Word: bellerophon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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...
...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...