JEROME KLiNKOWITZ
409
same magazine's January 1980 issue added further commentary
pertinent
to
his works of the intervening years
(Lost in the Funhouse:
Fictionfor Print, Tape, Live Voice,
1967;
Chimera,
1972; and
Letters: A
Novel,
1979). Barth explained that any educated writer in this day
and age was faced with "the used-upness of certain forms or
exhaustion of certain possibilitie " and that this is "by no means
necessarily a cause for despair."
In
The Sot- Weed Factor
and
Giles Goat-Boy,
Barth employed
various eighteenth-century convention
to
make twentieth-century
artistic statements. In the former, the secret journal of a character
named Henry Burlingame is framed within the narrative adventures
of the poet, Ebenezer Cooke; and all the familiar Fieldingesque
techniques, so tedious in the hands of anyone but their inventor, are
interesting and entertaining because they must be read, not as the
product of a third-rate contemporary, but as the studied parody by a
brilliant scholar of Fielding's art. In imilar manner
Giles Goat-Boy
takes what it can from Swift, substituting an allegory of mid–
twentieth-century academic politics as a comment on the state of the
world. As technique, the transpo itions from Fielding and Swift are
flawless; but as Robert Garis and others have complained, they are
only technique, otfering no new perspective at all and telling readers
nothing they do not already know .
Lost in the Funhouse
and
Chimera
are more deliberate investigations of narrative itself, including a cut–
out Moebius strip, a series of quotations successively swallowed up
by the necessary punctuation mark, a story which narrates its own
inception and dissolution, and various retellings of ancient myths.
Letters
functions as a coda to Barth's entire literary career so far, for
its seven epistolary authors who exchange correspondence among
themselves are either characters from the p'revious six books or John
Barth himself and some of his newly created characters .
This seven-book canon, no small achievement for a writer born
in 1931, would be the perfect index of a literary age except for one
fact, which its author keep repeating in his influential essays: he
does not sympathize with the spirit of his times. "The Literature of
Exhaustion" opens with a playfully sarcastic dismissal of a style of
work then being produced by a young writer-publisher outside the
conservative academic community, Dick Higgins of Something Else
Press . To illustrate this style, Barth includes a good sample (but not
all properly attributed to their best practitioners) of literary,
theatrical, musical, and artistic work unlike his and his academic
colleagues' own, including the assemblage novels of Robert Filliou,
the Happenings of Allen Kaprow, the music of John Cage, and the
