John Barth dies at 93. His books pulled stories apart
Spring of 1991, my junior year of college at the University of Illinois, I signed up for a course titled “Postmodern Literature.” Even though I was an English major I did not know what sort of literature this might be. All I knew was that the course fit a requirement and met at a time later than 11 a.m., when the odds were decent that I would be awake.
The first book we read was a collection of short stories titled “Lost in the Funhouse” by John Barth. I opened the book to the first story, “Frame-Tale,” which had provided instructions for cutting a portion of the right margin from the book, and then twisting and pasting that portion of the page into an endless Möbius strip which read, “Once upon a time there was a story that began.”
(Read that sentence over and over again as though you’re following the Möbius and you will begin to experience a kind of hypnotic effect.)
Here was someone who thought of stories as primarily opportunities for play. I had never seen a writer do something like this before, and quite frankly, I found it thrilling. On April 2, John Barth, the author of “Lost in the Funhouse” along with dozens of other books including classics of — literature, “The Sot-Weed Factor” and “Giles Goat-Boy,” died at age 93.
Barth coined the term “literature of exhaustion” as a shorthand descriptor of writers like himself, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges and other postmodernists who used their work to interrogate the nature of storytelling itself. For a time in the ’60s and ’70s, the postmodernists were giants. Barth won the National Book Award in 1973 for his novel, “Chimera.” Pynchon won the prize in 1974, and should have won the Pulitzer for “Gravity’s Rainbow,” as the book was unanimously endorsed by the judging panel, before it was rejected by the broader committee, resulting in no award that year.
In the ’60s and ’70s, Barthelme published hundreds of pieces in the New Yorker. Several stories from Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” first appeared in Esquire before winding up collected in the book.
Today, it is difficult to find much of the DNA of these artists in the fiction that garners wide public attention. I say this not necessarily as a criticism — though the writers I’ve listed are among my all-time favorites — but as an observation. Even in the early ’90s when I was in college the energy of the postmodernists had begun to fade as evidenced by how a dedicated and voracious reader like yours truly had never been exposed to this kind of writing until winding up in a college course.
Barth often cited Scheherazade, the storyteller of “One Thousand and One Nights” as his chief inspiration. He wanted his work to be imbued with the kind of energy that was sufficient to forestall your own execution. This attitude resulted in works like 1966’s “Giles Goat-Boy” about a human boy raised as a goat who only comes to discover his humanity when he goes to “college,” which in the book is a stand-in for all of planet Earth.
Trying to explain the plot of the book is futile because the plot is not the point. “Giles Goat-Boy” is an attempt to embody all of humanity, our myths, our desires, our psychoses, and spin them into a tale that absorbs the reader.
Some called the novel genius, others trash, but what I most remember is that I’d never read anything like it, and probably haven’t since.
Rest in power, Mr. Barth. Your work is a gift to this reader, at least.