Proquest Dissertations
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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- NOVEL THEORY IN PRACTICE: A STUDY OF JOHN BARTH'S DEVELOPMENT OF A "NEW" FICTION. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1977 Literature, 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. "Jorge Luis Borges: 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. THE END OF THE ROAD 43 Notes 64 III. THE SOT-WEED FACTOR 66 Notes 98 IV. GILES GOAT-BOY 100 Notes 137 V- LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE 139 Notes 177 VI. CHIMERA 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 metaphors 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 Homer, 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 fictions 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.