(Editor’s note: We first published this conversation between Big Other contributor’s John Domini and Amber Sparks in 2010.)
Part 1:
John Domini: Wanting to do more for Big Other summer reading, I reached out to Amber Sparks. She’d agreed to take on the next assignment: John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor. A tome of about 700 pages, Sot-Weed has enjoyed heady praise since its publication in 1960; William Gass, for one, is a staunch champion. Yet that very combination—wild praise, great length—can intimidate. It can, in fact, relegate a book to the dreaded status of unread classic.
To free up Sot-Weed, then, Amber and I take a tandem approach. See, she’s the newcomer, a young whippersnapper coming to the book for the first time. I’m the wizened fuddy, who’s now romped two or three times with Barth through early colonial America, his general subject here. I’ve even taught the text. We thought a dialogue would be the best way to air out these musty library stacks. For starters, then:
Amber Sparks: I read the first couple hundred pages of The Sot-Weed Factor, and so far it’s really entertaining—even a page turner, which definitely surprised me. It reminds me of Candide, which I suppose is not surprising.
Domini: What an exciting response! It reminds me all over again what sheer story fun the book is. William Gass, in On Being Blue (1975) examines a stretch of Sot-Weed and hails Barth as “a master of narrative art.” That’s a more sedate way of saying “page-turner,” isn’t it? As for Candide, I can only chime in again—hell yeah. Who else could we think of, given Sot-Weed’s time-setting, combined with this high-energy opening:
In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebeneezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly…
And we’re off!—for a whip-cracking opening sentence and paragraph of ten lines.
Sparks: I’m not sure that I’m reading it yet as a parody, or at least if it’s a parody it’s a very subtle one. But this is my fault and not Barth’s, no doubt—I don’t have much knowledge of the literature from the period he’s aping and I assume if I did, I might get more of the jokes and pointed barbs that are no doubt sprinkled throughout. As it was, if I had no knowledge of Barth or of the book prior to coming in, I’d probably have assumed it was a very funny, very bawdy narrative novel, not a parody.
Domini: As even the brief quote above demonstrates, Sot-Weed indeed mimics 17th– into 18th-Century English prose and poetry. The very title, which makes 20th– and 21st-Century readers wonder, is a term from the era, defined in the text, naturally. I’d say the parody here is respectful, celebratory, like when the Weezy parodies Kanye. Barth is tipping his cap, with a grin, to the early tyros of the English novel, novels many would say established the medium. Henry Fielding would be a case in point. He set the bar high in Tom Jones, 1749, a narrative full of knockabout action and sharp about social pretense.
Since Sot-Weed, I should add, others have tried their hand at revisiting the 18th-Century novel. Even Erica Jong tried, but the best effort was Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, 1997. When Pynchon published that novel, he sent the author of Sot-Weed a signed copy: “To John Barth, who’s been there, done that.”
Sparks: Oh, Pynchon. Love that. Tip of the hat, by the way, seems like a perfect description to me. I did get a few of the jokes—the ridiculous grandiosity of Eben over his Marylandiad is very funny, for example. (I was just reading, actually, about a French revolutionary writer who wrote a piece called The Columbiad, which sounded absolutely hilarious. It wasn’t supposed to be, of course. a tribute to Columbus civilizing the savage natives and all of that.) But I think I probably need to be better read in the 18th Century novel to get this fully. However, it’s an extremely entertaining read even if you’re not “in” on the joke, as it were.
Domini: Amber, first, I’ve got to say, you’re so obviously in on it! You get it! The butt of the joke in Sot-Weed is humanity in general, and in particular the writer’s vanity. You’re quite right Ebeneezer’s poems (“Hudibrastics,” of all the silly forms) do invite a snigger—with I’d say one telling exception, towards the end. See what you think.
Sparks: I love the Joan Toast character and hope she’ll return; I suspect she will. I found the bedroom scene between her and Ebeneezer hilarious, very witty, salon-worthy philosophy and wordplay. (I also loved Joan as written no doubt in part because I would have certainly played her in a stage production of this book. 95% of the characters I played during my acting years were some variation on Joan Toast, the whore with a silver tongue.)
I also enjoyed hugely that inconsistency, rather than adventure, is in fact the heart of this story. All springs from Eben’s indecision rather than his love of travel and romance. It’s a postmodern approach and a funny idea that I suspect Barth will continue to make good use of throughout.
Domini: Joan Toast will indeed return, she’s the book’s tragedy and also its heroine. Your response, in other words, is exciting again. I could say more, but let’s get a look at the woman, in another early example of Barth’s sharp observation and fine-turned idiom:
All spirit, imagination, and brave brown eyes, small-framed, large-breasted, and tight-skinned (though truly somewhat coarse-pored, and stringy in the hair, with teeth none of the best), this Joan Toast was his for the night who’d two guineas to take her for, and indignify her as he would, she’d give him his gold’s worth and more…
As for Eben’s inconstancy, right on. The question of identity, and in particular the artist’s identity, is central to Sot-Weed. As Barth says of his wannabe poet (no longer young, note!): “When a situation presented itself he could never choose one role to play over all the rest he knew.” The issue’s a moral one, ultimately: if the artistic sensibility is a chameleon, what color should it take on, and when?
Sparks: I did wonder at the decision to make Eben older. It really works here. The only thing I haven’t loved about this book so far is Charles Calvert’s rather long and dreadfully boring history of his family’s possession and dispossession of Maryland. Again, others may not find fault with this part; I’m a huge history buff but I’ve always found the American Colonial period rather snore-worthy. This may be the fault of my elementary school teachers—I think it’s the only history we learned back then and we learned it over and over and over again. So I confess I sort of skipped over much of Calvert’s speech, trying to read only the pertinent information.
Domini: Well, “dreadfully boring,” that’s harsh. I could point out that Calvert’s himself a figure of fun, snobbish, and simmering over old hurts. Also we have Eben in the scene, as the reader’s confused surrogate. Still, this is the draggiest bit in the whole book, suddenly introducing us to a number of old grudges. Could Barth be exemplifying, in this one quick sample, the sort of bloodless history that stands in contrast to the rest of his story? A story filled with hot blood indeed, as well as other excretions?
Sparks: Ah. I did appreciate Eben’s responses, which sounded exactly like when I’m talking to my mother on the phone about something she’s absolutely uninterested in. “Uh huh. Really. You don’t say.” So actually, if he is our surrogate, then that totally works. Maybe I’m overthinking things here. I usually do.
Have you read the original Sot-Weed Factor? Do you know if this book is in fact a direct parody? Do you happen to know why Barth wrote it? I’m very curious as to what would possess a modern author to write a long, serious parody of a period novel. Very interesting.
Domini: I’ve read some of it, the original. It’s okay for what it is, but as light-verse social critique it can’t hold a candle to this novelistic reinvention of the whole dawning, struggling society.
Barth grew up near Cooke’s old plantation, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and he learned about the poem in school. But what he does here flies free of sentiment. He raises a far-reaching questions about feminism, identity, morality—and especially about language and story and what we do with those tools, tools of the artist, in working out where we stand and whether we’ll fall.
Sparks: Anyhow, looking forward to Eben’s adventures in America.
Domini: Hell yeah.
Part Two: Our Hero & Heroine Attempt Some Further Understanding, Distracted by Much Laughter, Astonishment, & Musing Aloud, of the NOVEL’S Next—is’t Two? is’t Three?—Hundred Pages.
Domini: Above is my lame attempt to mimic John Barth, in his guise as 18th-Century novelist (say, Henry Fielding or Tobias Smollett), for his late-20th-Century masterwork The Sot-Weed Factor. For the Big Other reading list, Amber Sparks and I decided it was to treat it via correspondence—and come to think, weren’t a lot of those early novels, the texts that defined the form, epistolary?
Now:
Sparks: My thoughts on the middle third of the book are intentionally vague in places because I don’t want to give anything away. But I am enjoying Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor tremendously. It’s cracking along like a fabulous adventure novel now and I see no reason why it should stop being riveting and thrilling anytime soon. It’s like Barth was trying to write this parody, started really enjoying the form and decided on homage, and then decided oh, the hell with it, I’ll throw away the meta conceit (except on brilliant occasion) and just write the hell out of this thing. It’s clear he was having a grand time writing it, and it’s a grand time reading it as a result.
Domini: “Cracking along,” I love that. There’s so much going on, hijinks and low scrambling, plots and counterplots, a thousand disguises and a lot of sex. Thus the novel invites old-fangled praise, like the word “swashbuckling,” one John Madera used in his recent mention of Sot-Weed, here. I’d say you’re providing one answer to a key question you raised last time, namely, why? Why did a contemporary writer give himself over to a style from 200 years before? One answer, surely, is the reinvigoration you describe. Barth’s notorious 1967 essay, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” argued against exhaustion, in art and artists; rather, it warned how forms could get exhausted, a point he expanded on in “The Literature of Replenishment.”
In fact, this very summer he’s returned to the argument, in the fiction issue of The Atlantic, with a brief but erudite meditation, “Do I Repeat Myself?”
In this latest piece, again Barth reaches back: to Dante, the Aeneid, the Sanskrit Ocean of Story, and even Old Egypt, c. 2000 BCE. Yet in reaching back, he affirms again the power of language and story—of “cracking along.” (Just as having a young reader like you coming fresh to the text, and getting so caught up in it, reinforces the excitement of my first encounter, decades ago).
Then there’s this core point, an exchange been Ebeneezer Cooke and Henry Burlingame, his chameleonic teacher, friend, gadfly…and much more:
“Thou’rt a glutton for adventure,” Ebeneezer said.
“Mayhap I am, or better, a glutton for the great world, of which I ne’er can see and learn enough.”
Sparks: But of course it’s not ‘simply’ an adventure, not at all. The post-modernist in Barth is all over the place, making wry little observations and twisting the form. The “adventure-springs-from-uncertainty-rather-than-adversity” through-line is indeed running consistent and strong through the novel, as is the idea you mentioned previously, John, about the role of the artist—what is it?—and Barth is playing with both of these still. You get these dry, funny almost-stock routines every now and again (the one where Bertrand and Eben think they’re drowning comes to mind) where Barth is reminding us he’s not really writing from the far-off 18th century, but rather from a place after Beckett, after Abbott and Costello, after Charlie Chaplin. And he makes these stock pieces work for the novel.
Domini: How about I abandon thought balloons and get down to cases? Here’s one of Barth’s booby-trapped “routines,” as you aptly put it. Ebeneezer starts out speaking about virtue (“innocence,” and the havoc it causes, is a major theme), and then makes an intriguing correlation:
What I meant was, that sundry virtues are—I might say plain, for want of better language, and some significant. Among the first are honesty in speech and deed, fidelity, respect for mother and father, charity, and the like; the second head’s comprised of things like eating fish on Friday, resting on the Sabbath, and coming virgin to the grave or marriage bed, whiche’er the case may be; they all mean naught when taken by themselves, like the strokes and scribbles that we call writing—their virtue lies in what they stand for. Now the first… are matters of public policy, and thus apply to prudent men, be they heathens or believers. The second have small relevance to prudence, being but signs, and differ from faith to faith. The first are…guides for life, the second forms of ceremony; the first practical, the second mysterious or poetic—
Sparks: Another example. The exchange at the printer’s, when Eben goes to buy a notebook, is a brilliant little scene and showcases not only Eben’s spectacular inability to make up his mind—here he is bragging up his Poet Laureate title but he can’t even decide on a writing notebook—but also, centers around the question of the artist and fame: are you good if no one knows who you are? It’s also a very very funny scene and the beginnings of the great mystery that is to anchor the rest of the novel.
Domini: I’d say it’s one of the wellsprings for that mystery of identity. Our hero has many scenes where he’s paralyzed for lack of knowing what he’s about. Some of these veer towards the chilling; the most dangerous disguises are those that prevent as artist from seeing himself. Still, I too will bring up something comic. Perhaps delicacy restrained you—but what about the three pages Eben spends with his pants off, wondering what he’ll use to wipe his ass? Leaves you gaping, no? And gasping with laughter, and yet also (with a nod to Rabelais) thinking about the sheer uselessness of texts like the one in your hands:
Literature, too, he concluded with a heavy heart, availed him not, for though it afforded one a certain sophistication about life and a release from one’s single mortal destiny, it did not, except accidentally, afford solutions to practical problems.
Sparks: That part definitely had me on the floor. It’s like Eben’s almost aware of how funny life is—if only he could loosen up a little. But at least we can laugh at him.
I loved the great mystery here. Every great narrative epic has to have a great mystery at its heart. And often, often having something to do with a foundling child (ever since I read Pippi Longstocking as a kid I wanted to be a foundling child), a sea captain, far-off lands, native peoples, dubious parentage, etc., etc. It’s like a formula and Barth uses all the elements beautifully. Pirates, wenches, ships, ransoms, ravished maidens—all these thrown in a blender and whipped, pureed into an adventure tale all Barth’s own.
Domini: Right on. Your engagement feels like evidence of the novel’s feminist sympathies. Sot-Weed features a number of Pippi-like figures, in general more sexually adventurous—and in some cases tragically abused. In these cases (while as always there’s a lot else going on), Barth raises his feminist argument via its reverse, a classic method. He’ll have a character speak of some horrific abuse against women, and suddenly a dead-serious face appears behind the fiction’s many masks. Seriousness on that point pervades nearly all of his work, starting with End of the Road (1958), which anticipates Neil LaBute in its excoriation of macho posturing and its dangers. Then too, Barth has often cited Scheherazade as the greatest storyteller ever, and featured her and her work in Chimera (National Book Award, 1972) and other books. Rumor has it he’s posted her name, in calligraphic form, over his writing desk.
Sparks: Interesting. You can certainly feel his feminist sympathies throughout the novel, whether the woman in question is Ebeneezer’s sister or Joan Toast. Women as objects, never subjects, fully aware that they are in fact objects and trying as best they can to take advantage of that.
As I’ve been reading Sot-Weed, I’m actually reminded of nothing so much as (this will seem odd, but) David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Lynch is doing his own soap opera, right? And you can see him taking all of these traditional set pieces, stock characters, standard elements from the soap opera and mixing them up in his own way, his own style—in a way that’s commenting on the genre and mocking it but also showing how much enjoyment he must get out of the genre and how much fun he’s having playing in it. That’s how I imagine Barth must have felt, worked, writing The Sot-Weed Factor.
Domini: Twin Peaks seems entirely apropos, especially when you consider the surreal elements in Barth, like the unbreakable hymen on Barth’s Pocahontas. The way Sot-Weed revels in its genre game speaks for itself:
[The husband] scowled a fearsome scowl. ‘Whore!’ he cried at Betsy, and with the flat of his sword he fetched her a swingeing clap athwart her seat. Nor stopped he there, but made to run me through, and ‘twas only the nimblest of legs that saved my neck. I snatched up my breeches and dashed for the door, with the fiddler in hot career behind, nor durst I cover my shame…— Better lose pride than hide, sir, as they say. As for my tatling Betsy, the last I saw her she was springing hither and yon about the room, sir, hands on her buttocks and hollowing like a hero…
Sparks: Final thought, or rather, question: Is Henry always kind of mocking Eben? Does he know Eben’s poetry sucks? I thought that we (the readership) were Eben, but I feel like sometimes we’re Henry as well, or rather Henry is our surrogate in poking fun at the chaste and clueless Eben. I’m still a little bit in the dark about Henry, but I think that’s the point as well. Maybe. Henry not only is at the center of the mystery, he seems to be the mystery, as well.
Domini: Henry Burlingame III, whew. He keeps us all in the dark, doesn’t he? What I’d point out is that he’s a perfect foil to Ebeneezer, whose dilemma is always indecision, the absence of commitment or core—even as he remains, despite himself, a virgin and a (low-grade) man of letters. Burlingame presents a mirror reversal. He knows exactly what he’s about, he lives to find his father—yet the quest makes him a chameleon, a master of dissembling, so you never know what form he’ll take. In Barth’s 1979 novel, LETTERS (my pick for his best) he recycles elements of Sot-Weed and suggests “Burlingame” puns on ame, the French word for “soul.” A boiling soul? Divided like Berlin?
Sparks: Anyhow, very much enjoying the second brilliant installment and on to the last bits of the novel!
Domini: Right on. Since today’s the birthday of William Gass, I’ll close with some another of his thoughts on Barth, from his Paris Review interview: “Several of his books, in particular The Sot-Weed Factor, are the works which stand to my generation as Ulysses did to its.”
Part 3: Wherein our Hero & Heroine contemplate, to the Best of their Feeble Abilities, the NOVEL’S conclusion, its Far Reach, Revolutionary Folderol, & Altogether Righteous Fun. Or, a conversation between Amber Sparks & John Domini on One Kickass NOVEL.
Sparks: Now that I’ve finished this terrific book, I’m finding it hard to stop thinking about it. It’s a stylized novel and yet Barth manages to pack so much in about the essence of what it is to be human. Capturing the human condition in a parody of an 18th century novel—that’s incredible. It’s really a towering achievement. I’ve surprised myself immensely with how much I ended up empathizing with and caring about the main characters by the end.
Domini: Again, you’ve delivered one of the rewards I was hoping for, in our exchange. As a newcomer to the text, you reconfirm the pleasure of the text—the original pleasure, something we repeat visitors can only reconstruct. In the process, you brightly sketch the steep challenge Barth set for his storytelling. On the one hand, he wanted a wild affair, with the humanity and hijinx of old favorites like The Thousand Nights & a Night. On the other, he wanted a work of imagination that kept the fact of its dream nature squarely before us, so that every page pulls off the trick Ebeneezer and his sister Anna would play when they found themselves in a nightmare: “tis but a dream,” they’d tell themselves, in their dreaming, “and now I’ll wake.”
The dream that we call a “novel” first assumed its Anglo-American form about the same time as Sot-Weed is set (and the American Revolution began to brew. So Barth, by going back to his form’s beginnings, both grants us the pleasures of the dream and calls attention to its insubstantiality. Terrific, just as you say.
Sparks: One key theme I enjoyed was the exploration of the human sexual condition—something I would not have expected of this type of novel. This is quite possibly the bawdiest book I’ve ever read—and I don’t mean pornographic or lewd, but bawdy. Ebenezer’s guilty, repressed lust is contrasted throughout with just about everybody else, all of whom seem to be living in a state of complete abandon and natural healthy lust. Well, maybe not quite “healthy”; no doubt that’s overstating the case, since one character does express desire for a pig, and there is a lot of raping. But just about everyone in The Sot-Weed Factor is having a lot of sex. Including the Native Americans who frequent the pages of this novel in odd and interesting ways.
Domini: The rampant rutting of Sot-Weed, yes, a surprise and a delight, in a text that wears the trappings of Serious Litcher. The pig-fucking, I should say, is only alluded to, and more than that, the fucker in question turns out to be Henry Burlingame, in disguise. Burlingame is always…wait for it…slippery. Still, no other serious novel treats what the sexologists call “animal contact” so imaginatively, unless of course it’s Barth’s own Giles Goat-Boy (1966).
Not for nothing does this huge novel’s plot hinge on a Native American trick involving an eggplant, an erection, and a stubborn hymen. Come to think, isn’t “sot-weed” itself a more lubricious and suggestive term for “tobacco?” In this book sex is, in most cases, an intoxicant that allows for discovery. It’s accepted as “the sin o’ Father Adam, that we all have on our heads.”
When it comes to rape, though, Sot-Weed drops more somber notes amid the bumptiousness. Those cases amount finally to the indictment Joan Toast spits out at the end—an argument underscored by the fact that she’s about to outwit her enemies:
“Look at me!… Swived in my twelfth year, poxed in my twentieth, and dead in my twenty-first! Ravaged, ruined, raped, and betrayed! Women’s lot is wretched…”
Sparks: Yet at the same time, another theme: Live the shit out of life. Screw being polite, moral, civil. Clearly Barth thought this was an attractive idea, at least on some level. Henry Burlingame, clearly Barth’s favorite in the novel, declares at one point that he is a “glutton for the great world.” (I seriously plan to make this my next tattoo.) This is the only satisfactory reason for his behavior that he ever gives, and the correct one, I think. Those who live life to the fullest, who satiate every mortal appetite, do best. Everyone here is made deliciously equal by nature of their base humanity; no one is immune. The most pious have the farthest to fall at Barth’s hands. And indeed, though Barth seems to sympathize with Eben, he delights in the machinations of Henry Burlingame. All of Eben’s troubles (and Joan’s, too) stem from his high moral principles and his refusal to grant leeway to others, whereas Henry the great hedonist always manages to do fine for himself. Eben’s a bit of a snob, a stick in the mud, though by the end of the novel he’s lost much of his pride and arrogance and has come down a few pegs.
Domini: Yes! There I go being admonitory and stern, lecturing on “Women’s Lot in Sot-Weed”—but then, thank god, you remind us the text’s far too wild and free for any neat fit into such a confining argument. As Ebeneezer himself admits at the climax, his great crime was living by the narrow rule of “innocence:”
“There’s the true Original Sin our souls are born in: not that Adam learned, but that he had to learn — in short, that he was innocent.”
Indeed, insofar as this novel’s critical stock has fallen some (and the market’s difficult to measure), that’s due in large part to the complexity with which Barth treats our, whaddyacallit, our urge to live fully and freely. To live like the “cosmophilist” Burlingame (or like the woman who’s something of a female counterpart, Mary Mungummory). A text at once priapic and feminist, American and anti-American, feral and ethical, not to mention experimental and traditional, this one defies easy categorization.
Sparks: The last third of the book the plot became increasingly complex, but it felt almost unnecessary to know every detail of what was really going on, à la The Big Sleep—just adds to the fun. The Sot-Weed Factor absolutely deserves the ‘classic’ label. It’s a randy, wild, sweeping take on early Maryland, a land uncouth and newborn and full of “savages” of all kinds, before we “civilized” America; before we started writing such polite historical novels and leaving out all the best parts, the sex and blood and fart jokes and all the unsavory things that separate us from the angels—and make us a lot more fun.
Domini: William Gass called Barth “a great narrator, one of the best who ever plied a pen,” and that’s of course a tribute to his plotting. It takes a genius, or something close, to pack so many switcheroos into a novel’s final developments and yet keep us feeling both empathetic and top of the basic conflicts. Sot-Weed remains his greatest performance in sheer narrative ingenuity, all the more impressive for how he later renounced the approach. In the late ‘60s, deeply struck by his first encounter with Borges and mired in another long, intricately plotted novel, he swore off writing fiction altogether for a year. When he returned to the art, he brought off a very different sort of accomplishment, the three linked novellas—composed at white heat—of Chimera (National Book Award, ’72).
Yet whatever the book’s meaning for its author, or its current critical standing, its fictional gene pool remains our most potent. The obvious forebear is Moby-Dick, which reveals many similarities, crossing oceans after the biggest game, striving to embrace all of young America and more—a “cosmophilist” text, just right for the wily Burlingame. More recent progeny of the same impulse would be, of course, Wallace’s Infinite Jest. One notes how that novel has now started to come in for criticism, a backlash, and ironically, the best-known complaint about Wallace, Katie Roiphe’s in the Times, took him to task for the reticence with which he treated sex. Not a problem for Barth and Sot-Weed! Nor for Wallace either, really. He wrought his own epic—but only after he paid homage to his ancestor, in his novella “Westward the Course of Empire Makes its Way,” based on Barth’s ’68 short story “Lost in the Funhouse.”
Amber, I thank you for taking me back into this pool, and refreshing myself anew.
