An Interview with John Barth

Abstract

Like Ernest Hemingway, another ground-breaking writer of twentieth-century American fiction, John Barth writes every day, the initial drafts always in pen. He says his inspiration does not waft like gentle whisper from Greek muse, but resembles, instead, rumbling King Kong, metaphor for self-reference and self-reflection. But unlike his modernist predecessors, Barth has resisted the traditions of twentieth-century realism. Instead, he has collected an eclectic montage, the past with the present, the old story formulas in postmodern guise, displaying the elements alongside each other to produce curious image of world with which we are not always immediately comfortable or familiar. But, then, neither is he, always. Barth's twelfth book of fiction was released in May 1994 by Little, Brown. title is classic Barth, disarming but with cryptic punch: Once upon Time. And it is the book's subtitle, A Floating Opera, comes like finger's light touch, or reminder. Through it he has returned full circle to the riff set him in search of new literary form in his first long fiction piece, A Floating Opera (1956). Barth's description of his new as a memoir wrapped in novel echoes his generative technique of searching for and therefore redefining the narrative perspective of fiction. Barth's version of postmodernism is less jagged at the edges than of some writers in the mode, if it will sit still long enough to be characterized as mode. He defined his approach in 1967 in The Literature of Exhaustion and refined it little more than decade later in The Literature of Replenishment. heart of his thesis is the modern genre had been exhausted by the close of World War II. Writers at the turn of the century had picked up the torch of the Romantics and carried it once around the track: The great project of modernism, the idea of shaking up bourgeois notions of 'linearity,' and 'consecutivity' and ordinary description of character and ordinary cause and effect, had honorably done its job. Writers after World War II rebelled against their modernist predecessors, realizing nothing of the human condition was left to report in modern sense, except through retold tales--which is something like re-tasting stale raisin cookie has been belched. New ground had to be broken if place for literature was to be found in life not only sounded distinctly different tone but one could not be fully (a point already made by modern existentialists). And Barth was among the vanguard writers to seek synthesis of art and life, itself an imitation of an imitation, thus making of fiction something of two-way mirror through which one peers murkily. Barth makes this effort by employing repetition and by expanding the formal range available to modern fiction to include such forms as the epistolary (Letters), the eighteenth-century adventure (The Sot-Weed Factor), and the quest tale (The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor or Giles Goat-Boy). A narrative voice, usually omniscient, is central to traditional fiction, but in his work there is tension between eliminating the omniscient narrator (since apprehended life is at best tentative) and achieving synthesis towards which the text is headed. Forty years after his initial effort, many of his characters wave at each other from across novels, his house rule being that no particular reader should have to be aware of their appearance in other books. A short piece which probably best captures Barth's effort to use fiction to grab life by the scruff of the neck is Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction, which was part of monophonic tape series in which he participated in the 1960s. Here, fiction invents itself. As narrator, fiction is dissatisfied with the disturbing evolution of the product and argues with its father (Barth?) and its mother (the muse? …