Читать книгу The Production of Lateness - Rahel Rivera Godoy-Benesch - Страница 17

John Barth’s collection of short stories The Development (2008) usefully exemplifies what is at stake in late-style narratives written in response to the late-style debate. Firstly, Barth stands out for his ability to catch the Zeitgeist, and he is therefore a true representative of this group of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers whose critical awareness urges them to reassess their stylestyle as they grow old, which results in a re-fashioning of their artistic persona. This is the personal code of the three codes of production proposed for a reading of late-style 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 in a massive reduction of the works’ impact. Indeed, it is precisely Barth’s metafictional style that captures the Zeitgeist. In this respect, Barth’s The Development not only portrays the ‘artist as an old man’ but it also theorizes and discusses issues of old age and creativity, that is, latenesslateness and late stylelate style.

In taking up and exploring age-related topics, such as physical declinedecline, deathdeath, and issues of creativitycreativity, Barth’s latest works resemble those of many other elderly authors in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Yet, unlike some of his contemporaries, Barth does not resort to subjectivitysubjectivity and autobiographyautobiography in order to directly reveal the influences his own old age exerts on his writing. On the contrary, he approaches the theme of old age from a variety of perspectives in an attempt to convey a holistic view. The stories in The Development thus portray several elderly protagonists who live in a gated community and are all trying to come to terms with their age-related problems. Since they all have to deal with different ‘symptoms’ of old age, ranging from retirement from professional life, to loss of memory, illness, and the death of loved ones, their coping strategies are accordingly varied. Yet, they all have in common that they use writing, in one form or the other, to reassess and redefine their identityidentity in old age. This gated community thus represents a microcosm of old age and functions as a laboratory for Barth to explore the relationship between old age and writing in a safe, fictional world. In this microcosm, Barth himself is only present in the form of one of the protagonists, George Newett, who carries some autobiographical traits and functions as Barth’s alter ego. The image of the gated community – a neighborhood characterized by perfect organization and artificiality – not only represents the constructedness of the literary text, but the elderly residents’ effort in maintaining their homes also reflects their attempt at preserving their identity in view of the inevitable decline and decay of their bodiesbody, which is emphasized throughout the short story cycle.

The fact that Barth pays such close attention to the physicality of the ageing body mirrors and simultaneously modifies his strong concerns with the adolescentadolescence body in Lost in the Funhouse. Ambrose, the boy who is about to become an artist and gets lost in a funhouse, is the protagonist of the three ‘Ambrose stories’ in the volume, which have attracted most critical attention over the years. Ranging from Ambrose’s experiences as an infant and a fourth-grader to the decisive family trip to the funfair as a teenager, these stories’ events depict the boy’s development in view of his fate to become an artist, and, in so doing, they carefully assess the role his immature bodybody fulfills. The relationship between physical reality and language, between body and text, thus becomes a core issue in Ambrose’s search for his artistic identity. Indeed, as will be suggested in the discussion of the ‘Ambrose stories’ below, Lost in the Funhouse, despite its parodicparody attitude towards the genre of the Künstlerroman, copies the traditional move of the artist away from reality and his turn towards the abstractionabstraction of art, thus simultaneously affirming psychological life-spanlife span theories proposing that artists in their early phases reject and transform, or even ignore, objective reality (Cohen-Shalev, “Self and Style” 296). In a similar way, in The Development, the elderly protagonists’ physical realities are initially foregrounded through detailed descriptions of their decliningdecline faculties and healthhealth problems. Yet, in contrast, these ageing bodiesbody are not easily converted into a coherent narrative: the physical reality of the decaying body, illness and pain seem to resist narrative closureclosure. Following life-span creativity research, one can easily discern the“[f]ragmentationfragmentation by design, incompleteness, internal contradictioncontradiction and emotional ambivalenceambivalence loosen[ing] the boundaries between inner and outer realities” (Cohen-Shalev, “Self and style” 297), which Barth dramatizes in the opposition between the physical and the textual.

Yet, the fact that bodiesbody – aged and pubescent – are marked by rapid change is not the only connection between The Development and Lost in the Funhouse. Both collections of short stories question and reassess the traditional roles of author and narrator: they search for the origin of fiction and they do so mainly through structural means. When young Ambrose is lost in the funhouse and finally decides to “construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator” (Lost in the Funhouse 97), he merges with his work of art, since a symbolic reading of the funhouse suggests that it represents literature.2 Moreover, it is also the last time Ambrose appears as a character. As Zack Bowen points out, the remaining stories of the volume are

projections of events and attitudes in the Ambrose narratives, and, as [Ambrose] becomes distanced in time and more overwhelmed by the problems of composition, we can see him identified with the self-conscious author-narrators of the later stories. (52)

Thus, a complete symbolization of the artist as protagonist takes place, since Ambrose’s body literally and figuratively disappears in the literary funhouse as the stories unwind. For Ambrose, this means that, as a writer, instead of telling stories about himself, he will become the “secret operator” of funhouses – he will write fictional narratives (Lost in the Funhouse 97). In Lost in the Funhouse, therefore, one can observe a clear progression from reality to abstractionabstraction: Ambrose begins by narrating his own childhoodchildhood and youthyouth in chronological order and realist fashion and then digresses from his path as he “takes a wrong turn” in the funhouse (95). It is ‘the right turn’ for an artist in the Künstlerroman, however: as a prospective writer, he takes the decision to look at reality through the mirror of art.

In The Development, the methods for coming to terms with issues of creative production are more varied. Whereas some of the elderly writers, in a somewhat naïve manner, simply record what is going on in their community, others actively shape their life through writing. Whether their stories are images of their reality, or vice versa, is not always determinable. George Newett, who is the only true artist-type in the volume, makes a reverse development in comparison with young Ambrose: while Ambrose started out with the narration of his life story, Newett begins with fictional accounts of elderly people in his neighborhood. (Not until the fourth story, “The Bard Award,” is Newett featured as a protagonist, although he has made an occasional appearance as a character before). Yet, he must soon realize that these stories are somehow unsuitable to his purpose and he begins to write about himself as a character. The result is a highly complex and metafictionalmetafiction text, in which Newett takes the role of both producer and product. Hence, whereas Lost in the Funhouse shows the process of abstracting the story from its author’s life, one can observe the opposite structure in The Development: as an aged artist, narrator Newett sets out from fiction and turns towards autobiographyautobiography.

The active use of content-related and structural means from the Künstlerroman in the late-style narrative – of course not only in Barth’s oeuvre3 – leaves no room for doubt that a thorough knowledge of the Künstlerroman as a genre is a prerequisite for critically studying and assessing late-style narratives. Hence, the discussion of Lost in the Funhouse below shall serve two functions: on the one hand, it shall provide an overview of the structure and themes of the Künstlerroman, most especially in contrast to the BildungsromanBildungsroman. On the other hand, it shall discuss how Lost in the Funhouse portrays the artist and his stance towards language and textualitytextuality. In this way, the section below shall disclose some of the early Barth’s poetics regarding issues of literary creativitycreativity – a poetics that will be challenged and revised in Barth’s late-style narrative.