Beyond the End of the End of the Road

CHIMERA is not Barth's best book. It is not really even close. But it is serious experimentation of a high order and its failure works in ways more interesting than mere success.

Only just recently has perspective brought some recognizable shape into the fictional chaos of the last fifteen years and as the dust finally settles. John Barth is found at center stage. At each recent development in experimental fiction. Barth has consistently been on hand. His career is a case in point for a whole generation of American writers and as he and his colleagues try to write themselves into the seventies a brief glance back may be in order.

I

John Barth came of novelistic age in the fifties when existentialism was all the rage, and the grand American theme was embattled innocence in the rye and on the road. His first two novels. The Floating Opera (1956) and The End of the Road (1958) are cast in the spirit of those times conventional in form ironic in tone, and much preoccupied with the problem of moral choice in the face of absurdity. The two books received a due measure of critical success, and qualified Barth as one of the promising young talents on the American scene.

But he was plants dissatisfied Barth came to writing by was of literary studies--he is now a professor of English-and he knew too much of what fiction could be to be satisfied with what his fiction way. The construction of the realistic novel embarrassed him--the naming of characters, the filling in of backgrounds, the painstaking drawing up of climax and resolution. Why call his hero Lodd Andrews? And why have him resolve to commit suicide and why then change his mind? With an infinity of possibilities, choice implies reasons, and reasons and good reasons. But Barth had no good reasons. What so bothered him was that one story telling decision looked quite as good as another, so how could one go about deciding at all?

SO BARTH wrote The Sot-Weed Factor. Gone was the contemporary setting, gone the psychological verisimilitude, and gone this bogey of coherent realistic plotting. The Sot-Weed Factor is a parody of the 18th century English picaresque novel, replete with all the themes and devices that genre requires--journey and shipwreck, character disappearance and reappearance, discovery of long-lost relatives, bawdiness, drug peddling and diverse and sundry legal entanglements. Plot complications breed plot complications, and the tangle of events exceeds comprehension. It is the quintessential 18th century novel two centuries too late. Barth enjoyed himself completely.

The Sot-Weed Factor ushered in a new vein of American fiction in the early and middle sixties including Pynchon's V. Heller's Catch-22, and Coover's The Origin of the Brunists. What these works all share is an abiding contempt for the boundaries of traditional realism and traditional notions of seriousness. The example of the early moderns, Joyce in particular, had been terrifying. In a novel like Ulysses, the most incidental details were somehow necessary. Instead of trying to compete on these terms, the novelists of the sixties rejected such lofty ambitions and produced fiction where everything was superfluous, nothing necessary. The novels are large exuberant things; playful, comic, sexually explicit, sacreligious and exceedingly complex.

Barth is fond these days of recounting the origin of Giles Goat-Boy, his next novel. It seems that critics of The Sot-Weed Factor began commenting on the similarity between that novel's protagonist and the archetypal mythic hero--with his innocence, his rite of sexual initiation, his quest and so on. Barth himself protests that such similarity was quite unconscious, but once alerted, he set out to make good use of it. Written with the same complexity of plot and wild comedy that filled The Sot-Weed Factor. Giles Goat-Boy is the tale of George Giles, Everyhero, the offspring of a virgin and a computer, who sets out to save the world in a quest that recalls Jesus, Moses, Oedipus and Buddha, to name a few.

Giles Goat-Boy and The Sot-Weed Factor were investigations into the novel in all its massiveness and variety, storytelling released to its infinite possibilities. By the end of the sixties, though. Barth was looking in a new direction, and Lost in the Funhouse (1969) was a radical departure from everything that had preceded it in Barth's career. A collection of highly experimental stories, the volume was subtitled "Fiction for Print. Tape, Live Voice," and was originally scheduled for publication accompanied by tapes. Packaging prohibited it, and this certainly kept Barth's effort from full realization. In any case, among some disappointments, two strains of experimentation stand out. The first is a movement (in stories like Glossolaha or Two Meditations) toward the elimination of plot and character altogether leaving only words in sequence language to sound and rhythm. But this reaches something of dead end, and Barth has not returned to it since. The second strain of experimentation has proved more useful It is Barth's return to myth and agent for the subject matter of his fiction--as in Menelaid and or Anonymiad--making the novel new by making it old.

II

CHIMERA, a collection of three novellas pursues this latter trail. The first story Dunyazadiad is Barth's version of the thousand and one Arabian nights. Traditionally, you may remember the tale goes as follows. Shahryar, king of Samarkand, has been deceived in love. Resolving that woman is a weak and sinful creature, he decides on an elaborate punishment which includes his personal deflowering of a virgin every night and her execution the following morning. After a time, Scheherezade's turn arrives. To foil the king's designs, she begins a story that first evening but stops before its conclusion, promising to continue the following evening Intrigued the king grants her a respite, and for the next one thousand nights the strategy repeated Finally. Scheherezade, having so well entertained aimed her king, asks for and receives his pardon.

For Barth the legend is a natural, the storyteller is dramatic hero weaving tales to stretch out her life. More and more in the last several years. Barth has come to identify the modern novelist's predicament with Scheherezade's--the teller of tales on the verge of extinction, forced to dazzling heights of ingenuity to trick out one more lifesaving fable. Barth has begun to conceive of the act of storytelling as one of the most fun damental of human actions, and there is a passage in Dinyazadiad where he dwells for some time on similarities between the rise and fall of dramatic structure and the rhythms of sexual intercourse.

BUT BARTH'S attraction to myth is double edged. For while he retains his source's general outline of events, he thoroughly changes the tone humanizing his characters, satirizing them and altering enough details to make the heroic (into the comic. His Scheherezade the calls her Sherry) is a student at the university and a partisan of the women's movement she would like nothing better than to disrupt the king's indiscriminate slaughter of her sisters, but she has no plan at all, until a bald headed genie from the future (Barth himself) rivers and, having read A Thousand and One Nights, is able to supply her with the stories.

This is a use of myth which has nothing to do with the more traditional uses throughout this century. Novels like Malamud's The Natural, Updike's The Centaur and Joyce's Ulysses, Barth has said, are certainly admirable successes, but as far as he is concerned, they are at the wrong end of the stick. The trick is not to find the mythic elements in everyday reality but to go straight to the myths themselves to find the real people inside the heroic shells. This is Barth's method in Dunyazadiad and the other two novellas, as well Perseid and Bellerophoniad.

Barth's Perseus is twenty years past the glorious days of the slaying of Medusa--he is impotent, his wife sleeps around. Pegasus can no longer fly and Bellerophon has become a professor of literature. Barth's heroes have unheroic self-doubts, think dirty thoughts, study poli sci and get high on hippomenes. Zeus, in the form of a high school drop-out, rapes unsuspecting women and Bellerophon is dismissed by all as another quack would-be hero. Heroic love is forever lost in the sexual profusion and confusion of these post-Freudian ancient Greeks.

IN THE MEAN-TIME. Barth continues his radical experiments in form. There are stories within stories within digressions, flights back and forth through time and a complicated diagram of the heroic cycle. There are pauses in mid-text for the narrator to comment impatiently on the unsatisfactory progress of the narrative. Heroes from other Barth novels make cameo appearances, and halfway through Bellerophoniad, Barth presents an autobiographical account of his novelistic career. For the confused reader, he obligingly provides Robert Graves's summary of the details of the Bellerophon myth.

The trouble with Chimera is that Barth has grown too ambitious too fast. He is trying all at once to create new narrative forms, to engage in political satire and to tell stories. But the form is not yet ready, the satire is shrill, and the stories suffer. Chimera is an attempt to join the mythic experiments of Lost in the Funhouse with the storytelling--extravagance of The Sot-Weed Factor, and Barth himself seems not to have realized how monumental a task that is.

So Chimera is finally unsatisfying, unrealized. Barth's imagination has soared higher, his wit has pierced sharper. Still, there are moments when it is all working, when the myth, the irony, and the experiment resolve themselves into some sort of precarious harmony, and the radical possibilities of this fiction come clear. So it is not too much to hope that the seventies will yet bear what the sixties begot. It is not too much to hope that Barth's best work is still unwritten.