Yasir Mutlib Abdulla

PhD candidate
Literary Theory
1 Dec. 2020
Response Paper

In “The Literature of Exhaustion” John Barth vehemently expresses his disinterest in traditional
novel writing, particularly the realists’ of the previous decades and even his time, and with a long
argument in his essay he stresses that the sixties is so culturally, socially, politically and even
religiously different. He points out that “these years – 1965- 1973- were the American High
Sixties. The Vietnam War was in overdrive through most of the period; the U.S. economy was
fat and bloody; academic imperialism was as popular as the political kind” (62). Such changes
for him can no more be rendered in the realist fiction. Arguably, Barth’s disinterestedness and
opposition stems from the American atmosphere in the aftermath of the World War II and its
devastating impact on the individuals’ minds.

The novelists responded differently to the horror of the war and to the technological destructive
impact on society especially the war industry and atomic bombs which had horrifying impact on
them represented by the threat for human beings. Barth’s response to such atrocity as presented
in his essay is his belief that conventional realism was not adequate to render such threat. In
arguing so, Barth was trying to assume how the postmodern fiction was supposed to be dealt
with in as well as through novels. In his essay proposes that if a novelist would like to write a
novel, he or she should find new techniques compatible with the new trend. Barth states that
“among my reasons for writing Lost in the Funhouse…was that novelists aren’t easily included
in anthologies of fiction” (63). This is to say that postmodern fiction cannot be called fiction if it
remains conventionally realistic.

In another place Barth might stress the importance of experimentalism in fiction. He states that,
“Even our less sophisticated undergraduates…. seemed to breathe it in with the other
hydrocarbons… if their experiments… most often failed, they failed no more often than non -
“experimental” apprentice work” (64). The experimental that Barth is arguing here could be
metafiction. He moreover states that “Personally, being of the temper that chooses to rebel along

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traditional lines, I’m inclined to prefer the kind of art that not many people can do”: the kind that
requires expertise and artistry” (71). Bath believes that the traditional novel writing is imitation
of others before it and the traditional novelists imitated others. For him conventional novels
“imitate actions more or less directly, and its conventional devices – cause and effect, linear
anecdote, characterization…. have been objected to as obsolete notions, or metaphors for
obsolete notions” (72). I think this is part of the assumed problem with the structuralist
interpretation of the text as being reducing some production of literature because of the principle
of intertextualism. According to intertextualism texts imitate or repeat other texts. That is why
for him traditional or conventional literature is “The Literature of Exhaustion” which can lead to
the death of the novel.

In “The Literature of Replenishment” Barth argues about what it means to be a postmodernist.

He articulates that the term postmodernism is “awkward and faintly epigonic” (196) and takes
different examples from the labeled modern and postmodern novelists and writers, like James
Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, Eliot and others. He cites some critics and commentators who argued
about the term postmodernism, like Professor Alter, Professor Hassan. For him they emphasize
self-consciousness and self-reflexiveness of modernism, in a spirit of cultural subversiveness and
anarchy” (200).