John Barth

"...The Friday Book was the first work of nonfiction by novelist John Barth, author of The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy, and Chimera. Taking its title from the day of the week Barth would devote to nonfiction, the three dozen essays discuss a wide range of topics from the blue crabs of Barth's beloved Chesapeake Bay to weighty literary subjects such as Borges, Homer, and semiotics..."--www.amazon.com.

Essays and Other Nonfiction

The Friday Book

Simon Elliott Stegall

This book, and specifically its most famous essay "The Literature of Exhaustion" (1967), was the source of one of the weirder experiences of my (thank God, brief) foray into academia. I was writing some essay or other, about some postmodern topic or other, and I stumbled across "The Literature of Exhaustion" in my search for a reasonable, broad-minded approach to the novel post-1960. I quoted it in my essay. My professor, a lovely woman who, nevertheless, was a Sartre-loving Boomer, graded me down specifically for using John Barth to support my argument (which I've forgotten, but I'm sure was brilliant.) She wrote, and I remember this vividly, "Barth's not really used by us anymore. He's not a semiotician." 

Now, setting aside her weird use of passive voice and all the exclusionary tribalism it implies, it's perfectly possible that I used the quote badly and my argument sucked. But this wasn't what she critiqued. She simply didn't like my choice of supporting text. Never mind that I happened to agree with what Barth was saying - Barth was not in. This innocuous gate-keeping catastrophically widened the fault lines between me and "the Academy."

You can come at postmodernism (that weird, protean movement which is only named for its having taken place after something else) from a variety of angles: semiotics, psychoanalysis, technology, the stage, the novel, whatever. Barth comes to it from the perspective of a novelist, and I think he has some pretty darn good things to say, and (gasp) without a hint of semiotics! Because, you see, he is concerned with how people, from Scheherazade to Samuel Beckett, tell stories. Perhaps the way we tell stories changed a bit after 1960, but our desire (nay, need!) thereunto did not. 

This is all to say that I liked Barth in 2017, and I still like Barth in God-forsaken 2021. His is a narrow purview - what do we post-modernity Americans do with stories and novels? - but it's quite an interesting one. I recommend The Friday Book to anybody who likes post-'60 fiction and doesn't mind listening to a "no-longer-useful" novelist musing with childlike rapture about the 1001 Nights for a few hundred pages.

The Friday Book Essays and Other Nonfiction