| This dissertation studies innovations in narrative in two recent American novels, Chimera by John Barth and 98.6 by Ronald Sukenick. Although both novels reject realist conventions, their differing methods of composition contradistinguish them. They have much more in common with one another thematically than with realist novels because both have undergone a major shift in consciousness since the late 1960s. As a result, they share certain concerns: the politics of sexuality, the dangers of arrogance for the artist, the need to abandon competition with the past, transformation by imagination. These issues could take many forms. Chimera and 98.6 are only two, but they happen to be curiously twinned yet diametrical novels, arriving at compatible conclusions but formally opposed: Chimera is built like a snug series of Chineses boxes. 98.6 is a collection of fragments through which a unifying wave of imagination passes.;Like Chimera, 98.6 is in three sections, each an enactment of a frame of mind, each in an imagined country. The central character is on a quest leading from Frankenstein, an hallucinatory U.S.A., to a commune called The Children of Frankenstein to an imaginary Palestine, where religion, "a function of imagination," is born, because the central problem, death, is insoluable except in the imagination. Themes are similar to Barth's: sexual relationships, abandoning the ego, the power of imagination. In the first two sections, the imagination fails to achieve resolution because it fails to achieve a proper relationship to the body. Language is the medium between problem and resolution, so the central character, named Ron, invents a new language, Bjorsq. Moreover, in pseudo-acquiescence to our narrowly analytic society, the third section contains a series of mock-scientific formulas elaborating a new relationship to the body by means of the imagination.;Sukenick's method of composition is improvisation. The novel is loosely constructed as collage in fragments. The final chapter of this dissertation is an interview with Sukenick touching on 98.6, Long Talking Bad Conditions Blues, theories of composition, and current American fiction, among other topics.;Each novella of Chimera is closely read, explicating Barth's parodies of traditional elements like point of view, characterization, plot and setting. The elaborate system of narrators is dismantled to show Barth behind them speaking in his own voice as first person narrator. Characterization likewise points toward autobiography; characters are allegorical projections of problems Barth is struggling to solve in his personal and professional life. Despite their byzantine complication, the plots are binary. In "Dunyazadiad" one marriage is a mirror of the other, each a viable solution to the problem of inequality in love. "Perseid" is a double helix, its openendedness metaphoric of Perseus' escape from the confinements of ego. "Bellerophoniad" has many binary devices but Barth causes them to collapse under the weight of their circular complexities, metaphoric of Bellerophon's failure to escape the closed circle of his ego. Settings are very self-reflexive. They are emblematic rather than representational and always ambiguous. Disembodied narrators hover so close over the stories that in the last novella, "Bellerophoniad," Barth ingeniously collapses that little distance and situates the story on the page itself. |
