To the Editor:
I think it would be unfortunate if Robert Garis’s thin-blooded “observations” on John Barth prevented anyone from reading The Sot-Weed Factor [“What Happened to John Barth?” October 1966]. . . .
Garis complains . . . about a possible mistake in a New York Times Book Review article which ascribed a running journal in the novel to “Captain James Smith.” It was, said Garis triumphantly, really Sir Henry Burlingame’s Journal; and the Captain James Smith journal was a different one.
Well, since Mr. Garis is being silly, the correct name in the book is “Captain John Smith.” Of course, Garis has an easy out. He says that The Sot-Weed Factor is not a book that “encourages accurate reading.” That’s his problem. I have two children who read it when they were seventeen and nineteen and had no problem with it.
As for The Sot-Weed Factor, I think it’s just about the best novel written in the United States since Moby Dick. Because it teems with satire, comedy, richness, boldness, and depth of language, it may have been a bit too overwhelming for a man who prefers the fleshless, drained, cerebral prose of Nabokov.
Martin Solow
New York City
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To the Editor:
Robert Garis evidently belongs to that class of . . . pedants who, unable themselves to enjoy novels, must try to put to shame as unsophisticated others who do. The fact that a non-lover of Swift unfavorably compares Barth to Swift is hardly an interesting basis for criticism of two provocative and totally entertaining novels.
Allan J. Tobin
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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To the Editor:
. . . Mr. Garis terms Giles Goat-Boy a “pseudo-adaptation of the Swift of Gulliver’s Travels.” Having neatly placed the novel in its proper slot, it no longer becomes necessary for him to see what the work says and how it manages to say it. The very passage Mr. Garis quotes, which he judges as “self-conscious high style,” and to which he assigns a B-grade seems to be strikingly fresh poetic prose.
Mr. Garis allows himself to become involved in the business of identifying characters and places, and reduces the novel to a matter of substituting one term for another. But Barth’s concern with our identifying his characters’ counterparts is a minor one. . . . The identifications are there to heighten the impact of the novel by supplying the reader with a frame of reference to his own world.
Finally, Mr. Garis misses the intent of Barth’s allegory. . . . The Doctrine is not intended as a revelation to the reader, because Barth does not pretend to be the new Messiah. Rather, it is there to clothe Barth’s statement that man is incapable of receiving any new doctrine because of his spiritual blindness and moral impotence.
Howard Goldberg
Sayville, New York
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To the Editor:
Robert Garis has read Giles Goat-Boy—like most of the other critics of the work—only on the level of its superstructure. On this level, the result can appear to be little more than an overly-contrived jaunt into highbrow science fiction. . . .
Only when one looks below the surface icing is it clear that Barth has opposed a Christian superstructure to a pagan substructure. The richness of the work lies in the balance achieved between a Christian cosmogony . . . and a pagan substructure in which the role of archetypal hero determines everything that happens and much that otherwise would seem episodic, mere mystification, or elaborate joke.
Barth offers his first clues in the title. Giles Goat-Boy suggests not only St. Giles, patron saint of cripples (and the archetypal hero is always crippled), but the Greek derivation of Aegis, the shield made from the goat that fostered Zeus, and also Aegisthus, the Greek hero raised among goats. . . .
Barth owes his greatest debt to Lord Raglan’s The Hero, which virtually furnishes all the keys needed to understand the book. . . .
Raglan outlines twenty-two features of the archetypal hero pattern from an obscure birth and crippled feet to death on a hilltop. Oedipus meets twenty-one of the criteria, and Barth is careful to permit his goat-boy no more, but he also gives him the one feature Oedipus lacks—the role of lawmaker through his New Revised Syllabus.
Barth’s subsurface theme is most explicitly stated halfway through the novel in what appears to be one of his many diversions in plot action: a New Tammany College staging of Sophocles’s Oedipus. Giles resembles Oedipus more closely than some of the other archetypal heroes upon which Barth has modeled him. His relationship with his mother drives her mad, and he short-circuits WESCAC, his computer father. He also lives the riddle of the Sphinx . . . by walking first on four legs as a goat, then on two and finally on three legs (holding a staff) as he enters the University.
. . . Only when Giles Goat-Boy is read on both these levels does it become clear how fully the work elaborates the struggles between the animal and divine in man’s nature—an idea only toyed with in the Christian superstructure. While all questions at New Tammany College are multiple choice, there are indeed answers, and Barth’s demand upon the reader is that he seek them out. To date, all reviewers have been curiously lazy.
Harry Lawton
Riverside, California
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Mr. Garis writes:
Mr. Solow has caught me out fairly and embarrassingly. As for what he and the other correspondents offer in the way of interpretation or assessment of Barth, it seems to me that none of it brings any serious question against the points I made, which still seem to me the central ones.
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