After having published two novels by 1958, John Barth sat in front of a fireplace for two years, without moving or budging or repositioning himself for comfort; when asked what he was doing, the young man would respond, "Thinking." Come the end...
[more]After having published two novels by 1958, John Barth sat in front of a fireplace for two years, without moving or budging or repositioning himself for comfort; when asked what he was doing, the young man would respond, "Thinking." Come the end of this lengthy meditative period, a novel named "The Sot-Weed Factor" was published, and Barth was its author; the work had been written, edited, and published through the sheer profundity and tireless focus of his fireside cogitations, without even a single finger having tapped his typewriter's keyboard. It was the first novel to be produced entirely by thought.
No matter the veracity of this story, it exemplifies the nature of Barth's approach to and conception of prose fiction, and in particular the novel; it was a growing, vibrant, and provocative disposition, fastened together – through its divergent and digressive literary manifestations and strands of thought – by the integrity of Barth's thought and his dedication to exploring the essential qualities of fiction and storytelling.
It was these preoccupations that have led him to having become perhaps the preeminent "metafiction" writer. After "Sot-Weed," Barth wrote "Giles Goat-Boy, or The Revised New Syllabus of George Giles our Grand Tutor"; the two bear hints of his metafictional interests – primarily in their self-referentiality and allusive qualities, as well as their numerous digressions and frame stories, which question the singularity of a story's "plot" –, but it was not until his subsequent publication, the short story collection "Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice," that these preoccupations found more explicit, formal dedication. He would continue pursuing the integral qualities of fictional narrative in "Chimera" and "LETTERS" – the latter of which finds the characters of all of his previous works in epistolary conversation – and later in his essays "The Literature of Exhaustion" and "The Literature of Replenishment," both of which argue, from different theoretical vantage points, that literature, as it had come to be constructed and read, had reached a festering point at which new literary means and methods had to be explored.
What is missing in this reading – of Barth as eminent metafictionist – is his dedication to character and what even he would have considered traditional literary techniques – which is not necessarily to say outdated or ineffectual; his intent was not to provoke a revolution, but merely analyze to it, and he by no means called for a complete overhaul of all things old-fashioned, but merely all things "exhausted" –, all of which he evidently valued. Like his metafictionist bedfellows Robert Coover, William Gass, and Kurt Vonnegut, his work – however self-conscious and experimental – nonetheless maintained an interest in the earthly and humane, rarely straying, with the considerable exception of much of the stories in "Lost in the Funhouse," into purely theoretical and self-referential territory.
His name – outside of academic circles – may now be on the wane, as the inevitable decontextualization process takes hold and Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthelme seem primed to take the crowns as Postmodernist fiction's greatest heroes, but his contributions to metafictional critique and the depth of his considerations have long since become intrinsic to contemporary literary thought.
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