Word: barth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...BARTH'S attraction to myth is double edged. For while he retains his source's general outline of events, he thoroughly changes the tone humanizing his characters, satirizing them and altering enough details to make the heroic (into the comic. His Scheherezade the calls her Sherry) is a student at the university and a partisan of the women's movement she would like nothing better than to disrupt the king's indiscriminate slaughter of her sisters, but she has no plan at all, until a bald headed genie from the future (Barth himself) rivers and, having read A Thousand...
This is a use of myth which has nothing to do with the more traditional uses throughout this century. Novels like Malamud's The Natural, Updike's The Centaur and Joyce's Ulysses, Barth has said, are certainly admirable successes, but as far as he is concerned, they are at the wrong end of the stick. The trick is not to find the mythic elements in everyday reality but to go straight to the myths themselves to find the real people inside the heroic shells. This is Barth's method in Dunyazadiad and the other two novellas, as well Perseid...
...Barth's Perseus is twenty years past the glorious days of the slaying of Medusa--he is impotent, his wife sleeps around. Pegasus can no longer fly and Bellerophon has become a professor of literature. Barth's heroes have unheroic self-doubts, think dirty thoughts, study poli sci and get high on hippomenes. Zeus, in the form of a high school drop-out, rapes unsuspecting women and Bellerophon is dismissed by all as another quack would-be hero. Heroic love is forever lost in the sexual profusion and confusion of these post-Freudian ancient Greeks...
...MEAN-TIME. Barth continues his radical experiments in form. There are stories within stories within digressions, flights back and forth through time and a complicated diagram of the heroic cycle. There are pauses in mid-text for the narrator to comment impatiently on the unsatisfactory progress of the narrative. Heroes from other Barth novels make cameo appearances, and halfway through Bellerophoniad, Barth presents an autobiographical account of his novelistic career. For the confused reader, he obligingly provides Robert Graves's summary of the details of the Bellerophon myth...
...trouble with Chimera is that Barth has grown too ambitious too fast. He is trying all at once to create new narrative forms, to engage in political satire and to tell stories. But the form is not yet ready, the satire is shrill, and the stories suffer. Chimera is an attempt to join the mythic experiments of Lost in the Funhouse with the storytelling--extravagance of The Sot-Weed Factor, and Barth himself seems not to have realized how monumental a task that...