Word: chimeras
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...CHIMERA is not Barth's best book. It is not really even close. But it is serious experimentation of a high order and its failure works in ways more interesting than mere success...
...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...
...CHIMERA by JOHN BARTH 308 pages. Random House...
...Chimera is a coy variation on a number of Barth's favorite themes. Composed in three parts, "Dunyaza-diad," "Perseid" and "Bellerophoniad," the book is largely a gag at the expense of conventional literary forms. Instead of having characters symbolize archetypes as most novelists do, Barth uses the archetypes themselves as characters. Fortunately for the reader, Barth -who is also an English professor at the Buffalo campus of the State University of New York -provides a pony. (Pegasus by any name is just as helpful.) As he explains in Chimera: "Since myths themselves are among other things poetic distillations...
...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...