Word: barthes
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...BARTH wrote The Sot-Weed Factor. Gone was the contemporary setting, gone the psychological verisimilitude, and gone this bogey of coherent realistic plotting. The Sot-Weed Factor is a parody of the 18th century English picaresque novel, replete with all the themes and devices that genre requires--journey and shipwreck, character disappearance and reappearance, discovery of long-lost relatives, bawdiness, drug peddling and diverse and sundry legal entanglements. Plot complications breed plot complications, and the tangle of events exceeds comprehension. It is the quintessential 18th century novel two centuries too late. Barth enjoyed himself completely...
...Barth is fond these days of recounting the origin of Giles Goat-Boy, his next novel. It seems that critics of The Sot-Weed Factor began commenting on the similarity between that novel's protagonist and the archetypal mythic hero--with his innocence, his rite of sexual initiation, his quest and so on. Barth himself protests that such similarity was quite unconscious, but once alerted, he set out to make good use of it. Written with the same complexity of plot and wild comedy that filled The Sot-Weed Factor. Giles Goat-Boy is the tale of George Giles, Everyhero...
Giles Goat-Boy and The Sot-Weed Factor were investigations into the novel in all its massiveness and variety, storytelling released to its infinite possibilities. By the end of the sixties, though. Barth was looking in a new direction, and Lost in the Funhouse (1969) was a radical departure from everything that had preceded it in Barth's career. A collection of highly experimental stories, the volume was subtitled "Fiction for Print. Tape, Live Voice," and was originally scheduled for publication accompanied by tapes. Packaging prohibited it, and this certainly kept Barth's effort from full realization. In any case...
CHIMERA, a collection of three novellas pursues this latter trail. The first story Dunyazadiad is Barth's version of the thousand and one Arabian nights. Traditionally, you may remember the tale goes as follows. Shahryar, king of Samarkand, has been deceived in love. Resolving that woman is a weak and sinful creature, he decides on an elaborate punishment which includes his personal deflowering of a virgin every night and her execution the following morning. After a time, Scheherezade's turn arrives. To foil the king's designs, she begins a story that first evening but stops before its conclusion, promising...
...Barth the legend is a natural, the storyteller is dramatic hero weaving tales to stretch out her life. More and more in the last several years. Barth has come to identify the modern novelist's predicament with Scheherezade's--the teller of tales on the verge of extinction, forced to dazzling heights of ingenuity to trick out one more lifesaving fable. Barth has begun to conceive of the act of storytelling as one of the most fun damental of human actions, and there is a passage in Dinyazadiad where he dwells for some time on similarities between the rise...