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TONY TANNER
lessly malleable and the reiterated consciousness of this idea contributes
to the novel's prevailing atmosphere of insubstantiality. Some of Bur–
lingame's advice to Cooke reflects more interestingly on his author: "'You
must dance to some other fellow's tune or call your own and try to make
the whole world step to't.''' Barth makes history dance to his tune with
the result that we are always aware that we are listening to one man's
music-again we could see it as an assertion of the omnipotence of thought
as against the possibility of domination from without. Speaking of Amer–
ican liberty Burlingame makes another important point. " , 'Tis more than
just political and religious liberty-they come and go from one year to
the next. 'Tis philosophic liberty I speak of, that comes from want of his–
tory. It throws a man on his own resources, that freedom... .' " By exten–
sion it throws an artist on his own resources, and what Burlingame does
in
the book Barth does
with
the book-i.e., in his American freedom he
makes the world dance to his tune; he plays history "like a harpsichord"
-and pretty enough music he can make, too. This free sport with his–
tory-continually reshaping it according to mental plan, or whim-has an
interesting effect on how we respond to his material. When reading, say,
Tolstoy's novels we do have the illusion that we are reading about actual
people involved in the realities of history; when reading
The Sot-Weed
Factor
we are surely much more aware of the formidable mental scope
and verbal dexterity of John Barth. The "historical novel" has, inevitably,
changed with the times. At one point in the book two women exchange
terms of sexual abuse for seven pages-a minor gesture which reflects a
major mood of the book, namely, the dominance of words over things,
the potent independence of sheer language. Like these good ladies, or
rather like the author behind them, you can call each fact a hundred
names. Barth plays with the hundred names-and the identity and sub–
stantiality of the fact melt away as we watch him at his brilliant conjur–
ing. (Similarly, having mastered the resources of Jacobean prose he re–
writes the' Pocahontas story in such a way that we are mainly aware of
his amused pleasure at inventing
his version
of what happened-history
bows before the authoritative mastery of Barth's vocabulary.) The illu–
sions of time and space fade as we become more aware that the book is
a hugely entertaining demonstration of the independence, ingenuity and
power of John Barth, his mind, his words, his tune. In admiring the book
we are really acknowledging our sense that that mind is fairly prodigious,
And indeed it would take a prodigy of a mind to write
Giles Goat–
Boy,
though at times one feels that here that mind has run amuck. The
book itself wears masks and you have to peel off various letters, disclaim–
ers, introductions, etc., insisting the book should not be published, main-
