Textual Relics and Metaphysical Flux: Anti-Historicism in John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor

Originally published in 1960, John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor is a fictionalized account of eighteenth-century poet Ebenezer Cooke's adventures in colonial Maryland. Very little is known about the "real" Cooke save his authorship of a vicious anti-colonial satire titled "The Sot-Weed Factor" (1708). Almost entirely freed from an obligation to adhere to established biographical fact, Barth re-imagines Cooke as a naïve poet and avowed virgin who, after securing the title "poet laureate of Maryland," leaves England for his father's tobacco plantation in the New World. Surviving piracy, shipwreck, opium smugglers, the "French pox," Indian uprisings, a slave rebellion, the loss of his father's estate, and be-fouled breeches, the fictitious Cooke abandons his plans for a heroic, epic Marylandiad and authors instead the novel's eponymous—and historical—satire on the uncouth people and customs of the colony. By the novel's end, Barth's Cooke has lost his virginity, regained his lost estate, rejected both poetry and philosophy, and withdrawn from public affairs to become presumably a wiser, if embittered, man of experience.

More than a half-century after its publication, The Sot-Weed Factor remains one of the more influential historical novels of its time, representative of a genre that functioned as an important literary battleground from the 1960s through at least the turn of the twenty-first century. Theorists Linda Hutcheon and Brian McHale, for instance, regard Barth's novel as a major landmark in the development of postmodernist historical fiction, while Amy J. Elias considers The Sot-Weed Factor both an early instance of what she calls the post-1960s metahistorical romance and a direct progenitor of such later examples of that genre as Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon. Thus, over the past two decades The Sot-Weed Factor has been thought of primarily as a novel that looks forward, prefiguring postmodernist developments in historical fiction. This point of view seems particularly valid when one takes into account the novel's subversive attitude towards "official" historical accounts and its playful flouting of realist aesthetics, both of which are considered defining characteristics of postmodernism.¹ Though this account is in many ways convincing, it should be remembered that The Sot-Weed Factor, being firmly grounded in the anti-historicist arguments of modernist writers and philosophers from Ibsen and Joyce to Nietzsche and Karl Popper, is as much a continuation of modernism as it is the harbinger of the new, postmodernist historical fiction.

Historicism, as practiced through the middle of the twentieth century, is first the philosophical principle that historical experience is the central dimension of human life and secondly a mode of scholastic inquiry based upon this principle. According to historian Hayden White, the nineteenth century represented historicism's "golden age," when the human sciences, from art to philosophy, combined to seek an understanding of the ways that societies and the individuals within them change over time (48-49). For White, the upshot of the "old historicism" was political; nineteenth-century historicists, including philosophers, historians, and novelists, propagated a historical consciousness they hoped would lead to social progress. They saw the historian "as charged with the special task of inducing in men an awareness that their present condition was always in part a product of specifically human choices, which could therefore be changed or altered by further human action in precisely that degree" (49). Thus informed by historicism, the practice of history throughout the nineteenth century was explicitly political, serving what can be seen as a progressive, humanistic social philosophy.

For many theorists, the historical novel in its classical form—as practiced by Sir Walter Scott or Alessandro Manzoni—developed in the nineteenth century as the most important aesthetic component of historicism. Georg Lukács, for instance, argued that Scott's novels articulate an early version of the historicist imagination that found its apotheosis in Marxian historical materialism. According to Lukács, Scott's singular achievement was his ability to give literary shape (in the form of plot, character, and picturesque detail) to historicist principles. The...