LETTERS

...Letters has all the potential of what librarians call an unread best seller...

...Rereading the early English novelists," he writes, "I was impressed with their characteristic awareness that they're writing—that their fictions exist in the form, not of sounds in the ear, but of signs on the page, imitative not of life 'directly,' but of its documents—and I considered marrying one venerable narrative tradition to another: the frame-tale and the 'documentary' novel...

...By which he means simply that when the characters in a work of fiction "begin to manifest a kind of awareness of the fiction they're in, it reminds us of the fiction we're in...

...There is a great deal more in Letters, including a brilliant novel within a novel that describes the Mensch family of stonecutters who emigrate from Germany to Maryland (the material, as Morrell explains, is from a novel Barth started and never finished...

...The book will "preoccupy itself with, among other things, the role of epistles—real letters, forged and doctored letters—in the history of History...

...But I think it is one of those major works whose function is to remind us of the need for esthetic vision—a reminder which, in the United States at any time, is reason enough for existing...

...But almost immediately, Barth goes in the opposite direction...

...He retells the stories of the various conspiracies in the French and Indian wars, the attempt to smuggle Napoleon into the United States, the composition of The Star Spangled Banner, the burning of Washington in 1814, the battle of New Orleans, among others...

...Letters provides just that sense of depth and simultaneity while allowing Barth great latitude for the expression of his literary talents...

...Barth's term is "reenactment," and his characters are constantly rereading, remeet-ing, reliving, and reviving their experiences...

...It is one of the many wonderful inventions in Barth's novel, and it leads directly to the central theme, his main concern almost from the beginning of his career—to resist the demands of critics and readers that he become a writer of realistic prose...

...Gene Bluestein (Gene Bluestein, a professor of English at California State University, Fresno, is the author of "The Voice of the Folk: Folklore and American Literary Theory...

...The letters will be from seven correspondents: one from each of my previous books (or their present-day descendants or counterparts, in the case of the historical or fabulous works), plus one invented specifically for this work, plus—I blush to report, it goes so contrary to my literary principles—the Author, who had better be telling stories than chattering about them...

...It will also be concerned with, and of course be constituted of, alphabetical letters: the atoms of which the written universe is made...

...Claude Levi-Strauss describes perfectly what Barth intends and accomplishes when he notes that "there is a kind of continuous reconstruction taking place in the mind of the listener to a mythical story...

...Ultimately Barth's position is that "the relation between fact and fiction, life and art, is not imitation of either by the other, but a sort of reciprocity, an ongoing collaboration or reverberation ." Barth is not the kind of symbolist who wants to obliterate the physical world or diminish the significance of history (as opposed to art...

...He writes to characters from his earlier books, asking if they will agree to be in his present one...

...Quoting Jorge Luis Borges, Barth explains that the reason we're interested in fiction "where the characters in the story begin to have a kind of awareness that they're in a story...

...Another consequence of that insight is in Barth's deliciously playful reinvention of history...

...In a way quite different yet reminiscent of both Thomas Pynchon and E.L...

...Finally, to a small extent the book is addressed to the phenomenon of literature itself, the third main sense of our word letters...

...Barth wants this book to "echo its predecessors in my bibliography, while at the same time extending that bibliography and living its independent life...

...As he tells us several times in this epistolary novel, he intends to "reorchestrate some early conventions of the novel...

...the new character in the novel, Germaine Pitt, nee Gordon, Lady Amherst, one of the few intellectual women in Barth's work, and a marvelous scrip-tophiliac like her Author, who comments at the end of an unusually long letter to him, "I feel I could write on, write on to the end of time...

...In Barth, history and politics are always secondary to fictional analogues—in this case, myth...

...they respond, and often they describe aspects of each others' lives which become clear to us only after we have put together diverse materials from separate missives...

...On the contrary, he dramatizes the reverberations cleverly and often hilariously...

...Ask your local librarian if you've never heard the term...

...He didn't make it, but the War of 1812 materials are played against the contemporary scene...

...John Morrell's useful study, John Barth: An Introduction (1976), quotes Barth's intention to publish Letters in time for our Bicentennial...

...Doctorow, Barth uses historical materials to advance his fictional concerns...

...Like Hawthorne apologizing in the introduction to The Scarlet Letter for having written a romance rather than a novel, Barth pretends to make up for his past errors by using a form that relies on "real documents"—letters...

...Who will read all this, nearly 800 pages...

...a prolonged duel between an author and a film director (the word against the image), and a character who, with the aid of a computer, is inventing the successor to literature, numerature...

...The very date on a letter recedes from reality, once when it is published and again at the time it is read...

...the reason why that situation is fascinating is that it troubles us ontologically...