The Production of Lateness. Rahel Rivera Godoy-Benesch
focus on the physicality of their protagonists. However, whereas young Ambrose is initially just furnished with a bodybody, which only gradually comes into contact with language and literature, the aged writers in The Development start out from the opposite pole: their initially stable position within, and stance towards, language and writing is threatened as old age sets in and their faculties begin to decline. Thus, they are forced to reassess their writing strategies and redefine the relationship between their physical existence and language. Decisive for their success or failure, it seems, is to what degree they are willing to diverge from previous conceptions of what their writing meant for them. Barth’s aged artists thus make active use of previously fixed concepts of life and art in order to establish continuitycontinuity in their life narratives, especially with regard to the transition to old age. As a result, Barth’s theory of creativity in old age in the form of the late-style narrative falls heavily back on the Künstlerroman; meaning is produced through the contrast between the two genresgenre.
The Development thus effectively illustrates how two deeply engrained notions play together in narratives that portray old artists: Firstly, the artist-protagonist is always already present in the archetype of the artist per se, the protagonist of the Künstlerroman, a figure that has been copied, expanded, and refuted by innumerable authors over the centuries, from Goethe’sGoethe, Johann Wolfgang von initial sketches of Wilhelm Meister to Joyce’sJoyce, James portrait of Stephen Dedalus, and beyond. This image of the artist and his role in society has been so thoroughly impressed on writers’, readers’, and theorists’ minds that there is virtually no escape from it.1 In narratives about old artists, however, this archetype is constantly brought into conflict with the notion of late stylelate style, that is, with the idea that the artist’s old age has a particular influence on his art. As Gordon McMullanMcMullan, Gordon has shown, theories of late style originated in German romanticismromanticism and found their way into English literature and criticism through the reassessment of Shakespeare’sShakespeare, William late plays towards the end of the 19th century (cf. Shakespeare). In the contemporary writers’ awareness, and consequently in their late fiction, these two strong notions of the artist archetype and the idea of late style clash and interact to an extent that marks these works with their own, idiosyncratic attributes, both with regard to content and structure. In other words, narratives that portray ageing artists have a strong genericgenre quality. Hence, this chapter on two of Barth’s collections of short stories – one that shows the traits of a Künstlerroman and one that portrays several types of ageing writers – shall serve as an example of how late-style narratives grow out of the Künstlerroman but effectively turn against it, as they challenge the fixed notions of the ‘artist as a young man.’
When in 1967, John Barth – already well known for his complex novels – published his essay “The Literature of Exhaustion,” he caught the spirit of the time. His remark that for an author “to be technically out of date is likely to be a genuine defect” (66, original italics) had a considerable impact on contemporary authors and theorists, and his call for novelty in form, especially concerning the novel, is still thought to be a manifesto of Postmodernismpostmodernism. Besides his strong focus on formal originality in this essay, Barth also describes the successful contemporary artist as one who turns “the felt ultimacies of our time into material and means for his work” (71). It is hardly surprising, then, that Barth himself, well aware of the spirit of the time, in 1968 published a parodic Künstlerroman in the form of the short story cycle Lost in the Funhouse. Half a century after JoyceJoyce, James had given “definitive treatment to an archetype” (Beebe 260) with his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and had thus firmly set the standard of the adolescentadolescence artist, it was high time for a modification of the artist type, on the one hand, and for a reassessment of the form of the Künstlerroman, on the other. And in recent times, again, Barth seems to have sensed that the time is ripe for a new portrait of the artist: as the baby boomersbaby boomers are growing old, and the topic of old age has thoroughly flooded scientific research and the media, elderly protagonists have found their way into Barth’s fictional world.
Although Barth’s fiction has, over the years, become much more appreciated than his work as a literary critic and theorist, Barth’s short stories and novels are so imbued with metafictionalmetafiction elements that they can be approached as theoretical works, too. As WaughWaugh, Patricia states in her influential theory of metafiction, “all of the different writers whom one could refer to as broadly ‘metafictional’ […] explore a theory of fiction through the practice of writing fiction” (2, original italics). Moreover, Berndt Clavier affirms:
The value of Barth’s art is […] not related to the capacity of his fiction to properly imitate an existing reality, to forge a link between word and world; rather the value must be inferred from the critical work it does in exposing the systems and structures that produce such links. (10, italics added)
Yet, to try to separate fiction from theory in these texts is not only an enterprise doomed to fail, but it would also result in a massive reduction of the works’ impact. Indeed, it is precisely Barth’s metafictional style that captures the Zeitgeist. In this respect, Barth’s The Development not only portrays the ‘artist as an old man’ but it also theorizes and discusses issues of old age and creativity, that is, latenesslateness and late stylelate style.
In taking up and exploring age-related topics, such as physical declinedecline, deathdeath, and issues of creativitycreativity, Barth’s latest works resemble those of many other elderly authors in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Yet, unlike some of his contemporaries, Barth does not resort to subjectivitysubjectivity and autobiographyautobiography in order to directly reveal the influences his own old age exerts on his writing. On the contrary, he approaches the theme of old age from a variety of perspectives in an attempt to convey a holistic view. The stories in The Development thus portray several elderly protagonists who live in a gated community and are all trying to come to terms with their age-related problems. Since they all have to deal with different ‘symptoms’ of old age, ranging from retirement from professional life, to loss of memory, illness, and the death of loved ones, their coping strategies are accordingly varied. Yet, they all have in common that they use writing, in one form or the other, to reassess and redefine their identityidentity in old age. This gated community thus represents a microcosm of old age and functions as a laboratory for Barth to explore the relationship between old age and writing in a safe, fictional world. In this microcosm, Barth himself is only present in the form of one of the protagonists, George Newett, who carries some autobiographical traits and functions as Barth’s alter ego. The image of the gated community – a neighborhood characterized by perfect organization and artificiality – not only represents the constructedness of the literary text, but the elderly residents’ effort in maintaining their homes also reflects their attempt at preserving their identity in view of the inevitable decline and decay of their bodiesbody, which is emphasized throughout the short story cycle.
The fact that Barth pays such close attention to the physicality of the ageing body mirrors and simultaneously modifies his strong concerns with the adolescentadolescence body in Lost in the Funhouse. Ambrose, the boy who is about to become an artist and gets lost in a funhouse, is the protagonist of the three ‘Ambrose stories’ in the volume, which have attracted most critical attention over the years. Ranging from Ambrose’s experiences as an infant and a fourth-grader to the decisive family trip to the funfair as a teenager, these stories’ events depict the boy’s development in view of his fate to become an artist, and, in so doing, they carefully assess the role his immature bodybody fulfills. The relationship between physical reality and language, between body and text, thus becomes a core issue in Ambrose’s search for his artistic identity. Indeed, as will be suggested in the discussion of the ‘Ambrose stories’ below, Lost in the Funhouse, despite its parodicparody attitude towards the genre of the Künstlerroman, copies the traditional move of the artist away from reality and his turn towards the abstractionabstraction of art, thus simultaneously affirming psychological life-spanlife span theories proposing that artists in their early phases reject and transform, or even ignore, objective reality (Cohen-Shalev, “Self and Style” 296). In a similar way, in The Development, the elderly protagonists’ physical