This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
I. Legacy
The majority of the legendary postmodernists in American fiction lived long enough to be disappointed by their legends. Don DeLillo (87), Thomas Pynchon (87), Joseph McElroy (93) and Robert Coover (92) can still, as yet, contrast life with lore. The bitter privilege must have been a confirmation for John Barth, who recently died at 93, since the tidewater metafictionist specialized in measuring the wobbly frames of narrative against the hurricane of experience. Having lived mostly as a novelist ensconced within academia, a great many of the years therein spent along the cloistered waters of the Chesapeake, Barth once remarked to Michiko Kakutani that he’d led “a serene, tranquil and absolutely non-Byronic life.” In public statements, essays and fiction, Barth was always penning segments of his own eulogy, smuggling themes and flourishes into his life’s account before death could settle it. What he variably described as our “inclination to see our lives as stories” was a cognitive reflex, something humans did continuously, helplessly, to shape and temper experience, even if we knew it would violate “all agreeable plans and expectations.” At the time of Kakutani’s profile, Barth was presumably unaware that he would live for another 42 years.
Among literary people, the name “John Barth” tends to recall, with a decent spread of reverence and irritation, the matryoshka narratives and myth remaking of Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera—the uncut stuff of the pomo heyday. Unsurprisingly, his literary reputation has become chiefly that of a solipsist: a writer manacled to his own interpretation, whose wordplay and puzzle-making appear to spectators like “ridiculous dithering,” as critic Dale Peck, in his quest to further mystify postmodern literature, once described Barth’s writing.
A defense of Barth’s more involuted exercises is that they allow readers to glimpse the vacuum where all literary inventions emerge and perish. (See, for instance, the incredible “Autobiography.”) Like Death Valley, or the Antarctic, the location is certainly worthy of pilgrimage; less so habitation. Yet somewhere in the middle of his career, Barth decided to pitch his tent there, and I can’t deny that his writing got a bit out of hand. Giles Goat-Boy remains one of the looniest novels I’ve read. Chimera is the height of the allusive, alliterative rhythms of Barth’s gallivanting, horny prose (Persius describes the “navel” of a lover as “spiriferate, replicating the infinite inward wind both above and below the finite flesh on which my tongue now feast”), but its commentary on the inescapability and inadequacy of narrative is self-limiting. On two occasions, I began reading Barth’s 1979 novel LETTERS, a tome of correspondence between the author and the major characters of the five novels that precede it, only to soon feel that I, the reader, was somehow intruding on whatever Barth was up to in this book, as though I had opened a bedroom door and discovered someone busily masturbating—and closed it (sorry!), understanding that my presence was probably unnecessary.
So, I get it. It can be a frustrating and lonely experience reading Barth. But I would insist that this is only a hazard of his narrative regressions, tangents and intertextual tunneling, not their primary objective. The subtlety did not escape David Foster Wallace, even though his 1988 novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way was aimed—on behalf of a generation of writers afflicted by the sterility of the postmodern style—at what Wallace perceived to be Barth’s legacy. The novella follows three MFA students of a tidewater postmodernist named “Ambrose” (an allusion to a narrator in Lost in the Funhouse) as they travel toward a commercial reunion in a Midwestern city. Wallace makes it impossible to overlook the fact that Westward is itself an example of the Barthean metafiction that he spends much of the story lamenting. But Wallace’s critique finally concerns the postmodern genre, that “timelessly dumb” reification of literature which emboldened Barth’s most obnoxious excesses while enabling every tired and frivolous generalization about his fiction (e.g., again, Dale Peck).1
For Wallace, the most distressing tendency of Barth’s fiction was how it wielded self-awareness to preempt judgment, a prototype of the impenetrable self-consciousness he observed more broadly in young Americans, and especially in many contemporary writers, two of whom are represented as MFA students in Westward. The easiest case study would be Drew-Lynn Eberhardt, the most prolific of Ambrose’s pupils, who spends the novella idly composing a poem consisting “entirely in punctuation.” Eberhardt confesses to her lover that she’s consumed alcohol, benzos and hypnotics while pregnant with their child, in an effort to smoke out and disarm his disapproval (“See, you’re mad… you are mad… But if you’re mad just say so”), while being first to admit that she’s “bad at will.” Barth’s most insistent (frankly, overplayed) theme was that writer and reader achieved something like the relationship between the countless postcoital lovers of his narratives. Wallace would have reminded Barth that love and recognition trade in the same waters as scorn and judgment. To recruit self-awareness into a defensive blockade, as Wallace believed Barth did, frustrated critique at the cost of that communion.
Finding Barth in self-imposed solitude, Wallace made a familiar diagnosis: solipsism. But he carefully traced this failing to Barth’s fear of judgment, rather than his methods, which were ultimately neutral to the spiritual successes and failures of literature. Until his death, Wallace never stopped writing fiction that situated its author as a character, directly addressed the reader, or dabbled in the classics regurgitation he associated with Barth and Barthelme (e.g. “Tri-stan”). The irony of his critique of Barth was that it unintentionally bolstered a superficial disdain for postmodern antics in American literary culture, which neglects the very reasons that Barth believed his metafictional maneuvers necessary in the first place. Because I’d wager that most readers would be surprised to learn that John Barth, Herald of the Neverending Myth, Besieger of the Fourth Wall began as a writer of realistic psychodramas about the despair in American life during the 1950s. The young Barth could not desert his nihilism until he discovered what are today regarded as the instruments of his solipsism.
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II. Doom
“Who can live any longer in the world?” So Barth’s second novel begins to unwind, with a faithless question placed in the mouth of Jake Horner as he flees Wicomico, Maryland, where he’d witnessed a botched abortion. Mortified, he calls a cab. His destination is the novel’s last word: “terminal.”
Although Barth would rib himself for writing a book called The End of the Road (1958) at the overripe age of 27, the novel does not disappoint the dour ultimacy of its title. Mirthless, stagnant and misogynistic, The End of the Road was designed to render the already obvious nihilism of Barth’s first and better book, The Floating Opera (1956), undeniable. Of the American novelists who probed the social instabilities of the country’s postwar realignment, Barth, something of an existentialist, saw that beneath the cracking foundation was a void that beckoned dangerous questions. If the prevailing conventions could be so abruptly reformatted, what secured the permanence of their replacements or alternatives? What if every moral system that guided our decisions and all the cultural norms that calibrated our expectations turned out to be ultimately baseless? Barth dramatized these concerns by suspending The End of the Road and The Floating Opera in the ominous moment just after the overturning of white middle-class mores, when it was plausible for such Americans to believe they might live free of social restrictions altogether.
No messianic goat boys, insecure demigods or sentient spermatozoa; the principal characters of Barth’s first two books were, not unlike their author, ruminative bachelors living in Maryland, distressed by the arbitrariness of their decisions. In The Floating Opera, Todd Andrews, a lawyer beset by chronic prostatitis, begins his formal “inquiry” into the problem of life by writing about not knowing how to begin it. “Any arrangement of things at all is an order,” he complains. For Jake Horner, a youngish grammar professor and boneless worm, the logical architecture beneath language and thought generally appears detached from human affairs. The self-styled thinking man therefore suffers from an existential paralysis he terms “cosmopsis,” which renders Jake unable to choose a trivial weekend destination in one scene, and a vocation in another (his shady therapist chooses for him.) Todd jubilantly discovers that the solution to an arbitrary existence is suicide: “There is no final reason for living.” Such a fate would put him in the company of his father, whom Todd sometimes pictures hanging from a floor joist by a belt.
Ahead of a wider cultural liberation, Todd and Jake become pioneers in fornication, adultery and polyamory. When Todd is reunited with his old friend, Harrison Mack, he finds himself aroused by Harrison’s athletic wife, Jane. While vacationing with them, Todd awakens from a drunken nap to find a naked Jane on his bed (entirely plausible.) The two have sex and Todd, horrified at “the mess I’ve made,” assumes he has destroyed his friendship with Harrison, a disillusioned Marxist from an aristocratic family in Baltimore. Yet during an “objective discussion,” Harrison informs Todd that the affair was his idea. Attempting to reassure Todd, Harrison insists, “Janie and I love each other completely … We’re not stupid enough to be affected by jealousy or conventions” and conspicuously repeats the phrase “Don’t feel obligated!”
Todd and Jane proceed to have sex “six hundred seventy-three” times.
The love triangle of The End of the Road proves less robust. Hired at a local teacher’s college, Jake meets Joe, a megalomaniacal professor who insists, in the style of early Wittgenstein, that sentiments and ideas that cannot be clearly articulated cannot be held to exist. The two get along chopping the logic of pessimism and disparaging women. Jake is soon introduced to Joe’s battered wife, Rennie, whom he describes as a “chunky” woman of “clumsy force” who he finds nonetheless attractive.
Rennie and Jake fall into each other’s arms one night while Joe is away. Jake, typically incapable of making decisions, cannot believe that he has made such a consequential one. Rennie descends into self-loathing and becomes ever more obedient to her husband. Once Joe uncovers the truth, he demands that Rennie explain her infidelity; when she fails to do so, he commands her to have sex with Jake again and again until her reasons reveal themselves—a contrivance for “moral clarification,” as Barth described the passage in a later work. Rennie soon learns she is pregnant with a child that is likely Jake’s and demands he arrange the aforenoted abortion. Anesthetized, Rennie chokes to death on her vomit during the illegal procedure.
The polyamorous experiment of The Floating Opera is similarly abandoned after Jane’s daughter, Jeannine, is born to an uncertain father. Absent social stigma, it shouldn’t matter if it is Todd or Harrison, but of course it does. Near the end of the novel, Todd brings Jeannine to the titular Floating Opera.
As was her habit when excited, Jeannine slipped into the “Why?” routine.
“What’s it for, Toddy honey?” she shouted, awed at the Opera’s size.
“It’s a showboat, hon. People go on it and listen to music and watch the actors dance and act funny.”
“Why?’
“Why what?” I asked. “Why do the actors act funny or why do the people like to watch them?”
“Why do the people?”
“The people like to go to the show because it makes them laugh. They like to laugh at the actors.”
“Why?”
“They like to laugh because laughing makes them happy. They like being happy, just like you.”
“Why?”
And so on. The Floating Opera, a symbol of what Barth elsewhere called the “vaudeville of the world,” cannot be justified to Jeannine, or anyone else; it floats above the inscrutable depths of Why, without foundation or rationale, the deck lights of its comedy swallowed by the oceanic dark. Todd finally decides to kill himself on the opening night but, at the last minute, changes his plans without explanation. During the show, Todd leaves his seat to find the galley. He lights a stove burner, turns the others to full gas, and returns to his seat to await the explosion.
The arbitrariness of experience suggests that life should conform to our whims or comply with the marching orders of rationality. Yet we are denied these consolatory freedoms by our animal nature and the circularity of thought. For Todd, tearing up the contract of life was his last means for defining his existence. The act would provide him a narrative, one that would fulfill an expectation (I will die tonight), resolve a tension (I will no longer suffer an insufferable existence) and create a definitive meaning (life is an impossibility, but there is an exit.) But Todd reasons his way back to where he began, adjusting his epiphany near the end of the novel: “There’s no final reason for living (or for suicide).” The narratives we impose upon experience are fenced within the closed circuits of logic and language. Barth had found his true conundrum, an existential finger trap: the more we strain to order our lives, the more we realize how imprisoned we are within them. The end of the road joins and becomes its own beginning, idly spinning around us until it squeezes inwards, like a belt around a neck. Todd’s venture in mass murder is an expression of this frustration. But even his desperate thrash at a symbol doesn’t go to plan. Poor Toddy honey, awaiting the fiery resolution among his would-be victims, unaware that the bomb will fail to ignite.
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III. Destiny
Barth conceived of his next book as a “nihilist … extravaganza,” the terminus of a trilogy that had already found its end. No great surprise that he encountered some difficulty. Over four years, an unanticipated novel would call to Barth from beyond himself; composing it would foremost demand a transformation not in scheme, philosophy or method, but in the author. Barth would have to learn that “innocence, not nihilism, was my real theme, and had been all along.”
Barth’s third and greatest novel, The Sot-Weed Factor, located this innocence in the failure to distinguish experience from narrative. Barth animated the theme in a novelization of a picaresque about colonial Maryland, written by British-American poet Ebenezer Cooke, whom Barth imitates in a parodic seventeenth-century English (replete with idioms like “In sooth,” “‘sheart,” and “I’faith”2). Only slightly metafictional, the book marked Barth’s discovery of postmodernism (though he would tellingly insist it discovered him) and accomplished what only the postmodern novel could: it recovered a fundamental aspect of human existence that had been displaced by convention. The existential paralysis that Barth explored in The Floating Opera and perfected in The End of the Road was the outgrowth of a distended individualism, a delusion that the human being, by his intellect and agency, lords over experience as the writer masters the page. The Sot-Weed Factor announces itself as a coming-of-age tale, through which its protagonist learns that human beings have never enjoyed this authorial liberty.
The fictive version of Ebenezer “Eben” Cook begins his grand misadventure as a thirty-year-old virgin. A tall, conscientious Englishman, pampered by family wealth into staggering naïveté, Eben is sent to tidewater Maryland with two agendas: to look after his father’s tobacco estate, Malden, which is Eben’s inheritance; and, at the behest of Maryland’s governor, Lord Baltimore, to write an epic glorifying the colony and its denizens (the MARYLANDIAD, as Eben titles the unwritten epic). The poem to immortalize him, and the bountiful hectares of Malden as his earthly reward, Eben’s only other hope is that he will maintain his innocence on a journey that threatens to corrupt it with seduction and compromise. Before sailing west, he pledges himself to a lovely prostitute named Joan Toast, whom he plans to marry and bed once his inheritance makes him a man.
Barth spends one hundred pages describing Eben’s banal expectations and delirious ambitions (“sweet land,” he extols Maryland upon his commission, “Pregnant with song, thy deliverer approacheth”) before subverting them for the next seven hundred. Eben is not so much the subject of The Sot-Weed Factor as its target. He does not navigate the plot; the plot happens to him. He is hurled with the blind powers of nature from one calamity to the next: sailing across the Atlantic, Eben is launched overboard during a squall, then returned to the deck by a rogue wave; he is captured by pirates, who release him, until he is later captured by different pirates, who walk him off a plank; he drowns or prepares to drown a number of times only to find a nearby shore or sand just beneath his fluttering feet; he is abandoned several times by his wily tutor, Henry Burlingame, whom Eben discovers throughout his tale under different guises—Peter Sayer, Tim Mitchell, Nicholas Lowe—and who is also sleeping with Eben’s sister; Eben’s cherished identity as the Poet Laureate of Maryland is repeatedly stolen; he loses his father’s estate to a ruse, gets drunk, despairs, and recovers Malden through a legal technicality; he finds his beloved Joan Toast in America, dying of syphilis, robbed of the beauty that compelled Eben’s devotion, and he marries her anyways. In the end, Eben finds himself unable to sing the glories of colonial Maryland and instead writes a “Hudibrastic exposé” of that land of greed and depravity. Its title: “The Sot-Weed Factor.” Critically speaking, the poem is well received, but, the aged Eben believes, for the wrong reasons.
His idealism corrupted; his dreams foiled; his moral purity sullied; nothing turns out how Eben had imagined it. What rule of life had he broken? Is he a victim of outrageous misfortune? Does God hate him? Burlingame, traveling with Eben on a clear night in the colony, gestures to an answer beyond the false ceiling of narrative: “‘Forget the word sky,’ Burlingame said off-handedly, swinging up on his gelding, ‘’tis a blinder to your eyes. There is no dome of heaven yonder.’”
Ebenezer blinked twice or thrice: with the aid of these instructions, for the first time in his life he saw the night sky. The stars were no longer points on a black hemisphere that hung like a sheltering roof above his head … the constellations lost their sense entirely; their spurious character revealed itself, as did the false presupposition of the celestial navigator, and Ebenezer felt bereft of orientation.
The instinct for narrative that traces legends among the stars is the same with which we organize experience. We interpret our lives by the Freytagian terms of a story, as an uphill-downhill affair. We brood over whether we’ve “peaked.” Perhaps our present lull is the intermission before our “second act.” Besides, we always have our “final chapter” to await, the denouement of our golden years. The individual extrapolates between the stages and landmarks of life to weave a different constellation—a “life-story,” as Barth termed it—that becomes a map to orient them as celestial objects guide the navigator, and a shield against the horrifying range of possibility in experience. By way of his nauseous epiphany, Eben learns that we, deprived of our life story, are not only lost but exposed, helpless before the immensity of raw experience.
Eben’s vision is of the world’s fundamental anarchy. The “madness,” as Burlingame whispers, of living unsheltered from the “infinite winds of space” is what impels us to accept the impossible terms of the narrativized life: to be both author and protagonist of experience, deity of fate and heroic beneficiary. It’s a losing battle, but the delusion that sustains personal narrative is remarkably adaptable; capable not only of tolerating contradiction but absorbing it into its dramatic structure. Delays become tests of our patience and resolve. Failures indicate our correctable inadequacies. Denials charge up our imminent vindication. The countless other lives we see ruined by circumstance, rotten luck or self-sabotage become cautionary prologue to our legend. Their stories are tragedies. Praise the heavens, we live in a prophecy.
Soon enough, in some way, experience reminds us all of its unconquerability. It disrupts every scheme, overpowers every vehicle, ruptures every vessel. We begrudgingly concede that “the story of our life is not our life; it is our story,” as Barth usefully put it. The main juxtaposition within The Sot-Weed Factor, between the MARYLANDIAD (a fictional character’s dreamwork) and The Sot-Weed Factor (a record of his lived experience; a real object in our world) would suggest that most of our life is hyphenated, unavoidably caught between experience and narrative, world and dream.
That is certainly how I interpret the story of my life. And by “I” I don’t mean the formalized presence you locate behind these sentences, but the writer, the actual person, alive, just now, wearing a brown t-shirt, weathering a mean bout of acid reflux as he struggles to wind down this essay for the umpteenth time, partly because he insists that it conclude with some self-conscious acrobatics that don’t just defend Barth’s technique but exemplify it by conjuring that special zone of hyperawareness, here, where we are now, which, although not reality, is closer to it than the conventions of essay writing usually allow, but mostly because he has failed lately to summon the motivation to write, observing that each subsequent thing he puts into the world delivers less of the satisfaction he has come to expect, because as he’s become despondent about the prospect of a “career” as a writer in the 21st century, the centerpiece of his own outlandish narrative, he often doubts that anyone actually reads the things he writes. This is a practical concern, since he believes the already tiny readership that would be interested in a longish essay about a dead and difficult postmodernist is contracting, but it has also become a deeper paranoia, a failure to imagine anyone on the other end of the line, so to speak, not merely the idealization of a reader that writers are taught to address, but you, the living person supposedly reading these words on screen or paper, in a moment of a life that, this writer might wager, has not panned out the way you imagined, either. When the writer should be attempting to communicate to this theoretic you, he sometimes daydreams about Eben in the epilogue of The Sot-Weed Factor, whom Barth portrays as roundly defeated, wizened by experience, but grumpy, wondering if that is how his, the writer’s, own little story is bound to end.
But see I’ve made the mistake again. I imagine my life ending like a novel, even a postmodern one, and in a blink the sky assumes its sheltering dome. I am similarly tempted to claim that Barth discovered a lasting contentment after The Sot-Weed Factor, and that the bliss and terror of his insight never left him. But that is story, not life. During an interview with David Foster Wallace, the literary critic Michael Silverblatt once described his friend Barth sometime after the publication of Lost in the Funhouse as “happy” and “uxorious,” states difficult to reconcile with the gloomy sexists and the “nihilistic bent” of Barth’s first novels. By his abrupt metamorphosis, Barth had “solved certain of life’s problems that he thought couldn’t be solved.” Yet Silverblatt also identified a “wrong turning” in Barth’s writing around this time, in the compulsion to re-solve these same quandaries, to compose the same book, with the same tricks and themes “again and again, not in the attempt to get them right but to find out where they went wrong.” The notion conjures the image of Rennie and Jake fucking mechanically, programmatically, lovelessly, trying to dislodge an explanation for the very transgression they are committing.
Barth’s escape from nihilism required the composition of novels that were aware of themselves as narratives, as means of reducing and organizing experience, which both dramatized and transcended the countless failures of narrative when brought to the threshold of life. (It is something of a wonder that novels can do this.) To read these books is to learn (thrillingly) and relearn (less thrillingly) that your life is not a story because it is larger than any story could be. But how many times can this treasure be discovered? Although Barth’s late oeuvre would seem to attest otherwise, I suspect he knew the answer was, of course, once. What readers experience first as an urgent spiritual conundrum becomes, upon resolution, reconstruction and reenactment, an eroded and vacant labyrinth. The holy mystery is reduced to a math problem.
Barth’s awareness of this flaw becomes palpable in the preemptive defenses and apologies he inserted into his fiction. Typically concerned with the mechanics of his storytelling, these obsequious gestures often seem irrelevant or jokingly inadequate. There’s no use. Once narrative has broken itself open, its contents are indelibly absorbed into a wider inexhaustible reality. All one can do after that moment is live. What his critics would eventually regard as tyrannical solipsism was little more than insulation against life, and a terror of an art that embraces life.
Of course, that inadequacy was built into the largely destructive program of postmodernism. The great postmodern novelists sought apocalyptic reversals and demolitions (righteously, by my lights) in an effort to reacquaint humanity with its ductility, ignorance and helplessness. Pynchon miniaturized us before the entropic machinations of history. DeLillo rendered consciousness an instrument of totalizing cultural logics. Even Nabokov peered from behind his psychic sceneries to remind readers that character, like soul, was mere puppetry. Barth lampooned the wild audacity of the narrativized life, the assumption that each of us is owed a blank slate on which to etch and chisel our legend. Yet for how musically and variously he could puncture this conceit, he had so little to say about the life lived free of that illusion. In his later years, he even seemed to occasionally rediscover his old nihilism in new terms: the storytelling animal was helpless but to project narratives onto a universe that would never accommodate them.
But this, too, is its own form of childish world-denial. We cannot chart the course of our lives, because that course is drawn by the world beyond us. The adage to which many of us finally submit holds that the world (or God, if you like) poses questions that we answer in life. Poet William Bronk was closer when he wrote: “If we are asked how we shall live in the world / it doesn’t ask us. It lives us if it will.” We, our overflowingly storied lives, are the answer to the question the world is always asking itself. The best of Barth found this truth humming in the wreckage of “realism.” To live in the world, I am not asked to relinquish the meaning of my life, only the illusion that I am its author. One way or another, the destiny we plot for ourself will be wrenched from our white-knuckled grip to leave behind something realer, something we might call by that same enchanted word.
This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
I. Legacy
The majority of the legendary postmodernists in American fiction lived long enough to be disappointed by their legends. Don DeLillo (87), Thomas Pynchon (87), Joseph McElroy (93) and Robert Coover (92) can still, as yet, contrast life with lore. The bitter privilege must have been a confirmation for John Barth, who recently died at 93, since the tidewater metafictionist specialized in measuring the wobbly frames of narrative against the hurricane of experience. Having lived mostly as a novelist ensconced within academia, a great many of the years therein spent along the cloistered waters of the Chesapeake, Barth once remarked to Michiko Kakutani that he’d led “a serene, tranquil and absolutely non-Byronic life.” In public statements, essays and fiction, Barth was always penning segments of his own eulogy, smuggling themes and flourishes into his life’s account before death could settle it. What he variably described as our “inclination to see our lives as stories” was a cognitive reflex, something humans did continuously, helplessly, to shape and temper experience, even if we knew it would violate “all agreeable plans and expectations.” At the time of Kakutani’s profile, Barth was presumably unaware that he would live for another 42 years.
Among literary people, the name “John Barth” tends to recall, with a decent spread of reverence and irritation, the matryoshka narratives and myth remaking of Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera—the uncut stuff of the pomo heyday. Unsurprisingly, his literary reputation has become chiefly that of a solipsist: a writer manacled to his own interpretation, whose wordplay and puzzle-making appear to spectators like “ridiculous dithering,” as critic Dale Peck, in his quest to further mystify postmodern literature, once described Barth’s writing.
A defense of Barth’s more involuted exercises is that they allow readers to glimpse the vacuum where all literary inventions emerge and perish. (See, for instance, the incredible “Autobiography.”) Like Death Valley, or the Antarctic, the location is certainly worthy of pilgrimage; less so habitation. Yet somewhere in the middle of his career, Barth decided to pitch his tent there, and I can’t deny that his writing got a bit out of hand. Giles Goat-Boy remains one of the looniest novels I’ve read. Chimera is the height of the allusive, alliterative rhythms of Barth’s gallivanting, horny prose (Persius describes the “navel” of a lover as “spiriferate, replicating the infinite inward wind both above and below the finite flesh on which my tongue now feast”), but its commentary on the inescapability and inadequacy of narrative is self-limiting. On two occasions, I began reading Barth’s 1979 novel LETTERS, a tome of correspondence between the author and the major characters of the five novels that precede it, only to soon feel that I, the reader, was somehow intruding on whatever Barth was up to in this book, as though I had opened a bedroom door and discovered someone busily masturbating—and closed it (sorry!), understanding that my presence was probably unnecessary.
So, I get it. It can be a frustrating and lonely experience reading Barth. But I would insist that this is only a hazard of his narrative regressions, tangents and intertextual tunneling, not their primary objective. The subtlety did not escape David Foster Wallace, even though his 1988 novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way was aimed—on behalf of a generation of writers afflicted by the sterility of the postmodern style—at what Wallace perceived to be Barth’s legacy. The novella follows three MFA students of a tidewater postmodernist named “Ambrose” (an allusion to a narrator in Lost in the Funhouse) as they travel toward a commercial reunion in a Midwestern city. Wallace makes it impossible to overlook the fact that Westward is itself an example of the Barthean metafiction that he spends much of the story lamenting. But Wallace’s critique finally concerns the postmodern genre, that “timelessly dumb” reification of literature which emboldened Barth’s most obnoxious excesses while enabling every tired and frivolous generalization about his fiction (e.g., again, Dale Peck).11. It is also illustrative of this symmetrical ignorance that the critical manifesto popularly associated with Barth, his “The Literature of Exhaustion,” in fact is oblique, dull and roundly unhelpful to understanding his postmodern project.
For Wallace, the most distressing tendency of Barth’s fiction was how it wielded self-awareness to preempt judgment, a prototype of the impenetrable self-consciousness he observed more broadly in young Americans, and especially in many contemporary writers, two of whom are represented as MFA students in Westward. The easiest case study would be Drew-Lynn Eberhardt, the most prolific of Ambrose’s pupils, who spends the novella idly composing a poem consisting “entirely in punctuation.” Eberhardt confesses to her lover that she’s consumed alcohol, benzos and hypnotics while pregnant with their child, in an effort to smoke out and disarm his disapproval (“See, you’re mad… you are mad… But if you’re mad just say so”), while being first to admit that she’s “bad at will.” Barth’s most insistent (frankly, overplayed) theme was that writer and reader achieved something like the relationship between the countless postcoital lovers of his narratives. Wallace would have reminded Barth that love and recognition trade in the same waters as scorn and judgment. To recruit self-awareness into a defensive blockade, as Wallace believed Barth did, frustrated critique at the cost of that communion.
Finding Barth in self-imposed solitude, Wallace made a familiar diagnosis: solipsism. But he carefully traced this failing to Barth’s fear of judgment, rather than his methods, which were ultimately neutral to the spiritual successes and failures of literature. Until his death, Wallace never stopped writing fiction that situated its author as a character, directly addressed the reader, or dabbled in the classics regurgitation he associated with Barth and Barthelme (e.g. “Tri-stan”). The irony of his critique of Barth was that it unintentionally bolstered a superficial disdain for postmodern antics in American literary culture, which neglects the very reasons that Barth believed his metafictional maneuvers necessary in the first place. Because I’d wager that most readers would be surprised to learn that John Barth, Herald of the Neverending Myth, Besieger of the Fourth Wall began as a writer of realistic psychodramas about the despair in American life during the 1950s. The young Barth could not desert his nihilism until he discovered what are today regarded as the instruments of his solipsism.
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II. Doom
“Who can live any longer in the world?” So Barth’s second novel begins to unwind, with a faithless question placed in the mouth of Jake Horner as he flees Wicomico, Maryland, where he’d witnessed a botched abortion. Mortified, he calls a cab. His destination is the novel’s last word: “terminal.”
Although Barth would rib himself for writing a book called The End of the Road (1958) at the overripe age of 27, the novel does not disappoint the dour ultimacy of its title. Mirthless, stagnant and misogynistic, The End of the Road was designed to render the already obvious nihilism of Barth’s first and better book, The Floating Opera (1956), undeniable. Of the American novelists who probed the social instabilities of the country’s postwar realignment, Barth, something of an existentialist, saw that beneath the cracking foundation was a void that beckoned dangerous questions. If the prevailing conventions could be so abruptly reformatted, what secured the permanence of their replacements or alternatives? What if every moral system that guided our decisions and all the cultural norms that calibrated our expectations turned out to be ultimately baseless? Barth dramatized these concerns by suspending The End of the Road and The Floating Opera in the ominous moment just after the overturning of white middle-class mores, when it was plausible for such Americans to believe they might live free of social restrictions altogether.
No messianic goat boys, insecure demigods or sentient spermatozoa; the principal characters of Barth’s first two books were, not unlike their author, ruminative bachelors living in Maryland, distressed by the arbitrariness of their decisions. In The Floating Opera, Todd Andrews, a lawyer beset by chronic prostatitis, begins his formal “inquiry” into the problem of life by writing about not knowing how to begin it. “Any arrangement of things at all is an order,” he complains. For Jake Horner, a youngish grammar professor and boneless worm, the logical architecture beneath language and thought generally appears detached from human affairs. The self-styled thinking man therefore suffers from an existential paralysis he terms “cosmopsis,” which renders Jake unable to choose a trivial weekend destination in one scene, and a vocation in another (his shady therapist chooses for him.) Todd jubilantly discovers that the solution to an arbitrary existence is suicide: “There is no final reason for living.” Such a fate would put him in the company of his father, whom Todd sometimes pictures hanging from a floor joist by a belt.
Ahead of a wider cultural liberation, Todd and Jake become pioneers in fornication, adultery and polyamory. When Todd is reunited with his old friend, Harrison Mack, he finds himself aroused by Harrison’s athletic wife, Jane. While vacationing with them, Todd awakens from a drunken nap to find a naked Jane on his bed (entirely plausible.) The two have sex and Todd, horrified at “the mess I’ve made,” assumes he has destroyed his friendship with Harrison, a disillusioned Marxist from an aristocratic family in Baltimore. Yet during an “objective discussion,” Harrison informs Todd that the affair was his idea. Attempting to reassure Todd, Harrison insists, “Janie and I love each other completely … We’re not stupid enough to be affected by jealousy or conventions” and conspicuously repeats the phrase “Don’t feel obligated!”
Todd and Jane proceed to have sex “six hundred seventy-three” times.
The love triangle of The End of the Road proves less robust. Hired at a local teacher’s college, Jake meets Joe, a megalomaniacal professor who insists, in the style of early Wittgenstein, that sentiments and ideas that cannot be clearly articulated cannot be held to exist. The two get along chopping the logic of pessimism and disparaging women. Jake is soon introduced to Joe’s battered wife, Rennie, whom he describes as a “chunky” woman of “clumsy force” who he finds nonetheless attractive.
Rennie and Jake fall into each other’s arms one night while Joe is away. Jake, typically incapable of making decisions, cannot believe that he has made such a consequential one. Rennie descends into self-loathing and becomes ever more obedient to her husband. Once Joe uncovers the truth, he demands that Rennie explain her infidelity; when she fails to do so, he commands her to have sex with Jake again and again until her reasons reveal themselves—a contrivance for “moral clarification,” as Barth described the passage in a later work. Rennie soon learns she is pregnant with a child that is likely Jake’s and demands he arrange the aforenoted abortion. Anesthetized, Rennie chokes to death on her vomit during the illegal procedure.
The polyamorous experiment of The Floating Opera is similarly abandoned after Jane’s daughter, Jeannine, is born to an uncertain father. Absent social stigma, it shouldn’t matter if it is Todd or Harrison, but of course it does. Near the end of the novel, Todd brings Jeannine to the titular Floating Opera.
And so on. The Floating Opera, a symbol of what Barth elsewhere called the “vaudeville of the world,” cannot be justified to Jeannine, or anyone else; it floats above the inscrutable depths of Why, without foundation or rationale, the deck lights of its comedy swallowed by the oceanic dark. Todd finally decides to kill himself on the opening night but, at the last minute, changes his plans without explanation. During the show, Todd leaves his seat to find the galley. He lights a stove burner, turns the others to full gas, and returns to his seat to await the explosion.
The arbitrariness of experience suggests that life should conform to our whims or comply with the marching orders of rationality. Yet we are denied these consolatory freedoms by our animal nature and the circularity of thought. For Todd, tearing up the contract of life was his last means for defining his existence. The act would provide him a narrative, one that would fulfill an expectation (I will die tonight), resolve a tension (I will no longer suffer an insufferable existence) and create a definitive meaning (life is an impossibility, but there is an exit.) But Todd reasons his way back to where he began, adjusting his epiphany near the end of the novel: “There’s no final reason for living (or for suicide).” The narratives we impose upon experience are fenced within the closed circuits of logic and language. Barth had found his true conundrum, an existential finger trap: the more we strain to order our lives, the more we realize how imprisoned we are within them. The end of the road joins and becomes its own beginning, idly spinning around us until it squeezes inwards, like a belt around a neck. Todd’s venture in mass murder is an expression of this frustration. But even his desperate thrash at a symbol doesn’t go to plan. Poor Toddy honey, awaiting the fiery resolution among his would-be victims, unaware that the bomb will fail to ignite.
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III. Destiny
Barth conceived of his next book as a “nihilist … extravaganza,” the terminus of a trilogy that had already found its end. No great surprise that he encountered some difficulty. Over four years, an unanticipated novel would call to Barth from beyond himself; composing it would foremost demand a transformation not in scheme, philosophy or method, but in the author. Barth would have to learn that “innocence, not nihilism, was my real theme, and had been all along.”
Barth’s third and greatest novel, The Sot-Weed Factor, located this innocence in the failure to distinguish experience from narrative. Barth animated the theme in a novelization of a picaresque about colonial Maryland, written by British-American poet Ebenezer Cooke, whom Barth imitates in a parodic seventeenth-century English (replete with idioms like “In sooth,” “‘sheart,” and “I’faith”22. “Sot-weed” was colonial slang for tobacco, and “factor” referred to a trading agent or middleman.). Only slightly metafictional, the book marked Barth’s discovery of postmodernism (though he would tellingly insist it discovered him) and accomplished what only the postmodern novel could: it recovered a fundamental aspect of human existence that had been displaced by convention. The existential paralysis that Barth explored in The Floating Opera and perfected in The End of the Road was the outgrowth of a distended individualism, a delusion that the human being, by his intellect and agency, lords over experience as the writer masters the page. The Sot-Weed Factor announces itself as a coming-of-age tale, through which its protagonist learns that human beings have never enjoyed this authorial liberty.
The fictive version of Ebenezer “Eben” Cook begins his grand misadventure as a thirty-year-old virgin. A tall, conscientious Englishman, pampered by family wealth into staggering naïveté, Eben is sent to tidewater Maryland with two agendas: to look after his father’s tobacco estate, Malden, which is Eben’s inheritance; and, at the behest of Maryland’s governor, Lord Baltimore, to write an epic glorifying the colony and its denizens (the MARYLANDIAD, as Eben titles the unwritten epic). The poem to immortalize him, and the bountiful hectares of Malden as his earthly reward, Eben’s only other hope is that he will maintain his innocence on a journey that threatens to corrupt it with seduction and compromise. Before sailing west, he pledges himself to a lovely prostitute named Joan Toast, whom he plans to marry and bed once his inheritance makes him a man.
Barth spends one hundred pages describing Eben’s banal expectations and delirious ambitions (“sweet land,” he extols Maryland upon his commission, “Pregnant with song, thy deliverer approacheth”) before subverting them for the next seven hundred. Eben is not so much the subject of The Sot-Weed Factor as its target. He does not navigate the plot; the plot happens to him. He is hurled with the blind powers of nature from one calamity to the next: sailing across the Atlantic, Eben is launched overboard during a squall, then returned to the deck by a rogue wave; he is captured by pirates, who release him, until he is later captured by different pirates, who walk him off a plank; he drowns or prepares to drown a number of times only to find a nearby shore or sand just beneath his fluttering feet; he is abandoned several times by his wily tutor, Henry Burlingame, whom Eben discovers throughout his tale under different guises—Peter Sayer, Tim Mitchell, Nicholas Lowe—and who is also sleeping with Eben’s sister; Eben’s cherished identity as the Poet Laureate of Maryland is repeatedly stolen; he loses his father’s estate to a ruse, gets drunk, despairs, and recovers Malden through a legal technicality; he finds his beloved Joan Toast in America, dying of syphilis, robbed of the beauty that compelled Eben’s devotion, and he marries her anyways. In the end, Eben finds himself unable to sing the glories of colonial Maryland and instead writes a “Hudibrastic exposé” of that land of greed and depravity. Its title: “The Sot-Weed Factor.” Critically speaking, the poem is well received, but, the aged Eben believes, for the wrong reasons.
His idealism corrupted; his dreams foiled; his moral purity sullied; nothing turns out how Eben had imagined it. What rule of life had he broken? Is he a victim of outrageous misfortune? Does God hate him? Burlingame, traveling with Eben on a clear night in the colony, gestures to an answer beyond the false ceiling of narrative: “‘Forget the word sky,’ Burlingame said off-handedly, swinging up on his gelding, ‘’tis a blinder to your eyes. There is no dome of heaven yonder.’”
The instinct for narrative that traces legends among the stars is the same with which we organize experience. We interpret our lives by the Freytagian terms of a story, as an uphill-downhill affair. We brood over whether we’ve “peaked.” Perhaps our present lull is the intermission before our “second act.” Besides, we always have our “final chapter” to await, the denouement of our golden years. The individual extrapolates between the stages and landmarks of life to weave a different constellation—a “life-story,” as Barth termed it—that becomes a map to orient them as celestial objects guide the navigator, and a shield against the horrifying range of possibility in experience. By way of his nauseous epiphany, Eben learns that we, deprived of our life story, are not only lost but exposed, helpless before the immensity of raw experience.
Eben’s vision is of the world’s fundamental anarchy. The “madness,” as Burlingame whispers, of living unsheltered from the “infinite winds of space” is what impels us to accept the impossible terms of the narrativized life: to be both author and protagonist of experience, deity of fate and heroic beneficiary. It’s a losing battle, but the delusion that sustains personal narrative is remarkably adaptable; capable not only of tolerating contradiction but absorbing it into its dramatic structure. Delays become tests of our patience and resolve. Failures indicate our correctable inadequacies. Denials charge up our imminent vindication. The countless other lives we see ruined by circumstance, rotten luck or self-sabotage become cautionary prologue to our legend. Their stories are tragedies. Praise the heavens, we live in a prophecy.
Soon enough, in some way, experience reminds us all of its unconquerability. It disrupts every scheme, overpowers every vehicle, ruptures every vessel. We begrudgingly concede that “the story of our life is not our life; it is our story,” as Barth usefully put it. The main juxtaposition within The Sot-Weed Factor, between the MARYLANDIAD (a fictional character’s dreamwork) and The Sot-Weed Factor (a record of his lived experience; a real object in our world) would suggest that most of our life is hyphenated, unavoidably caught between experience and narrative, world and dream.
That is certainly how I interpret the story of my life. And by “I” I don’t mean the formalized presence you locate behind these sentences, but the writer, the actual person, alive, just now, wearing a brown t-shirt, weathering a mean bout of acid reflux as he struggles to wind down this essay for the umpteenth time, partly because he insists that it conclude with some self-conscious acrobatics that don’t just defend Barth’s technique but exemplify it by conjuring that special zone of hyperawareness, here, where we are now, which, although not reality, is closer to it than the conventions of essay writing usually allow, but mostly because he has failed lately to summon the motivation to write, observing that each subsequent thing he puts into the world delivers less of the satisfaction he has come to expect, because as he’s become despondent about the prospect of a “career” as a writer in the 21st century, the centerpiece of his own outlandish narrative, he often doubts that anyone actually reads the things he writes. This is a practical concern, since he believes the already tiny readership that would be interested in a longish essay about a dead and difficult postmodernist is contracting, but it has also become a deeper paranoia, a failure to imagine anyone on the other end of the line, so to speak, not merely the idealization of a reader that writers are taught to address, but you, the living person supposedly reading these words on screen or paper, in a moment of a life that, this writer might wager, has not panned out the way you imagined, either. When the writer should be attempting to communicate to this theoretic you, he sometimes daydreams about Eben in the epilogue of The Sot-Weed Factor, whom Barth portrays as roundly defeated, wizened by experience, but grumpy, wondering if that is how his, the writer’s, own little story is bound to end.
But see I’ve made the mistake again. I imagine my life ending like a novel, even a postmodern one, and in a blink the sky assumes its sheltering dome. I am similarly tempted to claim that Barth discovered a lasting contentment after The Sot-Weed Factor, and that the bliss and terror of his insight never left him. But that is story, not life. During an interview with David Foster Wallace, the literary critic Michael Silverblatt once described his friend Barth sometime after the publication of Lost in the Funhouse as “happy” and “uxorious,” states difficult to reconcile with the gloomy sexists and the “nihilistic bent” of Barth’s first novels. By his abrupt metamorphosis, Barth had “solved certain of life’s problems that he thought couldn’t be solved.” Yet Silverblatt also identified a “wrong turning” in Barth’s writing around this time, in the compulsion to re-solve these same quandaries, to compose the same book, with the same tricks and themes “again and again, not in the attempt to get them right but to find out where they went wrong.” The notion conjures the image of Rennie and Jake fucking mechanically, programmatically, lovelessly, trying to dislodge an explanation for the very transgression they are committing.
Barth’s escape from nihilism required the composition of novels that were aware of themselves as narratives, as means of reducing and organizing experience, which both dramatized and transcended the countless failures of narrative when brought to the threshold of life. (It is something of a wonder that novels can do this.) To read these books is to learn (thrillingly) and relearn (less thrillingly) that your life is not a story because it is larger than any story could be. But how many times can this treasure be discovered? Although Barth’s late oeuvre would seem to attest otherwise, I suspect he knew the answer was, of course, once. What readers experience first as an urgent spiritual conundrum becomes, upon resolution, reconstruction and reenactment, an eroded and vacant labyrinth. The holy mystery is reduced to a math problem.
Barth’s awareness of this flaw becomes palpable in the preemptive defenses and apologies he inserted into his fiction. Typically concerned with the mechanics of his storytelling, these obsequious gestures often seem irrelevant or jokingly inadequate. There’s no use. Once narrative has broken itself open, its contents are indelibly absorbed into a wider inexhaustible reality. All one can do after that moment is live. What his critics would eventually regard as tyrannical solipsism was little more than insulation against life, and a terror of an art that embraces life.
Of course, that inadequacy was built into the largely destructive program of postmodernism. The great postmodern novelists sought apocalyptic reversals and demolitions (righteously, by my lights) in an effort to reacquaint humanity with its ductility, ignorance and helplessness. Pynchon miniaturized us before the entropic machinations of history. DeLillo rendered consciousness an instrument of totalizing cultural logics. Even Nabokov peered from behind his psychic sceneries to remind readers that character, like soul, was mere puppetry. Barth lampooned the wild audacity of the narrativized life, the assumption that each of us is owed a blank slate on which to etch and chisel our legend. Yet for how musically and variously he could puncture this conceit, he had so little to say about the life lived free of that illusion. In his later years, he even seemed to occasionally rediscover his old nihilism in new terms: the storytelling animal was helpless but to project narratives onto a universe that would never accommodate them.
But this, too, is its own form of childish world-denial. We cannot chart the course of our lives, because that course is drawn by the world beyond us. The adage to which many of us finally submit holds that the world (or God, if you like) poses questions that we answer in life. Poet William Bronk was closer when he wrote: “If we are asked how we shall live in the world / it doesn’t ask us. It lives us if it will.” We, our overflowingly storied lives, are the answer to the question the world is always asking itself. The best of Barth found this truth humming in the wreckage of “realism.” To live in the world, I am not asked to relinquish the meaning of my life, only the illusion that I am its author. One way or another, the destiny we plot for ourself will be wrenched from our white-knuckled grip to leave behind something realer, something we might call by that same enchanted word.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.