Word: mythical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...traditional uses throughout this century. Novels like Malamud's The Natural, Updike's The Centaur and Joyce's Ulysses, Barth has said, are certainly admirable successes, but as far as he is concerned, they are at the wrong end of the stick. The trick is not to find the mythic elements in everyday reality but to go straight to the myths themselves to find the real people inside the heroic shells. This is Barth's method in Dunyazadiad and the other two novellas, as well Perseid and Bellerophoniad...
...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 of our ordinary psychic experience...to write realistic fictions which point always to mythic archetypes is in my opinion to take the wrong end of the mythopoetic stick...
...little occurrence. He is variously a Parisian auto mechanic, a keeper of military carrier pigeons, a P.O.W. assistant to the chief forester at Hermann Goring's hunting preserve, and a youth scout for a Nazi eugenics program. Each of these jobs gives Tiffauges a chance to spread his mythic wings. As Abel, he recalls...
...thesis and antithesis. But he is also a good Jungian. Signs, symbols and archetypes are pried from every incident and lofted chaotically into the mythological vacuum of the modern world. The presumption is that these fragments are awaiting a supersign that will unify them into some sort of new mythic order. When this in fact occurs in Tournier's book, the effect is one not of artistic revelation but of melodramatic kitsch: a young Auschwitz refugee turns into a Star of David; the star, in turn, spins off to the heavens as a more generalized mandala symbolizing a harmonious...