The Dome of Heaven | The Point Magazine
This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
The majority of the legendary postmodernists in American fiction lived long enough to be disappointed by their legends. Don DeLillo (87), Thomas Pynchon (87), Joseph McElroy (93) and Robert Coover (92) can still, as yet, contrast life with lore. The bitter privilege must have been a confirmation for John Barth, who recently died at 93, since the tidewater metafictionist specialized in measuring the wobbly frames of narrative against the hurricane of experience. Having lived mostly as a novelist ensconced within academia, a great many of the years therein spent along the cloistered waters of the Chesapeake, Barth once remarked to Michiko Kakutani that he’d led “a serene, tranquil and absolutely non-Byronic life.” In public statements, essays and fiction, Barth was always penning segments of his own eulogy, smuggling themes and flourishes into his life’s account before death could settle it. What he variably described as our “inclination to see our lives as stories” was a cognitive reflex, something humans did continuously, helplessly, to shape and temper experience, even if we knew it would violate “all agreeable plans and expectations.” At the time of Kakutani’s profile, Barth was presumably unaware that he would live for another 42 years.
Among literary people, the name “John Barth” tends to recall, with a decent spread of reverence and irritation, the matryoshka narratives and myth remaking of Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera—the uncut stuff of the pomo heyday. Unsurprisingly, his literary reputation has become chiefly that of a solipsist: a writer manacled to his own interpretation, whose wordplay and puzzle-making appear to spectators like “ridiculous dithering,” as critic Dale Peck, in his quest to further mystify postmodern literature, once described Barth’s writing.
