Word: sot
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...BARTH wrote The Sot-Weed Factor. Gone was the contemporary setting, gone the psychological verisimilitude, and gone this bogey of coherent realistic plotting. The Sot-Weed Factor is a parody of the 18th century English picaresque novel, replete with all the themes and devices that genre requires--journey and shipwreck, character disappearance and reappearance, discovery of long-lost relatives, bawdiness, drug peddling and diverse and sundry legal entanglements. Plot complications breed plot complications, and the tangle of events exceeds comprehension. It is the quintessential 18th century novel two centuries too late. Barth enjoyed himself completely...
...Sot-Weed Factor ushered in a new vein of American fiction in the early and middle sixties including Pynchon's V. Heller's Catch-22, and Coover's The Origin of the Brunists. What these works all share is an abiding contempt for the boundaries of traditional realism and traditional notions of seriousness. The example of the early moderns, Joyce in particular, had been terrifying. In a novel like Ulysses, the most incidental details were somehow necessary. Instead of trying to compete on these terms, the novelists of the sixties rejected such lofty ambitions and produced fiction where everything...
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...
Giles Goat-Boy and The Sot-Weed Factor were investigations into the novel in all its massiveness and variety, storytelling released to its infinite possibilities. By the end of the sixties, though. Barth was looking in a new direction, and Lost in the Funhouse (1969) was a radical departure from everything that had preceded it in Barth's career. A collection of highly experimental stories, the volume was subtitled "Fiction for Print. Tape, Live Voice," and was originally scheduled for publication accompanied by tapes. Packaging prohibited it, and this certainly kept Barth's effort from full realization. In any case...
...create new narrative forms, to engage in political satire and to tell stories. But the form is not yet ready, the satire is shrill, and the stories suffer. Chimera is an attempt to join the mythic experiments of Lost in the Funhouse with the storytelling--extravagance of The Sot-Weed Factor, and Barth himself seems not to have realized how monumental a task that...