John Barth, who, believing that the previous literary conventions had been exhausted, prolonged the bounds of storytelling with imaginative and intricately woven novels like “The Sot-Weed Factor” and “Giles Goat-Boy,” died on Tuesday at a hospice facility in Bonita Springs, Fla. He was 93.
His demise was confirmed by his spouse, Shelly Barth. Earlier than coming into hospice care, Mr. Barth had lived within the Bonita Bay neighborhood of Bonita Springs.
Mr. Barth was 30 when he revealed his sprawling third novel, the boisterous “The Sot-Weed Factor” (1960). It projected him into the ranks of the nation’s most revolutionary writers, drawing comparisons to contemporaries like Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov.
He adopted up with one other main work, “Giles Goat-Boy” (1966), which he summarized as a narrative “about a young man who is raised as a goat, who later learns he’s human and commits himself to the heroic project of discovering the secret of things.” It was additionally an erudite and satirical parable of the Chilly Warfare, during which campuses of a divided college confronted one another in hostility and mutual deterrence.
Mr. Barth was a practitioner and a theoretician of postmodern literature. In 1967, he wrote a essential essay for The Atlantic Month-to-month, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” which continues to be cited because the manifesto of postmodernism and which has impressed greater than three many years of debate over its central rivalry: that previous conventions of literary narrative might be, and certainly have been, “used up.”
As his foremost inspiration, Mr. Barth cited Scheherazade, the tale-spinning enchantress who nightly wove tales to maintain her grasp from executing her at daybreak. He mentioned it was she who first bewitched him when he labored as a web page within the stacks of the Johns Hopkins College library in Baltimore as an undergraduate.
From 1965 to 1973, Mr. Barth taught on the State College of New York at Buffalo (now the College at Buffalo), the place he was a member of a famend English division that additionally included the critic Leslie Fiedler.
Mr. Barth’s inventive output was prodigious: He revealed almost 20 novels and collections of quick tales, three books of essential essays and a ultimate ebook of quick observational items. In his educating and in his writing, he pressured the drive of narrative creativeness within the face of demise, and even simply boredom. When the college was thrown into chaos by a protracted and shapeless scholar upheaval in early 1970, Mr. Barth was requested by a younger reporter what the expertise had taught him.
Within the Tidewater accent of his native Maryland, Mr. Barth acknowledged that by temperament he was not prone to get entangled in campus protests and “the casuistries that people evolve.” He volunteered laconically that what he had discovered was “the fact that the situation is desperate doesn’t make it any more interesting.”
Mr. Barth was a particular presence. “He is a tall man with a domed forehead; a pair of very large-rimmed spectacles give him a professorial, owlish look,” George Plimpton wrote within the introduction to an interview he conducted with Mr. Barth for The Paris Overview in 1985. “He is a caricaturist’s delight.”
“In manner,” Mr. Plimpton continued, “Barth has been described as a combination of British officer and Southern gentleman.”
John Simmons Barth was born on Might 27, 1930, in Cambridge, Md., on Chesapeake Bay, to John Jacob and Georgia (Simmons) Barth. His father ran a sweet retailer. He had a twin sister, Jill, who as soon as advised The Washington Publish that he had “gotten a lot of things without trying very hard at school.” An older brother, William, mentioned that as a baby John “always had an overactive imagination.” He added, “What amazes me is how he imagines so much when he’s experienced so little.”
In highschool Mr. Barth was drawn to music; he performed drums within the faculty band and hoped to change into a jazz arranger. He was accepted to hitch a summer season program run by the Juilliard College in New York earlier than enrolling at Johns Hopkins.
“I found out very quickly in New York,” he mentioned in a 2008 interview, “that the young man to my right and the young woman to my left were going to be the real professional musicians of their generation, and that what I had hoped was a pre-professional talent was really just an amateur flair.”
Mr. Barth graduated from Johns Hopkins in 1951 and obtained a grasp’s diploma there the following 12 months. He taught at Pennsylvania State College from 1953 to 1965.
His first revealed novel, “The Floating Opera” (1956), was narrated by a personality who considers killing himself out of existential boredom earlier than realizing that this alternative could be as meaningless as some other. In 1969, Mr. Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse,” an experimental assortment of quick tales, was a finalist for the Nationwide E-book Award. He gained the award in 1973 for “Chimera,” one other assortment.
After the publication of “The End of the Road,” a campus novel crammed with parodies of psychiatric and tutorial jargon, in 1958, Mr. Barth set out in a brand new and fewer reasonable path with “The Sot-Weed Factor,” an enormous picaresque written in Elizabethan model and laden with puns. It tells the story of Ebenezer Cooke, the “sot-weed factor” (tobacco peddler) of the title, who travels by way of a sinful late-Seventeenth-century world along with his twin sister and his tutor, struggling to take care of his advantage.
“The book is a bare-knuckled satire of humanity at large and the grandiose costume romance,” Edmund Fuller wrote in a evaluate in The New York Occasions, “done with meticulous skill in an imitation of such 18th-century picaresque novelists as Fielding, Smollett and Sterne.”
He added, “For all the vigor of these models, we have to go back to Rabelais to match its unbridled bawdiness and scatological mirth.”
Mr. Fiedler, Mr. Barth’s colleague in Buffalo, mentioned “The Sot-Weed Factor” was “closer to the Great American Novel than any other book of the last decade.” Time journal referred to as it “that rare literary creation: a genuinely serious comedy.”
Mr. Barth took one other gamble along with his subsequent ebook, saying it could be “a souped-up Bible.”
“What I really wanted to write after ‘The Sot-Weed Factor’ was a new Old Testament, a comic Old Testament,” he advised an interviewer.
What emerged was “Giles Goat-Boy,” the story of a younger man who, having acknowledged that he’s human and never a goat, seeks to advertise ethical conduct on the west campus of a college and redeem its scholar physique by reprogramming a pc, WESCAC, that dominates that portion of the campus, even whereas the machine is in a harmful standoff with the equally threatening EASCAC, a deus ex machina that controls life on the east campus.
The ebook was usually obtained with enthusiasm and gained Mr. Barth new admirers. However it was additionally criticized for what some referred to as its artifice and contrivance. Whereas Newsweek mentioned it “confirms Barth’s standing as perhaps the most prodigally gifted comic novelist writing in English today,” Michael Dirda, writing in The Washington Publish, referred to as it “more than a little overwrought and too clever by half.”
The criticism would proceed. Writing in The Times in 1982, Michiko Kakutani famous that through the years Mr. Barth had been “praised, on the one hand, for creating daring, innovative texts” and “damned, on the other, by critics as disparate as John Gardner and Gore Vidal, for substituting high-tech literary gimmicks for real characters and moral passion.”
Mr. Barth was clearly delicate to such views and seemingly addressed them in one among his best-known statements: “My feeling about technique in art is that it has the same value as technique in lovemaking. That is to say, heartfelt ineptitude has its charm and so has heartless skill, but what you really want is passionate virtuosity.”
He defended his use of postmodern units like jokes, irony and exaggeration to punctuate, touch upon, and even ridicule and undermine a story. Such strategies, he insisted, supplied the instruments to replenish and construct on what he thought-about to be the moribund realism of the Nineteenth-century novel.
When an interviewer for Bookforum requested him in 2004 if he learn his opinions, Mr. Barth replied: “Oh, sure. As I used to tell my apprentices, what you want most of all is intelligent praise. If you can’t have intelligent praise, you’ll take stupid praise. If you can’t have stupid praise, then the third-best thing is intelligent criticism. And, of course, the worst thing is stupid criticism.”
He particularly disliked it when he was accused of writing spoofs. He as soon as advised Esquire journal that the phrase “spoof” appeared like imperfectly suppressed flatulence.
Mr. Barth usually tinkered along with his personal work and ready revised editions of a lot of his books. One in every of his novels, “Letters” (1979), consisted of letters to and from the characters of his earlier novels. He revisited the essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” in one other essay, written in 1980, titled “The Literature of Replenishment.” His “Tidewater Tales: A Novel” (1987) was conceived as a mirror-image twin to “Sabbatical: A Romance,” revealed 5 years earlier. Each handled {couples} on a sailboat journey, however with key characters making reverse life decisions.
Mr. Barth’s novel “Coming Soon!!!” (2001) was a riff on his first ebook, “The Floating Opera.” It involved a writing competitors between an growing older author recognized solely because the “novelist emeritus” and a scholar on the Johns Hopkins writing division, the place Mr. Barth had taught from 1973 to 1995.
As he grew older, so did his characters. “The Development” (2008) was a set of linked stories concerning the aged residents of a gated group referred to as Heron Bay Estates. There have been toga events and excessive spirits in these tales, but in addition ache and loss. One story was titled “Assisted Living,” one other “The End.” His final ebook, a set of quick nonfiction items, “Postscripts,” was revealed in 2022.
Mr. Barth married Harriette Anne Strickland in 1950. That they had three kids, Christine, John and Daniel, and divorced in 1969. He married Shelly I. Rosenberg in 1970. He’s survived by his three kids.
Mr. Barth usually sailed within the Chesapeake, as did a lot of his characters. He commonly performed the drums with a neighborhood jazz band in Baltimore.
He confided to Ms. Kakutani that his expertise on the earth at giant had been considerably restricted. He mentioned he had “led a serene, tranquil and absolutely non-Byronic life.”
Michael T. Kaufman, a former Occasions editor and correspondent, died in 2010. Alex Traub and Orlando Mayorquín contributed reporting.
