“Scheherazade, c'est moi”: Narrativist mimesis and the principle of metaphoric means in John Barth

Abstract

Summary Since his retirement in the early nineteen nineties as a professor of creative writing from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, John Barth has published three new works: Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera (1994) ‐ which he calls a “semi‐novel semi‐reminiscence”; Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction (1995) ‐a collection of essays; and On With the Story: Stories (1996) ‐ a collection of short stories. The title and contents of this latest work confirm my earlier hypothesis that Barth's entire later work is governed by the principle of what I have come to call “narrativist mimesis”; the ultimate form of poststructuralist mimesis. His fictions have over the years developed an ongoing critique of forms of mimesis, moving from realist and mythemic to poststructuralist and narrativist mimesis.1 Concurrently we also see in Barth's later fiction that not only the genesis, but also the viability and survival of fiction as such, are other major concerns. Part of his programme forthe replenishment of literature is a return to “the story‐teller's art”, in the form of narrativist mimesis, a return with a difference to “the springs of narrative”. This article investigates how his later fiction, that is, from his seventh novel, LETTERS (1979), onwards, is fed by contemporary literary‐aesthetic theory and guided by the principle of narrativist mimesis.