Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Classed as a black humorist in the '50s, Barth was hailed as a fabulist in the '60s. He was actually becoming a school of one. Following hints in his own work and examples out of Beckett, Borges and Nabokov, he evolved assumptions that increasingly governed his fiction. Among them: the number of stories to tell is finite and dwindling; print has been rendered passe by film and electronics; realism is an irrational goal for the writer (What is real? Whose reality is it?); art rehashes art. Barth's response was to exalt artifice and make telling...
Barth's career is germane not only because it is one of the most interesting in contemporary letters but also because it literally dictated Letters. The subject of the book, some ten years in the writing, is the body of Barth's previous fiction. Letters is a vast hall of mirrors, endlessly reflecting earlier reflections. After two decades of preparation, Barth has finally lost himself in his own funhouse...
...possible to respect and admire the tenacity that drove the author to this pass. It is possible to state that no student of fiction will be able to ignore the existence of Letters. But it is almost impossible to read the book. Pore over, dip into, muse about, trace patterns through, yes. Follow it willingly and comfortably from beginning...
...first clue appears on the title page, where the word LETTERS is built up from a welter of small letters that, when properly viewed, spell the following: "an old time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls & dreamers each of which imagines himself actual." Letters made up of letters, fiction made up of fictions, Chinese boxes diminishing to emptiness. Such diminution is what the novel is about. The 772 pages that follow thus constitute a stunningly obsessive exercise in inflatio ad absurdum...
...FICTION: A Bend in the River...