Postmodern
Theories and Texts
John Barth
The Literature
of Exhaustion
(from
The Friday Book)
"By 'exhaustion' I don't
mean anything so tired as the subject of physical, moral, or intellectual
decadence, only the used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion
of certain possibilities--by no means necessarily a cause for despair.
(64)
-
His examples: Beckett,
Borges and Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
[Borges: "Tlon, Uqbar,
Orbis Tertius"]
. . . like all of
Borges's work, it illustrates in other of its aspects my subject: how
an artist may paradoxically turn the felt ultimacies of our time into material
and means for his work -- paradoxically, because by doing so he transcends
what had appeared to be his refutation (71).
-
his own novels as examples
. . .novels which imitate
the form of the Novel, by an author who imitates the role of Author (72).
A labyrinth,
after all, is a place in which, ideally, all the possibilities of choice
(of direction, in this case) are embodied, and -- barring special dispensation
like Theseus's -- must be exhausted before one reaches the heart.