John Barth's "Glossolalia"

Abstract

NE OF THE MOST fundamental distinctions in literary criticism is one between verse and prose. Every literary text, it is assumed, is either one or other, or occasionally some mixture of two. The possibility of a third category is rarely entertained. The chief difference between verse and prose, it is also assumed, is meter. The Oxford English Dictionary says that principal signification of prose is the ordinary form of written or spoken language, without metrical structure; esp. as a species or division of literature. Verse is defined in an analogous but opposite fashion: Metrical composition, form, or structure; language or literary work written or spoken in metre; poetry, esp. with reference to metrical form. Such a simple set of definitions for prose and verse has been weakened, or at least made far more complicated, by general acceptance of free (that is, nonmetrical) verse. Though there are still many dissenters, a large number of critics are willing to admit that there are nonmetrical texts which nevertheless ought to be called verse. In this essay I propose to complicate matters further by examining a text which is metrical in a perfectly unambiguous way but which remains in spite of its meter a piece of prose. To make issues as clear as possible, I shall establish metrical structure of this text by comparing it to another one which, though metrical in exactly same way as first, happens to be verse. It is hoped that out of this dramatic confrontation will come a new understanding of relationships that obtain in practice among notions of meter, verse, and prose. John Barth's collection Lost in Funhouse contains a group of six short paragraphs collectively entitled Glossolalia. It is, in spite of its brevity, a formidably complex fiction, one that requires an especially imaginative and attentive reader. Each paragraph is composed in a different narrative voice. And each paragraph, one notices, is metrically