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RICHARD POIRIER
interest of this novel resides not in its allegorical identifications, not
in mythological filaments that can be traced back to the Greek drama
or to the literature of existentialism, but rather in the fantastic pro–
liferation, intermixture and confusion of these, in the blurring excess
of meanings. We are invited to feel the nightmarish fusions among
literary, political, sexual, anthropological and historical myths. Such
an accomplishment requires that Barth be as adroitly in command as
he proves to be of the English language, of English and classical
literature, of present-day politics and of pop culture. He can manage
even within the small area of a paragraph to mix the cants appropriate
to any of these and to show how they overlap, and he takes delight in
violating silly but slow-dying critical rules about maintaining con–
sistency in point of view. More than merely playing literary tricks
and games here, he is really questioning the stability of what we take
to be natural and obvious in the political, physical and sexual or–
ganizations of life. The implication is that the human imagination,
out of which all of these have issued, is impossibly entangled in its
own creations, and that it would get even more entangled by any
further effort on the part of interpretive critics to sort it all out.
We have been classified, so to speak, by the most limiting in–
ventions that have been made about our own species, and if this is
unpleasant news for anyone, it is especially distasteful for the in–
dustrious explicator - it means that the books which subscribe to
this view of contemporary existence really do not need analysis or
translation. Such books do the work themselves, with nearly ob–
noxious persistence. Indeed one can read Barth's earlier novels retro–
spectively as a warning that analysis isn't merely a further contribu–
tion to distraction and intellectual waste: it may even be psycho–
logically debilitating. Wholly to sort out the filaments of the allegori–
cal dream world we've made for ourselves is to arrive at a clarified
sense of life at once dreary and pointless. We
need
to delude our–
selves.
If
all categories and structures are equally inconclusive, then
all are equally good, and are apparently necessary to the conduct of
life. From such a view it
is
only a step to the conclusion that psycho–
analysis is not so much wrong as unnecessary. In this particular novel
the refusal to deal with human actions as if they existed for psycho–
logical rather than for philosophical inquiry allows Barth to treat
sex with an openness scarcely matched since the Circe episode of
