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PARTISAN REVIEW
Where have I been? What am I doing? Barth is as loquacious as
Germaine Amherst, and tells us repeatedly at regular intervals: "Cur–
rently I find myself involved in a longish epistolary novel, of which I
know so far only that it will
be
regressively traditional in manner; that
it will
not
be obscure, difficult, or dense in the modernist fashion; that
its action will occur mainly in the historical present, in tidewater
Maryland and on the Niagara Frontier; that it will hazard the resurrec–
tion of characters from my previous fiction , or their proxies, as well as
extending the fictions themselves, but will not presume, on the reader's
part, familiarity with those fictions, which I cannot myself remember
in detail.
In
addition, it may have in passing something to do with
alphabetical letters." Early in
Letters,
the most studied and foolish of
the correspondents, Jerome Bray, whose origin appropriately is
Giles
Goat-Boy,
raises the question of plagiarism. He accuses the Author,
and wants Todd Andrews (from
The Floating OPera)
to press charges.
Barth does not openly pursue the issue, and yet the question is implicit
in the very conception of the novel.
Plagiarism, it might be said, is the hidden anxiety of metafictional
writing. Beginning with
The Sot-Weed Factor,
Barth happily stole
from traditional sources, and as late as
Chimera
he was still, with
considerable wit and ingenuity, transforming familiar tales and myths.
Like many of his peers at the end of the fifties, he had turned abruptly
from the realist novel to explore the fabulous, to reappropriate classical
narrative, with the peculair twist of post-modernist despair. This
fiction, as everyone knows, is filled with outcries, interpolations, with
bursts of temper, with breakdowns.
If
representation of the " real"
world had proved tiresome, imitation of the purer' world of classical
narrative turned out to be twice as arduous. Each mythy tale was now
inclosed in a body of diverse interpretation, and the writer had to
confront the truth that his fiction, at some point, was just another
interpretation, however cleverly construed-or worse, the impersona–
tion of a plagiarist. Like Humbert Humbert wrestling with Clare
Quilty, the writer struggled with a knowing interpreter, himself; an
unhappy condition that reduced Barth in
Lost in the Funhouse
to the
device of multiple quotation marks, to echoing Echo graphically.
Imitation reveals, plagiarism conceals. What, then, is hidden in
Letters?
An elaborate discourse on the impossibility of writing histori–
cal fiction. Time presses on this novel. The Author intermittently
deluges the reader with headlines, the six o'clock news, his time, his
place, the incoherence of it, and then there is the blather of his several
correspondents, his revivified characters, who tell us of their progeny,
