Word: barth
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...Barth's trick is to bend the old Golden Bough into fairy tales about the ordinary daily reality of archetypes. So we find Perseus, the slayer of Medusa, bogged down in middle age and suffering from what might be called hero's block. "You saw how it was," he says to his mistress, a nymph. "The kids were grown and restless; Andromeda and I had become different people; our marriage was on the rocks. The kingdom took care of itself; my fame was sure enough-but I'd lost my shine with golden locks...
...recapture his youth when Athena re-Gorgonizes Medusa. Only this time Perseus has to pull off the caper without the old tricks -winged shoes, helmet of invisibility, etc. The problem is akin to that of an experienced novelist who cannot use old techniques to write a new novel, and Barth seems to get quite a chuckle...
...Bellerophoniad," the domesticated archetype is Bellerophon, tamer of the winged horse, killer of the fire-breathing Chimera, conqueror of the Amazons and generally a favorite of the gods. Barth renders Bellerophon's adventures into a dizzying situation comedy in which metaphors are homogenized and characters recede into their own stories and reappear so that the middle of one man's tale could be another's beginning or ending. Both "Perseid" and "Bellerophoniad" spin on little else than the axis of Barth's cleverness, and both wobble badly...
...Dunyazadiad" is a different story (within a story within a story) and a winged horse of a brighter color. In it Barth succeeds with clarity, succinctness and natural ease in creating a modern tale out of the oldest forms of storytelling. It is about Scheherazade's famous plight as told by her younger sister Dunyazade, who sat at the foot of the bed for 1,001 nights while the Shah made love to Scheherazade and was held spellbound by her stories. It may be recalled that before the Shah met "Sherry," as she is known in the bedchamber...
...love-which become pretty much the same thing before Barth gets through-soothe the Shah. Art and love are among the few things that Barth seems to take very seriously. They are beyond the reach of his word webs, or, as Scheherazade says: "Making love and telling stories both take more than good technique-but it's only the technique that we can talk about...