Word: novelized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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 the subject of the tale. Giles Goat-Boy (1966) was less a novel than a treatise on the archetypes of heroism; some of the stories in Lost in the Funhouse (1968) suggested antiphonal readings between printed page and tape recorder, or struggled gamely just to get themselves started; the three novellas in Chimera (1972) portrayed classical myths swallowed by their own commentaries...
What happened? The 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...
...chief virtue of the old epistolary novel was suspense; the tense was present, and the letter writers did not know what would happen once they put down their quills. Barth strips the form of any forward thrust. His interest is not in progress or advancement but in recapitulation. The letters are governed by a "Deeper Pattern"; the letter writers slowly merge in the conviction that they are living the first part of their lives for a second time or, as one writes, that "biography like history may re-enact itself as farce." Stasis reigns, history is not Viconian cycles...
...takes a major writer to commit a major blunder. What Barth publishes matters, in capital Letters, and this novel will fuel brush fires in academic journals and little quarterlies for years to come. Considerations will be reconsidered, opinions re-opined. At this moment though, Barth looks like a magician who has described too fully the trip wires up his sleeve or the spare tiger dozing fitfully in a box just offstage. As he talks on and on, piling analysis upon explanation, the audience slowly files out. If Joyce's Ulysses was the milestone of modernism, Barth's Letters...
...hope your review of my Letters novel will not emphasize the role in it of my earlier novels, since that is the aspect of the novel I am most inclined to de-emphasize. My books are allowed to know one another, as children of the same father, but they must lead their lives in dependently. It is a rule in our house that one may recycle characters from one's earlier stories, but only if one does not presume even for a sentence that even one reader has even heard of those stories and characters, much less that anyone...