LOVE AND ART: THE DEVELOPMENT OF TWIN VALUES IN THE FICTION OF JOHN BARTH

John Barth's fiction has accumulated many labels, from "the literature of exhaustion," to "black humor," but Barth is not known as a novelist of romantic love. And yet, although he is recognized for his technical virtuosity, self-reflexiveness, and innovative style and form, his stories, paradoxically, are about that most traditional theme of the realistic novel: love between men and women. Postmodernists such as Barth have been characterized as writing fiction that is more about the process of writing than about ordinary life. But Barth is also concerned with human relationships and feelings as well as with technical experimentation. His works may be best understood through a combination of psychoanalytic and stylistic analysis which illuminates his intertwined topics--the development of love and art.;By making the narrative process itself the central metaphor for expressing the larger subject of love, Barth is able to write about traditional love relationships while also writing fiction that is technically contemporary. As his stories become more about love relationships between men and women, they paradoxically become more metafictional and technically avant-garde. What sets Barth apart from most contemporary authors is this ability to have it both ways, to forge fire and algebra into art.;In The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, writing replaces loving, the story becoming a substitute for a relationship with a woman. In The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy, Barth next explores the conflict between the roles of artist and lover, the two identities alternating but not coexisting. Lost in the Funhouse marks a transition, beginning to examine not only the possibility of the artist as lover but the idea of narrative as a love relationship between author and reader. Chimera and LETTERS continue to explore both narrative and personal "love-relations," using the idea of inspiration as a love affair between artist and muse. Finally, in Sabbatical a woman becomes an equal partner in the storytelling, and husband and wife together create a story in place of a child.