The Tale of Tyrone's dick

[David Casseres]

Joaquin Stick (aka Fledermaus) sez
>...I think that (especially in a book like
>_Chimera_) Barth is addressing more than just what it means to write and
>create. ... The satire of Campbell's mythical model in the
>"Bellerophoniad" portion of _Chimera_ or the rather emotionally involved
>relationship between the Author and Scheherezade in the "Dunyaziad," I
>think can and must be read not only as discussion of literary/critical
>technique but as an allegory.

I think Chimera is Barth's masterpiece, and I agree that in it, Barth 
transcends being "a writer's writer writing about writing."  But he 
transcends it by taking it all the way to its extreme limit and then 
going further in the same direction.  I don't know if I'd call it 
allegory, but I would say that it is about how life and story become one 
and the same, how fictional narrators in stories within stories all turn 
out to be the author himself, all the stories turn out to be 
autobiography.  Not about writing, in the end, but about what writing is 
about, yeah, uh, life.

At the same time it's a stunning and showy tour-de-force of tricksy 
narrative structure, one more-than-clever feat of transformation after 
another, like a really good stage magician at work.  *And* at the same 
time, the mythic themes and the pieces of autobiographical story have the 
kind of emotional directness that was hinted at in the early novels.

Barth had never done anything quite like this before, and though I wish 
he would do it again, I bet he can't.


Cheers,
David