Romancing Scheherazade: John Barth's self-perpetuating narrative machine from "The Floating Opera" through "Chimera".
Date
1991
Authors
Ben Aziza, Lahsen.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Dalhousie University
Abstract
Description
This study explores John Barth's use of framing as a narrative-generating strategy.
Barth uses the frame-tale technique precisely because it allows him to tell tales endlessly. The most essential quality of this ancient narrative convention is the perpetuation of narrative. Framed narrative is by essence self-generating, self-perpetuating, and Barth capitalizes on this property with a vengeance. Barth is aware that one can write a potentially infinite book by embedding subordinate narratives within the main narrative, just as one can expand the most basic sentence by inserting within it an infinite series of subordinate clauses. To the extent that the structure of tales within tales is an open-ended structure, it allows an infinite continuing along an infinite sequence of suspensions which can become in their turn new narrative-launching points. A frame closes the story it contains only to usher in a new one, thus enabling the narrative to perpetuate itself ad infinitum.
Of all the classics of frame-tale literature, The Arabian Nights is Barth's favourite. He has a long-standing obsession with Scheherazade, who saves her life from King Shahryar's murderous misogyny by bewitching him with a myriad of tales within tales spun over one thousand and one nights. Barth finds Scheherazade's terrifying publish-or-perish situation emblematic of the daunting task that the artist must grapple with. For Barth, eluding the menace of artistic impotence is no less dreadful than the menace of death Scheherazade contends with for one thousand and one nights. The ontological implications of Scheherazade's situation are deeply embedded in Barth's fiction.
By studying the frame-tale technique as a narrative strategy in Barth's fiction, this study links Barth with such masters of frame-tale literature as Scheherazade, Boccaccio and Chaucer. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 1991.
Barth uses the frame-tale technique precisely because it allows him to tell tales endlessly. The most essential quality of this ancient narrative convention is the perpetuation of narrative. Framed narrative is by essence self-generating, self-perpetuating, and Barth capitalizes on this property with a vengeance. Barth is aware that one can write a potentially infinite book by embedding subordinate narratives within the main narrative, just as one can expand the most basic sentence by inserting within it an infinite series of subordinate clauses. To the extent that the structure of tales within tales is an open-ended structure, it allows an infinite continuing along an infinite sequence of suspensions which can become in their turn new narrative-launching points. A frame closes the story it contains only to usher in a new one, thus enabling the narrative to perpetuate itself ad infinitum.
Of all the classics of frame-tale literature, The Arabian Nights is Barth's favourite. He has a long-standing obsession with Scheherazade, who saves her life from King Shahryar's murderous misogyny by bewitching him with a myriad of tales within tales spun over one thousand and one nights. Barth finds Scheherazade's terrifying publish-or-perish situation emblematic of the daunting task that the artist must grapple with. For Barth, eluding the menace of artistic impotence is no less dreadful than the menace of death Scheherazade contends with for one thousand and one nights. The ontological implications of Scheherazade's situation are deeply embedded in Barth's fiction.
By studying the frame-tale technique as a narrative strategy in Barth's fiction, this study links Barth with such masters of frame-tale literature as Scheherazade, Boccaccio and Chaucer. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 1991.
Keywords
Literature, American.