Author Barth to discuss fine writing at ceremony

Today, the University will dole out its most prestigious awards for literary achievement: the Hopwoods. Big-money, big-recognition and prizes will reward stellar work, and to add to the occasion, John Barth will speak at the ceremony.

It's not easy to talk about John Barth because he is a pioneering postmodern author who is virtually unknown outside of literary circles.

PREVIEW
	Hopwood Awards Ceremony Rackham Auditorium Today at 3:30 p.m.

In a recent telephone interview, Barth aptly summarized his literary contribution, observing that "great fiction is seldom solely about itself, but it is almost always also about itself." This final clause is the watchword of postmodernists like Mark Leyner and Donald Barthelme, writers of metafiction.

Metafiction is the school of writing that takes fiction itself as its subject. This can be a hard to grasp concept; here's an example (taken from DF Wallace's novella "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way": "Nouns verbed by, adverbially adjectival."

In this very metafictional sentence the subject (the thing being talked about) is the form (the manner in which the thing is discussed.)

Wallace's sentence isn't about Dick and Jane going to the park, or Spot eating his dinner; it's a sentence about sentences, about the nature of sentence-ness. This approach is akin to taking a photo of a mirror.

The classic example of digestible metafiction is Barth's own short story "Lost in the Funhouse" (from the collection of the same name).

In this story, the tale of adolescent Ambrose, desperately infatuated with his cousin and lost in an amusement park funhouse, is interrupted and modulated by observations about the facts and methods of writing.

Suffice it to say that metafictionists are "writers' writers," although I'm not sure if that's meant to be a compliment or an insult.

Barth himself isn't comfortable with the term "metafiction" because "what it seems to imply is a kind of fiction that really is mainly about its own process."

"What I'd much prefer is fiction that does not naïvely approach form but, that being said, goes on to make an appeal to the emotions," he said. Thus, Wallace's sentence would also be an example of what Barth dislikes in "metafiction;" prose that is solely about itself.

A better example is Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five," which, en route to telling us Billy Pilgrim's story, also tells us a great deal about the nature of storytelling and chronology.

With or without his approval, Barth was instrumental in metafiction's inception; his work is the unwilling mother of Leyner's "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist," Wallace's "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," Donald Barthelme's "Sentence," etc.

What is most admirable about Barth isn't his innovation (for, when push comes to shove, admiring creativity is like admiring how tall someone is), but his unwillingness to sit on his laurels.

Despite great critical and at least moderate commercial success, Barth has never chosen to stick with what's safe or has worked before; in his work Barth is constantly moving forward and further.

"The Floating Opera," (Barth's first novel, published in 1956) is Todd Andrews' life's story compressed to the day he decides to kill himself.

It's standard in the sense that it is clearly character and plot driven, yet nonetheless we already see shades of the metafictional super-voice (the voice that eradicates everything outside of itself) and paralyzingly apathetic protagonist that will become the backbone of the works of Vonnegut, Leyner, Wallace et al.

The real high-water mark for Barth's metafiction comes in his short story collection "Lost in the Funhouse" (1968), wherein we find stories such as "Title," a story with no point or content apart from the story being constructed.

But that summation is too simple: Vibrating within the story struggling to be told is, of course, the author trying to tell the story: "As you see, I'm trying to do something about the present mess; hence this story. Adjective in the noun! Don't lose your composure."

Although we never know this author's hair color or gender, we can make a legitimate connection with his/her struggle. At the core of the formal experimentation is a cathartic heart. If there is one quality that characterizes Barth's work across the board it is this sort of virtuoso litheness.

Barth's significance cannot conceivably be over-emphasized.

If you have ever, in your life, read a book you enjoyed or written a sentence that's made you proud, then you will never, ever forgive yourself if you miss Barth's lecture at the Hopwood Awards Ceremony, today at 3:30 p.m. at Rackham Auditorium.

04-21-98