Chimera

“‘Mythology is the propaganda of the winners,’” (277) says Anteia, sister-in-law to mythic hero Bellerophone who kills the monster Chimera.
And Perseus, heroic slayer of Medusa, muses: “‘No man’s a mythic hero to his wife.’” (87)

In this mash-up of myth, John Barth applies shape-shifting magic to the concept of story-telling in general and the Heroic Journey in particular. It takes lots of background knowledge to enjoy the book … not JUST Scheherazade and Greek myth and Joseph Campbell/Robert McKee … but also endless variations and parodies of all three. I practically reread Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths in order to keep up with Barth’s fractured fairy tales. I loved and laughed with most of the crazy book, but show more will confess I got tired of the wittily described gymnastic sex. There is more pronging, banging, boinking, finger diddling, and daisy-chaining than even Zeus and Dionysus combined might ask for.

“Yet the empire of the novel, vaster once than those combined of France and England, is shrunk now to a Luxenbourg, a San Marino. Its popular base usurped, fiction has become a pleasure for special tastes, like poetry, archery, churchgoing.” (246) And whose fault is that, Mr. Barth?

“How does one write a novella? How find the channel, bewildered in these creeks and crannies? Storytelling isn’t my cup of wine; isn’t somebody’s; my plot doesn’t rise and fall in meaningful stages but winds upon itself like a whelk-shell or the snakes on Hermes’s caduceus: digresses, retreats, hesitates, groans from its utter et cetera, collapses, dies.” (196) Many readers will agree with the collapses and dies part. I happen to find it hilarious. show less

A collection of three intertwined novellas, all retellings of classical tales. I enjoyed the 1001 Nights retelling, but strangely enough, not so much the Perseus and Bellerophon ones. Or maybe it's not that strange at all; I'm fairly protective of my classical myths. Barth is clever and all in what he does with the stories, but it felt a little too...flippant for me. *shrug*

This is a stupid book.

John Barth has admirable goals (rejuvenating the novel) and an precise, musical command of language. But his one fatal flaw is his inability to get outside his own head. He aims for mythic significance, but the cosmic scope of his stories keeps getting mixed together with the very un-cosmic matter of John Barth, 20th century American writer, trying to think of words to put on the page. This manifests itself most obviously in two ways: his metafictional bent (he likes to write stories that are about their own telling -- a perilous endeavour, since "John Barth wrote a book" isn't a very good story), and his injection of 20th-century language and attitudes into other times and places (usually played for comedy, but show more not very successfully).

In Giles Goat-Boy, this all worked, because the tension between Barth's impressive craftsmanship and his silliness felt like a deliberate balancing act. The combined effect was uncanny, like the book was a religious text from some unfinished draft of our own universe. In Chimera, the same tension just feels dumb. The story is about mythology (it is a retelling of several myths), but Barth's interest in Barth obscures Barth's interest in myth almost entirely. Scheherazade, Perseus, Bellerophon and numerous other mythic figures discuss literature like grad students (some of them before the invention of writing -- they wonder aloud at this paradox, which only distances us further from their impossible situation). They parrot Barthian slogans (comparisons between literature and sex, the phrase "passionate virtuosity"). Historical accuracy is not just ignored but flouted: Scheherazade was "Homecoming Queen, valedictorian-elect, and a four-letter varsity athlete"; ancient Greeks drink Metaxa; Amazons talk like modern feminists and a gay man (in ancient Greece, yes) has a ridiculous lisp. (This list is a pretty representative sample of the book's boringly irreverent "humor.") Everyone sounds like they're from the 1970s.

Well that just sounds like a silly book, doesn't it? And what's wrong with that? Why can't I lighten up? Well, because it's not very funny, for one thing. But more importantly, Barth really has higher ambitions. He doesn't just want to joke around -- he wants to make a new kind of art that takes all the old ones into detached consideration (hence this knowing, winking attitude toward ancient myths) and spits out some trans-historical ideal (both Chimera and GGB involve computers that chew up texts and produce mechanically optimized literature). But in his desire to be knowing and metafictional and above-it-all, Barth can't bring himself to create plausible -- or even vivid or interesting -- characters. It's hard to relate to someone who's constantly in flux, arguing with the author about lit theory here, acting like some 20th-century stereotype for laughs there, never showing much of a coherent personality. Barth's most famous books have naive protagonists (Ebenezer Cooke and George the Goat-Boy), which works well with his style, since innocent characters provide a nice reference point in the weird, shifting worlds he creates. Without his innocents, the reader has nothing to grab onto -- they're left adrift in a protean world of John Barth clones, bantering about their writerly anxieties, taking on many forms but capturing none of the wild variance of the real world. (The past is a foreign country -- but in Barth's hands even the ancient Greeks are less foreign than his next-door neighbors, in that his next-door neighbors aren't him.)

I will give Barth another chance sometime. But not for a long while. (His next big book after Chimera is called LETTERS, and consists of Barth and characters from his other books sending each other letters for 800 pages. Oh, joy.) show less

I read this first in the '70s, shortly after it was published in paperback, and I loved it -- so much that I've hung on to my cheap ($1.50!) paperback copy for 40 years. Nudged by reading 1001 Nights recently, I read it again, and I think I enjoyed it even more this time through, maturity and "widsom" allowing a richer appreciation of the tales.

The book consists of three interrelated novellas that stretch and twist and tie in knots any sense of narrative in the traditional sense (though Barth takes a little time out for a little exposition on the narrative arc). The narrator changes, voice changes, the author makes appearances, characters change their names, shapeshifters shift their shape while somehow and slowly the reader is told show more extended stories of Dunyazade (Sharhazade's sister from 1001 Nights) , Perseus, and Belleraphon.

It would be difficult to read if you tried to "understand it", but it's great fun if you just approach it as you would a story told you by an educated, clever, and thoroughly deranged friend -- it's literate, erotic (without even approaching pornographic), wise, silly, fun and good-natured. I can't recommend it highly enough. show less

Ok, the 1st review in the front of my copy (actually a paperback) is from Playboy, the 2nd is from Cosmopolitan. Playboy is hardly representative of my idea of sexual politics.. & neither is Cosmo: to the editors of the latter: How many times can you rehash X # of tips for pleasing yr man? Really, it's sickening. Let's just FUCK, shall we? Remember INSTINCT for fuck's sake?!

ANYWAY, at 1st I was disappointed by this: I've just recently read "The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor" by Barth & given it a positive review. I hadn't realized that it had a predecessor in "Chimera" - from 19 yrs before. SO, I thought something along the lines of: "Oh, 'Chimera' explored this retelling of tales &, therefore, "Last Yoyage" is less interesting show more b/c it's a remake". Well.. that's not really what I 'thought', that's a drastic oversimplification - but it's somehow relevant.

On p 20 of my edition, Barth has the "Genie" (hypothetically Barth himself) essentially reveal that: "his two-decade marriage [was:] but a prolonged infidelity to her [Scheherazade:], his own fictions were mimicries, pallid counterfeits of the authentic treasure of her Thousand and One Nights".

&, yes, it takes off from there. There are enuf levels to this to astound me. I've even given it a 5 star rating ALMOST against my 'will'. It also made me wonder (not enuf to research the question) how Barth's presumed marriage(s) fared?

It's funny: I note that the GoodReads reviews that I've skimmed thru call it "postmodern" & I reckon that's 'right' - but is it more accurately 'pre-post-modern'? Having come out in 1972 or thereabouts? Whatever. There's plenty of fucking w/ conventions of narrative, times & places mixed together, etc.. - & Barth does it wonderfully - w/, to use a cliché, 'consummate skill'.

There's also a VERY heavy dose of sexual politics - Barth tries to address issues of equality & role models, etc, but there's still a rampant male ego at work - not that I mind, mind you - I just wd like to read a feminist critique of this.. instead of a Playboy review..

& I DON'T MEAN a knee-jerk feminist review - I mean a feminist review in wch it's admitted that PMS exists, that SOME women have rape fantasies, etc. I shd know: after sex w/ a former president of a state chapter of NOW, she wrote a rape fantasy inspired by our sex for an arts journal - they denied it publication. I'm not a rapist - but describing me as such got HER off - not me.

SO, I look at some of the GoodReads reviews: women love it, women don't love it, men love it, men don't love it. I only superficially looked at the reviews but I saw nary a mention of the sexual politics of the bk - wch seem to me to be a central theme.

The bk addresses SO MANY THINGS that I cdn't help but give it a good review. Barth, why weren't we friends when you taught at Hopkins & I lived in Baltimore? B/c you lived the safe life of a well-compensated writer of fantasy & I lived the REAL dangerous life of a street adventurer? It's ok, I like you anyway. show less

For her part (she would go on--what a wife was this!), she took what she was pleased to term the Tragic View of Marriage and Parenthood: reckoning together their joys and griefs must inevitable show a net loss, if only because like life itself their attrition was constant and their term mortal. But one had only different ways of losing, and to eschew matrimony and childrearing for the delights of less serious relations was in her judgment to sustain a net loss even more considerable.

A number of confessions should precede any analysis of Chimera. The opening section was the most fun I have had reading since the Derrida bio in late July. I enjoyed the second and third elements of the novel more than Calasso's marriage. That may prove show more heretical. I'll take my chances. One of the local liquor stores offered Goose Island Summer Ale for three dollars a sixer. I bought a case. Sure, it was outdated. I did not care. I halted my reading last night and turned to youtube. This is always a precarious decision and destination. If I then turn to Conway Twitty I know to run to our bedroom. Instead I watched interviews with John Barth and eventually discussions of Leopardi's Zibaldone. Associations were threshed and threaded. I pondered the historical arc of narrative and sighed, considering Barth's taxonomy of the endeavor. That isn't an impediment to an appreciation of such. The sequence in the final section which segues from Robert Graves to an anthropological examination of the Amazons - thus linking the first section to the subsequent pair -- was astonishing.


This was a novel which needed to be read in one's 40s. Being married is also of benefit. show less

Chimera is my first introduction to John Barth. It consists of three interrelated novellas, the first based on 1001 Arabian Nights and the other two based on Greek mythology. Chimera was also, I believe, my first introduction to meta fiction, where part of the story being told is the creation of the story. There is a lot going on here, a lot to get your head around, and I will be the first to admit I only comprehended some of it.

Let's start with the basics, though. When John Barth is just telling a story, he can tell an entertaining story. He's funny, sometimes laugh out loud funny, and he creates engaging characters that seem very alive despite being derived from myths. But then he layered on the metafiction, and in some cases the show more metafiction added interesting twists to the story, such as when he would describe different versions of the same story or call into question the validity or accuracy of a particular version of the story. In other cases, the metafiction just seemed distracting or confusing, and I wanted him to get back to the original story.

In John Barth and his writing, I felt an incredible and unique intelligence. I have not read enough about Barth to talk knowledgeably about his intentions, but it almost felt as if he was bored by just telling the basic story, and had to do something else, something more to keep himself engaged. I for one would pay good money just to see him limit himself to the basics, but I also know that an artist has to do what an artist has to do. show less