The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth (1960)

This novel doesn’t seem to be much talked about today, and knowing that John Barth had a reputation as the original American literary postmodernist, I had come to think it was because it was difficult, more difficult perhaps than the still popular postmodern monster Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. I was a long way off the mark. The Sot-Weed Factor is in fact hugely enjoyable, transparently written, and outrageously fat with a love of life and storytelling.

The Pynchon book that it most resembles is actually Mason & Dixon. Both are based in the early days of Britain’s American colonies, concern themselves with the intrigue and culture of the nascent United States, and employ the language of the time — Late 17th or early 18th century English in the case of The Sot-Weed Factor, late 18th century English in the case of Mason & Dixon.

But whereas Pynchon’s book (which I like a lot, by the way) is a knotty and difficult hippie stoner fabulism, Barth’s is the smooth, tightly controlled creation of what could almost be a newly unearthed 18th century picaresque or Bildungsroman. There is nothing fantastical — no talking dogs or mechanical ducks possessing consciousness and the power of invisibility — and there is no hint of modern concerns. It reads like Daniel Defoe or Henry Fielding. The plot is endlessly complex and sometimes tiring, but from beginning to end there is always a madcap mishap, an exciting adventure, a glittering insight or a fascinating conversation around the next page. It never lets up, and hardly ever falters or slows down. The characters are appropriately loveable and hateful, the events of their roller-coaster lives always involving and never obscure.

The book differs also from the metafictional postmodern experiments of, say, Italo Calvino in If on A Winter’s Night a Traveller. Such self-reference and winking to the reader as there is in The Sot-Weed Factor is considerably less than you find in centuries-old books like Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy.

An imitation of a novel

So the postmodernism here, if that’s what it is, is a postmodernism “along traditional lines” (to quote from Barth’s essay, “The Literature of Exhaustion.”) It is a return to the omniscient and reliable narrator and the art of storytelling, at a time when…

Not only the “omniscient” author of older fiction, but the very idea of the controlling artist, has been condemned as politically reactionary, even fascist. [1]

I feel like piping up here to say that although Barth is not politically reactionary, he is artistically reactionary, since in The Sot-Weed Factor he returns to a discarded form and mode of fiction. This is not a work of the avant-garde or experimental literature.

Isn’t it? Surely the return to earlier forms of fiction is itself an experiment? The very fact that Barth knowingly reproduced a long-surpassed form already makes The Sot-Weed Factor some kind of artistic statement, against both the techniques and psychological interiority of modernism, and against the conceptual artists’ rejection of technique and individual artistry.

There are two obvious things about the novel that suggest the label of postmodernism. First, it’s a total pastiche, a fully realized anachronism. Zooming out, Barth’s amazing performance reminded me of the Borges story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (as I recall, I made this connection before I realized that Barth had written about it in his essay, but I might be giving myself too much credit). In this story, an author reproduces Don Quixote line for line, but in doing so paradoxically produces something totally different from the original, since it has been produced in a different era and in different circumstances, by a different author with different motivations. It cannot be interpreted in the way that the original is, even though it’s identical.

Similarly with The Sot-Weed Factor: can we just enjoy it as an eighteenth century novel? But what is such a thing doing there in the middle of the twentieth century? As Barth himself put it…

… art and its forms and techniques live in history and certainly do change.

In any case, to be technically out of date is likely to be a genuine defect: Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony or the Chartres Cathedral if executed today would be merely embarrassing. [2]

What makes The Sot-Weed Factor different? Isn’t it precisely the kind of thing he is describing here?

Well, not quite. Unlike Mason & Dixon, Barth does not completely reproduce 17th or 18th century English in the narration, reserving that for the dialogue and the long quotations from the old journal the protagonists are trying to piece together. Barth wrote it for people like us. (Of course, one could see it from a different perspective and say that Pynchon just did it better.)

And the thing is, we don’t have to think about all that, since it is absorbing and entertaining in its own right. It is a story to immerse yourself in, not (or not only) to analyze. This is the art — storytelling — that the writer of fiction is engaged in, and as Cervantes, Sterne and others demonstrated a long time ago, it does not preclude self-reference, formal innovation and playfulness. We don’t have to read it primarily as an important novel, or as a call to literary arms, because it’s already a perfectly executed romantic adventure, with its own penetrating insights and philosophical meditations on human nature and the ups and downs of life, with its own themes of identity and innocence, and most of all with its celebration of humanity, warts and all (one suspects that for Barth, the love of storytelling and the love of humanity are pretty much the same thing). Its greatness is internal, that is, without zooming out — as I’ve done above — to see it as a strange object with an uncertain place in the landscape of literature (but which it also is).

Be that as it may, zooming out again we can see a second mark of the book’s postmodernism: the way it combines fact and fiction. The main character is the poet Ebenezer Cooke, who really existed. Barth weaves a fiction around his most notable work of poetry, also entitled The Sot-Weed Factor, and around certain events in his life, but it’s impossible to distinguish fact and fiction for any reader (which is pretty much every reader) who is not familiar with his life history or with the poem. In the last chapter, the author — still the notional narrator, although now closer to Barth himself — says that he expects to be criticized by “a certain stodgy variety of squint-eyed antiquarians” for playing fast and loose with history. His primary reply to this charge is that it’s storytelling all the way down: narratives of all kinds are constructed for the needs of author and audience in the moment of their creation, thus there is little difference between a chronicle and a fiction. Barth believes that “Fact and Fancy” are not so far apart as we sometimes imagine, and this demonstrates a very postmodern scepticism towards some of the underlying intellectual distinctions of modernity, e.g., between fact and value or subjective and objective.

This second postmodern aspect might also go some way to answering the charge that Barth is another Pierre Menard: his blend of biography and fiction is arguably an innovation, thus he is not in fact simply producing a copy or even just a comprehensive pastiche—he manages to sneak in an important innovation without calling attention to it (important because such experiments became more widely used later in the twentieth century, with “autofiction” and “non-fiction novels”).

Having said that, it now occurs to me — I make this up as I go along — that War and Peace does something similar, since it weaves a fictional narrative around real events and even has Napoleon and Kutuzov as characters. So perhaps Barth’s innovation is to use a historical person as the main character: in War and Peace, the foreground human drama involves purely fictional characters, and Napoleon and Kutuzov are minor characters used to lay out Tolstoy’s views on the 1812 invasion and on war and history in general, whereas The Sot-Weed Factor — which does have historical figures featuring as minor characters in the background (Francis Nicholson, John Coode) — also has a historical figure at the centre and right out in front, filling out the gaps in our knowledge of Ebenezer Cooke’s life with a fiction, inventing the life that led to his published poem. Thus Barth’s innovation is to blend history and fiction in just this way; and not just history and fiction but the history of literature and fiction.

In Barth’s essay he describes The Sot-Weed Factor as a work that “imitate[s] the form of the Novel, by an author who imitates the role of Author,” and revises his earlier statement about the imagined contemporary poduction of Chartres Cathedral and Beethoven’s Sixth:

I mentioned earlier that if Beethoven’s Sixth were composed today, it would be an embarrassment; but clearly it wouldn’t be, necessarily, if done with ironic intent by a composer quite aware of where we’ve been and where we are. [3]

Barth in general seems to be saying that The Sot-Weed Factor is meant simultaneously as, on the one hand, a skilfully executed and meaningful work of art; and on the other hand as an intentional intervention in the evolution of literature. The question is how, without the external help of his stated intentions, we are supposed to know that the book is meant as just such an intervention, or put another way, how do we recognize it as a knowing, ironic pastiche rather than an embarrassing imitation? The answer, I suppose, is precisely the perfection of the performance and the resulting tension of its existence out of time — which the reader might sometimes forget while absorbed in the story but which he always recognizes at the back of his mind.

I realize I’ve left myself with a contradiction. Is the book a perfect pastiche, as I’ve said, or is it written transparently for people like us, as I’ve also said? Perhaps this is just the balancing act that Barth had to perform, and whether he succeeded or not is a matter of taste. I don’t know.

Zooming in

So what is it about? Barth builds his story around a fictionalized version of the 17th-18th century poet Ebenezer Cooke. Barth’s Ebenezer is a directionless young man, starting out in London, who seemingly by accident and not through any particular talent finds himself appointed Poet Laureate of Maryland, and proudly takes to the role immediately. Treasuring his virginity, which begins as a mere incel predicament but which he comes to see as the source of his poetic and spiritual energy, he sets out for the New World, with the task — a somewhat secondary one to him in the beginning — of taking over and improving his father’s tobacco plantation.

Of course, the romantic innocence that leads him to imagine Maryland as a golorious and idyllic version of England eventually crumbles in the face of ugly reality. Cruelty, rape, deception, corruption, squalor, and lawlessness are what he finds. Late in the book he has to amend his earlier rosy view of the place following a string of unfortunate events:

“What price this laureateship! Here’s naught but scoundrels and perverts, hovels and brothels, corruption and poltroonery! What glory, to be singer of such a sewer!”

But along the way, we grow to love him in the way we grow to love Don Quixote. He can be a fool, and he can get himself and others into hot water, but he means well. And he has his own Sancho Panza too: his down-to-earth, cowardly, and unreliable manservant Bertrand. Their relationship must have been heavily inspired by Cervantes’s famous double-act.

A more complex relationship is that between Ebenezer and Henry Burlingame. Burlingame is irresistibly charming to men and women alike, an endlessly capable man of action and intelligence, but the reader begins to suspect long before Ebenezer does that he might not be the loyal friend he pretends to be.

I don’t usually do plot summaries, and I won’t attempt one this time, but something has to be said about it, since the novel is first and foremost a story. To summarize, it’s pirates, mistaken identities, kidnapping, political intrigue, and convoluted comedies of mistaken identity, sex, and shit. If I have a criticism it’s that the political intrigue, involving characters who were never more than names, was difficult to keep a grip on, possibly because I’m ignorant of the history of Maryland and the early United States in general. Francis Nicholson, Lord Baltimore, John Coode and others were real people, but I couldn’t easily keep track of who they were and where they stood in the political drama. In the end it didn’t really matter.

Equal in importance to Ebenezer’s mission to take the reins at his father’s house is Burlingame’s mission to discover his provenance. Together, the two of them track down parts of a journal written decades before, which has clues to Burlingame’s identity, and we get to read it along with the characters. This story within the story is itself very entertaining, and includes a bawdy retelling of the story of Pocahontas.

Unwoke?

I’ve seen a few reviews that complain about the book’s treatment of native Americans and women, but I was actually very impressed that Barth was able to show, through his characters, great sympathy for the suffering of abused women and for the struggles of black slaves and native peoples to assert themselves against the colonizers. It’s impressive because he could only push this so far without breaking the spell, that is, ruining the illusion of a lost 18th century romantic adventure story, an illusion that depends on contemporaneous stereotypes and most of all on an essential lightness of tone. On top of that, Barth is not doing fabulism or alternative history, so even though he fictionalizes the events of real people’s lives, there’s a limit to how much he can push against the bounds of historical accuracy.

That said, the characters’ initial support for the struggles of the oppressed repeatedly fizzles out as if forgotten by the author, and the promised philosophical discussions about savagery versus civilization don’t amount to much. Extending the principle of charity I’ll say again that it had to be this way to maintain the pastiche, but perhaps Barth could have done more, and I did find it disappointing.

Conclusion

The Sot-Weed Factor has both brains and heart, not only technical mastery but also love. Barth said the following in an interview:

My feeling about technique in art is that it has about the same value as technique in love-making. That is to say, on the one hand, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and, on the other hand, so does heartless skill; but what you want is passionate virtuosity. [4]

And that’s what I see in this book.

If you’re okay with 800 pages of 18th century verbosity liberally seasoned with toilet humour and dick jokes, I highly recommend it.

Notes

[1], [2], [3] John Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion”, Atlantic (August 1967) [link]

[4] “An Interview with John Barth,” by Alan Prince and Ian Carruthers, Prism (Spring 1968), [PDF]