Word: sot
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...them. Whenever the rubber spiders and indiscreetly aimed jets of air become too threatening, the lights suddenly flash on and Proprietor Barth himself ambles in and starts explaining about the machinery. Those who take their funhouses seriously may grow confused and exasperated. But readers of The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy are familiar with Barth's impulses toward farce, his intellectual mobility, shaggy doggerel and merry nihilism. These people are apt to accept the clever gimmickry as one would a party favor...
...while turning mythology into domestic comedy. Ambrose His Mark, Water-Message and the title story, Lost in the Funhouse, contain elements of autobiography, though the characters and events have an Olympian quality. Menelaiad and Anonymiad, bawdy colloquializations of the Aeneid, are reminiscent of Barth's historical burlesque The Sot-Weed Factor...
...John O'Hara, an acknowledged social historian, makes no plea for the special virtues of the past. For other novelists, the present may be a disaster, but there is no indication that things ever were any better. When they do turn to the antecedents-John Barth in The Sot-Weed Factor or William Styron in The Confessions of Nat Turner-it is only to show that America has been headed for catastrophe right from the start...
...SoT.) THOMAS R. SANFORD U.S.A.F. Robins Air Force Base...
...authentic selves can best be seen, says Fiedler, in a myth-busting novel such as John Barth'g The Sot-Weed Factor, which purports to relate the naked, ribald truth about Pocahontas and John Smith. Fiedler also singles out Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, in which a white man and an Indian struggle against being lobotomized (read "castrated") by Big Nurse in a psycho ward. In these contemporary works the spirit of the Vanishing American returns, enabling the authors to debunk traditional notions of how the West was won. This debunking criticizes...