MYTH AND THE SEARCH FOR STRUCTURE IN THE FICTION OF JOHN BARTH

John Barth uses myth in a noticeably self-conscious way in order to write about the process of his own composition, and to explore and satirize myth itself and the forms it takes. He views myth with a multiplicity of attitudes, simultaneously praising and mocking, affirming and denying, using and abusing it in order to explore its potential as a satiric device. This study examines Barth's books from The Sot-Weed Factor to Letters to discover the ways in which Barth parodies myths to exploit and reaffirm their meaning.;In his fictions Barth goes back to the original myths, contemporizing them through language and parallels to modern situations, but remaining true to them in spite of the parody. His fictions combine and affirm the creative possibilities of literature to renew itself. In his fiction Barth does far more than contemporize myth. He makes both the narrator and reader share in the creative process of literature as renewal. Barth affirms myth by reliving the process of myth-making within his stories. His narrators are divine-like creators in the way they recapitulate the creative process as they work out their labyrinthine structures and mythic materials. To read Barth is to share in the process of mythological creation through his self-conscious artistic attempts to re-experience myth's core symbolism in fiction itself. Barth searches for a parallel between the author and his protagonists, between the author's search for an artistic (and personal) rebirth and his heroes' parallel quests for personal (and often also artistic) renewal.;John Barth has been an increasingly self-conscious myth-maker since the 1960s. Most of his protagonists and narrators have been writers, literally or symbolically. Many become the subjects of their own stories within Barth's fiction. For example, in "Menelaiad," the myth of Menelaus and Helen of Troy is parodied, refitted recycled and gloriously affirmed and revitalized by and towards love. Barth parodies his own narrative structure by introducing multiple convoluted tales within tales and narrators within narrators, losing both himself and his title character in a funhouse construction that emotionally distances the reader from the story. Yet the narrative representation of this entrapment finally becomes the solution to the problem of how to retell this old story again and make it new. The parodied myth is itself comic, warm, and emotionally engaging, affirming the central theme of love and renewal.;Throughout Lost in the Funhouse the way out of the narrative maze is to an examination of the dilemma itself, usually employing a parody of the structure and content of mythology, while turning the discussion of the problem into the solution, the story itself. All of Chimera affirms that "the key to the treasure is the treasure": the telling of the struggles to write a mythic tale becomes itself the renewed mythic tale and the way out of the narrative funhouse of exhausted possibilites and "usedupness" of literature.;For Barth the use of myth constitutes both a curse and a blessing, a source of ideas and subject matter that also places formal limitations on him. The contrivance of Barth's narrative method becomes a subject matter in itself and in turn acts as a foil to the universality of the myth upon which it is based. Very important tensions are thus set up between the myths used and the self-conscious contrivances with which they are used. Barth exploits these tensions in order to generate an ultimate replenishment of the material and a paradoxical renewal of the myths.