Making it out of those limitations, age, stage, etc., as well as out of ancient Orientalisms, Greek mythology, sexual impotency and its attendant anti-feminist-anti-homosexual-sado-masochistic-frights and also out of literary criticism However much to either, rhyme and lyrical vagary make his difficulties into thin ironical baloney, and, besides, 'Chimera' is here - dense, pretty fat - by virtue of those difficulties and the worried writer (not Barth) is everywhere in 'Chimera' How much can they be ascribed to his 'limitations, his age and stage and personal vicissitudes,' 'how much to the general decline of letters'? He arrives early, this writer, as a genie conjured talkily up among his characters - Scheherazade (whose life, like his, hangs upon storytelling) and her 'kid sister.' He worships 'Sherry's' storytelling and worries about his Imagined, eating itself, saying what it tastes like, good, bad and terrific - and, as if such behavior were basically offensive to a writer, full of self-revulsion. Literally, 'Chimera' is a shut-your-critic's-mouth exhibition of the crafty master's craft.

Pleases - even to say he knows what he is doing, has done and will do henceforth. What 'right' has to do with imaginative writing I don't know, but analyses, evaluations and justifications are spared the reader's head and made labors of the page, where the polymorphic, multivocal hero-author speaks up whenever he (Does this sound like chasing one's own behind? Well the book says as much.) Given this structural obsession, it can be as boring as a snailĪnd seem compulsively idiosyncratic, though the author is 'sure' that it is 'right.' His own arms as if there's nothing more to say.Īnd there is certainly nothing more to say about 'Chimera' that isn't said in the book itself - even that it consists of three parts retelling three ancient myths (the stories of Scheherazade, Perseus and Bellerophon), complicated togetherīy accretions and repetitions, all in pursuit of a pattern it makes in that very pursuit. He's outside, photographed on the jacket back, looking witty and cool, wrapped in Writer's life his life contains 'Chimera,' and it contains its writer, its 'shape-shifting' hero, inside. In John Barth's sixth book, 'Chimera,' where talking about it becomes the work, and the more serious problem - verbal suicide - is copiously acknowledged, along with a great deal else, and why not? The work contains the

Ome writers won't talk about their worked because it's hard to find time enough, in the first place, to work.

Chimera john barth pdf creator