Never Read John Barth

 I came close to reading John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor while in prison. A copy had been dumped in one of the classrooms, I glanced at it, decided to come back for it, and when I did so the book was gone. Prison seems a good place to read it, or an extended convalescence. It was a huge paperback.

 Rob Madole wrote about the novel in his Life in the Fap Lane. Aftger reading this, I am not sure I did not get lucky:

Barth’s humor, in other words, verges on the self-pleasuring. But the charge of onanism goes beyond Barth’s bawdy predilections to the broader aesthetic formation The Sot-Weed Factor was among the earliest novels to delineate, characterized by a penchant for nesting stories within stories within stories, an indiscriminate mixing of high and lowbrow, and an explicit fondness for self-referential, so-called “metafictional” narrators (the epilogue to The Sot-Weed Factor is entitled “The Author Apologizes to His Readers”). These were all traits of an emerging literary style critics such as Leslie Fiedler would, by the end of the decade, be calling “postmodernism,” and the term’s earliest adopters, in defining its contours, often cited Barth’s trio of books from the 1960s as examples. (After The Sot-Weed Factor came Giles Goat-Boy in 1966, a surprise commercial hit, followed in 1968 by the story collection Lost in the Funhouse.)

By the 1980s, critical theorists like Fredric Jameson and David Harvey had reframed postmodernism as a historical epoch rather than an aesthetic category—a “cultural ether,” to quote Perry Anderson’s The Origins of Postmodernity—that emerged alongside the prevailing postwar social order and was conditioned by “objective alterations of the economic order of capital itself.” Nevertheless, within literary discourse, the word remained linked to the style of maximalists like Barth, and it accrued a controversial reputation that still clings to it today. Among detractors, postmodern novels are derided as show-offy and self-indulgent, reflecting the baleful influence of navel-gazing Continental theory....

But it does raise the question of what the novel is to be. That is a question that does interest me, one I have been trying to understand ever since KH suggested I try to write a novel instead of killing myself. 

Vidal’s “R&D fiction” coinage encapsulates a common critique of postmodernism’s supposedly ouroboros-like nature, written not to move readers’ hearts but to generate a self-perpetuating loop of eggheaded academic analysis. In most other respects, his takedown reads as a cantankerous settling of scores—Vidal goes out of his way to emphasize he knows more about eighteenth-century novels than Barth—but it does distil one critical point about literary postmodernism in America that often goes unremarked upon: its deep entanglement with the postwar institutionalization of creative writing. The definitive book on the subject is Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, which points out that nearly all the postmodern iconoclasts—Pynchon being the exception who proves the rule—were, at one point or another, salaried instructors in an MFA program. Barth himself enrolled in one of the nation’s first undergraduate writing programs during his junior year at Johns Hopkins in 1950; he’d finish his bachelor’s, master’s, and half a doctorate there before leaving to teach at Penn State and SUNY Buffalo, only to return in the wake of Giles Goat-Boy’s success and remain until his retirement in 1995.

McGurl’s Program Era framing helps broaden the perspective around the Barth backlash, highlighting the extent to which self-reflexivity was not some pernicious creation emanating from Baltimore, as Wallace’s “Westward” allegory has it, but instead the prevailing literary paradigm during an era in which, as McGurl writes, “every work of serious fiction . . . is, on one level, a portrait of the artist.” McGurl characterizes this as the “autopoetics” of America’s literary discourse network, reflecting a broader society-wide imperative toward self-observation and self-staging in the emerging postwar information economy, the navigation of which requires “individuals who understand themselves to be living, not lives simply, but life stories of which they are the protagonists.” Collegiate creative writing fills an obvious programmatic role under such a paradigm, and its instructors are subject to the same mandates as any knowledge worker laboring under a regime of “reflexive accumulation”—postmodernity’s answer to modernity’s famous “logic of differentiation”—which is to submit one’s craft to rigorous self-monitoring and analysis in order to pursue innovation in formal, stylistic, or technical terms. One byproduct of such a system is an aesthetic of involuted self-referentiality of the sort exemplified as much by Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” as Wallace’s supposed renunciation of it in “Westward”—stories that, while pedagogically deconstructing on a “meta” level the very narrative conventions they’re employing, also function to fashion authorial origin stories and elaborate a series of thematic concerns that will be revisited across the authors’ careers (in Wallace’s case a torturously ambivalent relationship to “sincerity,” and in Barth’s an ever-more-involuted treatment of the “funhouse mirror room” metaphor, which renders his novels after the 1970s a bit of a slog for any but the most devoted fans).

Sounds like bloody serious stuff, the sort I am not likely to entertain with whatever time I have left me. Also, I have other goals, purposes, for my writing. CC told me that I would have to write the story I thought she had to tell. Well, then I will play witness. In my own way.

But we’re still left with the question of the novel’s social function—whether only works of fiction that are “penetrative,” that seek to elicit a species of perspective-broadening sympathy within their readers, are fulfilling literature’s proper role and responsibility. The answer hinges, to a certain extent, on whether one subscribes to a liberal aesthetic program that maintains faith in the weighty, empathy-generating power authors wield to redeem our solipsistic epoch. This isn’t a perspective shared by Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, at the root of which lies an earthy, self-deprecating joke about the sordidness of all authorial pretensions. After Ebenezer publishes his denunciatory poem to scant acclaim, he puts aside his literary ambitions and settles down to the boring life of a tobacco planter in tidewater Maryland, where in 1732 he expires, enjoying the distinction, at least, of having been the colony’s first and only poet laureate. “To the best of the Author’s knowledge,” read the final lines of the book, “[Maryland’s] marshes have spawned no poet since Ebenezer Cooke, Gentleman, Poet and Laureate of the Province.” The joke, of course, is that the bawdy, bewildering, maximalist reimagining of Ebenezer’s life in the form of the giant novel we’ve just finished positions Barth as the sole true heir to Ebenezer’s concocted title, which is not exactly a noble distinction—a portrait of the artist as a virginal, provincial, status-seeking hack, deluded by visions of grandeur and given to penning couplets with the same knuckly hand that . . . well, you get the point. Writers, they’re just like us.

And I am back with Milan Kundera in his Art of the Novel, hearing him talk about how every trend of literature is caught up in one novel: Don Quixote.  Now, I have no clue what I am doing with my novels. I have not even been able to get all of any one of them typed, but unlike the short story, it seems to me anything is possible. It is a tool, a vessel, to tell the story wanting to be told. What I want to tell is the craziness of the world around me.

sch 11/24/22