BARTH, John Simmons

(b. 27 May 1930 in Cambridge, Maryland), fiction writer whose novels are both complex human tales and investigations into the nature of fiction.

The son of John Jacob Barth and Georgia Simmons, Barth was born in the Maryland Tidelands area that has been the scene of most of his fiction. He had an older brother and a twin sister, and indeed, twins became a theme in his writing.

After graduating from high school, Barth went to study music at Julliard High School in New York City, where he soon realized that he did not have the ability to become a professional musician. He returned to Maryland and attended Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, attaining an A.B. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952. On 11 January 1950 he married Anne Strickland, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. He remained at Johns Hopkins as a junior instructor until 1953, then moved to Pennsylvania State University, where he moved up the academic ladder to the rank of associate professor. In 1965 he went to the State University of New York at Buffalo as a full professor.

His first two novels, both brief, amusing, nihilistic tales, were published in the1950s: The Floating Opera in 1956 andEnd of the Road in 1958. (A revised edition of the latter, published in 1967, was called The End of the Road.) These did not prepare the reader for his next work, in 1960.

The Sot-Weed Factor (its title is an archaic term for a tobacco merchant) is an 800-page mock epic, mostly set in late-seventeenth-century Maryland. Its protagonist, Ebenezer Cooke (based on a historical figure of that name), is described throughout as "poet and virgin." In the former role, Cooke sets out to write an epic Marylandiad, about the newly discovered land; in the latter, he sets out as an innocent, like Voltaire's Candide, and encounters even more sex, violence, and disillusionment than his predecessor. Cooke is guided by the utterly corrupt Henry Burlingame, a trickster who impersonates many other people during the book, and thus sets a theme of the untrustworthiness of all information, from texts to the evidence of the senses. The Sot-Weed Factor has stories within stories, including the epic Cooke is writing and the remarkably obscene alleged diary of Captain John Smith. The doubt cast upon all these sources leaves the reader with little or no certainty about anything that has happened.

Barth's next novel, Giles Goat-Boy; Or, the Revised New Syllabus (1966), managed to be even stranger than its predecessor. With some simplification, it may be described as an allegorical gospel about a half-man half-goat who discovers his humanity and becomes a savior in a university that represents the universe. Barth, who denied that the book was his own work, presented it as a computer tape given to him, but the book includes an (alleged) note from the publisher to the effect that Barth really did write it. In the course of his quest, Giles must fulfill all of the traditional hero roles. (In fact, Barth has admitted that he referred to Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces to ensure that he included all the stages.) Eventually, Giles has to find three separate answers to the central riddle of life. The book also includes parodic references to the Bible (both testaments) and many ancient myths, as well as a full-length play, Taliped Decanus, which is Oedipus Rex translated to the university setting. At the end, the reader is left even more uncertain than in The Sot-Weed Factor as to what is true in the context of the book.

Having seemingly exhausted the possibilities of the long novel, Barth turned to short stories, publishing the collection Lost in the Funhouse in 1968. These stories likewise turned away from traditional narrative. The book largely focuses on Ambrose, a writer, beginning with "Night-Sea Journey," the saga of the sperm that will unite with an egg to become him. In the title story Ambrose finds the experience of being in the funhouse so daunting that he decides to become an artist, one who creates funhouses for others, and the author demonstrates his ability to create such complex wonders. One tour de force, "Menelaid," includes seven levels of quotation (quotes within quotes), yet remains clear.

Another important Barth work of the 1960s was an essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion" (first printed in the Atlantic, 1967). The essay was widely considered to be a statement of "the death of the novel": the belief that it no longer was possible to write meaningful novels. Barth has insisted that he was merely making clear that a particular stage in history was passing, and pointing to possible directions from there. He later wrote a follow-up essay, "The Literature of Replenishment" (1979), to clarify the point.

At the end of the decade Barth went through personal changes. He and his wife divorced in 1969, and the following year, on 27 December 1970, he married Shelly Rosenberg. In 1973 he returned to Johns Hopkins as a professor. He has written eight more books of fiction, including the remarkable Letters (1979), in which he brings back the central characters from his six previous books.

Barth is often considered one of the patron saints of post-modernism because of the way his fiction calls its own existence into question, leaving the work not a self-contained whole with its own internally consistent truth, but an entity in multiple dialog with the author, the reader, and the rest of literature—perhaps the rest of the universe. The multiple frauds and impostures in The Sot-Weed Factor and the complex apparatus surrounding the central tale in Giles Goat-Boy admirably serve this purpose. Barth should not, however, be seen as merely the constructor of funhouses, complex but ultimately lifeless. He is a writer of wit and grace, and his self-referential structures are inhabited by living beings.

Barth's manuscripts are kept in the Library of Congress and the libraries of Pennsylvania State and Johns Hopkins Universities. He discusses his life in The Friday Book (1984), particularly in the essay "Some Reasons Why I Tell the Stories I Tell the Way I Tell Them Rather than Some Other Stories Some Other Way." There is no full biography of Barth. Important studies of his life and writing include David Morrell, John Barth: An Introduction (1976); Max F. Schulz, The Muses of John Barth: Tradition and Metafiction from Lost in the Funhouse to The Tidewater Tales (1990); and Alan Lindsay, Death in the Funhouse: John Barth and Poststructural Aesthetics (1995).

Arthur D. Hlavaty