John Barth on inspiration, categories and genres
The American author John Barth, perhaps best known for his novel «The Sot-Weed Factor,» published in 1960, has a keen following in Greece, where four of his works have been translated for Polis. Now Kedros has brought out a Greek translation of «The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor,» first published in 1991, and Kathimerini took the opportunity to ask the writer about his work. Your first two novels were short and more or less straightforward tales. However, one can see in them your preoccupation with philosophical issues, such as existential anguish, nihilism and the absurd. Was that an early sign of your own tendency to explore philosophical issues in your fiction? Did this change in later works, when your structure and narrative techniques became more complex? I cut my apprentice teeth on the great Modernists – Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Proust – along with the «traditional» tale-tellers like Homer, Scheherazade and Boccaccio, and the early convention-defying novelists like Rabelais, Laurence Sterne and Diderot. Over the decades, my own fiction has been classified as Existentialist, Black Humorist, Fabulist, Post-Modernist. Such category-labels can be useful when discussing art or anything else but I finally shrug my shoulders and get on with it, never quite knowing what my muse will do next: a sort of low-grade suspense that keeps me going from project to project. Some critics label your works as «novels of ideas.» I feel that this is an oversimplification as your characters are made of flesh and blood, they seem very real indeed. How hard is it to combine a fictional world of ideas with real-life characters? More categories! In fact (at my work table, at least), whatever happens happens: A project may hatch from an image, a character, a «theme,» a story-idea. Sometimes the «world-view» gives rise to the story, sometimes vice versa. Do you agree that black humor plays an important role in your work, and if so what is its aim? I don’t «aim,» as a rule, I just shoot. Prevailingly, my muse has been the one with the grin instead of the grimace; but she switches masks from time to time, or combines them. Do notions like optimism or pessimism play an important role in the way writers write their novels? «Optimistic,» «pessimistic,» I agree with my late literary comrade Donald Barthelme that the important question to ask of a work of fiction isn’t whether it’s optimistic or pessimistic, realist or irrealist, traditional or innovative; the important question is «Is it first-rate?» Or, as Barthelme put it, «Does it knock your socks off?» Your essay «The Literature of Exhaustion» was widely considered to be a statement of «the death of the novel» in the late 1960s. Do you agree with this comment? Milan Kundera has argued that far from being dead, the novel hasn’t exhausted all its possibilities. Where do you stand today? I’ve never felt that the novel as a literary genre was kaput. What the «Literature of Exhaustion» essay addressed was the widespread feeling, back in the 1960s, that it might be, and how that climate of opinion might itself inspire lively new work – as Jorge Luis Borges so artfully demonstrated. You have been associated with writers such as Pynchon, Calvino, Garcia Marquez, Nabokov and others. Do you feel a connection with these writers? Also, to what extent has Borges influenced you? That’s a brilliant constellation of writers, with whom it’s an honor to be associated, whether one deserves to be or not. But as usual when I see such listings, I’m at least as impressed by their dissimilarities as by any similarities among them. The particular importance to me of discovering Borges back in the 1960s was that up until then I’d been exclusively a novel writer. His «Ficciones» re-awakened my interest in the short-story form and inspired my «Lost in the Funhouse» series and the «Chimera» novella-triad. I still think of myself as mainly a novelist by temperament, but now and then I enjoy returning to the short forms – as I’m doing currently. Philip Roth laments in interviews that readers are gradually disappearing. Do you agree? How do you see the future of reading? Roth is probably correct, alas, thanks to the distractions of television, video games and other electronic diversions. My friends at Johns Hopkins University tell me that even their fiction-writing students are much less widely read than they used to be, although they turn out page after page of their own fiction. So it may be that literary readership is going the way of our planet’s rain forests and coral reefs. More likely, the novel and short story are becoming ever more a «special niche» pleasure, like poetry since the 19th century. Better that than extinction. Your novel «The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor» deals with medieval Islam and this reference to Islam cannot be read without associations with present-day Islam and its connection with terrorism. Would you say that your novel suggests, among other things, an alternative approach to the «other» Islam? My «Islam,» for better or worse, is the Islam of «The Thousand and One Nights,» my contact with contemporary Islam has been negligible. I did have the interesting experience years ago of delivering in Morocco my lecture on Scheherazade’s menstrual cycle as a (half-serious) key to «The 1001 Nights» to a mixed audience of locals and American students, in an outdoor lecture theater on the last night of Ramadan, with the crescent moon rising over nearby minarets like the very flag of Islam – and wondering whether I might be giving great unintended offense. But several women Arab-literature scholars in the audience assured me that they found the talk amusing and even enlightening, and that the «Nights» were not regarded as serious literature anyhow. What is your comment on present-day America, after 9/11, in light of the war on terror and the policies of the Bush administration? Can there be a comparison between the existential anguish of the 1950s and a similar feeling that contemporary times generate? Like most of our American friends, neighbors and colleagues, my wife and I are appalled and embarrassed by both the foreign and the domestic policies of the current US presidency, particularly the war in Iraq. One hopes for more enlightened presidencies down the road, but it’s hard to resist the tragic view of history (a Greek invention, as I recall). The author Novelist and short-story writer John Barth was born in 1930 in Maryland. He studied musical theory and orchestration at the Juilliard School then literature at Johns Hopkins. He became a university professor, teaching literature (at Penn State, Buffalo, Boston and Johns Hopkins) from 1965 until his retirement in 1995. His first novel, «The Floating Opera,» came out in 1957. He has written 15 works of fiction and two collections of essays. Barth is renowned for his innovative, postmodern approach, brilliantly illustrated in his groundbreaking mock epic, «The Sot-Weed Factor.»
