SOURCE: “John Barth and the Novel of Comic Nihilism,” in Critical Essays on John Barth, G. K. Hall & Co., 1980, pp. 14-29.

[In the following essay, which was originally published in 1966, Waldmeir investigates John Barth's affinity with the nihilistic tradition and his preoccupation with suicide.]

I

When Nietzsche announced the death of God toward the end of the nineteenth century, he also added further stimulus to one of the obsessive themes of contemporary literature—the problem of the loss of value and meaning in human life and the search for new value and meaning to replace the old. And since Nietzsche's conception of the Dionysian was generally misinterpreted as a call for the abandonment of reason and intelligence (the Apollonian),¹ one of the most frequent answers to the problem of value has been an effort to return to the primitive, the anti-intellectual, and the irrational.

But this attempt to replace the Western Apollonian ego with a Dionysian consciousness has never been entirely satisfactory. The return to the irrational in philosophy, literature, and politics has produced an important body of writing—Lawrence, Miller, the surrealists, some of the existentialists, for example—but it has also distorted the nature of man by its radical insistence on an absolute conflict between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Such a view, moreover, is liable to very dubious and destructive social and political applications—applications which, since the irrationalist's political hero is as likely to be Hitler's as he is Nietzsche's superman, may well lead to totalitarian possibilities rather than to political emancipation.

Other sources of value, therefore, have been sought, some within more traditional modes of thought (the neo-orthodox theology of Barth, Brunner, and Niebuhr, for example), some which attempt to assert conscious and rational possibilities as well as unconscious and irrational ones (such a man as Camus, for example, who is concerned both with the absurdity of existence and with free and moral choice). Still others have simply taken the fact of nihilism as the subject matter of their work without necessarily developing a single philosophical position on which to base a system of values.

Such is the case with John Barth. Barth establishes his affinity with the nihilistic tradition and with the existential novel in his first book, The Floating Opera (1956). The world of the existentialist novel, says Ihab Hassan, is largely devoid of “presuppositions” about “values, traditions, or beliefs.” Thus, “whatever values man creates, he does so in isolation, and starting from scratch.”² So Todd Andrews, the narrator and protagonist of The Floating Opera: “Nothing has intrinsic value”;³ And if nothing has value, “There is, then, no ‘reason’ for living”; (p. 243). Thus the novel begins and ends on the problem which Camus has made central to existential thought—that of suicide. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem,” Camus says, “and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”⁴

This is the question which Todd (“Tod is death … Todd is almost Tod—that is, almost death …” [p. 9]) must answer. Todd is a lawyer in Cambridge, Maryland (a town on the East Shore). He tells his story as an aging man who thinks back to a day in 1937 when he woke up and decided to commit suicide. This decision, so Todd thinks, is the result of his long effort to master the fact of his imminent death. Since 1919 he has lived with a diagnosis of subacute bacterial endocarditis (“heart trouble, in English” [p. 11]), and his response to this fact has been a series of masks by which he hopes to hide the reality of his illness from himself: “My heart, reader! My heart! You must comprehend quickly, if you are to comprehend at all, that those masks were not assumed to hide my face, but to hide my heart from my mind, and my mind from my heart (p. 238). Three different masks were required from 1919 to 1937: “a rake, a saint, and then a cynic … when one mask no longer served its purpose of disguise, another had perforce to take its place at once” (p. 239). And one by one these masks fail. Todd passes from the hedonism of the rake to the self-restraint and renunciation of the saint to the disenchantment of the cynic—but a cynic who at least believes in the value of cynicism. Even this mask fails finally, and one morning in 1937, after a long night of despair, he suddenly realizes that he must destroy himself:

Here is what I saw: that all my masks were half-conscious attempts to master the fact with which I had to live; that none had made me master of that fact; that where cynicism had failed, no future mask could succeed … the conclusion that swallowed me in its overwhelming despair was this: There is no way to master the fact with which I live.

(p. 241)

But we have only Todd's word for it that the fact of his death caused the failure of his masks, and so of meaning. It is equally clear, however, that Todd's masks are at least as much an effort to avoid life as to master death. So much Todd himself makes clear when he fills in what he considers the crucial emotional experiences of his life. These he rationally calculates as five in number: first, from his initiation into love he learns mirth, the sense that all human copulation is essentially ridiculous; second, from his experience in the First World War he learns fear; third, from his father's death he learns frustration; fourth, from his only real love affair he learns surprise; and fifth, from his accumulated experience he learns despair.

Two of these emotional lessons are of particular importance. Todd remains obsessed with his father's suicide after financial losses in the depression. Unable to accept the fact that it was really over money, Todd is baffled by the real motive for this act. Such frustration of understanding, he thinks, can only be a result of an “imperfect communication” (p. 235) between him and his father—the same imperfect communication which afflicts all his personal relations. So he begins his interminable Inquiry—a complete written study of his own and his father's lives, which is to include in particular an examination of his father's death in minute detail, a study of the quality of their relationship, and, Kafka-like, a letter of explanation to his father. The task as he conceives it is impossible of completion, yet by 1937 he has filled three peachbaskets and a cardboard box with notes and drafts. Even Todd, it would seem, with his dislike of unconscious motives, could hardly fail to miss the obsessive nature of this effort and the primal human relationship which lies behind it.

But Oedipus requires a triangle, and this is what Todd gets with his only real love affair. This affair is with Jane Mack, wife of his best friend, Harrison Mack. And he learns surprise rather than love, first because Jane suddenly and without warning offers herself to him one day; and second, because he later discovers that she did so because Harrison wanted her to. In fact, both Jane and Harrison want the affair. They want it, they say, out of love for Todd. They want no silly jealousy, no guilt, no recriminations. Richard Schickel considers this episode Barth's commentary on “‘liberal’ morality, both politcal and sexual …”⁵; political because of Harrison's left wing sympathies, sexual because of the curious and self-conscious, almost ideological, nature of the affair itself. The Macks, in other words, attempt to order their lives too rationally, too abstractly, as Todd does with his masks. They live by theory, not genuine feeling. They do what any good liberal couple should. Yet the affair succeeds for a number of years—indeed, until 1937, when, on the night before the morning of his decision to commit suicide, Todd is embarrassed by Jane's attention to his clubbed fingers (a clinical sign of bacterial endocarditis, and so a reminder of his mortality) and then finds himself impotent with her. Another mask, the last, crumbles, and he is left with the fifth of his crucial experiences, complete despair.

That Barth is fascinated by this triangular affair in which Todd, Jane, and Harrison engage is shown by its reappearance in the Jacob Horner-Rennie Morgan-Joseph Morgan triangle in End of the Road (1958) and by the Ebenezer Cooke-Anna Cooke-Henry Burlingame triangle in The Sot-Weed Factor (1960). Each triangle has its own character and special nuances. Yet basically Barth is playing variations on the same situation, a situation which is also explored by Joyce in Exiles, and in which, as Stanley Edgar Hyman says, “two male friends attain symbolic union by sharing the body of a woman.”⁶ There is thus an implicit homosexual theme running through the three novels, which becomes quite explicit in The Sot-Weed Factor and of which Barth is quite aware. What this latent theme serves to suggest is the very Platonic (and Freudian) notion that society is bound together by the erotic, by Eros, or that it must be if it is to remain a society. The failure of this basic human group, which is at once representative of the family (the nuclear social unit), of ordinary people seeking contact with each other, and, through the positions taken by each person, of various ideas and ideologies, is more than personal. It is symbolic of a failure of contact of the members of a whole society on the most basic level possible. And since love and friendship are not erotically directed, only abstract systems are left by which people attempt to communicate with each other. But this in turn leads to the constant change and inadequacy of these supposedly rational efforts. Or it leads, as it does with Jacob Horner in End of the Road, to a complete paralysis of will.

Todd is not completely paralyzed. But neither is he the man of reason he thinks he is. It is Todd, not Barth, who thinks of himself in this way. To Barth, he is a man in whom reason and emotion run in separate directions. Without emotion, reason can give him no purpose for living. It cannot establish permanent value or affirm life. It can only determine that there are no absolutes.⁷ Without reason, emotion turns sour and makes Todd, as Hyman says, a “victim of his Oedipus complex, a latent homosexual; a cold fish, and a malicious sadist” (p. 21).⁸ The implication, of course, is that Todd can find value and affirm life only by a unity of reason and emotion. A passionate reason is required for a genuine involvement.

And when Todd finally decides not to commit suicide, it is because for once he responds passionately rather than rationally. Jeannine, Jane's daughter and possibly Todd's, has a convulsion just as Todd is about to kill himself.⁹ Todd realizes that he must know how serious it is, that he cares what happens to Jeannine, though there is really no reason for such concern. Barth is no doubt sentimental here, as Hyman observes, when he relates Todd's change of mind to Jeannine. This ending is undoubtedly “too sudden, too easy, too pat a solution to the difficult existential questions he has raised” (Schickel, p. 65). Todd should have killed himself or, even more appropriately, simply gone on as before. But at least the response to Jeannine is consistent in that Todd needs to find value that is not purely rational but an impulsive and spontaneous involvement with life.

Such an involvement, of course, does not satisfy Todd. He must formulate his experience in some way, which he does at once. He decides that if there are no absolute values, there are at least relative values, and that “a value is no less authentic, no less genuine, no less compelling, no less ‘real,’ for its being relative!” There is an enormous difference, he decides, between saying “Values are only relative …” and “There are relative values!” (p. 271). But he does not say what these relative values are. The real tone of the ending is caught by a much less affirmative statement: “If nothing makes any final difference, that fact makes no final difference either, and there is no more reason to commit suicide, say, than not to, in the last analysis” (p. 270).

II

Jacob Horner, the narrator of End of the Road, is a successor to Todd. “‘I deliberately had him [Todd] end up with that brave ethical subjectivism,’” Barth says in a letter quoted by Gregory Bluestone, “‘in order that Jacob Horner might undo that position in #2 and carry all non-mystical value-thinking to the end of the road!’”¹⁰ Herbert Fingarette has observed that an acceptance of the arbitrariness of value combined with the recognition of the necessity to commit oneself to this uncertainty can lead to one of three possible consequences:

(1) integrity, the willingness to treat one's decisions seriously and to live by them; (2) evasion, the making of decisions without serious concern for or acceptance of the implications of our act; and (3) dogmatism, initial commitment with subsequent refusal to face the recurrence of anxiety and the need for those new acts of commitment which life forces upon us from time to time.¹¹

In End of the Road, little integrity is evident, but there is much evasion and dogmatism. Jacob Horner is a portrait of Todd Andrews with a complete paralysis of will, which Barth calls cosmopsis. But the paralysis is not always total. There are degrees. At times it may take simply the form of an inability to make a decision, when for all arguments in favor of something (the taking of a teaching job, for example) “a corresponding number of refutations lined up opposite them, one for one, so that the question of my application was held static like the rope marker in a tug-o'-war where the opposing teams are perfectly matched.”¹² At other times, Jacob is the passive victim of moods. He may be manic or depressed, or he may have no mood at all. At such times he is, as he says, “without a personality” (p. 31).

But these periods of no mood usually pass or are easily broken by outside interference. They are related to Jacob's doubts as to his identity—“In a sense, I am Jacob Horner,” he says in the opening statement of the novel. Only once does he reach a state of complete cosmopsis. In the Pennsylvania Station in Baltimore, where, after abandoning graduate study at Johns Hopkins, he has gone to take a train to any place he can afford, he runs out of motives and remains seated on a bench, like Melville's Bartleby, for the next eleven hours. “There was no reason to do anything,” he says.

My eyes … were sightless, gazing on eternity, fixed on ultimacy, and when that is the case there is no reason to do anything—even to change the focus of one's eyes … It is the malady cosmopsis, the cosmic view, that afflicted me.

(p. 60).

The spell is broken by the Doctor, an elderly Negro who operates an extra-legal farm for the treatment of immobility and paralysis. He is, says Jacob, “some combination of quack and prophet … running a semi-legitimate rest home for senile eccentrics …” (p. 69). As “a kind of superpragmatist” (p. 68), the Doctor adapts his treatment to the patient. He has a system of therapy for any kind of person or illness, and he takes Jacob to his farm to treat the cosmopsis. Jacob, he says, must act impulsively. He must also take a job teaching prescriptive, not descriptive, grammar, which leads Jacob to the Wicomico State Teachers College on Maryland's Eastern Shore, the scene of the main action of the book. And he must be instructed in Mythotherapy, which is, the Doctor says, based on two assumptions: “‘that human existence precedes human essence, if either of the two terms really signifies anything; and that a man is free not only to choose his own essence but to change it at will’” (p. 71). The point for Jacob, of course, is that he is to assume a role, any role, to adopt quite arbitrarily a character which will be an alternative to the nonidentity of cosmopsis. “‘This kind of role-assigning is myth-making, and when it's done consciously or unconsciously for the purpose of aggrandizing or protecting your ego … it becomes Mythotherapy’” (p. 72).

So Jacob adopts this pragmatic, arbitrary, yet fluid therapy as a way of avoiding cosmopsis. The role he assumes is unimportant, so long as it is a role. He can change when he wishes to. But Joseph Morgan, who teaches history at Wicomico State, cannot. Like the Doctor, he understands the arbitrariness and relativity of all roles and values. But on this awareness he builds his own arbitrary but dogmatic system by which he lives. Unlike Jacob, Joe is always certain of what he does. “Indecision,” Jacob says of him, “… was apparently foreign to him; he was always sure of his ground; he acted quickly, explained his actions lucidly if questioned, and would have regarded apologies for missteps as superfluous” (p. 29). But his grounds of action are as arbitrary as Jacob's. He knows that his personal code is not logically defensible, that it is subjective, and that he is only right from his own point of view. One operates in this way, as he says, “‘because there's nothing else’” (p. 39).

But what might for a man of the Enlightenment be the basis for a pluralistic and tolerant view of value becomes for Joe a personally absolute system on which he is as unyielding as the most committed ideologue. One of these absolutes is “marital fidelity,” “taking your wife seriously” (p. 39). As a result of this view, Joe becomes Pygmalion to his wife, Rennie. He attempts to mold her into his idea of what Joe Morgan's wife should be. And to test her fidelity to their private code he exposes her deliberately to Jacob. Herbert F. Smith sees the ensuing struggle between Jacob and Joe for Rennie as a kind of philosophical paradigm. Joe, he thinks, represents Reason (Being), Jacob Unreason (Not-Being or moral nihilism), and Rennie the tabula rasa.¹³ In this scheme Joe is God, the creating and ordering force, but “one who does not understand what has happened to his otherwise sufficient rules of causality” (p. 72). This is a bit too allegorical, and it also misses the extent to which both Jacob and Joe represent not-being. Joe's single abstract system is ultimately no more creative than Jacob's more flexible one. Both systems are simply a response to the sense of nothingness. And both systems fail in the final analysis because, like Todd's masks, they are not adequate to a concrete situation in which concern and responsibility are required, not an abstract code of behavior. Thus Jacob and Joe share the responsibility for Rennie's death by criminal abortion (she refuses to have the child when she cannot know whether it is Jacob's or Joe's; this is her way of acting as she thinks Joe Morgan's wife should). She is the “ethical vacuum” (Smith, p. 75) on whom both impose their abstract roles, Jacob inadvertently, Joe actively. What begins as an “ideological farce”¹⁴ thus moves, like Waugh's A Handful of Dust, grimly and efficiently from comedy to tragedy.

III

The existential novel, says Hassan, is neither “wholly tragic nor truly comic.” It cannot achieve the finality and awareness of these forms because there is no finality or awareness in the world which it records. For in this world everything is tentative, relative, or (probably) meaningless. The existential novelist, therefore, must present this world in a form which contains an awareness of relativity, a form which includes both terror and laughter. Such a form, Hassan observes, is typically ironic, which allows “the recognition not only of irreconcilible conflicts but actually of absurdity.”¹⁵ Barth's novels exhibit precisely this mixture of tragedy and comedy. A past suicide, an attempted suicide, and a contemplated suicide dominate The Floating Opera, while a sudden and seemingly unnecessary death climaxes End of the Road. Yet the tragedy, or near tragedy, is qualified. Todd decides to live, to be sure, but he does not do so because of a new perception of the meaning and value of life. He decides merely that there is no more reason to die than to live. And neither Jacob nor Joe clearly comprehends a larger meaning to Rennie's death. Jacob, in fact, is at the end of the novel on his way to meet the Doctor, presumably to resume his therapy and to seek other identities.

Barth's comedy is equally ambiguous and ironic. Its characteristic form is parody or burlesque. For one thing, any abstract system or ideology is parodied—that liberal urge, for example, which leads the Macks to offer Todd such a curious kind of love. Existentialism itself is parodied in the Doctor's various systems (he advises Jacob to read Sartre as preparation for therapy), as well as the various systems of psychotherapy. Barth may even burlesque the most ordinary and customary human activity: sex, for example, which Todd finds ludicrous; the seeking of a teaching job (End of the Road seems at first to be an American Lucky Jim, in which the misadventures of a chronic misfit at a provincial college are recounted); or the pursuit of one's profession, which for Todd is a kind of elaborate game. The entire legal procedure, in fact, is parodied in The Floating Opera in a lawsuit worthy of a place in Bleak House—a lawsuit which involves seventeen wills left by Harrison Mack's father, President of Mack Pickle Co., each will containing clauses that conflict with clauses in all the other wills. “In any world but ours,” Todd observes, “the case of the Mack estate would be fantastic; even in ours, it received considerable publicity from the Maryland press” (p. 93). Such parody points up the absurdity of all man's activities. Even jurisprudence and justice, Todd says, have “no more intrinsic value than, say, oyster-shucking” (p. 81).

In The Sot-Weed Factor, this mode of parody and burlesque reaches its fullest development. So much so, in fact, that Earl Rovit has called this novel a “kind of prolonged academic joke … somewhat perversely fixed on a puristic conception of the factuality of source materials.” What Barth has done, he argues, is to write parody for the sake of parody rather than to seek new meaning or vision or to use the parody as a technique of criticism. The Sot-Weed Factor is thus a cul-de-sac, like Finnegan's Wake, and exhibits “an eccentric faith in the limitations (rather then the possibilities) of the imagination and the creative process.”¹⁶

There is considerable force in this view. And this force is contained in a very simple formulation: Barth has written a very good eighteenth-century novel. What Rovit is questioning, of course, is why a twentieth-century writer should do such a thing, if by it he deliberately cuts himself off from the resources of the language and technique of his own time. It is as if Barth had accepted Todd's belief that one does something not because it is intrinsically valuable but simply to occupy one's time. If one builds a boat, as Todd does, one may as well do as good a job as possible on it. And if one writes an eighteenth-century novel, one may as well write a good eighteenth-century novel. Language, form, and content should be as close to the original as possible, as they were in Thackeray's Henry Esmond. Rovit admits that in Henry Burlingame Barth seems concerned with contemporary identity problems, but for him the parody for its own sake dominates everything else in the novel. He is attacking Barth, in other words, for abandoning the serious novelist's task of dealing with his own time.

But this view is only partially true. At the heart of Barth's work says Alan Trachtenberg, “is the problem of existence and identity.”¹⁷ And since existence and identity are two of the main themes of the book, The Sot-Weed Factor stands quite easily as a successor to The Floating Opera and End of the Road. Barth, in fact, intended this progression, but, as he says, “What happened was, I had thought I was writing about values and it turned out I was writing about innocence.”¹⁸ Not only did he add the theme of innocence, he also added the dimension of history—specifically, of American colonial history. The form of the novel now becomes genuinely significant. For Barth has combined the eighteenth-century picaresque novel and the eighteenth-century philosophical tale (such as Candide¹⁹ or Rasselas) with the picaresque form which many twentieth-century existential novels have taken.²⁰ What results is a kind of existential study of American colonial history, and also of the traditional themes and concerns of American literature, notably the theme of innocence.

The innocent in The Sot-Weed Factor is Ebenezer Cooke, the central character.²¹ Ebenezer is Barth's version of that perennial figure of American fiction, the American Adam, an image, as R. W. B. Lewis says, “of the authentic American as a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities, poised at the start of a new history.”²² Lewis sees this theme of innocence as a movement between two extremes, between what he calls the party of Hope, which accepted the idea of innocence without qualification, and the party of Memory, which tended toward a doctrine of original sin which denies innocence. The main tradition of American literature, he thinks, involves a dialectic between these extremes which simultaneously affirms and denies the possibility of innocence, and which reaches its tragic apotheosis in Moby Dick, its transcendent affirmation of innocence in Billy Budd. Barth examines this dialectic comically rather than tragically.

Ebenezer does not come by his innocence naturally. He acquires, or rather assumes, it. And he does so only after suffering for many years from Jacob Horner's malady, cosmopsis. He is indecisive, equally attracted to all ways of life, and content to drift with “the tide of chance.” He is “consistently no special sort of person.” And once he reaches complete immobility, when “one day he did not deign even to dress himself or eat, but sat immobile in the window seat in his nightshirt and stared at the activity in the street below, unable to choose a motion at all even when, some hours later, his untutored bladder suggested one.”²³

This chronic inability to achieve an identity is responsible initially for Ebenezer's sexual innocence. Such is his incapacity to assume a definite character that he cannot decide whether to be bold or bashful, the young innocent or the old lecher when confronted with a woman—a woman, for example, like Joan Toast, London prostitute, with whom he falls in love. Unable to play a role, he usually ends up “either turning down the chance or, what was more usually the case, retreating gracelessly and in confusion, if not always embarrassment” (p. 57). But with Joan Toast he finds himself suddenly propelled into a role. He is in love; she is interested only in pursuing her profession. So Ebenezer decides that he will be what he already is, virgin. And he will also be a poet: “‘What am I? What am I? Virgin, sir! Poet, sir! I am a virgin and a poet; less than mortal and more; not a man, but Mankind!’” (pp. 71-72). And in a hymn to innocence which he writes on the spot and signs “Ebenezer Cooke, Gent., Poet and Laureate of England,” he reveals more of the source and meaning of this choice than he is ever aware:

Preserv'd, my Innocence preserveth me From Life, from Time, from Death, from History; Without it I must breathe Man's mortal Breath: Commence a Life—and thus commence my Death!

(p. 71)

What Ebenezer unconciously seeks, in other words, is permanence, something above the flux which he sees all around him. He understands what his friend and former tutor, Henry Burlingame, tells him—that “‘we sit here on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave’” (p. 36). The search for a soul, Burlingame says, reveals only a “‘black Cosmos whence we sprang and through which we fall …’” (p. 364). So “‘One must needs make and sieze his soul, and then cleave fast to 't, or go babbling in the corner. … One must assert, assert, assert, or go screaming mad’” (p. 365). Both Ebenezer and Burlingame attempt to create and assert their souls. But where Burlingame does so by immersing himself in the shifting and ambiguous historical process, Ebenezer seeks a way above this process. He seeks being itself; Burlingame is content with becoming. While Burlingame searches for the identity of his parentage, he accepts change and morality in a way that Ebenezer does not. Like Joe Morgan, Ebenezer must have an absolute with which to shield himself from what he and Burlingame know as reality: “Blind Nature” (p. 364) and chaos.

The central action of the novel is the fate of Ebenezer's innocence and Burlingame's search for identity. From the outset it is clear that Ebenezer's innocence is dangerous to himself and to others. He is ignorant of himself (which is what the sexual innocence turns out to mean) and of the world at large. He sets out to guard his virginity like Joseph Andrews and to impose his vision on the world like Don Quixote. But he finds only a world for which he is not prepared and which he cannot understand. He sets out from England to manage his father's tobacco plantation in Maryland and to assume his newly appointed post as laureate of Maryland. But a journey that was to be a kind of odyssey turns into a nightmare of confused identities and unknown conspirators (it turns out that it was actually Burlingame, in the role of Lord Baltimore, who commissioned Ebenezer laureate of Maryland). Maryland is not the beautiful land about which Ebenezer writes glowing lines before he has even seen it. It is simply a place where slavery and exploitation of the Indian are commonplaces of life; where the planters are barbarous, rude, and illiterate; and where the law is dishonest and badly abused (“‘This is my court,’” says a judge, “‘and I mean to run it honestly: nobody gets a verdict he hath not paid for!’” [p. 417]). By the time he gets to his father's plantation, it has been turned into an opium den and brothel. The New World, he discovers, is a place where all the evils of the Old World persist: commercial intrigue, dishonest and intriguing governors, hatred and violence between the separate colonies, mob violence, conspiracy and counterconspiracy with the French, the Indians, and the Dutch to seize various colonies—all the Machiavellian politics which Howard Mumford Jones has documented as a part of American life from the very beginning.²⁴ Ebenezer is thoroughly confused: “‘'T'is all shifting and confounded!’” (p. 544). And he is thoroughly disenchanted: “‘Here's naught but scoundrels and perverts, hovels and brothels, corruption and poltroonery! What glory, to be singer of such a sewer!’” (p. 483).

So Ebenezer sheds his worldly innocence. He learns what Burlingame has told him all along, that it is dangerous. It causes him to lose his father's plantation. And it destroys Joan Toast, who, attracted by his innocence, winds up a syphilis-ridden opium addict in a Maryland brothel. After such an experience, Ebenezer cannot write the grand epic, the Marylandiad, he had once projected. The appropriate form for America is satire. And so he writes “The Sot-Weed Factor,” a bitter assault on the horrors of Maryland.

Even as he loses his innocence, however, he affirms its value. If he no longer believes that justice, beauty, and truth “live not in the world, but as transcendent entities, noumenal and pure” (p. 408), he does see value in the innocence which once allowed him so to believe, or to act as if he believed. Such innocence may have been a kind of pride. Yet, he reflects, “the very un-Naturalness, the vanity, the hubris, as it were, of heroism in general and martyrdom in particular were their most appealing qualities … there was something brave, defiantly human, about the passenger on this dust-mote who perished for some dream of Value” (p. 732). Thus, there is loss as well as gain in Ebenezer's end of innocence, and Ebenezer remains ambivalent about it: “‘… a voice in me cries, “Down with 't, then!” while another stands in awe before the enterprise; sees in the vain construction all nobleness allowed to fallen men’” (p. 670).

Nor is Maryland any the less ambiguous. Barth may show a colonial America of lawlessness and disorder, but he also draws an America of as yet unharnessed energy.²⁵ It is not, of course, the ordered and pleasant land of American mythology. And it is not the ordered and gracious Paradise which Lord Baltimore paints to Ebenezer in England. It is a land, as Burlingame says, where “‘the soil is vast and new where the sot-weed hath not drained it and oft will sprout wild seeds of energy in men that had lain fallow here’” (p. 180). The seeds of energy are erotic, and the society portrayed is a lusty and uninhibited place. It is well characterized by Mary Mungummory, the Traveling Whore o' Dorset; by the long exchange of insults between two prostitutes where each epithet is a synonym for prostitute (pp. 466-472); by the seduction of Sir Harry Russecks' daughter, an incident described as if it were fabliau out of Chaucer; and by the unorthodox glimpse into American history provided by the secret journal of Captain John Smith, where a very different version of the Pocahontas episode is given.²⁶ In End of the Road, Jacob Horner wonders “what could be more charming than to believe that the whole vaudeville of the world, the entire dizzy circus of history, was but a fancy mating dance?” This Jacob calls the “Absolute Genital” (p. 75), and in The Sot-Weed Factor Barth sees the world in part in its terms. It is absolute because no other value is needed to supplement it. The passion it releases is reason enough for living, unlike the detached rationality of Todd.

And in Burlingame, Barth suggests even further erotic possibilities. A man of many identities, yet of no one identity, Burlingame is congenitally impotent. Yet he embraces an exuberant pansexuality which includes all living things, indeed all of nature. But Barth is no latterday D. H. Lawrence. He does not offer the Absolute Genital as the source of all value, nor does he elevate it to mystical status. The anarchic passion of America may be more innocent than the political, but it too generates its own problems. Sir Harry Russecks does, after all, die. Pirates do rape a whole shipload of women. Unbridled sexuality, in other words, can be brutal and aggressive. And passion may as often be unsanctioned as innocent, as in the incestuous bond which Ebenezer and his twin sister, Anna, finally recognize.²⁷ Barth has indeed written, as Leslie Fiedler has suggested, a “kind of subversive erotic tale with historic trimmings which Mark Twain tried and failed at in 1601.”²⁸ But he has also provided material with which to undercut the erotic as an absolute.

Burlingame, furthermore, for all his affirmation of the freedom of pansexuality,²⁹ finds this freedom a burden. He can accept change and uncertainty, he can live with shifting identities, and he can affirm life—but only up to a point. The freedom of having no history, he finds, “‘throws one on his own resources … makes every man an orphan like myself and can as well demoralize as elevate’” (p. 181). Thus he is driven to seek the truth of his birth. He finds it, and he also finds the secret of his family's virility. Freedom of identity and sexuality are lost, as Ebenezer's innocence is lost. Again, both gain and loss are implied: marriage and stable identity are now possible, but the range of possible activities is narrowed. As a comment on America, this change portrays the loss of an impossible freedom, as Ebenezer's education portrays the loss of an impossible and dangerous innocence.

And gain and loss are implied as well by the ending. The elaborate plot is tidied up, of course. But what would in Fielding have been the emergence of a new society in which new knowledge and identity replace outworn innocence and unknown identity fails to appear in The Sot-Weed Factor: “… it cannot be said that the life of any of our characters was markedly blissful; some, to be sure, were rather more serene, but others took more or less serious turns for the worse, and a few were terminated far before their time” (p. 794). The apparently happy ending is only the prelude to further loss and change. Thus form parodies a universe which at this point in the twentieth century is, to many, inconceivable. The rational, ordered, and moral world of the age of reason is now seen as an unsuccessful attempt to create order, value, and identity out of the same shifting, uncertain, and meaningless chaos that has tormented writers in the twentieth century. So the present is not measured against the past. Rather the past is assimilated to the present. And the perennial themes of American literature—the idea of innocence, the place of the artist in American society, the Indian as evil or noble savage, the wilderness as paradise or anti-paradise, the initiation into society, the problem of identity, and the international theme (here reversed; Ebenezer encounters experience in America, not Europe)—are examined against the background of an absurd universe. The result is a comic view of the American experience, but a comic view qualified by an awareness of absurdity in tragi-comedy.

IV

Barth is surely one of the most interesting American novelists to appear in the last decade. He is original and independent. So, for example, one might expect him to continue to explore the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the location of the main action of all three novels, and turn it into his own Yoknapatawpha County.³⁰ But Barth will fortunately do as he pleases: his next novel is to be Giles Goat-Boy, a “new Old Testament, a comic Old Testament.”³¹ Originality and independence, however, do not mean perfection. None of the novels is without flaw: The Floating Opera is marred by the sentimental and forced happy ending; End of the Road by a weakness in characterization (Joe is never much more than a spokesman for his system of conduct; Jacob seems composed of disembodied forces); and The Sot-Weed Factor by what Rovit sees as the perverseness of its parody and a continued thinness of character drawing.

This thinness of character (except for Todd) is to be expected. Barth is interested in dramatizing ideas in character, and his most interesting and important achievement to date is the embodiment of philosophical ideas in a form both tragic and comic. He suggests the extent to which psychological need determines ideas and beliefs, but he does not probe deeply. He achieves meaning through incident rather than depth of characterization. He considers each of the ways in which Western man has attempted to fill his life with value after the death of the old gods—love, liberal and radical politics, the quest for power (the Machiavellian politics of early Maryland), primitivism (the noble savage and the return to nature), art, and private systems—only to find all of them inadequate. What would be adequate, if anything, he does not show. And if his intention of carrying “‘all non-mystical value-thinking to the end of the road’” implies a personal belief, it is a belief which has not as yet found expression in his work. Sooner or later, however, Barth will have to answer Rovit's objections more completely: he will have to show whether his parody is a kind of artistic trap, and hence an evasion of genuine engagement; or whether it is a real critical technique which reflects Barth's own moral vision. Barth may use parody as a way of clearing his vision, but he can hardly rest in it if he is to develop at all.

Notes

1. See Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ (New York, 1964). Kaufmann argues convincingly that Nietzsche's Dionysus is actually a union of the Apollonian with his earlier conception of the Dionysian. Hence the chaos of the instinctual and the orgiastic is controlled and used by reason. The superman is the man in whom these elements are most highly unified (pp. 130, 145).

2. Ihab Hassan, “The Existential Novel,” The Massachusetts Review, III (Autumn 1961-Summer 1962), 795-797.

3. John Barth, The Floating Opera (New York, 1965), p. 232. All italics in subsequent quotations are Barth's.

4. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York, 1960), p. 3.

5. Richard Schickel, “The Floating Opera,” Critique, VI (Fall 1963), 58.

6. Stanley Edgar Hyman, “John Barth's First Novel,” The New Leader (April 12, 1965), 21. As far as I know, Hyman was the first to suggest the theme of Joyce's Exiles when, in The Tangled Bank (New York, 1962), p. 392, he connected it with a paper by Freud on neurotic mechanisms in jealousy.

7. So Brigid Brophy, in Mozart the Dramatist (New York, 1964): “Reason was necessary to illuminate him [man], but it was never the enlightenment's main objective, because it could not supply the motive-power of life or even any reason for living at all. Those had to be provided by the natural instinct towards pleasure” (p. 63).

8. The sadism can be seen, for example, in the way in which he goads Mister Haecker, a seventy-nine year old retired high school principal and fellow resident of Todd's hotel, to attempted suicide.

9. Todd is in the galley of a showboat, Adam's Original & Unparalled Floating Opera, with the gas on when Jeannine has her seizure. The novel, of course, takes its title from the name of the showboat, which Todd explains as being symbolic of life itself, in which “our friends float past; we become involved with them; they float on, and we must rely on hearsay or lose track of them completely; they float back again, and we must either renew our friendship … or find that they and we don't comprehend each other any more” (pp. 13-14). But it is life as Todd sees it, not everybody—the life of the uninvolved and impartial spectator observing the human comedy.

10. Gregory Bluestone, “John Wain and John Barth: The Angry and the Accurate,” The Massachusetts Review, I (Fall 1959-Summer 1960), 586.

11. Herbert Fingarette, The Self in Transformation (New York and Evanston, 1965), p. 102.

12. John Barth, End of the Road (New York, 1960), p. 8. All italics in subsequent quotations are Barth's.

13. Herbert F. Smith, “Barth's Endless Road,” Critique, VI (Fall 1963), 68-76.

14. David Kerner, “Psychodrama in Eden,” Chicago Review, XIII (Winter-Spring 1959), 60. Auther's italics.

15. Hassan, “The Existential Novel,” 797. Author's italics. For an elaboration of Hassan's views in this short article, see his longer critical study, Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (Princeton, 1961).

16. Earl Rovit, “The Novel as Parody: John Barth,” Critique, VI (Fall 1963), 77.

17. Alan Trachtenberg, “Barth and Hawkes: Two Fabulists,” Critique, VI (Fall 1963), 9. It is worth noting that in a short story, “Ambrose, His Mark,” Esquire, LIX (Feb. 1963), 97, 122-127, Barth writes a comic tale of the way in which choosing a name is also choosing an identity.

18. “John Barth: An Interview,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, VI (Winter-Spring 1965), 11.

19. Stanley Edgar Hyman has made the suggestive observation that The Sot-Weed Factor is a rewriting of Candide, which is “The archetypal American novel, as writers from Cooper to Salinger have demonstrated by rewriting it” (“The American Adam,” The New Leader, [March 2, 1964], 21).

20. As R. W. B. Lewis has argued in The Picaresque Saint (Philadelphia and New York, 1959). Robert Alter, in Rogue's Progress (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1964), thinks that Lewis has stretched his definition of a picaresque hero a bit too far, so that the “picaroon has unexpectedly become a kind of ne'er-do-well Christ” (p. 12). The picaresque hero, he says, must always remain to some extent a rogue. On this view, Ebenezer Cooke in The Sot-Weed Factor is not really a picaresque hero, nor is the novel, strictly speaking, picaresque. It merely has elements of the picaresque. Ebenezer himself is not a rogue except inadvertently. Like Don Quixote, Ebenezer is not a rogue rejected by society, but a man who himself rejects society as it exists and, says Alter of Don Quixote, “brings himself to see the world as it is not” (p. 109). It is of interest in connection with the contemporary use of the picaresque form and hero that Alter finds that the picaresque novel flourishes only in periods of social disintegration. Such disintegration, of course, is the testimony of many twentieth-century novels. The picaresque hero, already an outsider, is easily transformed into the alienated existential hero who seeks the grounds of new meaning and value, or who encounters the pain of the loss of old values. This is the characteristic hero of the so-called New American novel, an anti-hero in a picaresque comedy.

21. It is not of great importance in the novel, but it is interesting to note that Ebenezer Cooke was a real person, about whom nothing is known but who published “The Sot-Weed Factor” in 1708. His complete works are available in a volume called Early Maryland Poetry (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1900), which includes “The Sot-Weed Factor,” “Sotweed Redivivus, or the Planter's Looking-Glass,” and “An Elegy on the Death of the Honourable Nicholas Lowe, Esq:.” A fourth poem in the volume, “Muscipula,” is by Edward Holdsworth. The title page to “The Sot-Weed Factor” shows the author as “Eben. Cook, Gent.”; that to “Sotweed Redivivus” shows him as “E. C. Gent.” and the elegy is signed by “E. Cooke. Laureat.,” though, as the author of the introduction observes, laureate of what? The author of “The Sot-Weed Factor” is thought to have been an Englishman who did not like America and so wrote a satirical attack on it—thereby becoming an ancestor of such nineteenth-century travelers in America as Mrs. Frances Trollope, Captain Basil Hall, and Charles Dickens. It is suggested in the introduction that the other two poems were written by a different man, one Ebenezer Cooke who lived in St. Mary's City in 1693. Barth, however, has used one man as author of all these poems and has chosen to spell his name “Cooke” rather than “Cook.” A sot-weed factor is a tobacco salesman.

22. R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago, 1955), p. 1.

23. John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (New York, 1964), p. 21. All italics in subsequent quotations are Barth's.

24. Howard Mumford Jones, O Strange New World (New York, 1964), p. 114-161.

25. As Jones observes in O Strange New World, both of these images of America—as a Paradise and Utopia, on the one hand, and an anti-Paradise, on the other—were present in the European mind from the time of the discovery of the New World (pp. 1-70).

26. Here, of course, Barth burlesques the writing of American history and suggests that much of it may be more fancy than fact and that the facts would be subversive of many orthodoxies.

27. It is implied, in fact, that Ebenezer's sexual innocence may be a defense against an unconscious recognition in this incestuous wish. His ideal is as irrational in origin as are the events in the world around him. The pure being that Ebenezer seeks, that state above death and time with which he concludes his hymm to innocence, may well be the paradaisal and timeless world of his and Anna's childhood. In Burlingame's vision of Ebenezer's and Anna's union as a symbol of “the Whole—the tenon in the mortise, the jointure of polarities, the seamless universe …” (p. 526), with himself as a kind of cosmic observer of this totality, the triangular theme of the first two novels reaches its climax. But the unity is never attained. Eros remains fragmented. Had Love and Death in the American Novel not appeared in 1960, one might suspect an elaborate spoof of Fiedler in Barth's use of this situation. Yet it seems basic to his view of human relations, and will undoubtedly be worked out in future novels.

28. Leslie A. Fiedler, “John Barth: an Eccentric Genius,” The New Leader, 44 (February 13, 1961), 23. A more recent example of this contrast of present day sexuality to that of a previous period is to be found in Anthony Burgess's fictional account of Shakespeare in Nothing Like the Sun, where the uninhibited eroticism of the Elizabethans is contrasted to the brutalized and sadistic sexuality of A Clockwork Orange, a fantasy on the near future of England.

29. “‘… I am Suitor of Totality, Embracer of Contradictories, Husband to all Creation, the Cosmic Lover!’” (p. 526).

30. Barth has done a brief imaginative sketch of Maryland's Eastern Shore and one of its aging inhabitants in “Landscape: The Eastern Shore,” Kenyon Review, 22 (1960), 104-110.

31. “John Barth: An Interview,” 8.