BARTH, John (Simmons)

Nationality: American. Born: Cambridge, Maryland, 27 May 1930. Education: The Juilliard School of Music, New York; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, A.B. 1951, M.A. 1952. Family: Married 1) Anne Strickland in 1950 (divorced 1969), one daughter and two sons, 2) Shelly Rosenberg in 1970. Career: Junior instructor in English, Johns Hopkins University, 1951-53; instructor 1953-56, assistant professor, 1957-60, and associate professor of English, 1960-65, Pennsylvania State University, University Park; professor of English, 1965-71, and Butler Professor, 1971-73, State University of New York, Buffalo; Centennial Professor of English and creative writing, Johns Hopkins University, from 1973, later emeritus. Awards: Recipient; Brandeis University Creative Arts award, 1965; Rockefeller grant, 1965; American Academy grant, 1966; National Book award, 1973; F. Scott Fitzgerald award, 1997. Litt.D.: University of Maryland, College Park, 1969; Pennsylvania State University, 1996. Member: American Academy, 1974; American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1974.

Publications

Short Stories

Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice. 1968. Chimera. 1972.

Todd Andrews to the Author. 1979.

On With the Story. 1996.

Novels

The Floating Opera. 1956; revised edition, 1967.

The End of the Road. 1958; revised edition, 1967.

The Sot-Weed Factor. 1960; revised edition, 1967.

Giles Goat-Boy; or, the Revised New Syllabus. 1966. Letters. 1979.

Sabbatical: A Romance. 1982.

The Tidewater Tales: A Novel. 1987.

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor. 1991.

Once Upon a Time. 1994.

Other

The Literature of Exhaustion, and The Literature of Replenishment(essays). 1982.

The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction. 1984.

Don't Count on It: A Note on the Number of the 1001 Nights. 1984.

Further Fridays. 1995 .

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Bibliography:

Barth: A Descriptive Primary and Annotated Secondary Bibliography by Josephy Weixlmann, 1976; Barth: An Annotated Bibliography by Richard Allan Vine, 1977; Barth, Jerzy Kosinski, and Thomas Pynchon: A Reference Guide by Thomas P. Walsh and Cameron Northouse, 1977.

Critical Studies:

Barth by Gerhard Joseph, 1970; Barth: The Comic Sublimity of Paradox by Jac Tharpe, 1974; The Literature of Exhaustion: Borges, Nabokov, and Barth by John O. Stark, 1974; Barth: An Introduction by David Morrell, 1976; Critical Essays on Barth edited by Joseph J. Waldmeir, 1980; Passionate Virtuosity: The Fiction of Barth by Charles B. Harris, 1983; Barth by Heide Ziegler, 1987; Understanding Barth by Stan Fogel and Gordon Slethaug, 1990; "Technology and the Body: Postmodernism and the Voices of John Barth" by Hartwig Isernhagen, in Technology and the American Imagination, An Ongoing Challenge edited by Francesca Bisutti De Riz and Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, 1994; "John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor as a Prototype of Historiographic Metafiction" by Heinz Joachim Mullenbrock, in Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature edited by Bernd Engler and Kurt Muller, 1994; "Before the Law, after the Judgment: Schizophrenia in John Barth's The Floating Opera" by Theron Britt, in Cohesion and Dissent in America edited by Carol Colatrella and Joseph Alkana, 1994; "The Metamorphosis of the Classics: John Barth, Philip Roth, and the European Tradition" by Clayton Koelb, in Traditions, Voices, and Dreams: The American Novel since the 1960s edited by Melvin Friedman and Ben Siegel, 1995.

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While John Barth's literary reputation rests largely upon his work as a novelist, he is most readily introduced to new readers through the short stories in Lost in the Funhouse and the three linked novellas of Chimera. Coming as the two collections did at the end of the 1960s and the start of the 1970s, Barth's experimental fictions "for print, tape, live voice" captured a spirit of mold-breaking, convention-assaulting formal innovation that both sealed off one period of literary history and opened the door to a whole series of others. As much for their exemplary as for their intrinsic merit, both the title story and "Life-Story" in Lost in the Funhouse are among the most frequently anthologized stories from this period in American fiction.

Barth's short stories crystallize on the interface between modernism and decadence. They occupy a moment in literary history when a certain hip awareness of the medium in which one creates threatens to turn opaque, obscuring the work's ostensible subject. His stories may usefully be compared to such postmodernist architectural pranks as the Pompidou Center in Paris, an edifice turned inside out, with all its normally hidden pipes and conduits on display.

"Without discarding what he'd already written he began his story afresh in a somewhat different manner." So begins "Life-Story," Barth's footnote-laden account of a writer grappling with the crushing weight of literary history as he endeavors to write something fresh and true. Writers, readers, and texts tend to be at the center of Barth's fiction; they remind us insistently that they have been written, confront us pointedly with the experience of our own reading, and refuse obstinately to pretend to be anything other than an artifice concocted from words. Yet Barth manages, with surprising success, to be both funny and touching even as he betrays the illusions of his fiction, largely because the writer's and reader's plight (if not that of the characters) is seen itself to be both funny and touching indeed.

Barth manages to turn even self-mockery inside out, and so mocks it: "If I'm going to be a fictional character G declared to himself I want to be in a rousing good yarn as they say, not some piece of avant-garde preciousness" ("Life-Story"). Where characters once clashed in believable settings, now genres do battle in the ruins of rejected and worn-out traditions. The resultant exercises in wit and literary play are not for all readers' tastes, clearly, but to those of "writerly" inclination, Barth's reflexive pastiches and tours de force offer durable delights.

Formal experimentation is pushed to unprecedented extremes in some of these pieces. The first story in Lost in the Funhouse, "Frame-Tale," is a single line of print that runs up the right margin of one page and down the left margin on the other side of the sheet. The reader is instructed to cut it out of the book (!) and tape its ends together with a twist so as to form what topologists call a Möbius strip. If the instructions are followed correctly, the strip reads: "Once upon a time, there was a story that began, Once upon a time, there was a story …, " etc. Barth thus celebrates the ultimate triumph of form over content: perfect symmetry, no plot, and words used to create an analog to video feedback, such as results when a camera is aimed at its own monitor. A similar fascination with the possibilities of substituting the frame for the canvas itself animates "Menelaiad," a Homer-inspired concatenation of nesting narrators whose coinciding interquotations produce such eye-boggling (but ultimately scrutable) lines as "'(") ("(("What?"))') (")"'

A fundamental preoccupation with originality runs through Barth's fictions, even as some of them dare to retell familiar classical stories, such as "Dunyazadiad" (told by Scheherazade's sister), "Perseid," and "Bellerophoniad," the three related novellas of Chimera. The author reminds us repeatedly of the paradox that nothing is so old as the urge to be new. He responds to the challenge by seeking out fiction's own origins—the Homeric retellings, the myths reskewed, the Arabian Nights re-imagined from the distaff side—and making the improbability of improving on them the comic dilemma of his own storytelling heroes and heroines.

Barth's short fiction marks an end to innocence in the willing suspension of the reader's disbelief and the arrival of literary criticism as a mode of fiction itself. In a central passage of "Life-Story" the narrator observes:

inasmuch as the old analogy between Author and God, novel and world, can no longer be employed unless deliberately and as a false analogy, certain things follow: 1) fiction must acknowledge its fictitiousness and metaphoric invalidity or 2) choose to ignore the question and deny its relevance or 3) establish some other, acceptable relation between itself, its author, its reader.

Barth's short fiction playfully and comically explores a variety of those "other, acceptable relations" and does so in full view of the reader—frequently by inserting a version of the reader into the experiment itself. The ludic (or game-playing) stories that result thus embrace esthetic virtues over mimetic ones.

—Brian Stonehill

See the essay on "Lost in the Funhouse."