Editor’s Note: The article we publish below originally appeared in the Spanish edition of Letras Libres in April 2025. We wish to thank Daniel Gascón, editor of Letras Libres in Spain, for allowing us to share this text with LALT’s readers.
In life there are no essentially major or minor characters. To that extent, all fiction and biography, and
most historiography, is a lie. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.… So fiction isn’t a lie
at all, but a true representation of the distortion that everyone makes of life.
John Barth
Just one year ago, on April 2, 2024, John Barth died in a nursing home in Bonita Springs, Florida. The supreme storyteller of postmodernism was ninety-three years old. A man of the sea, a great ocean-going navigator of life, literature and the world, Barth knew in depth the secrets and mechanisms of the art of narrating and the art of revealing secrets and how to strip down these mechanisms through the act of narrating. He had an excellent teacher, from a very young age, the seductive Scheherazade, who taught him the tricks and ruses by which life extends beyond its ends and becomes immortal through fiction, just as fiction serves to gain time and defeat death, or postpone it as much as possible. “Scheherazade, my only love,” Barth says in the tale “Life-Story” (included in Lost in the Funhouse, his first short story collection), where he discovers that his own life is potentially as fictional as the stories concocted by the voluptuous Arabian narrator.
It is possible that Barth saw parading through his brain, in his last seconds of life, the feverish images of the narrative universe he had created over the years, like the prolific author Borges, another of his unmistakable models, overcrowded with charismatic and eccentric characters who swirled around in the nets of fiction with the prodigious energy that their creator gave them. Over time, some of these characters took on a dangerous autonomy; others remained imprisoned in the funhouse of the father of fiction. It was then—in the moment when Barth himself was about to transform into a fictional character, meaning death in his narrative system, settled in his armchair from which he admired the amazing Florida sunsets—that he contemplated the profiles of the creatures that had emerged from his imagination under a clearer light. They were all gathered there together, like spectra of light, celebrating the father’s embrace, welcoming him into the realm of the immortals.
Beginning and End of the Road
Barth is twenty-four years old when he writes The Floating Opera, his first novel, and two more years go by before he publishes it, with a different ending, following some rejections by publishers. But Barth’s great success in writing this magnificent novel lies not only in his ability to smell the stale air of the times and perceive, across the Atlantic, the nauseating smoke of Parisian existentialism or the foul detritus of Beckett’s corpus, but in knowing how to transfigure this spirit of European anguish and decadence into an extravagant party of nihilistic ingenuity. In The Floating Opera, Barth performs an exercise of great intelligence by parodying the principles of existentialist discourse, dynamiting them with black humor and white comedy, with the aim of dramatizing the death of the subject, a traditional idea of self and community, and the beginning of a chaotic era where reality, threatened by the most destructive technology ever created, atomic energy, would never be the same again. In this sense, the imaginary autobiography of Todd Andrews is, as Daniel Grausam said, an allegory of life and death in the twentieth century.
The End of the Road, his second novel, is a reflection that strolls ironically along the path of its characters’ life and shatters into a thousand pieces when it reaches the end of its journey, where a woman prepares to undergo an illegal abortion in an improvised operating room. This ending is one of the most terrible scenes in the literature of the past century. Hyperrealism of the highest quality with neither gratuitous sensationalism nor salacious or grotesque details. The technical overtaking of Hemingway, Faulkner and Sartre and the announcement of a totally new and indefinable literary aesthetic (the postmodern one) for a time of fullness in fiction as a new key to interpret reality. The narrator and protagonist of this philosophical fable is Jacob Horner, a subject with a fragile identity, a dubious psyche paralyzed by an ailment called “cosmopsis,” who by chance finds an enigmatic African-American doctor who subjects him to a radical cure: a treatment for his blocked life based on “mythotherapy.” That is, on the notion that in life we take on roles, and to do so successfully it is necessary to recognize this mask straightforwardly, as a fiction of the self.
In the 1960s, in a famous essay (“The Literature of Exhaustion”), Barth diagnosed the exhaustion of modernist literature, mentioning the adjacent cases of Borges and Beckett, the fiction that unfolds in metafiction through disbelief toward the potential of the story and the dying voice that slowly diminishes, putting the foundations of the very existence of the character and the world in crisis. These extreme cases seem to Barth more typical of the end of a road than the opening up of new avenues in literary creation. Obsessed with the ghost of impotence and sterility, decrepitude and the death of an entire culture and civilization, and not only of the creative individual, he gives himself over, with renewed passion, to the impossible task of creating original and exuberant work that does not shy away from resorting to plagiarism and brazen influence, palimpsest and pastiche, like The Sot-Weed Factor, an eighteenth-century-style farce about the founding of America where natives and European pioneers live through a festive carnival of promiscuous sex and confused trade, and Giles Goat-Boy, a Rabelaisian satire about a Dionysian messiah who leads a cultural revolution on a cybernetic American campus in the middle of the Cold War. In short, works that showed the ongoing vitality of ambitious fiction within a cultural context in unstoppable mutation.
In the early 1970s, however, Chimera confirmed the definitive exhaustion of a narrative model while paying splendid tribute to its two main sources of inspiration: Greek myths and Eastern fantasies. At the end of that same decade, Letters transformed the cosmos of Barthian fiction into a huge labyrinth, literal and literary, incorporating several characters from his previous fictions into an epistolary and acrostic puzzle in a multi-sided game of sending and resending, like in a metafictional version of Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons, with little debauchery and abundant Oulipian licenses (seven senders writing eighty-eight letters grouped into seven sections). Barth presides over, as author-character, an anachronistic game of cards, up to the last combinational possibilities, with the inventive rigor and mathematical accuracy of Queneau, Perec or Calvino. Shortly thereafter, Barth would publish another famous essay (“The Literature of Replenishment”), reversing the apocalyptic argument of its predecessor to proclaim the advent and creative fullness of a transnational postmodern literature, led by García Márquez and Calvino. His later novels, however, Sabbatical, The Tidewater Tales, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor and The Development, unfortunately did not live up to the announcement, giving sad testimony to the twilight of genius, the eclipse of his original conception of narrative art.
Reading today, therefore, his two great contributions to the history of the novelistic form (The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy) is a discipline of aesthetic pleasure and intellectual rigor for the most awakened minds.
Foundational Palimpsest
A great fabulist like Barth, despite his youth, could only measure himself in his beginnings against the greatest storytellers of his time. The big difference between Barth and other postmodernists, nevertheless, lay in the extreme attention Barth paid from the start to the canonical texts of the pre-modern era such as The Arabian Nights, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Don Quixote, Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews and Tristram Shandy.
To bring back the novelistic heights of the ancient masters and overcome the unproductive blockade of modernity, Barth came up with the genius idea of writing an eighteenth-century novel. But not a stylistic pastiche or a vulgar imitation, as a theorist of the stature of Gérard Genette would recognize immediately. On the contrary, Barth set out to write a great eighteenth-century novel that did not resemble any novel written in that erudite century and would, at the same time, suppose a consummation of the imaginative form, free construction, humor and philosophical style of novel-writing exercised by Voltaire, Fielding, Diderot and Sterne. As can be seen, Barth did not renounce being original even in copying, imposing the value of novelty and invention by means of creative parody. With The Sot-Weed Factor, Barth revitalized the literary magic of novelists prior to the genre’s nineteenth-century fossilization with a contemporary sensitivity coming from counter-culture and pop art.
Fortunately for everyone, this joyous restoration of forms did not translate into a vacuous formalism, but rather into knowledge of the world. Through this document, Barth succeeded in fictionalizing the true origin of the American nation by inventing the most gruesome episodes in the virginal life of Maryland Poet Laureate Ebenezer Cooke, author of a satirical poem from which the novel steals its untranslatable title. With the hilarious magic spell of a dizzying plot, Barth recreates the least exemplary historical phase of a still non-existent country, freeing it with irony from the lies and mystifications that patriotic propaganda had imposed on it for two centuries. The carnival-like image of colonial America where the most frenetic part of the action takes place is more typical, in this sense, of a picaresque novel than of a foundational epic.
Despite the dazzling display of resources and artifices with which he enlivens the baroque plot, where Barth’s comic genius shines is in the pornographic version of the Rousseauean romance between Captain Smith and the Indian Pocahontas, of unwavering virginity, interspersed as a “diary” of unspeakable exploits. Another sentimental myth about American innocence torn down by Barth in the humorous style of Rabelais. With great, spirited laughter. In short, it should not be forgotten that the corruption of innocence (whether it be that of historical representation and contemporary reality, with its idealized or sublime versions, or that of the anesthetized conscience of the reader) is not only a spicy and juicy motif but also one of the fundamental ends of imaginative discourse, as Kundera would celebrate.
Dionysus on Campus
Proof of Barth’s past prestige as a public figure can be found by anyone reviewing images of the endless footage from Chelsea Girls (1967), one of Andy Warhol’s most accomplished film experiments, in which a copy of Giles Goat-Boy, or The Revised New Syllabus, the hip book at that time in the most fashionable settings, appears in one of the scenes. It is a pop sign of the notoriety achieved by this Menipean satire published in 1966, a decisive year in the historic birth of postmodernism.
Giles Goat-Boy transforms the turbulent world of the Cold War and libertarian counterculture into a gigantic university campus where the plot’s infinite adventures take place. In this sense, even if Barth manipulates the mythological outlines of the life of the ancient hero, what will fascinate current readers of this masterful novel is how the cultural renewal of heroism, embodied in the fabulous figure of Giles, Goat-Boy and Grand Tutor of the decadent West Campus, goes through the quadrature of a new definition of what is human based on the psychic equation established between animality, technology, information and mythology. As such, literature achieves a total synthesis of know-how: Dionysian wisdom inseminates academic knowledge, critically reviewing the narratives of religions, humanities, sciences and political ideologies that separate humans into irreconcilable factions and creating a mystical vision of reality that encompasses all its dimensions, without excluding the lowest passions of the flesh or the highest gazes of the spirit.
And all this process of ironic re-founding of the world’s cultures is narrated, or edited, or both at once, by an infallible supercomputer, the WESCAC: an artificial intelligence that has inexhaustible creative energy and a sense of humor and of eroticism imitated from its creators, the fallible humans. Thus, this work by Barth becomes the first cyberfiction in history.
It is created, or not, in the Dionysian-carnival ideology as the most appropriate to the complexity of human nature, so Giles Goat-Boy constitutes a new-style sacred text: a utopian discourse that demystifies the ancient sacred fables and at the same time underlies a desacralized culture with new fables and myths in response to the indecipherable puzzle, increasingly more computerized, of the world and life.
The Man in the Castle of Fiction
Despite all their cultural differences, if there is a writer who shares with Barth this anti-Cartesian idea of fiction, as Adam Roberts calls it, in which the character’s mind knows itself to be trapped in the imaginary architecture built by the intelligence of another, it is Philip K. Dick. The connecting point between such antagonistic writers as Barth and Dick is Borges: Borges’s fictions and artifices adulterate their theory and their practice of narration equally. In this respect, Dick’s exegesis illuminates Barth with a mark of paradoxical contemporaneity.
