ON BARTH
lOS
potency of the actual is as nothing to the prevalence of thought. The
basic "freedom" so often talked about in these books is not least the
ambiguous license enjoyed by minds for whom words are no longer an–
swerable to things.
Which makes his later work especially interesting because in a way
it seeks to introduce the central character into an environment so that he
is forced to encounter the realities of time and space. The results have
been, to say the least, extraordinary-sufficiently so to make Barth
manifestly one of the most interesting of contemporary novelists. The bril–
liance of
The Sot-Weed Factor
is undeniable and the sophistication of
the mind that wrote it is clearly formidable. Indeed, in a way that is the
point. The book, for all its accumulations of pseudo-historical data, is
transparent: we see clear through to the mind that wrote it. It really has
little to do with Maryland and the eighteenth century and a great deal to
do with the mental world of John Barth. Of course the book is full of all
sorts of historical morals. The first human-being the innocent idealistic
poet Ebenezer Cooke sees on reaching the brave new American world is
a flogged negro; and the last lesson he has to learn is that his innocence
was in itself a crime, an agent of destruction (the lesson is sealed and
absolution gained by going to bed with his pox-ridden wife Joan-so
Cooke embraces a diseased and imperfect world). Much is made of
the idea that history is an inextricable tangle of treacheries, and
we read of the "strange and terrible energy" of the men who struggle
for power on the new continent. But in sum what has happened is that
eighteenth-century history has been completely dissolved by Barth's twen–
tieth-century mind. Cooke is subject to the same paralysis that befell Todd
Andrews and Jacob Horner, immobilized by a sense of theoretically infi–
nite possibilities ("the moment I grow sensible that I must choose, I see
such virtue in each alternative that none outshines the rest"). The mys–
terious Burlingame is a virtual incarnation of all Barth's thinking about
life as a "game," a series of roles, a constant changing of masks. The
existentialist wardrobe is all before him from which to choose, and the
emphasis given to dressing up in various kinds of clothes throughout the
book is a way of underlining the idea that a man is only the role he
chooses, the garb he dons. " 'The world's a happy climate for imposture,' "
says Burlingame (a modern echo to Simon Suggs's maxim, "It is good to
be shifty in a new country"), and his constant metamorphoses are a literal
demonstration of his conviction that the self is endlessly fluid and a man
may make himself over as many times as he chooses (it also provides
Cooke with a lesson in the endlessly equivocal nature of all appearances).
It is said of Burlingame that he can "play this world like a harpsichord"
and "manipulate its folk like puppeteers"; both self and world are end-
