Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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LIKE A LITERARY KRONOS, John Barth has stuffed each of his fictional offspring down his maw and let forth an echoing belch of a novel. The noise deafens; Barth blushes. With reason--many an atrocity litters Letters's past, including the authorial analogues of incest, cannibalism and flagellation. But what Barth does in the privacy of his own imagination is his own business; the worst atrocity he reserves for the hapless reader. The siren call of Barth's in-souciance, his cleverness, his recklessness, beckons you towards a grinding crash on the rocks surrounding these 750 pages, and a lonely...
Barth knows. No novel has displayed such an elaborate Maginot Line of prepared defenses since Joyce had Stuart Gilbert write a whole book under his "supervision" to explicate Ulysses. Barth demands that Joycean parallel. You could spend a month, a year, maybe a life detecting patterns within patterns in Ulysses; at the end you might look back and wonder why you bothered, but at least you'd have met thousands of smart people along the way. You can spend the same time with Letters and find equally pleasing patterns, but then look over your shoulder and your only company...
Currently I find myself involved in a longish epistolary novel, of which I know so far only that it will be regressively traditionalist in manner; it will not be obscure, difficult, or dense in the Modernist fashion...
This assault on mechanical modernism--one of Barth's correspondents describes "those symbol-fraught Swiss watches and Schwarzwald cuckoo clocks of Modernism"--hardly fits a novel that follows a schematic masterplan. You see, if you take the seven letters of the title-word "letters," superimpose them on a seven-month calendar using a quaint motto, so that the letters of the motto form the letters of "letters," then each letter of the motto will fall neatly onto a date in the calendar, one for each of the letters in the book...
...letters to the author describes the progress of her affair with Ambrose Mensch, a dilettante writer late of Lose in the Funhouse. Barth makes a feeble effort to set her up as an allegorical representation of "Belles Lettres," on which her--or Ambrose--hopes to father forth a new novel, but she balks, her past liaisons with famous men of letters notwithstanding...