The Production of Lateness. Rahel Rivera Godoy-Benesch

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СКАЧАТЬ narratives in Chapter 2. The second reason is Barth’s metafictionalmetafiction mode, which merges fiction and theory in one single text and not only shows the creative result of the author’s awareness of age-related style issues, (i.e. the fictional narrative), but also provides some clues as to why and how these stories were conceived. As Stephen J. BurnBurn, Stephen J. suggests in his article on Barth’s late phaselate phase, “the fourth-period Barth [i.e. the late Barth] is less an example of late style than it is itself a multi-volume theory of late style” (187, original italics). Hence, the work’s self-referentiality is also one of the codes of production that late style allows for. Finally, by contrasting Barth’s ageing-artist-types with the young artist-to-be Ambrose in Barth’s much earlier Künstlerroman, the short story cycle Lost in the Funhouse (1968), one can also gain insight into the way in which the creative processescreativity in old age draw on earlier, ‘youthful’ definitions of artistic creativity that were established in a Künstlerroman. Hence, The Development also makes use of the genericgenre code of production.

      BurnBurn, Stephen J., who has to my knowledge published the only extensive article on John Barth’s late style so far, identifies a strange dearth in later-Barth criticism. Scholars generally “prefer […] to re-read the earlier (and already intensively studied) books to locate new weights of emphasis in the already known” (180), he observes, and whereas for studies of the later Barth it seems necessary to consider his earlier works, “there is no corresponding responsibility for the critic of the early works to consider the late books” (181). Burn therefore proposes reading Barth’s later works not as “a late return to an already complete fictional project, but rather as […] a new phase in Barth’s career” (181). This new phase begins with On with the Story (1996) and carries on to his latest published work, Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons (2011). This chapter is less concerned with establishing a comprehensive account of Barth’s late style and my choice of texts is therefore more selective. However, in order to explore the late-style narrative – here The Development – and its central figure, the ageing artist, it is necessary to have some kind of ‘counternarrative’ with a ‘counterfigure,’ with which the late-style narrative can be contrasted. Barth’s early collection Lost in the Funhouse, a postmodern Künstlerroman with highly metafictional, theoretical messages, provides ideal conditions for such a comparison: it contains the same strong focus on creativitycreativity as The Development and therefore offers itself for comparison. Yet, with its youthful artist-protagonist, Ambrose, Lost in the Funhouse dwells at the opposite pole of the age spectrum.

      The artist-protagonist’s bodybody is the point where young and old artists meet – and separate. For both, the young and the old artist, their body is a source of instability and unease, but the nature of the physical change that is taking place is quite different: the adolescentadolescence boy’s body undergoes a process of growth and maturing whereas the ageing man is confronted with physical declinedecline, illness and pain. Hence, both short story volumes, Lost in the Funhouse and The Development, are characterized by a strong focus on the physicality of their protagonists. However, whereas young Ambrose is initially just furnished with a bodybody, which only gradually comes into contact with language and literature, the aged writers in The Development start out from the opposite pole: their initially stable position within, and stance towards, language and writing is threatened as old age sets in and their faculties begin to decline. Thus, they are forced to reassess their writing strategies and redefine the relationship between their physical existence and language. Decisive for their success or failure, it seems, is to what degree they are willing to diverge from previous conceptions of what their writing meant for them. Barth’s aged artists thus make active use of previously fixed concepts of life and art in order to establish continuitycontinuity in their life narratives, especially with regard to the transition to old age. As a result, Barth’s theory of creativity in old age in the form of the late-style narrative falls heavily back on the Künstlerroman; meaning is produced through the contrast between the two genresgenre.

      The Development thus effectively illustrates how two deeply engrained notions play together in narratives that portray old artists: Firstly, the artist-protagonist is always already present in the archetype of the artist per se, the protagonist of the Künstlerroman, a figure that has been copied, expanded, and refuted by innumerable authors over the centuries, from Goethe’sGoethe, Johann Wolfgang von initial sketches of Wilhelm Meister to Joyce’sJoyce, James portrait of Stephen Dedalus, and beyond. This image of the artist and his role in society has been so thoroughly impressed on writers’, readers’, and theorists’ minds that there is virtually no escape from it.1 In narratives about old artists, however, this archetype is constantly brought into conflict with the notion of late stylelate style, that is, with the idea that the artist’s old age has a particular influence on his art. As Gordon McMullanMcMullan, Gordon has shown, theories of late style originated in German romanticismromanticism and found their way into English literature and criticism through the reassessment of Shakespeare’sShakespeare, William late plays towards the end of the 19^th century (cf. Shakespeare). In the contemporary writers’ awareness, and consequently in their late fiction, these two strong notions of the artist archetype and the idea of late style clash and interact to an extent that marks these works with their own, idiosyncratic attributes, both with regard to content and structure. In other words, narratives that portray ageing artists have a strong genericgenre quality. Hence, this chapter on two of Barth’s collections of short stories – one that shows the traits of a Künstlerroman and one that portrays several types of ageing writers – shall serve as an example of how late-style narratives grow out of the Künstlerroman but effectively turn against it, as they challenge the fixed notions of the ‘artist as a young man.’

      When in 1967, John Barth – already well known for his complex novels – published his essay “The Literature of Exhaustion,” he caught the spirit of the time. His remark that for an author “to be technically out of date is likely to be a genuine defect” (66, original italics) had a considerable impact on contemporary authors and theorists, and his call for novelty in form, especially concerning the novel, is still thought to be a manifesto of Postmodernismpostmodernism. Besides his strong focus on formal originality in this essay, Barth also describes the successful contemporary artist as one who turns “the felt ultimacies of our time into material and means for his work” (71). It is hardly surprising, then, that Barth himself, well aware of the spirit of the time, in 1968 published a parodic Künstlerroman in the form of the short story cycle Lost in the Funhouse. Half a century after JoyceJoyce, James had given “definitive treatment to an archetype” (Beebe 260) with his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and had thus firmly set the standard of the adolescentadolescence artist, it was high time for a modification of the artist type, on the one hand, and for a reassessment of the form of the Künstlerroman, on the other. And in recent times, again, Barth seems to have sensed that the time is ripe for a new portrait of the artist: as the baby boomersbaby boomers are growing old, and the topic of old age has thoroughly flooded scientific research and the media, elderly protagonists have found their way into Barth’s fictional world.

      Although Barth’s fiction has, over the years, become much more appreciated than his work as a literary critic and theorist, Barth’s short stories and novels are so imbued with metafictionalmetafiction elements that they can be approached as theoretical works, too. As WaughWaugh, Patricia states in her influential theory of metafiction, “all of the different writers whom one could refer to as broadly ‘metafictional’ […] explore a theory of fiction through the practice of writing fiction” (2, original italics). Moreover, Berndt Clavier affirms:

      The value of Barth’s art is […] not related to the capacity of his fiction to properly imitate an existing reality, to forge a link between word and world; rather the value must be inferred from the critical work it does in exposing the systems and structures that produce such links. (10, italics added)

      Yet, to try to separate fiction from theory in these texts is not only an enterprise doomed to fail, but it would also result СКАЧАТЬ