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The Location of “The Author” in John Barth's LETTERS

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The Location of “The Author” in John Barth's LETTERS The Author’s Metamorphosis: The Location of “the Author” in John Barth’s LETTERS Naoto KOJIMA Abstract 1979 年に発表されたジョン・バースの浩瀚な小説『レターズ』は、トマス・ピンチョ ンの『重力の虹』と並び、アメリカ文学におけるポストモダン小説の極点として考えら れている。『レターズ』をリアリズムと（ポスト）モダニズム的言語実験との綜合を試 みる小説とする議論を踏まえながら、この論文は、それ以前のバース作品に特徴的な自 己言及的メタフィクションが問題とした、「作者」の位置についての矛盾との関係にお いて『レターズ』の達成を捉える。そしてそのメタフィクションの矛盾からの脱却が、 小説の構造的なレベルだけでなく物語内容のレベルにおいても、作中に登場する「作者」 の正体を巡る謎解きのプロットとして表れていることを示す。手紙の書き手の一人であ る「作者」こそが、物語中での不在の息子ヘンリー・バーリンゲイム７世にほかならず、 その両者がテクストの内部と外部を行き来する作者の「変身」によって特徴づけられて いるのである。従来の研究ではこの小説における「作者」の正体（と小説の構造との関 係）を十分に突き止められてはおらず、その点でこの『レターズ』論は一つの新たな作 品解釈の提示であり、同時に、小説における「作者」の位置づけを巡る考察でもある。 Key Words: author, metafiction, presence/absence, realism, postmodernism 1. Introduction John Barth is a highly self-conscious writer. From the beginning of his career, his fiction has shown a distinctive self-referential nature. In his first novel, The Floating Opera, Todd Andrews mourns the dilemma of writing his own story in a Tristram Shandy-like manner: “Good heavens, how does one write a novel! I mean, how can anybody stick to the story, if he’s at all sensitive to the significances of things?…[E]very new sentence I set down is full of figures and implications that I’d love nothing better than to chase to their dens with you, but such chasing would involve new figures and new chases, so that I’m sure we’d never get the story started, much less ended, if I let my inclinations run unleashed” (2). He realizes that it is impossible to tell the story completely. Telling a story holds an inevitable difference between the telling and the told. - 251 - His self-reflective fictions derive from this acknowledgement of painful resignation. In his career as a writer, Barth’s orientation toward a self-referential structure is inextricably interwoven with his failed effort to write an autobiographical novel. After publishing his first two companion novels, The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, in the 1950s, he tried writing an autobiographical novel, The Seeker (or The Amateur), while also writing a notable historiographical novel, The Sot-Weed Factor. In contrast to the success of The Sot-Weed Factor, he finally abandoned The Seeker in 1960. This decisive failure to write an autobiographical novel made a great impact on his following career, as David Morrell examines in detail through his correspondence with Barth. In Giles-Goat Boy, Barth’s fourth novel, started after abandoning The Seeker, there is a reference to The Seeker. The signature of “Cover-Letter to the Editors and Publisher” (a letter toward imaginary editors) reads: “This regenerate Seeker after Answers, / J. B” (xxxi). Furthermore, according to Morrell, Barth’s fifth book, Lost in the Funhouse, also is deeply related to the failed autobiographical novel. The character Ambrose Mensch in Funhouse “was also the main character in The Seeker or The Amateur…that novel Barth…never completed.” Two short stories, “Ambrose His Mark” and “Water-Message,” were “salvaged” from The Seeker. 1) The third Ambrose story, “Lost in the Funhouse,” which depicts Ambrose’s experience of being lost in the funhouse of an amusement park, can also be considered in this context. As some critics have argued, this story metaphorically describes the narrator’s detachment from life or reality.2) The various metafictional3) and experimental devices which are foregrounded most thoroughly in Funhouse can be seen as Barth’s disenchanted response to his failed The Seeker. In this sense, Funhouse is “the peak or nadir” (Tobin 84), or the turning point of Barth’s metafictional aesthetics which leads him to a new standpoint by pressing his longstanding obsessive motifs toward their limitations. When Barth overcame a writer’s block by finishing Funhouse and Chimera, he “began to envision the possibility of a new work” (Funhouse 197), and set out again to utilize autobiographical realism in his next fiction, LETTERS.4) This substantial novel, published in 1979, took Barth almost ten years to write. He reconsidered his position as “a fictionist who…had long since turned his professional back on literary realism in favor of the fabulous irreal” and he attempted to make “a détente with the realistic tradition” and go “back to LETTERS, to history, to ‘realism,’” thinking that “it is as if Reality, a mistress too long ignored, must now settle scores with her errant lover” (LETTERS 49; 52). In LETTERS, he achieved the location of the transcendental “Author” and reached a position to write about his own stories by constructing a polyphonic novel. The following, through a reading of LETTERS, examines how Barth succeeded in reconstructing the position of the “author.” - 252 - 2. LETTERS and postmodernist synthesis LETTERS was not only a tidemark in Barth’s career, but also the high-water mark of American postmodern fiction. In fact, since it contains almost all of the themes in postmodernism such as reality, revolution, the father, the mother, the sixties, and self-reference, it is sometimes called a postmodern epic. Critics often mention LETTERS and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow as the two most significant postmodernist “big” fictions during the 1970s.5) Under the strong influence of “The Literature of Replenishment,” also written in 1979, LETTERS has often been connected with Barth’s own argument in the essay (Harris 160-1; Schulz 183-5; Tobin 18-20). “The Literature of Replenishment” is a kind of reply to the debate surrounding the meaning of the word “postmodernism,” in which Barth and others are “praised or damned as postmodernists” (196). He tries to define the term “postmodernism” in his own way, as a synthesis of premodernism and modernism. The passage below works both as a summary of his statement and as a self-commentary on LETTERS: In my view, the proper program for postmodernism is neither a mere extension of the modernist program as described above, nor a mere intensification of certain aspects of modernism, nor on the contrary a wholesale subversion or repudiation of either modernism or what I’m calling premodernism: “traditional” bourgeois realism. […] A worthy program for postmodernist fiction, I believe, is the synthesis or transcension of these antitheses, which may be summed up as premodernist and modernist modes of writing. My ideal postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his twentieth-century modernist parents or his nineteenth-century premodernist grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back. […] The ideal postmodernist novel will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and “contentism,” pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction. (Friday 201-3) It is possible to read LETTERS from the above perspective as a work of “synthesis or transcension of these antitheses” such as premodernism/modernism, realism/irrelism, formalism/contentism, pure literature/committed literature, and coterie fiction/junk fiction. Actually, the themes represented in this list are eccentrically located in LETTERS. Therefore it seems reasonable to say that LETTERS represents Barth’s theory of postmodernism in practice which he outlined in “The Literature of Replenishment.” Furthermore, the tendency to see his fiction in the light of his own essay is reinforced by the aesthetic and cultural connection between Lost in the Funhouse and “The Literature of Exhaustion.” Thus, Barth’s progress as a writer can be measured in light of his theoretical development from “exhaustion” to “replenishment.” C. B. Harris writes that “[s]ignificantly, from - 253 - the corpus of his own work Barth cites LETTERS as an example of postmodernism, which suggests that ‘The Literature of Replenishment’ will prove as indispensable a guide through the intricacies of this novel as ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’ has for Lost in the Funhouse” (161). In this way, “Replenishment” can be seen as “the theoretical counterpart to LETTERS” (Carmichael 66).6) However, this presumption can be questioned. Most critics implicitly accept this premise and make the assertion that LETTERS is a synthesis of both Barth’s precedent works and the varieties of the literary tradition. Yet, is it really a “synthesis or transcension”? Even though it may be, in what sense is it a synthesis? LETTERS is an ensemble that consists of various themes and literary styles. For instance, when it comes to the issue of literary style, the characters in LETTERS employ different kinds of narratives: the realist narratives (Todd Andrews, Geremaine Pitt), irrealist narratives (Jerome Bray, Ambrose Mensch), schizophrenic narratives (Jacob Horner), historical narratives (Andrews Cook IV and VI), and metafictional narratives (“the Author”) all are juxtaposed within the style of the epistolary novel. Yet it cannot be concluded from this point that LETTERS succeeds as a synthesis. It can only be seen as a juxtaposition, not a synthesis. Similarly, the arguments that try to find the value of this novel in the individual narratives of the characters are also unacceptable. Again, Harris follows this line. He states, for example, that Ambrose Mensch alone can achieve the vision of mutuality between world and word, while all of the other characters fail to embrace the vision respectively and fall into “representational thinking” (190-2). Then he attributes Ambrose’s realization directly to “Barth’s own epistemological-ethical-esthetic stance in LETTERS” (193). Although his conclusion that “the world, Barth has come to realize, does not exist in so much as through the word” (194) does not seem incorrect, his argument passes over a significant point in LETTERS: the existence of “the Author” in the text. To find the true achievement of LETTERS, it is necessary to discuss the strange location of “the Author” in this novel. The location of the Author here should not be considered just a typical metafictional device. Rather, the location of the Author has an indispensable function in the composition of both the story and form of LETTERS. Because of the existence of “the Author” in the text, the diverse narratives, themes, and literary styles in this novel function as a postmodernist synthesis instead of a juxtaposition.
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