Why I Hate John Barth

i'm turning this in tomorrow as a response to reading some of his work to include "Lost in the Funhouse" CRITICISM PLEASE! here goes:

I once had a set of legos that I would play with for hours on end and my mom would get mad at me because I didn’t want to stop making different shapes or patterns or random things. I never constructed anything that was distinguishable such as a tractor or a catapult or a truck, but I liked the multi-colored towers that might’ve been any tower in the world. Fast-forward a few years when I turned 11 - I still had all those legos, but they were a wad of sharp plastic corners clawing at the triple layer of garbage bags. They were probably dusty from all the time I spent not using them but how would I know? I didn’t play with them anymore. In Barth’s whole life, he’s been looking at the literary version of lego towers and now every story he could think of is sitting in a triple layer of garbage bags. Maybe he is shaking a death rattle out of literature by writing mockeries or teases or witty “gotcha!”s, but he needs to find a new toy to play with.
I think he just wants to be mocked and hated for his inability to be moved by literature anymore. Maybe the future of literature is mockery of mockery. I’d read a satire of Candide. “And let the reader see the serious wordplay on the second reading” (Barth p.86)
“I’m John B__ and I’m so smart that I’ve read everything ever and I’ll never be pleased again. Also, I’m smarter than you. While I’m busy hating the canon (which has been aimed at me and passed in through my ears and out through my), I’ll write something because I don’t know what else to do. I think I’ll call it Inside Jokes for the Author. You’ll think I’m talking about you guys, the “authors,” but there aren’t any authors anymore because everything has already been written about and I’m ok with it. [some random fact about literature just to throw you for a loop]. I got you there didn’t I? I bet you weren’t expecting that were you? Pedants. Lets be serious for a second. Let’s not. Let snot. Lent’s tot. Bet you’ll be trying to figure that one out for a while. Did I mention I’m smarter than you? Go ahead and look at how I ignore everything there is about reading and literature and storytelling and ways of seeking emotional Truth despite the facts. Well guess what? I’ve already found it. I know the Truth and you don’t and I’m bored with it and you aren’t and I already know what makes the emotional mammal, Man, tick. Why don’t you? I bet you’re curious as to why I italicized that aren’t you? I did it to make you curious. Something else is coming but I think I’ll write this and offer it to be published so I can make money off of you reading and attempting to dissect my High Art. I put the toilet in the gallery. I hanged the blank canvas. Dark huh? I’m smarter than you.”
Maybe the cycle of mockery of mockery will continue until we really do forget why a doped up Juliet stabbed herself. Maybe one day people will read in the papers of some simpleton picking up and reenacting The Cask of Amontillado with a literature snob to wake them out of the “it’s been done” fog. Maybe Barth was right and we’ll need to go back and read the Ancients, but this time, add electricity, meth, Stallone, hackers, Xboxes, Johnny Knoxville and porn.

 

Sorry I wasn't a member here while you still sought response. David Foster Wallace's infinite jest led to suicide, so I think we might give more credence to the extended night sea journey (the nightsy journey, dear, that has survived knowing of Holocaust—survived the darkest nights of the abyss) to become like Maude with her Harold: Forgetting the number tatooed on her wrist, as she watches the sunset while snacking, and finds all life elating.

 

Whose suicide? It certainly wasn't his-- that book was published a decade before he killed himself which was, according to his family and wife, him coming off of his antidepressants.

Of course, the simple act of reading Infinite Jest might lead one to suicide. Referencing all of those footnotes was killer all on its own.

 

EventHorizon's reaction to John Barth reminded me of Wallace's nihilism, which was a worldview of infinite jest that preceded and succeeded the book Infinite Jest. Barth's literary playfulness was not nihilistic. But Wallace's nihilism going into and out of Infinite Jest was apparently parasitic on drug addiction, like the stereotypical writer who can't create unless he's got a whiskey nearby. Wallace's worldview expressed in Infinite Jest was an infinite jest born of a nihilistic sense of the world as a philosophy student (well, logicistic, but that leads to nihilism) and a lifelong problem of major depression. He was brilliantly lost. EventHorizon caricatures Barth as brilliantly lost, but he remained happily creative and is aging well, thank you.

 

But thanks for your comment. It causes me to think about why I felt like responding to a post (EventHorizon's) that hadn't caused response for over a year and a half.

I want to think about Literature.

But EH's jest was no good motive for that here. I was just being too spontaneous.

I'm aware that comments on posts at TFP aren't supposed to be proxies for blog writing confessionals, but this might help others get to know me.

I had an affair with some of John Barth's work decades ago, in particular Lost in the Funhouse. So, EH's frivolous rant about Literature evinced interests of mine that I didn't take time to detail. I should start a topic like "Why I love Literature." No one cared why EH hates his image of John Barth, and rightly so. His self-incriminating rant had nothing whatsoever to do with dear John Barth.

Barth's book of short pieces includes one titled “Lost in the Funhouse,” whose premise is a boy and girl in a funhouse maze who lose each other, but come to hear each other pass through adjacent tunnels separated by a plywood wall, such that they can hear each other and can be so close to each other through the wall, but don’t know how to get to each other except through the wall, because they don’t know the way to the other’s side, the other’s tunnel.

The situation is clearly an allegory about relationship, and the boy/girl scenario is, to my mind, an “incestuous” allegory about intimacy. Barth, at that point in his career, had done a lot with seriously-protracted play on canonical literature and was now/then happily lost in the funhouse of psychological figurativity that implicates the authorship of the writer. The archetypal merit of canonical stories echoes in the play of children. But also, a general issue of writer and reader separated by the “wall” of the text is in play, so close to each other we are through words, yet so inaccessible to each other as long-gone author and unmet reader. The text is a potentially great resonance of the obvious and mysterious obliquity, as are our lives, as are our intimacies.

EventHorizon is so far away from the text in front of him, that he can’t see how he’s been thrown into The Question of Literature in the very act of his dismissiveness. “Surely, you jest,” I first thought. You can’t be serious here. EH writes: “[A]dd electricity, meth, Stallone, hackers, Xboxes, Johnny Knoxville and porn”? No wonder EH got no response.

Another story in Lost in the Funhouse is titled “Night sea journey.” It’s allegorical of the canonical, Odyssean journey that’s already played to high jest in Joyce’s Ulysses, and the sojourn of self formation is so canonical, so integral to the children’s story, yet so little understood in lives surrounded with frivolity (2000 "Friends" on Facebook?), that it’s like Literature must begin all over again with stories for children, for we are children of a terrible century, now in a world of avaricious marketing where we medicate despair by consuming fashions and food without limit ("Get more by paying less." Big gulp your unhappiness).

We are children in our evolving. All the silliness of the movie “Harold and Maude” (so outdated now, in its corny “Mod” idiom) is post-Holocaust, as is all reading now, to the canonical mind.

Being postmodern is grossly misunderstood by most folks, and this is very dangerous, potentially. People confuse true postmodern sensibility with high cynicism, and this leads to nihilism. True postmodernity is very hopeful and plays for keeps, as an affirmation of our potential.

The difference between a sophistication of cynicism and a sophistication of Innocence is profoundly at stake for the future of our species on a heating planet. So, where in this is “Literature,” which was already in the early ‘70s at risk of being swallowed up by mediazation (McLuhanism as pathology, rather than hope)?

In another topic at TFP, Snowy asks “Is literature necessary?” Another member wonders how to deal with depression. Another wonders whether he can benefit from therapy.

Any day’s news is easy reason for cynicism. How do we find and sustain the joy of productive imagination that sees beyond all that? Is it a retrieval of the Inner Child that’s so integral to artistic sensibility?

“Play, my dear, because belief in our power of anewal (and renewal) may be our best road to lasting, constructive hope.”

Class dismissed.

 

back in the olde days, t.s. eliot argued that the main reason for teaching the canon was to allow more people to get jokes and, from there, maybe, to work out how genre conventions operate and, maybe, to start understanding that these conventions shape how you project what you read and are analogous to others that shape various registers of normal perception(s) in this fiction we laughingly call the world, and how these conventions have histories and operate whether you are aware of them or not and from there, maybe, arrive at something like a position which would hold that, if these conventions operate anyway, perhaps it is better to reveal them than it is to pretend they are not operative, that the furthest reach of fiction is the naive one that would see representation as not artifice. or as spinoza said once, but more elegantly, no-one is free unless they understand what it is that conditions their actions. from there one might say that simple projection through simple-seeming forms is a performance of one's own abjection in the face of an ideological context (for lack of a better term) that is so dominant (for you) that you see it as transparent, much in the way you see these other convention sets that shape your reading/projecting as transparent. and while it would be silly to argue that a recusive awareness of literary conventions will make you free politically, it isn't silly to see in the various relations to genre rules (say) staged in the work of a whole riot of people since the early 20th century in various ways little exercises in recursion. you know, that basic self-reflexive mode of thinking that would enable one to put one's own frame of reference into question, the sort of thing that is basic to democratic thinking/acting, which we would all know about were there such a thing around us, were we part of one.

and so and so.

 

Thanks, roachboy. Your stream of consciousness is fun to entertain. It belongs to a new topic, as did really my rant on why I liked Barth, like maybe “What good is literary thinking?,” and I’d say a lot of good! But I’m not going to start a topic yet. I adore issues of...

How does that relate to how you interpret what you read? Projection of meaning is surely an issue, so “these conventions” figure into that. But we want to understand what we’re reading as having its real presence, apart from our projections of meaning. Surely, you agree that genre conventions fruitfully shape understanding, as well as “how you project”? Inasmuch as this is the case, then reading is a resonance of projection and accurate construal constrained in part by genre conventions positively as well as projectively. I’m confident you agree.

Interesting; I agree. Conventions shape various registers of normal perceptions, and those include genre conventions. Hmmm. It would be so interesting to dwell with the notion of “registers of normal perception.” We want reading to be enlightening (as well as entertaining, etc.), so we want our conventions and registers brought into view or into question. How (I ask myself—rhetorical question) are genre conventions analogous to what else shapes not only our perception but the registers?—in...

Yeah. Everything’s a narrative. I go with Hayden White on historicality of consciousness: “figural realism” in the “content of form.” Indeed,...

[to be continued. TFP software won't allow this to go further. So, I'll make this a blog posting ]

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Please don't needlessly blame our software for your attempts to plug your blog. The software is more than capable of handling your replies and you haven't even scared the word cap.

Please don't try to take our discussions over to your blog. That's just a bit rude and presumptuous, don't you think?

 

I think not.

I had no intention of referring to a blog entry. I was quoting roachboy in detail throughout his wonderful response, so I had to write it offline, in order to deal with the small-scale quoting. When I pasted the result into this reply box, then posted it, halfway through the posting, the entire thing began to turn into italic script, then the latter quarter became strikethrough. I know from other platforms that that's a sign that a limit has been transgressed.

So, I removed all the italic/strikethrough and posted. Fine.

Then I tried to post the remainder in a new reply box; it was automatically merged, and the merged text was all in italic/strikethrough.

So, I made the remainder a blog entry. As you might have seen, the continuation of my response to roachboy was a very thoughtful (discursive) response to his thoughts.

I would have preferred to not have gone to a blog. I would gladly never refer to a blog entry. I have no interest in "plugging" my blog.

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Let me be 100% clear, ThomW. Do not refer people to your blog to continue discussions. There is no set of circumstances where that is OK - the sole exception being where you have prior staff approval. Regardless of how thoughtful, helpful or wonderful you may feel the continued thought may be, it is an absolute violation of our rules and one we don't take particularly lightly. We generally ban people that do this, but you're getting to stick around based on your contributions thus far. But please don't think that the rules don't apply to you.

When your posting issue happens again, make the post then report it so that the staff can fix it for you.

 

Understood. Thanks, Jazz! I really didn't believe I was violating rules. Trust that I won't anymore extend my responses such that I need to go to a blog entry. I did that again earlier today, because I thought I needed to. I have no desire to violate rules. Thanks again for the heads up. I do appreciate it.