Brief Analysis Of The Unique Artistry Of John Barth's Once Upon A Time

The research on John Barth in contemporary academy mainly focuses on the works he published between 1950s and 1960s, and, John Barth is generally ranked as a writer of irony, theater and mate-fiction. Concerning his late novels, there are only a few superficially introductory reviews instead of any deep study. Once Upon A Time: a Floating Opera, one of the novels he composed in his anaphase, with its uniqueness creation in artistic construction, plays a very important role in Barth's works and is regarded as a profound innovation in western literature history. However, this work is seldom studied, or even mentioned in China. So it is with great necessities to focus this essay on studying the uniqueness of the inside frame and the outside profile of this work as well as the work itself, and analyzing the emergence of this uniqueness at the point of communicating medium.There are three artistic construction characteristics of Once Upon A Time: a Floating Opera: Firstly, the theatricality of the text. Barth structured the novel in the form of opera. His novel, without the restriction of the traditional medium of paper and text, becomes a magnificent novel which can be "sung"; Secondly, the virtual-ness and structuralism of the text. Once Upon A Time: a Floating Opera is an autobiographical novel, which is traditionally based on the revising of reality. However, in this novel, its frame, characters and plot are virtualized. In another word, the author created a virtual artistic space; Lastly, The non- linearity of the text. This novel was constructed with a flexible, open, web-like and nonlinear structure. In this novel, Barth applied a few of medium measures such as tape recorder, video camera and computer to combine different types of literature and broke the classification of art and merged various artistic forms within one text.Such an unique method of artistic construction, from the point of genetic theory, is attributed to the impact of electronic medium, which, with its essential characters of "cyberspace", "hyper text", "hyper medium", "non- linearity" and etc. inflicted deep influence on Barth's literature creation and became the sources of theory that supported Barth's experimental movement of novel-writing. In this way, It is reasonable that the conceptions of "theatricality", "virtual-ness" and the "non-linearity" in the novel of Once Upon A Time: a Floating Opera are equivalent to the conceptions of cyberspace, hyper text, hyper medium and non- linearity in electronic medium completely.