Memory Patterns And "Self-consciousness" In Once Upon A Time:A Floating Opera

As a precursor of American postmodernist literature,Barth's postmodernist creative aesthetics is chiefly characterized by highlighting the writer's self-consciousness in the literary creation process.Published in 1994,Barth's autobiography Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera is another important work to make a theoretical interpretation of Barth's thought of self-consciousness.By rewriting his early works-The Floating Opera,The End of The Road,The Sot-Weed Factor,Giles Goat-Boy,Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera,Barth presents three connotations of his thought of self-consciousness in Once Upon a Time.Although Barth claims that this novel is an autobiography,its narrative focus is not the dramatic life in the conventional autobiography.Instead,Barth just takes his life experience as writing materials and clarifies the connotations and the importance of self-consciousness.In Once Upon a Time,Barth is incarnated as the protagonist Oatmeal who is given the identity of the writer.Thus,Oatmeal's self-consciousness expresses his contemplation about fiction and literary creation,and simultaneously embodies Barth's thought of self-consciousness in creation.By aid of Aleida Assmann's theory “functional memory”,the thesis is going to analyze three connotations of Barth's thought of self-consciousness: mature love,elimination of rigid tradition and minimalism through “revalued” love memory,“shifted” growth memory and “reshaped” storytelling memory in order to systematically show Barth's thought of creating postmodern literature from the perspectives of ethical concerns,thematic creative method and narrative strategy.Functional memory emphasizes a reconsideration of the past and proposes that memory can carry out three functions: legitimization,delegitimization and distinction towards original experience.In doing so,functional memory realizes the writing of literary and cultural meanings,which is quite consistent with Barth's original intention of creating Once Upon a Time.Oatmeal as the “protagonist” in the novel is the incarnation of Barth,experiencing once again the life of those protagonists in the early works created by Barth as a “writer” in real life.In that sense,Barth's early works become the latent texts rewritten by Once Upon a Time.Therefore,the relationship of remembering and being remembered between Once Upon a Time and Barth's early works comes into being,which is not simply a kind of repetition but full of changes and reconstruction.Based on the above-mentioned analysis,the thesis explores the memory patterns in Once Upon a Time and focuses on the functions of memory carried out by the retelling text towards the latent texts,thereby revealing the ideologicalconnotations of self-consciousness.This thesis is to be organized into five chapters.In the introduction,it gives a brief introduction of John Barth and Once Upon a Time,reviews the existing study on John Barth's fictions both abroad and at home.According to the literature review,few scholars and critics have touched upon Once Upon a Time,not to mention a detailed study of self-consciousness in Once Upon a Time.Then the methodology and the framework of this thesis are involved as well.The following three chapters discuss respectively three types of functional memory in the novel and accordingly three connotations of self-consciousness.Chapter 2 interprets“revalued” love memory.In Once Upon a Time,the protagonist Oatmeal's love is a restatement of the unreasonable and frigid love in Barth's early works and the characteristics of combining passionate emotion and rational responsibility form a revaluation of love memory.In Barth's early works,love is only a thematic representation.However,in Once Upon a Time,Barth makes the protagonist's ideal love highly artistic.Therefore,the protagonist's consideration of love points to Barth's ethical contemplation of literary creation,which makes love turn from the realistic world to the idea of literary creation.Thus,the revaluation of love memory is Barth's “legitimization” of mature love in self-consciousness and the mature love embodies the ethical concerns of postmodern literature.Chapter 3 analyzes “shifted” growth memory and implies that the writer should self-consciously get rid of the rigid tradition which includes both the escape from tradition and the routinism of tradition in the process of writing.In Barth's fictional world,the tension of growth story is often represented by the conflict between self and tradition.Based on rewriting,the protagonist's growth is featured by spatial antedisplacement and temporal juxtaposition compared with the protagonists' growth in Barth's early works.First of all,in terms of spatial dimension of growth,in Once Upon a Time,the protagonist in his artistic growth makes an antedisplacement of the space of world outside himself,emphasizing the correction of excessive obsession with the space of self,which is a “delegitimization” of escape from tradition;in addition,in terms of temporal dimension,the protagonist in Once Upon a Time grows together with his counterself who is the incarnation of the protagonist in Barth's early works,thus achieving a temporal juxtaposition of the past and the present.However,the counterself fails to become a writer due to his fetishizing tradition.By temporal juxtaposition,Barth makes a “delegitimization” of the routinism of tradition.In a word,the shifted growth memory is a delegitimization of rigid tradition in self-consciousness,whichstresses reexamining and innovating tradition.Thereby,it exhibits the thematic creation of postmodern literature.Chapter 4 discusses “reshaped” storytelling memory and the impact of minimalism in Barth's self-consciousness.The focus of minimalist narration is to carry rich ethical connotations and literary tradition in a minimalist way,which shows narrative strategy of postmodern literature.Storytelling memory is reshaped by Barth from two aspects: from“blankness” to “an honest-to-god cask” and from “suspense” to “a floating opera”.The abstract concepts “blankness” and “suspense” in his early works show Barth's summarization of minimalist content and minimalist structure.The concrete memory images built by Barth in Once Upon a Time are important media of “distinguishing” those abstract elements scattered in Barth's early works.By establishing unified and symbolic image carriers,the conciseness of minimalist content and the metaphoricity of minimalist structure are further consolidated,strengthened and highlighted.The conclusion of the thesis is condensed into two points.It summarizes Barth's self-consciousness and points out the diversity and the interrelation of its implications.Barth's thought of self-consciousness involves three aspects: ethical concerns,thematic creative method and narrative strategy,among which the ethical concerns decide his thematic creative method,and the minimalist narrative strategy achieves the goal that “less is more” in terms of his ethical concerns and thematic creation.Furthermore,the conclusion shows that Barth's thought of self-consciousness plays a guiding role in literary creation and life philosophy,thus effectively demonstrating Barth's thought of postmodern literary creation.