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PARTISAN REVIEW
cially, and philosophically - served many contrary interests. Like
the boom in Spanish-American literature, described with no small
irony by one of its participants, Jose Donoso, in his book of that
name, America's momentary boom in antirealistic fiction has been
more useful as a descriptive tool for its enemies than for its writers.
Quite unhappily at the center of the Generation of '31 stands John
Barth, the writer who was probably most responsible for the boom
that antirealistic fiction enjoyed among the commercial publishing
houses, and yet, paradoxically, the writer least antirealistic in
his approach.
"In a sense, I amJacob Horner," proclaims the narrator ofJohn
Barth's second novel,
The End
oj
the Road
(1958). Sentenced to a self–
consciously absurdist therapy of teaching college English, Barth's
narrator reminds us of the dispensation under which Barth himself
felt he must write.
It
was 1958 - an era which, as Barth saw it, had
rejected the Cartesian definition of ego so central to traditional
novelistic design. A hero could no longer speak with confidence and
coherence and so define himself, since under contemporary philo–
sophical pressure the old
cogito, ergo sum
had become a farcically
painful lie.
The End oj the Road
and Barth's first novel,
The FLoating
Opera
(1956), were written in the same burst of creative energy during the
mid-fifties, when the promise of commercial publication drove Barth
to a frenzy ofJiterary production he has not since matched. That first
work was not to have been a novel at all, but "a philosophical
minstrel show," as Barth described it, not wanting to write a novel
yet hoping to make it "a work of literature" nevertheless. Both books
turned out to be rather conventional novels in the then-popular style
of Andre Malraux, Albert Camus, and other such reflective writers.
Each was heavily philosophical, and the first brushed so closely with
absolute nihilism that its original publishers insisted on a different,
more humanistically acceptable, ending. (Barth's preferred text is
found in the revised and restored edition published by Doubleday in
1967.) But these initial works won Barth the beginnings of a
substantial following: not among the reading public (less than 5,000
copies of the two books are estimated to have been sold), but with
John Barth's colleagues in the profession of English. A knowledge of
literary and philosophical tradition complemented by the experience
of teaching were the qualifications of Barth's ideal reader.
Barth's eloquent justification of his technique appeared in his
article "The Literature of Exhaustion," published in the
AtLantic
in
1967. A sequel, called "The Literature of Replenishment," for the
