John Barth: The American master of high satire, keen purveyor of metafiction

For much of his writing life, Barth wrote fiction from Monday to Thursday, while Fridays were devoted to essays and other forms of non-fiction. This habit lent itself to the title of his essay collection The Friday Book (1984) and its follow-up volumes, Further Fridays (1995) and Final Fridays (2012). The first of these collections included perhaps his most famous essay, ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’, sometimes referred to as the manifesto for postmodernist literature. In it, Barth makes the case for the novel’s traditional techniques and narrative structures being obsolete, their possibilities being ‘exhausted’ over time.

In Barth’s reading, the conventional (ie ‘realistic’) 20th century novel is utterly inadequate when it comes to depicting the increasingly fractured, probabilistic nature of modern life. And so, he saw the future of the novel in postmodernist techniques, not unlike those demonstrated by Vladimir Nabokov or before him, Jorge Luis Borges.

Barth wrote: “If you happened to be Vladimir Nabokov, you might address that felt ultimacy by writing Pale Fire: a fine novel by a learned pedant, in the form of a pedantic commentary on a poem invented for the purpose. If you were Borges you might write Labyrinths: fictions by a learned librarian in the form of footnotes, as he describes them, to imaginary or hypothetical books. And I’ll add that if you were the author of this paper, you’d have written something like The Sot-Weed Factor or Giles Goat-Boy: novels which imitate the form of the Novel, by an author who imitates the role of Author.”

A gifted literary mime

Both The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy are excellent examples of novels which “imitate the form of the Novel”; they are feats of pure mimesis, first and foremost. The Sot-Weed Factor assumes the style, structure and linguistic patterns of the 18th century novelists like Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy) and Henry Fielding (The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling).

It is a satirical epic set in the colonial Maryland of the 1680s and 90s, following Ebenezer Cooke, “poet and virgin” (as he is referred to repeatedly in the text), as he makes his way across the American state while striving to preserve his virginity — a parodic touch intended to make fun of the too-salacious adventures of protagonists in this genre. The book marks Barth’s shift (as he put it himself later in an essay in The Friday Book), “from the Black Comedy of the Fifties to the Fabulism of the Sixties”.

Giles Goat-Boy is an impossibly elaborate literary joke, wherein the Universe is reimagined as the University, different parts of the campus standing in for real parts of the world. Through the petty, internecine battles of academics and students, Barth crafts a pointed allegory for the Cold War. As though confirming Barth’s metafictional turn by the late 60s, the book opens with a longish “note from the Publisher”, explaining that the novel was almost not published because of legal concerns. We are then given four different Editor’s Statements, in which they either support or criticize the decision to eventually publish Giles Goat-Boy.

This particular device became extremely popular among writers fond of whimsy and experimentation, as the publishing industry became increasingly corporatized in the decades following the release of Giles Goat-Boy. You can see several examples in David Foster Wallace’s short stories and the novels of Junot Diaz. Readers who follow Indian English literature closely may remember Rajorshi Chakraborti’s metafictional novel Derangements (2008), which begins with an editor’s note explaining that this manuscript had been sent to them by a “Raj Chakraborti” who had then vanished into thin air, seemingly — talk about death of the author, amirite?

For me, however, the quintessential Barth work is the titular short story from Lost in the Funhouse. This is where he unleashed his full bag of tricks. The story is ostensibly about a 13-year-old boy named Ambrose who’s on a road trip with his family and a 14-year-old girl from the neighbourhood he has a crush on. At some point in the trip, Ambrose gets lost in the titular ‘funhouse’, a hall filled with trick mirrors, basically.

From the beginning itself, Barth plays with the reader’s expectations—almost every paragraph ends with the author explaining why he used certain devices and how those same devices have been used historically by writers like James Joyce, John Dos Passos et al. By the end of the story, Barth is almost depicting decision paralysis as a writer. Every authorial choice branches off into ‘what if’ scenarios, and like a Borgesian labyrinth, the infinitude of choice is rather the point.

“One possible ending would be to have Ambrose come across another lost person in the dark. They’d match their wits together against the funhouse, struggle like Ulysses past obstacle after obstacle, help and encourage each other. Or a girl. By the time they found the exit they’d be closest friends, sweethearts if it were a girl; they’d know each other’s inmost souls, be bound together by the cement of shared adventure; then they’d emerge into the light and it would turn out that his friend was a Negro. A blind girl. President Roosevelt’s son. Ambrose’s former archenemy.”

The funhouse legacy

When it was first published, Lost in the Funhouse provoked furious debates and discussions amidst Barth’s peers. Some found the approach pretentious and overly complicated while others were in thrall of Barth’s innovation and the points he made about narrative structure, literary devices and the expectations readers have from the contemporary realist novel. The late David Foster Wallace responded to the story directly. In Wallace’s collection Girl With Curious Hair, the short story ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Own Way’ features a bunch of youngsters who register for a writing course taught by a Professor Ambrose; he claims to be a character in, and the inspiration behind, Lost in the Funhouse.

Towards the end of his career, Barth wrote a number of essays about the role of literature in society. He also wrote about the growing influence of the internet and the ways in which hypertext could change the way we read and write. At the same time, he was bullish about the future of print-only books, pointing out that while novels do not have sensory components, they do certain things that films or virtual reality can never compete with.

“Even in the greatest, most spirit-stirring novels there are no literal sights/ sounds/feels/tastes/smells, only their names, artfully invoked in silent language. The virtual worlds of literature are unencumbered by literality. It is both their great limitation and their indispensable virtue that their virtuality is virtual; that they exist not in our nerve-endings but in the pure hyperspace of our imaginations.”

Barth will be remembered not only as one of the premier writers of his generation, but also as an astute critic who wore his learning lightly.