Passage, framed by [a] fictitious literal voyage.” Neither description—memoir bottled in a novel or ship’s log cum fictitious voyage—quite explains all that Barth is up to in this his twelfth book and ninth novel, “if it is a novel.”

Subtitled A Floating Opera (the title of his first novel), Once Upon a Time starts out with “Overture” and “Interlude,” which together make up fully one-third of the book’s length, at once advancing and delaying the minimalist action of Barth’s maximalist work; then “Act 1,” followed by an “Entr-Acte,” “Act 2,” followed by “Between Acts,” “Act 3 (of 2),” though there is no 2, not here anyway, and finally “Episong” to complement the introductory “Program Note.” Never one to pass up the chance to explore, exploit, and explode a fictional device or structural metaphor, Barth skillfully combines novel and memoir, narration and navigation, ship’s log and opera (bouffe) in a semi-autobiographical dance of the seven veils. Since this is an opera of sorts, there are arias, and if arias, why not drum solos? There are also footnotes, serving both to explain and as navigational/narrational aids for the reader lost in this Barthian fictive funhouse.

The impetus for writing Once Upon a Time came from Barth’s having reached, as the title of his second novel puts it, “the end of the Road”—if not the road, then a road, in fact several of them. He had just retired from full-time teaching at The Johns Hopkins University, had just seen his “last” book, The Last Voyage of Some-body the Sailor (1991), through publication, had just completed the sixth decade of his life and second decade of his second marriage, and had just filled up his third notebook and second student roll. He was, as his colleagues Donald Barthelme, Italo Calvino, and Raymond Carver were not, alive and well at the end of the “American Century,” and maybe the end of the written, printed word too, and with it the end of the novel. As the title playfully suggests, Once Upon a Time is a decidedly low-technology (if high-jinks) affair. This previously self-confessed “print oriented” writer prefers the virtual virtuality of fiction to the “real virtuality” of computer-generated virtual reality. As a result, he confines his special effects to pulling the narrative rug from under the reader every so often and to some time-tripping made possible by twisting the cap of his “reemote,” his trusty Parker fountain pen (or facsimile thereof), and even this he has some difficulty mastering.

This latter-day Dante, lost in the dark wood of semiretirement and emeritus status, facing a dark night of the postmodern, postpublication, postacademic soul, decides to while away a few years in kenosis, emptying out the exhausted “vessel” of his imagination in preparation for, in expectation of, future replenishment. On Columbus Day, 1990, he commences a new story of a voyage that begins on yet another Columbus Day two years later. Barth’s plan here is to have the writing eventually catch up to the story, a Faustian sleight of narrative wits that allows the author to project himself into the future and thus to add years to his life, especially his writing life. Of this 1992 Barth, the 1990 version can say, as Gustave Flaubert did of Madame Bovary, “C’est moi,” though with a difference, maybe a Derridean difference.

So far so good, but that is about as far as Barth, if Barth is to be believed, has plotted his and his narrative’s course. Departing from his custom of carefully plotting a work before writing it out, Once Upon a Time is “an ad-lib odyssey” in which the title serves as narrative “open sesame” to whatever may follow. With luck, this means his and his wife’s living happily ever after, basking in the glow of his twelfth book and ninth novel, if it is a novel, the very book Barth’s dear reader will someday read, is just now reading, his “last” book—that is, the one before the next.

All literature, Barth likes to say, is about its own making, but not all literature is quite so self-consciously and self-reflexively about the principles underlying and the circumstances surrounding its composition as Barth’s generally are. His high-wire art is very much about setting himself a stunt and then seeing whether or not he can bring it off. Sometimes he does, brilliantly in The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Lost in the Funhouse (1968), and The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, and sometimes he does not, in Giles Goat-Boy (1966; despite its early popularity), Letters (1979; immense and immensely unreadable), and Sabbatical (1982; something of a dry run for Once Upon a Time). While this stunt-making can and at times does become a bit wearying, Barth, at his best, knows just when enough is enough (not easy for a writer so enamored of excess); he knows, that is, when the reader is becoming more exasperated than expectant, fed up with what Barth has been doing or, more usually, not doing. That is when he likes to drop in something to create suspense, or rather “suspense,” as Barth bares not his soul but his devices.

It is invariably Barth’s baroque artistry that is complex, not his themes. The point of Once Upon a Time is especially simple: that human life is not inherently meaningful; that what is inherent is the desire to make it meaningful, and to prolong it the way readers want a writer to prolong a good story. It is this desire that Barth honors and as fiction writer practices, positing a metaphorical relationship between living and writing that includes thinking of his early lives as early drafts of his present self, a work-in-progress. (The plural here is significant; this is, after all, a writer who once suggested “mythotherapy” as a way of life.) To René Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum,” Barth implicitly replies, “I write, therefore I am.” He offers up a life in writing, a literary life of a new kind that harks back to (recycles) his own previous publications and to earlier practitioners of the art of living by narrating, especially Scheherezade, whose actual if altogether fictional life, not merely her livelihood, depended on her storytelling skill. One is also reminded of Walt Whitman, another operatic singer projecting himself into the future, hoping to cease not until death, and Theodore Roethke, who learned by going where he had to go, not, like Whitman, by inventing a new form, but instead by working within the confines of an old one, the villanelle.

Anyone at all familiar with Barth’s earlier work may well say of Once Upon a Time what Barth, or “Barth,” does in one of his arias: “I know these waters . . . and yet . . .” The waters are literally those of the Chesapeake Bay. Figuratively, they include Barth’s early life and career and, since this is a literary life, a host of literary figures: Margaret Mitchell, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Whitman on only the first page, soon followed by Laurence Sterne, Edgar Allan Poe (both for his sea stories and for his Baltimore connection), Herman Melville, William Shakespeare (The Tempest), Homer, James Joyce (and not just for Ulysses), Julian Barnes, and Gabriel García Márquez—both of whose own water-borne (or water-born) stories A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989) and The General in His Labyrinth (1990) Barth happens to be reading—and even Christopher Columbus and Captain John Smith.

At times, Once Upon a Time reads like a send-up of a Paris Review interview (what are your work habits? how did you come to be a writer? how did you come to write your books? and so forth). A quincentenary novel of a curious kind, indebted in part to the story of the lost log of Columbus’ first voyage, it is also a Borgesian ficción but in reverse. Where Jorge Luis Borges compacts entire worlds into short stories, Barth expands small worlds into long narratives through a series of what if’s. What if one crossed novel with memoir, fiction with fact, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with Tristram Shandy, Remembrance of Things Past with Arabian Nights Entertainments, the Divine Comedy with Song of Myself, Gilgamesh, or any one of a number of other permutational possibilities, and a passion for writing with a passion for sailing and another for orchestration? What if one admitted that any attempt to recall the past—one’s own past—means inventing it and therefore oneself?

Like Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat, then, Barth shows the reader all the good tricks that he knows. He conjures up “us” (himself, the DWGMPMFUP, personals shorthand for Divorced White Goyische Male PostModern Fictioneering University Prof, and his wife, Shelly, “my missing shipmate, Reality Principle, muse personified” and “dear dedicatee,” who remains nameless on all but the dedication page) and US, their self-consciously symbolic sailboat, not to mention us, his readers. Once he casts US off, author and readers soon become lost in a mazelike marsh (a marsh that is very much like the story itself, not one thing, land, or another, water, but somehow both and neither), up a creek so to speak, on our or their and later his own. He, “Jack” Barth, meets the apparition of his “real” and still living twin sister Jill and the ghost of his more purely fictional, recently dead, longtime friend Jay Wordsworth Scribner, né Jerome Schreiber. As his Beatrice, Jill takes Jack and his story up the narrative hill to puberty, at which point Jay takes over as Virgil (the order of Dante’s guides reversed). Barth credits his “acerbic counterself” not only with living the more politically, academically, and sexually engaged and engaging life but with many of Barth’s best ideas, from the literature of exhaustion to the structure of Chimera (1972).

“Leave whys to the wise,” the Mephistophelean Jay tells Faustian Jack; “let’s us lesser spirits have at whos whens whats and wheres.” Whatever its formidable and, for some, forbidding intricacies (“For whom is the funhouse fun?” he asks here as he did in the earlier story; “perhaps for lovers”), Barth is quite aboveboard, as it were, about the nature of his art, which stands on its own merits and limitations, independent of any moral, philosophical, or sociopolitical justification. Once Upon a Time is timeless not because it speaks the eternal verities to all people for all ages but because Barth plays with time, either time-tripping or canceling the time of his inside story altogether through a computational error, the exact nature of which will not be revealed here. Suffice it to say that that unpremeditated mistake, if it is an unpremeditated mistake, allows Barth to end his story where and when he does, peremptorily but tidily, with no loose ends, and without betraying the trust and privacy of his wife and muse, whose wrath this Rip Van Winkle would rather not risk. Instead of ending in full disclosure, the story comes full circle. It comes, that is, to the words “once upon” with which this novel, like many fairy tales and Poe’s famous poem “The Raven,” began. Thus Once Upon a Time proves, as the earlier looping, self-generating Moebius strip of a story “Frame Tale” did in its comically compact way, that Barth’s world is, as Columbus first imagined and subsequently discovered his to be, round after all, and, like Finnegans Wake (1939), teasingly roundabout.

Sources for Further Study

The Atlantic. CCLXXIII, June, 1994, p. 138.

Chicago Tribune. May 29, 1994, XIV, p. 6.

Kirkus Reviews. LXII, March 1, 1994, p. 223.

The New York Times Book Review. XCIX, July 3, 1994, p. 13.

The Review of Contemporary Fiction. XIV, Fall, 1994, p. 203.

The Washington Post Book World. XXIV, May 8, 1994, p. 4.