Irony, Cynicism and Satire in The Floating Opera

CHRIS CONTI Irony, Cynicism and Satire in The Floating Opera 'Open'-texts contradict and subvert organicist beliefs . . . but it remains to be seen whether in the past century the hegemonic frame of mind has not in fact abandoned organicism, and replaced it with openness and irony. Moretti, Signs Taken For Wonders The scent of the hoax has always clung to John Barth's work. Barth's fiction abounds with literary confidence men and his metafictional method foregrounds the operations of the aesthetic suspension of disbelief. The parody of the eighteenth century novel and its foundling hero in The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), the disclaimers and postscripts framing the hero's ironic quest for "flunkedness" in Giles Goat-Boy (1966), the Möbius strip binding the frame-tale experiments of Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and Chimera (1972), or the recycling of his previous output in the form of letters to the Author in LETTERS (1979), all share something of the structural joke of conceptual art. In these and other novels and stories, the machinery of fictional narrative is laid bare as a magician's trick. Although a "passionate virtuosity" is Barth's goal, and all he believes possible in an age of digital literacy, the more sophisticated his narratives have become the fewer signs of life they seem to possess (Friday Book 79). While his metafictional method intends creative open-endedness—symbolized in devices like the Möbius strip and the embedded narratives inspired by tale cycles like The 1001 Nights and The Ocean of Story—the result is, so to speak, open-endlessness.' The Floating Opera (1956) is Barth's first narrative goose-chase— the subplot charts the changing fortunes of the Mack estate—a quest Arizona Quarterly Volume 6i, Number 4, Winter 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 16 10 128 Chris Conti for meaning that might prevent the narrator from killing himself and the rest of his community. The quest is humbug and revealed in the closing chapter as little more than a narrative device: "The truth is that nothing makes any difference, including that truth. Hamlet's question is, absolutely, meaningless" (251). Todd writes with the knowledge that a heart condition might end his life at any moment, making his existential dilemma also something of a narratological one. Barth later considered this dilemma the first example of his Scheherazadian aesthetic and the condition of narrative artists generally: the narrator spinning yarns to defer the inevitable sentence of death. The theory identifies narrative closure with symbolic death—rather than with the finitude necessary to all narrative—and thus places a premium on its avoidance. By projecting his "publish or perish" dilemma onto Scheherazade and his creative exhaustion onto the dynamic of literary evolution , the dilemma of the metafictional author appears as the universal narratological dilemma (Friday Book 135). The metafictional parody of narrative form, combined with the comprehensive role assigned to the frame tale—a metaphor for the immortality of story-telling—gives the impression that Barth aspires to narrate the fortunes of literature itself. Where literary modernism sought to confer order on "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history" (Eliot 177), metafictional parody seeks to order the fragmentation of literary modernism. Barth looks to parody, as the irony of form, to subíate the claims of modernism in what amounts to a literary idealism, a notion of literature's independent life as "self-transcendent parody" (Friday Book 205). The survival of narrative art in ironic form is reenacted in the trials of the metafictional narrators, who experience writer's block in the face of the canon's exhaustion ofcreative possibilities before discovering , via parody, that the wine sacks have not run dry. The real division in Barth's oeuvre is not, as is so often supposed, between different paradigms of representation indicated by the terms "realism" and "metafiction." The narrative tricks of The Floating Opera anticipate later experiments with narrative frames; Todd's narratological dilemma is closer to Scheherazade's than is any of the later narrators that identify with her; and the seeds of the metafictional aesthetic are present in the Doctor's advice to Jacob Horner...