'A tale well wrought is the gossip o' the gods': Storytelling in John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor

? tale well wrought is the gossip o' the gods': Storytelling in John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor John Zurlo Lamar University Storytelling, an important motif in John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor that functions as the foundation for the development of the book's plot, characters, and theme, serves also as an excellent guide on storytelling. The stories told throughout the book are models for the novel itself, thus creating a substructure of stories within stories. These stories create a spiraling rhythm which establishes the pacing for plot development, and they especially complicate the protagonist's search for self-identity. Each time Ebenezer Cooke thinks he understands his environment, the characters around him change masks and further isolate Cooke from reality. The difficulty of taking any solid, permanent fix on reality and self-identity is a foundamental tenet in Barth's philosophy.1 By recognizing and accepting the absurdity of the observed world, Barth's characters become free to create their own existential reality. And although not exact representations of life, the created tales are as accurate as any historical account of events. Cooke represents the philosophy of essence: we possess the basic material or propensity for being specific types of people. Cooke decides very early that he is destined to remain a virgin and become a poet. Henry Burlingame, Cooke's former tutor, represents the philosophy of existentialism: we make our own identity and meaning in life, moment by moment. Burlingame engages in an orgy of impersonations. Although there are more than twenty-five different stories told in the novel, the plot evolves out of two maj or stories. The principle one is about Cooke who sails from England to take over his father's tobacco plantation in Maryland, but who really undergoes initiation into adulthood. The other major story, woven contrapuntally through the novel, is about Burlingame who searches for his roots in the colonies. Burlingame is the most magnificent teller of tales. Masked 1. Interview with Alan Prince, quoted in David Morrell, John Barth: An Introduction (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), p. 30. 104ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW behind nine different disguises, Burlingame's fantastic stories fluster Cooke's views of himself and the world. Two secondary characters emerge as model storytellers. The quintessential storyteller is Henrietta Russecks, Cooke's half-sister. But the purest statement about the art of storytelling is by Harvey Russecks, Henrietta's step-uncle. Cooke's isolated childhood with his twin sister, Anna, places him in a fertile world of games and imagination. Although the two spend their childhood "play-acting," Ebenezer becomes the more imaginative and emotional.2 In short, he has the temperament of an artist, always "dizzy with the beauty of the possible" (p. 21), and the eyes of a storyteller never able to take seriously the authenticity of historical events or characters. To Cooke history could have happened in any number of ways (p. 19). In addition to establishing Cooke's identity as a storyteller and as a character in a larger story, Cooke's attitude promotes Barth's thesis that "we all invent our pasts, more or less, as we go along, at the dictates of Whim and Interest; the happenings of former times are a clay in the present moment that will-we, nill-we, the lot of us must sculpt" (p. 793). Cooke's decision that he is both virgin and poet casts him out into the absurd world and exposes him to a multiplicity of near disasters that grate away at his innocence and ignorance. He resolves to compose an epic "in the form of an imaginary voyage, thinking thereby to discover to the reader the delights of the Province [Maryland] with the same freshness and surprise wherewith they would discover themselves to the voyager-poet" (p. 183). The version eventually published, however, is a work intended to "scourge the Province with the lash of Hudibrastic as a harlot is scourged at the public post" (p. 484). Cooke says, "I shall make the piece a fiction!...All my trials I'll reconceive to suit the plot and alter just enough to pass the printer" (p. 484). Thus possessed, Cooke writes for months...