AMERICAN

pointless wanderings and various
weird enterprises — and his opposite,
the educated Herbert Stencil,
who seeks a mysterious female spy,
V (alternatively Venus, Virgin, Void).
The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), a short
work, deals with a secret system
associated with the U.S. Postal
Service. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
takes place during World War II in
London, when rockets were falling
on the city, and concerns a farcical
yet symbolic search for Nazis and
other disguised figures.
In Pynchon’s comic novel
Vineland (l990), set in northern
California, shadowy forces within
federal agencies endanger individuals.
In the novel Mason & Dixon
(1997), partly set in the wilderness
of 1765, two English explorers survey
the line that would come to
divide the North and South in the
United States. Again, Pynchon sees
power wielded unjustly. Dixon asks:
“No matter where…we go, shall we
find all the World Tyrants and
Slaves?” Despite its range, the violence,
comedy, and flair for innovation
in his work inexorably link
Pynchon with the 1960s.
John Barth (1930- )
John Barth, a native of Maryland,
is more interested in how a story is
told than in the story itself, but
where Pynchon deludes the reader
by false trails and possible clues
out of detective novels, Barth
entices his audience into a carnival
fun house full of distorting mirrors
that exaggerate some features
while minimizing others.
“
No matter
where…we go,
shall we find all
the World
Tyrants and
Slaves?” Despite
its range, the
violence,
comedy, and flair
for innovation
in his work
inexorably link
Pynchon with
the 1960s.
Realism is the enemy for Barth,
the author of Lost in the Funhouse
(1968), 14 stories that constantly
refer to the processes of writing
and reading. Barth’s intent is to
alert the reader to the artificial
nature of reading and writing and
to prevent him or her from being
drawn into the story as if it were
real. To explode the illusion of realism,
Barth uses a panoply of reflexive
devices to remind his audience
that they are reading.
Barth’s earlier works, like Saul
Bellow’s, were questioning and
existential, and took up the 1950s
themes of escape and wandering.
In The Floating Opera (1956), a
man considers suicide. The End of
the Road (1958) concerns a complex
love affair. Works of the 1960s
became more comical and less
realistic. The Sot-Weed Factor
(1960) parodies an 18th-century
picaresque style, while Giles Goat-
Boy (1966) is a parody of the world
seen as a university.
Chimera (1972) retells tales
from Greek mythology, and Letters
(1979) uses Barth himself as a
character, as Norman Mailer does
in The Armies of the Night. In
Sabbatical: A Romance (1982),
Barth uses the popular fiction
motif of the spy; this is the story of
a woman college professor and her
husband, a retired secret agent
turned novelist. Later novels —
The Tidewater Tales (1987), The
Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor
(1991), and Once Upon a Time: A
Floating Opera (1994) reveal
Barth’s “passionate virtuosity” (his
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