Irony, cynicism and satire in The Floating Opera

The parody of the eighteenth century novel and its foundling hero in The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), the disclaimers and postscripts framing the hero's ironic quest for "flunkedness" in Giles Goat-Boy (1966), the Möbius strip binding the frame-tale experiments of Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and Chimera (1972), or the recycling of his previous output in the form of letters to the Author in LETTERS (1979), all share something of the structural joke of conceptual art. The metafictional parody of narrative form, combined with the comprehensive role assigned to the frame tale-a metaphor for the immortality of story-telling-gives the impression that Barth aspires to narrate the fortunes of literature itself. Barth looks to parody, as the irony of form, to sublate the claims of modernism in what amounts to a literary idealism, a notion of literature's independent life as "self-transcendent parody" (Friday Book 205). The survival of narrative art in ironic form is reenacted in the trials of the metafictional narrators, who experience writer's block in the face of the canon's exhaustion of creative possibilities before discovering, via parody, that the wine sacks have not run dry. The narrative tricks of The Floating Opera anticipate later experiments with narrative frames; Todd's narratological dilemma is closer to Scheherazade's.than is any of the later narrators that identify with her; and the seeds of the metafictional aesthetic are present in the Doctor's advice to Jacob Horner in The End of the Road (1958) that "fiction isn't a lie at all, but a true representation of the distortion everyone makes of life" (337), a formulation later refined and extended but not fundamentally altered (see Friday Book 221), and no different, for example, to Andre Castine's "action historiography: the making of history as if it were an avant-garde species of narrative" (LETTERS 72). The Doctor's historiography is never far from lunacy and is subjected to satire, implying a range of critiques of the therapeutic society; Andre Castine's avant-gardism, which mirrors the devices by which LETTERS frames and incorporates historical material, is promoted as the fictional principle of biography and history itself.