1960), 104-110. "Help! A Stereophonic Narrative for Authorial Voice." Esquire, 72 (Sept. 1969), 108-109. NON-FICTION "My Two Muses." The Johns Hopkins Magazine, 12 (Apr. 1961), 9-13. "Afterword." In The Adventures of Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett. New York: The New American Library, 1964. pp. 469-479. "John Barth: An Interview." With John J. Enck. Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 6 (1965), 3-14. "Muse, Spare Me." Book Week, 26 Sept. 1965, pp. 28-29.

"The Literature of Exhaustion." The Atlantic Monthly, 220 (Aug. 1967), 29-34.

213 214 "Having it Both Ways." An interview with Joe David Bellamy. New American Review, 15 (Spring. 1972), 134-150.

"'Buffalo's Funhouse Revisited:' An Interview with John Barth." Buffalo Courier Express Sunday Magazine , Sept. 12, 1976, pp. 1-3. CRITICISM:

Bienstock, Beverly Gray. "Lingering on the Autognostic Verge: John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse." Modern Fiction Studies, 19, No. 1 (Spring 19737, 69-78. Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961.

Buchen, Irving. "The Aesthetics of the Supra-Novel." In The Theory of the Novel: New Essays, ed. John Halperin. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974, pp. 91-108.

Byrd, Scott. "Giles Goat-Boy Visited. Critique, 9, No. 1 (1966), 108-112.

Cantrill, Dante. "'It's a Chimera:' An Introduction to John Barth's Latest Fiction." Rendevous, 10, No. 2 (Winter 1975)., 17-31. Dippie, Brian W. '"His Visage Wild; His Form Exotick': Indian Themes and Cultural Guilt in John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor." American Quarterly, 21 (1969), 113-121.

Deutsch, Andre. "The Narrative Springs." Times Literary Supplement, July 26, 1974, p. 783. Diser, Philip E. "The Historical Ebenezer Cooke." Critique, 10, No. 3 (1968), 48-59. Eliot, T.S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." In The Major Critics, ed. S. Holmes et al_. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957. pp. 292-302. Ewell, Barbara C. "The Artist of History." Southern Literary Journal, 5, No. 2 (Spring 1973), 32-46. Fiedler, Leslie. "The Death and Rebirth of the Novel." In The Theory of the Novel: New Essays, ed. John Halperin. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974, pp. 189-209. . "John Barth: An Eccentric Genious." The New Leader, 44 . (T3~Feb. 1961), 22-24. 215 Forrest, David B. On Coming Seminal: Cyclic Vulvofugal Retrogression in the Books of Barth. 1974. Private Printing for the Society for the Celebration of Barthomania.

Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1927.

Frost, Robert. "The Silken Tent." Selected Poems of Robert Frost. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963, p. 220. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. New York: Atheneum, 1963. Garis, Robert. "What Happened to John Barth?" Commentary, 42 (Oct. 1966), 89-90, 92, 94-95. Graff, Gerald E. "Mythotherapy and Modern ." Tri-Quarterly, No. 11 (1968), pp. 76-90. Greene, Donald. The Age of Exuberance. New York: Random House, 1970. Gross, Beverly. "The Anti-Novels of John Barth." Chicago Review, 20 (Nov. 1968), 95-109. Hartman Geoffrey. "Structuralism: The Anglo-American Adventure." In Structuralism, ed. Jaques Ehrmann. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1970, pp. 148-168.

Hendin, Josephine. "The Works of John Barth." Harpers, 247 (Sept. 1973), 102-106. Hindin, Michael. "Lost in the Funhouse: Barth's Use of the Recent Past." Twentieth Century Literature, 19, No. 2 (1973), 107-118. Holder, Alan. "'What Marvelous Plot...Was Afoot?' History in John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor." American Quarterly, 20 (1968), 596-604. Joseph, Gerhard. John Barth. Minneapolis: Univ. Of Minnesota Press, 1970. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Chester G. Anderson. New York: The Viking Critical Library, 1968. Kennard, Jean Elizabeth. "John Barth: Imitations of Imitations." Mosaic, 3 (Winter 1970), 116-131. Kerner, David. "Psychodrama in Eden." Chicago Review, 13 (Winter- Spring 1959), 59-67. 216

Kiernan, Robert F. "John Barth's Artist in the Funhouse." Studies in Short Fiction, 10, No. 4 (Fall 1973), 373-381. Klinkowitz, Jerome. Literary Disruptions. Chicago: Univ. Of Illinois Press, 1975.

Knapp, Edgar H. "Found in the Barthhouse: Novelist as Savior." Modern , Fiction Studies, 14 (Winter 1968-69), 446-451. Kolb, Harold H. Jr. The Illusion of Life: American Realism as a Literary Form. Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1969. Kyle, Carol A. "The Unity of Anatomy: The Structure of Barth's Lost in the Funhouse." Critique, 13, No. 3 (1972), 31-43.

LeClair, Thomas. "John Barth's The Floating Opera: Death and the Craft of Fiction." Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 14 (1973), 711-730.

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Schickel, Richard. "The Floating Opera." Critique, 6, No. 2 (Fall 1963), 53-67. Scholes, Robert. "The Allegory of Exhaustion." Fiction International, 1 (Fall 1973), 106-108. . 'Tabulation and Epic Vision." In The Fabulators. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, pp. 133-173. . "George is my name." The New York Times Book Review, 7 Aug. 1966, pp. 1, 22. . Structuralism in Literature. New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1974. Schultz, Max F. "Characters (Contra ) in the Contem­ porary Novel." In The Theory of the Novel: New Essays, ed. John Halperin. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974, pp. 141-154. Shenker, Israel. "Complicated Simple Things: An Interview with John Barth." New York Times Book Review, 24 Sept. 1972, p. 35. Slethaug, Gordon E. "Barth's Refutation of the Idea of Progress." Critique, 13, No. 3 (1972), 11-29. Smith, Herbert F. "Barth's Endless Road." Critique, 6, No. 2 (Fall 1963), 68-76. Stark, John 0. The Literature of Exhaustion: Borges, Nabokov and Barth. Durham North Carolina: Duke Univ. Press, 1974. Stubbs, John C. "John Barth as a Novelist of Ideas: The Themes of Value and Identity." Critique, 8, No. 2 (Winter 1965-66), 101- 116. Surfiction. ed. Raymond Federman. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1974. Tanner, Tony. "The Hoax that Joke Bilked." Partisan Review, 34 (1967), 102-109. . . "What is the Case?" In City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970. New York: Harper and Row, 1971, pp. 230-259. Tatham, Campbell, "The Gilesian Monomyth: Some Remarks on the Struc­ ture of Giles Goat-Boy." Genre, 3 (Dec. 1970), 364-375. 218

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