John Barth

John Simmons Barth (May 27, 1930 – April 2, 2024) was an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work.

• The night-sea journey may be absurd, but here we swim, will-we nill-we, against the flood, onward and upward, toward a Shore that may not exist and couldn't be reached if it did.
  • "Night-Sea Journey" (Esquire, June 1966). Reprinted in Lost In the Funhouse (New York: Doubleday, 1968). Anchor Books edition (1988), p. 5

• Marilyn Marsh, who had about had it with Spain, declared to him [the old Spanish man]: … But it redounds to your national credit, the then Missus Turner went on in effect — she'd been reading up on reciprocal atrocities in the Guerra Civil — that the sunny Spanish could never be guilty of an Auschwitz, for example. In the first place, your ovens would have died, like our kitchen stove, instead of your Jews, whom you'd got rid of anyhow in the sunny Fifteenth century, no? And in the second place the whole idea of extermination camps would've been too impersonal for your exquisite Moorish tastes. Much more agradable to push folks off a cliff one at a time into a gorgeous Mediterranean sunset, as you did near Malaga — three hundred, was it, or three thousand? Or to rape and then kill a convent-full of nuns in the manner of the saint of their choice — was that Barcelona or Valencia?
  • Sabbatical: A Romance (1982), p. 37

• One of the things I miss about teaching is that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back in the 1960s, put me onto Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way.
  • Boston Sunday Globe, C7 (2 Nov 2008)

• Women thought me charmingly shy, and sometimes stopped at nothing to “penetrate the disdainful shell of my fear,” as one of their number put it. Often as not, it was they who got penetrated.
  • Ch. 3

• [N]othing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it, from outside, by people.
  • Ch. 19

• [T]here is no will-o'-the-wisp so elusive as the cause of any human act.
  • Ch. 25

• [I]t is sometimes pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him.
  • Ch. 27

• More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations.
  • Part 2, Ch. 1

• 'Tis e'er the wont of simple folk to prize the deed and o'erlook the motive, and of learned folk to discount the deed and lay open the soul of the doer.
  • Part 3, Ch. 9

• 'Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion.
  • Part 3, Ch. 11

• Is a man a salvage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile manners? Or is salvagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?
  • Part 3, Ch. 12

The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997

• Consider that if the novelist is like God and a novel like the universe, then the converse ought to have at least some some metaphorical truth: The universe is a novel; God is a novelist! (I have observed elsewhere that the trouble with God is not that He's a bad novelist; only that He's a realistic one, and that dates Him.) [Footnote:] But also keeps bringing Him back into fashion.
  • "How to Make a Universe" (1960), pp. 22–23

• I don't think it's a good idea, as a rule, for artists to explain their art, even if they can. Jorge Luis Borges puts it arrogantly: God shouldn't stoop to theology. A modern painter put it more politely and poetically: Birds have no need of ornithology.
  • "More Troll Than Cabbage" (1967), p. 78

• [T]he vocation of writing seriously involves the continuous and deep examination of one's own experience of life and the world, and of the language and literary conventions we use to register that experience and make it meaningful.
  • "Intelligent Despisal" (1973), p. 113

• The simple burden of my essay ["The Literature of Exhaustion"] was that the forms and modes of art live in human history and are therefore subject to used-upness, at least in the minds of significant numbers of artists in particular times and places: in other words, that artistic conventions are likely to be retired, subverted, transcended, transformed, or even deployed against themselves to generate new and lively work. I would have thought that point unexceptionable. But a great many people … mistook me to mean that literature, at least fiction, is kaput …

  That is not what I meant at all. … [L]et me say at once and plainly that …literature can never be exhausted, if only because no single literary text can ever be exhausted — its "meaning" residing as it does in its transactions with individual readers over time, space, and language. …

  What my essay "The Literature of Exhaustion" was really about, so it seems to me now, was the effective "exhaustion" not of language or of literature, but of the aesthetic of high modernism: that admirable, not-to-be-repudiated, but essentially completed "program" of what Hugh Kenner has dubbed "the Pound era." In 1966/67 we scarcely had the term postmodernism in its current literary-critical usage — at least I hadn't heard it yet — but a number of us, in quite different ways and with varying combinations of intuitive response and conscious deliberation, were already well into the working out, not of the next-best thing after modernism, but of the best next thing: what is gropingly now called postmodernist fiction; what I hope might also be thought of one day as a literature of replenishment.

  • "The Literature of Replenishment" (1980), pp. 205–206

• I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist.
  • "Tales Within Tales Within Tales" (1981), p. 219

• We tell stories and listen to them because we live stories and live in them.
  • "Tales Within Tales Within Tales" (1981), p. 236

The Tidewater Tales: A Novel. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1987

• The story of our life is not our life. It is our story.
  • Day 1: Dun Cove to Dun Cove, p. 142
  • Barth gives an expanded version of this quote in "Ad Lib Libraries and the Coastal Measurement Problem" (1993), in Further Fridays (1995), p. 239:
    • [T]he story of our life (any story of our life) is not our life; it is our story.

• A book is what gets me off: something with heft to it, that you can take in two hands and spread like a woman. Mnyum!
  • Day 5: Lay Day, Annapolis, p. 330
  • The speaker is a heterosexual woman, Katherine Sherritt, who once had a brief lesbian affair.

• [G]ood readers read the lines and better readers read the spaces.
  • Days 11 & 12: Wye to Sassafras, p. 534

Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction, 1984–1994. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995

• A "limited imagination," as I understand it, gets things wrong. From its mere incapacity, like limited intelligence or limited physical strength, it fails to anticipate accurately and to come up with the really new or more effective idea. Never mind that even the most powerful imagination may not be literally unlimited. … In the literary sphere, limited imagination is likely to be limited to the most conventional and obvious: a mere lack of originality in the material, the form, the treatment.
  • "The Limits of Imagination" (1985), p. 51

• Our ability to experience life may be more or less limited by inexperience of art as well as vice versa, since each tends to increase the wattage of the great illuminator of both — namely the imagination.
  • "The Limits of Imagination" (1985), p. 56

• Life teaches the storyteller his themes and subject matter; literature teaches him how to get a handle on them: what has been done already, what might be done differently, what's a story anyway, and what is to be found in the existing inventory of situations, attitudes, characters, tonalities, forms, and effects accumulated over four thousand years of written literature.
  • "Borges and I: A Mini-Memoir" (1991), p. 165

• [While] we have only one life, nevertheless that one life ("that massive datum," John Updike calls it in his memoir Self-Consciousness) lends itself to any number of stories — and I'm speaking here not of fabrications but of sincere, straightforward factual accounts. Another way to put it is that any life's story can be told in any number of ways, depending on the teller's "handle," or angle of view, or lens. In fact, of course, the same applies to fictional characters: people made out of words in a novel or words and images on a screen.
  • "Ad Lib Libraries and the Coastal Measurement Problem: A Reminiscence" (1993), p. 239

• [A]rtistic Meisterstücken, even less-than-Meisterstücken, have always been points of departure for "solitary meditation and contemplation," to a degree depending, I suppose, on the particular Meisterstück, the particular reader, viewer, or auditor, and the particular circumstances of their encounter.
  • "Postmodernism Visited: A Professional Novelist's Amateur Review" (1991), p. 297
  • Barth "protest[s]" Octavio Paz's call in the opening paragraph of his 1970 essay "Blank Thought" for "another art" that can satisfy our "imperative need" for "solitary meditation and contemplation." In Barth's view, serious art has always done that.

• There is a popular misconception of the Romantics as rebelling against all formal constraints in favor of untrammeled freedom (as in their fondness for "wild" gardens" around those "broken" columns), and indeed we have heard Schlegel's Julius explicitly rejecting "all that … we call 'order'" in his Lucinde project. But it is clear that in fact he and his creator have a veritable passion for form — in Wallace Stevens's famous phrasing, a "rage for order" — and that what they're rejecting is only certain "conventions" of order and form. I prefer to think of Schlegel as a "romantic formalist" — a term that I apply to myself as well — and I will venture to say that the principal difference between Romantic romantic formalism and Postmodernist romantic formalism is that the latter, more than the former, inclines to the ironic (though impassioned) reorchestration of older conventions — including the classical and the neoclassical — rather than to their rejection in favor of "new" forms.
  • "The Arabesque" (1991), pp. 326–327
  • A little earlier, Barth mentions "the 'broken' columns of Romantic landscape architecture." Julius is the protagonist of Schlegel's novel Lucinde (1799). The Wallace Stevens quote is from the poem "The Idea of Order at Key West" (1934). (Ellipsis in Schlegel quote is in Barth's text.)

• [O]ne does not write a truly contemporary novel … merely by writing about contemporary matters. … One writes a contemporary novel by writing it in a contemporary way.
  • "Chaos Theory: Postmod Science, Literary Model" (1991), p. 341

• The Romantics enthusiastically and optimistically rejected neoclassical forms; the Postmodernists are just as likely to embrace such forms, although the embrace is seldom unskeptical or unironic, however impassioned it may be underneath its coolness.
  • "PM/CT/RA: 'So What?' or 'Ah, So!'?" (1991), p. 346.
  • "PM/CT/RA" in the essay title is an acronym for "Postmodernism, Chaos Theory, and the Romantic Arabesque". See p. 281.

• [T]he essentially human characteristic of general intellectual curiosity interests itself in the demonstration of previously unremarked interconnections between apparently disparate phenomena, as part of our ongoing project of making sense of the world. Somewhat different, and more rigorous, is the novelist's So what? … [T]he best artists have a keenly intelligent feel, however intuitive, for just [such] demonstrable interconnections …, and for the relevance of those interconnections not only to their own artistic practice but to the circumstance of being humanly alive and vigorously sentient in a particular historical time and place.
  • "PM/CT/RA: 'So what?' or 'Ah, so!'?" (1991). pp. 347–348
  • By "the novelist's So what?", Barth means "So what follows, humanly or artistically or both?"

• The ascendancy of the novel is historically associated with the ascendancy of the middle class and the spread of general literacy, and those in turn, in the West at least, with the development of the institutions of liberal democracy and the civil state. … No doubt I am being both biased and superstitious, but because of that historical connection I think of the novel (and, by extension, of general literacy) as a canary in the coal mines of democratic civil society. … If this particular canary really does go belly-up, I'm old-fashioned enough to fear for the general civic air.
  • "The Novel in the Next Century" (1992), pp. 362–362

Final Fridays: Essays, Lectures, Tributes & Other Nonfiction, 1995–. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2012

• [R]eading a splendid writer, or even just a very entertaining writer, is not a particularly passive business. An accomplished artist is giving us his or her best shots, in what she or he regards as their most effective sequence—of words, of actions, of foreshadowings and plot-twists and insights and carefully prepared dramatic moments. It's up to us to respond to those best shots with our minds and hearts and spirits and our accumulated experience of life and of art.
  • "The State of the Art" (1996), pp. 27–28

• [B]y writing an Aenead that combines an Odyssey with an Iliad, Virgil gives the impression of wanting to outdo the Homer of whom he is the self-conscious heir and to whom his Latin epic is also a homage, just as Augustan Rome is at once the cultural heir and political master of classical Greece. You want to be a great epic poet? Here are your models. Virgil follows them—programmatically but not slavishly—and because he happens to be a great epic poet, his Aenead turns out to be not a monumental Case-1 imitation of the great model, but a great epic poem. Thirteen centuries later, Dante compounds the stunt, taking as his literal and figurative guide not "unselfconscious" Homer but self-conscious (and Homer-conscious) Virgil, and not only scripts himself into the wandering hero role but orchestrates his own welcome … into the company of the immortals—in a Limbo, moreover, where they must ineluctably remain, but from which he will proceed through Purgatory to Paradise. Talk about chutzpah! Happening to be a great poet, Dante brings the thing off.
  • "'In the Beginning': The Big Bang, the Anthropic Principle, and the Jesus Paradox" (1996), pp. 54–55

• As instanced by Virgil and Dante, the vocation of artisthood bears some analogy to those of mythic-herohood and messiahship—conspicuously so for the Romantics and the great early Modernists, with their characteristic conception of the artist as hero (one recalls James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, originally named Stephen Hero, vowing to "forge, in the smithy of my soul, the uncreated conscience of my race"), more modestly so even for Postmoderns. In at least some cases, the present author's included, one's apprentice sense of calling may be far from clear. even to oneself. … One may be uncertain of both one's vocation and one's talent for it, or confident of one of those but not the other, or confident of both but mistaken, or doubtful of both but mistaken, or correct on one or both counts. In the happiest case, one comes to have reasonable faith in both calling and gift and at least some "objective" confirmation that that faith is not altogether misplaced. But "real, non-scripted life" is slippery terrain, in which templates and prophecies are ill-defined, elastic, arguable, and verdicts are forever subject to reversal. One crosses one's fingers, invokes one's muse and does one's best.
  • "'In the Beginning': The Big Bang, the Anthropic Principle, and the Jesus Paradox" (1996), p. 306, footnote 15

• So what's to be said … for a curriculum devoted to a study of a more-or-less-agreed-upon roster of "the best that has been thought and said," in Matthew Arnold's famous formulation — or at least as representatively much of that Best as the ever-evolving consensus of a good college faculty believes can be fruitfully addressed between undergraduate matriculation and the baccalaureate?

  Well: what's to be said for it, needless to say, is that it not only edifies and instructs — any good old curriculum does that — but permits discourse within a shared frame of reference richer and more stable than this season's pop music, films, and TV shows, which a colleague of mine used to lament were the only points of cultural reference that he could assume to be shared by his undergraduate students.

  • "Liberal Education: The Tragic View" (2002), p. 185
  • The Arnold quote is from the preface to Culture and Anarchy (1869).

• The Tragic View of liberal education is that even at its best, … it is so necessarily, unavoidably limited that all it can attempt is to afford us some experience of, for example, informed close reading and critical thinking, and to make us aware that there remain continents of knowledge out there that one lifetime could scarcely scratch the surface of, even were we to devote it all to reading and studying — which we must not, since education comes so much from hands-on doing and experiencing as well as from reading and study.
  • "Liberal Education: The Tragic View" (2002), pp. 189–190

• [T]o a greater or lesser extent our knowledge even of close kin is often fragmentary, inferred like a fossil skeleton or an ancient vase from whatever always-limited experience and shards of memory we have of them.
  • "The Judge's Jokes: Souvenirs of My Father, the After-Banquet Speaker" (2007), p. 297

• I got a lot of encouragement there from John Barth, a genius, a superb teacher
  • Louise Erdrich Interview with The Paris Review (2010)

• [Johns] Hopkins had this very postmodernist slant. You couldn't help but be really influenced by this emphasis on the text, on experimental texts. People were fascinated with Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon, and was there, and the focus was on that, which I found very helpful.
  • 1986 interview in Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris edited by Allan Chavkin and Nancy Feyl Chavkin (1994)

• [F]or me, self-consciousness vitiates creation. A writer like John Barth deliberately plays with self-consciousness; I doubt that Barth thinks much of my writing, and I don't take pleasure in his, but I know he knows what he's doing and I respect him for it.
  • 1982 interview in Conversations with Ursula Le Guin