In memoriam: John Barth, writer who pushed storytelling’s limits

MT KAUFMAN, D GARNER

John Barth, who, believing that the old literary conventions were exhausted, extended the limits of storytelling with imaginative and intricately woven novels like “The Sot-Weed Factor” and “Giles Goat-Boy,” died on Tuesday at a hospice facility in Bonita Springs, Fla. He was 93. His death was confirmed by his wife, Shelly Barth. Before entering hospice care, Barth had lived in the Bonita Bay neighborhood of Bonita Springs.

Barth was 30 when he published his sprawling third novel, the boisterous “The Sot-Weed Factor” (1960). It projected him into the ranks of the country’s most innovative writers, drawing comparisons to contemporaries like Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov.

He followed up with another major work, “Giles Goat-Boy” (1966), which he summarised as a story “about a young man who is raised as a goat, who later learns he’s human and commits himself to the heroic project of discovering the secret of things.

It was also an erudite and satirical parable of the Cold War, in which campuses of a divided university confronted each other in hostility and mutual deterrence.

Barth was a practitioner and a theoretician of postmodern literature. In 1967, he wrote a critical essay for The Atlantic Monthly, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” which continues to be cited as the manifesto of post-modernism, and which has inspired decades of debate over its central contention: that old conventions of literary narrative can be, and indeed have been, “used up.”

As his foremost inspiration, Barth cited Scheherazade, the tale-spinning enchantress who nightly wove stories to keep her master from executing her at dawn. He said it was she who first bewitched him when he worked as a page in the stacks of the Johns Hopkins University library in Baltimore as an undergraduate.

From 1965 to 1973, Barth taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo (now the University at Buffalo), where he was a member of a renowned English department that also included the critic Leslie Fiedler.

Barth’s creative output was prodigious: He published nearly 20 novels and collections of short stories, three books of critical essays and a final book of short observational pieces. In his teaching and in his writing, he stressed the force of narrative imagination in the face of death, or even just boredom.

When the university was thrown into chaos by a long and shapeless student upheaval in early 1970, Barth was asked by a young reporter what the experience had taught him. In the Tidewater accent of his native Maryland, Barth acknowledged that by temperament he was not likely to get involved in campus protests and “the casuistries that people evolve.” He volunteered laconically that what he had learned was that “the fact that the situation is desperate doesn’t make it any more interesting.”

Barth was a distinctive presence. “He is a tall man with a domed forehead; a pair of very large-rimmed spectacles give him a professorial, owlish look,” George Plimpton wrote in the introduction to an interview he conducted with Barth for The Paris Review in 1985. “He is a caricaturist’s delight.”