What do you think?
Rate this book
The Sot-Weed Factor
Considered by critics to be Barth's most distinguished masterpiece, The Sot-Weed Factor has acquired the status of a modern classic. Set in the late 1600s, it recounts the wildly chaotic odyssey of hapless, ungainly Ebenezer Cooke, sent to the New World to look after his father's tobacco business and to record the struggles of the Maryland colony in an epic poem.
On his mission, Cooke experiences capture by pirates and Indians; the loss of his father's estate to roguish impostors; love for a farmer prostitute; stealthy efforts to rob him of his virginity, which he is (almost) determined to protect; and an extraordinary gallery of treacherous characters who continually switch identities. A hilarious, bawdy tribute to all the most insidious human vices, The Sot-Weed Factor has a lasting relevance for readers of all times.
On his mission, Cooke experiences capture by pirates and Indians; the loss of his father's estate to roguish impostors; love for a farmer prostitute; stealthy efforts to rob him of his virginity, which he is (almost) determined to protect; and an extraordinary gallery of treacherous characters who continually switch identities. A hilarious, bawdy tribute to all the most insidious human vices, The Sot-Weed Factor has a lasting relevance for readers of all times.
756 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1960
352 people are currently reading
24466 people want to read
About the author
John Barth
74 books779 followersJohn Barth briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, received a bachelor of arts in 1951 and composed
The Shirt of Nessus
, a thesis for a Magister Artium in 1952.
He served as a professor at Penn State University from 1953. Barth began his career with short The Floating Opera , which deals with suicide, and The End of the Road on controversial topic of abortion. Barth later remarked that these straightforward tales "didn't know they were novels."
The life of Ebenezer Cooke, an actual poet, based a next eight-hundred-page mock epic of the colonization of Maryland of Barth. Northrop Frye called an anatomy, a large, loosely structured work with digressions, distractions, stories, and lists, such as two prostitutes, who exchange lengthy insulting terms. The disillusioned fictional Ebenezer Cooke, repeatedly described as an innocent "poet and virgin" like Candide, sets out a heroic epic and ends up a biting satire.
He moved in 1965 to State University of New York at Buffalo. He visited as professor at Boston University in 1972. He served as professor from 1973 at Johns Hopkins University. He retired in 1995.
The conceit of the university as universe based Giles Goat-Boy , a next speculative fiction of Barth comparable size. A half-goat discovers his humanity as a savior in a story, presented as a computer tape, given to Barth, who denies his work. In the course, Giles carries out all the tasks that Joseph Campbell prescribed in The Hero with a Thousand Faces . Barth meanwhile in the book kept a list of the tasks, taped to his wall.
The even more metafictional Lost in the Funhouse , the short story collection, and Chimera , the novella collection, than their two predecessors foreground the process and present achievements, such as seven nested quotations. In Letters , Barth and the characters of his first six books interact.
Barth meanwhile also pondered and discussed the theoretical problems of fiction, most notably in an essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion," first printed in the Atlantic in 1967, widely considered a statement of "the death of the novel" (compare with Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author"). Barth has since insisted that he was merely making clear that a particular stage in history was passing, and pointing to possible directions from there. He later (1979) a follow-up essay, "The Literature of Replenishment," to clarify the point.
Barth's fiction continues to maintain a precarious balance between postmodern self-consciousness and wordplay on the one hand, and the sympathetic characterisation and "page-turning" plotting commonly associated with more traditional genres and subgenres of classic and contemporary storytelling.
He served as a professor at Penn State University from 1953. Barth began his career with short The Floating Opera , which deals with suicide, and The End of the Road on controversial topic of abortion. Barth later remarked that these straightforward tales "didn't know they were novels."
The life of Ebenezer Cooke, an actual poet, based a next eight-hundred-page mock epic of the colonization of Maryland of Barth. Northrop Frye called an anatomy, a large, loosely structured work with digressions, distractions, stories, and lists, such as two prostitutes, who exchange lengthy insulting terms. The disillusioned fictional Ebenezer Cooke, repeatedly described as an innocent "poet and virgin" like Candide, sets out a heroic epic and ends up a biting satire.
He moved in 1965 to State University of New York at Buffalo. He visited as professor at Boston University in 1972. He served as professor from 1973 at Johns Hopkins University. He retired in 1995.
The conceit of the university as universe based Giles Goat-Boy , a next speculative fiction of Barth comparable size. A half-goat discovers his humanity as a savior in a story, presented as a computer tape, given to Barth, who denies his work. In the course, Giles carries out all the tasks that Joseph Campbell prescribed in The Hero with a Thousand Faces . Barth meanwhile in the book kept a list of the tasks, taped to his wall.
The even more metafictional Lost in the Funhouse , the short story collection, and Chimera , the novella collection, than their two predecessors foreground the process and present achievements, such as seven nested quotations. In Letters , Barth and the characters of his first six books interact.
Barth meanwhile also pondered and discussed the theoretical problems of fiction, most notably in an essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion," first printed in the Atlantic in 1967, widely considered a statement of "the death of the novel" (compare with Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author"). Barth has since insisted that he was merely making clear that a particular stage in history was passing, and pointing to possible directions from there. He later (1979) a follow-up essay, "The Literature of Replenishment," to clarify the point.
Barth's fiction continues to maintain a precarious balance between postmodern self-consciousness and wordplay on the one hand, and the sympathetic characterisation and "page-turning" plotting commonly associated with more traditional genres and subgenres of classic and contemporary storytelling.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 541 reviews
November 28, 2021
The Sot-Weed Factor is a voyage – a grandiose ridiculous journey through space, time, life and poetry.
Not all romantic poets of this world manage to live quiet and meditative lives…
Ebenezer Cooke – a soi-disant Poet Laureate – is an unrivalled hero of this breathtaking saga… He must find his proper and unique place under the sun, solving in the process the grand mystery of aubergine hidden in the old enigmatic manuscript…
Seafarers sailing across the ocean of misfortune are the greatest adventurers.
Not all romantic poets of this world manage to live quiet and meditative lives…
My dear fellow, we sit here on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the worms will care, when anon they make a meal of you, whether you spent your moment sighing wigless in your chamber, or sacked the golden towns of Montezuma?
Ebenezer Cooke – a soi-disant Poet Laureate – is an unrivalled hero of this breathtaking saga… He must find his proper and unique place under the sun, solving in the process the grand mystery of aubergine hidden in the old enigmatic manuscript…
He demanded to be brought food at once. The Salvage was loath to bestire him selfe, so it seem’d to me, the moreso when my Captain commenc’d to tell what dishes he crav’d; to witt: one egg-plant (that frute, that is call’d by some, Aubergine) with corne-floure wherein to cooke it, & water wherewith to drinke it downe…
Seafarers sailing across the ocean of misfortune are the greatest adventurers.
November 21, 2022
El veredicto es claro: 3 de cada 4 lectores de Goodreads piensa que la novela es una obra maestra o está muy cerca de serlo. En lo que a mí respecta puedo decir que, aunque sea una novela algo alejada de lo que suelo leer y de la literatura que me sulibeya, me hizo pasar grandes ratos, lo cual tiene un mérito importante si tenemos en cuenta que el librito lo componen 1.173 páginas, prólogo incluido, y que un buen puñado de ellas puede que le sobren.
La novela es un homenaje a la pura narración de historias, muchas veces enlazadas en una espiral cuyo fin es el disparate, el absurdo, el desbarre total, y en el que se pasa revista a un buen puñado de cuestiones morales, amorales e inmorales, que son parodiadas pero nunca demonizadas. La sátira, e incluso la parodia de ciertos personajes e historias, nos puede recordar a otros personajes y narraciones clásicas, historias de piratas, náufragos, epopeyas clásicas, o las picarescas propias del siglo XVII, a lo que contribuye en buena medida el lenguaje utilizado (felicito efusivamente al traductor por el trabajo realizado).
Es una novela muy cervantina, con su Sancho codicioso de su ínsula Barataria y siempre preocupado por su amo... siempre que sus intereses vayan en la misma dirección que los propios. Y, por supuesto, la novela tiene a su Quijote virgen y a su Dulcinea puta. Sí, el sexo es importantísimo, tanto que, si le damos algún grado de verosimilitud a la historia, está en el propio nacimiento de la nación norteamericana: lo hay de todo tipo y no siempre con humanos.
Todas esas historias estás llenas de grandes y pequeñas barbaridades, de crueldades, de estupideces, algunas incluso bienintencionada, de todas esas acciones de las que somos capaces los humanos, de nuestra esencia como especie, de la eterna disputa Rousseau / Hobbes, hombre salvaje / hombre civilizado.
“...no se puede menos de recordar lo empinada y espinosa que es la senda que lleva a las alturas de la cortesía y el refinamiento, hasta el punto que con distraerse una sola vez para tomar aliento, por decirlo así, puede bastar para hacer que el escalador se despeñe y vuelva a su estado originario.
¿son los hombres unos seres salvajes recubiertos por un pátina de cortesía? ¿O es la condición salvaje una débil mancha que contamina la cortesía natural del hombre y que una y otra vez se manifiesta en forma de erupción, como si a un ángel le salieran granos en el trasero? “
En definitiva, que si es usted del tipo de lector que piensa que...
“un cuento bien urdido es chismorreo de dioses, a quienes les es dado ver el corazón y la médula de la vida que hay en la Tierra; es la telaraña del mundo; la urdimbre y la trama... ¡Vive Dios, lo que me gustan las historias, señores! “
... entonces este es su libro.
September 1, 2017
This book is a sheer marvel. Set in the 1600s, it's awash in lyrical excess, bawdy humor, historical satire, human vice, roguish fools, epic intent, and pirates and Indians and prostitutes and poets, oh my! The sheer life force of this novel is amazing, the prose is masterful and wickedly funny, and the journey is like nothing I've ever been on before. Now I'll shut up and let the far more eloquent Mr. Barth take over. Here's the opening line:
"In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point."
"In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point."
Read
February 17, 2020
Escher: Sphere, 1942, Maple, diameter 235mm
I visited the Escher museum in The Hague recently. It was a real treat because I've been fascinated by Escher's work since I first saw his ‘Hand Drawing Itself’ and some of his other drawing puzzles when I was a teenager. I often doodle my own versions of puzzle drawings, turning a person's profile into an architectural feature, for example, or making a geometric pattern reveal a face hidden inside it. There's an absurdity about such puzzle drawings that I love. There's no meaning, just lines assembled in curious ways. I simply enjoy the astonishment of making a few lines amount to more than is at first apparent.
Escher seems to enjoy astonishment too. The works I saw at the museum, and in the anthology I bought afterwards, are truly astonishing, and while at first I thought they were simply complex feats of magic and illusion, little by little I began to see meaning in them. Escher, in his own way, is a spinner of story cycles even if his stories are not at first obvious. With careful observation of the different elements, the parts become relatively clear, the method is understood, and the entire work becomes accessible. This is easier when we understand the preposterous parallels of his graphic language, the way he suggests the spatial in the flat and the flat in the spatial.
The works that most clearly demonstrate his storytelling ability are his series of Metamorphoses. I had never realised how many of these he had done. Here are just two examples:
Like a writer, he had certain themes he reworked constantly in his series. The Angel versus Devil sphere I used at the beginning of the review illustrates one of them: the dark side of our world versus the brighter side. In one of his Metamorphoses, day becomes night as black birds turn into white ones.
In another, pure white doves become fish which turn into great black toads which then become fierce looking birds before turning back into innocent white doves again.
At this point you are probably thinking that I’ve mistaken the page and instead of this being a review of John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor, it is instead a review of The Magic of M.C. Escher.
The truth is, this digression has served to make a point: we can do what we like in a review, meta and morph it however we choose just as John Barth does in his fiction: he thumbs his nose at literary convention and revels in piling up absurd coincidences and preposterous parallels. He distorts our perceptions so that we can no longer be sure of what we see. He shifts the poles of ‘morality’ as he pleases, angels are devils and devils are angels by turns. And civilisation? Where on this earthly sphere is that to be found? Certainly not where we tend to think.
His is spectacular story-telling, designed to astonish, and not averse to far more outlandish digressions than I’ve essayed here. He uses such obscure language and phraseology that it can confuse the reader at the beginning, but it only takes a short time to adjust to it and then everything is relatively clear and transparent.
One of his favourite strategies is metamorphosis: characters are rarely what they seem. They don disguises as smoothly and as frequently as the tessellated images in this Escher print.
Sometimes, however, the metamorphosis is carried out by the trials of life itself - this is the case for women characters more frequently than for male characters. Eve is never done paying the price of seduction it seems. The main character is one of the few who manage to magically retain a dove-like innocence in spite of passing through many tribulations and transmogrifications.
The entire book can be seen as a kind of giant metamorphosis. Starting out as straight historical fiction, it seems to pass through many guises from sharp satire to outright farce. We catch glimpses of authors and works we know in its pages, from Tristram Shandy to Don Quixote, from Rabelais to Shakespeare, from Joyce to the Bible. The only thing that’s missing is a whale!
…………………………………
In spite of my little shill-I, shall-I shuffle near the mid-point of this book when I was almost taken captive by the pirate ship Morpheides, I made it, will-he, nill-he, to as neat an 'alls-well that ends-well' summing-up as ever Shakespeare summoned up, and which Barth justifies with such wonderful casuistry that I declare him Saint John the Chronicler, patron saint of story-tellers henceforth and forever.
Read it and indulge in laughters low.
Amen.
January 9, 2017
Luego de nueve días y más de 1200 páginas puedo decir con total seguridad que El plantador de tabaco es una obra maestra. Una historia declamada por decenas de personajes variopintos que entran en escena para luego salir y volver a entrar cientos de páginas después, piratas, esclavos, indios, personajes históricos como Charles Calvert, Francis Nicholson o el mismo Ebenezer Cooke y múltiples relatos dentro de relatos. Una locura llevada a su grado máximo, en la que la identidad carece de valor real y su suplantación es moneda corriente, la virginidad es un prestigio ilusorio entre el trasfondo de la masacre entre nativos y conquistadores, el límite entre lo salvaje y lo civilizado se difumina y una intriga política tan enrevesada y desesperante que no se tiene nunca constancia de lo que sucede.
La escritura de Barth me resultó extraordinaria, en especial por su manejo de los tiempos para hacer determinadas revelaciones. Cuando el libro comienza a lentificarse, saca una sorpresa debajo de la manga que propulsa la historia por unos cuantos capítulos que hacen del proceso de lectura un viaje de lo más adictivo. Sus descripciones envuelven al lector en la atmósfera del Maryland del siglo XVII e inicios del XVIII y los diálogos, aunque a veces pecan de artificiales, se sienten reales a pesar de las exageraciones propias de la sátira.
Lo principal de El plantador de tabaco es la burla al sentido de la vida, de la conexión de los hechos y de la seriedad con la que (quizá) debería tomarse la existencia. Todo lo que ocurre en este relato (y en parte epopeya) es un delirio que sobrepasa cualquier esencia significativa. Barth se sienta sobre miles de años de escritos filosóficos y proclama desde la altura un nuevo orden: el caos. La endeblez de la historia y de lo que nos hace ser quienes somos. Rompe la moralidad impuesta, la ética absurda y la inocencia inconcebible y despliega una sucesión de aventuras no solo grandiosa sino también inquietante.
En fin. El plantador de tabaco es una obra maestra plagada de humor, inteligencia y profundidad, que recomiendo sin dudarlo.
La escritura de Barth me resultó extraordinaria, en especial por su manejo de los tiempos para hacer determinadas revelaciones. Cuando el libro comienza a lentificarse, saca una sorpresa debajo de la manga que propulsa la historia por unos cuantos capítulos que hacen del proceso de lectura un viaje de lo más adictivo. Sus descripciones envuelven al lector en la atmósfera del Maryland del siglo XVII e inicios del XVIII y los diálogos, aunque a veces pecan de artificiales, se sienten reales a pesar de las exageraciones propias de la sátira.
Lo principal de El plantador de tabaco es la burla al sentido de la vida, de la conexión de los hechos y de la seriedad con la que (quizá) debería tomarse la existencia. Todo lo que ocurre en este relato (y en parte epopeya) es un delirio que sobrepasa cualquier esencia significativa. Barth se sienta sobre miles de años de escritos filosóficos y proclama desde la altura un nuevo orden: el caos. La endeblez de la historia y de lo que nos hace ser quienes somos. Rompe la moralidad impuesta, la ética absurda y la inocencia inconcebible y despliega una sucesión de aventuras no solo grandiosa sino también inquietante.
En fin. El plantador de tabaco es una obra maestra plagada de humor, inteligencia y profundidad, que recomiendo sin dudarlo.
November 27, 2021
Well-loved books from my past
Rating: 5 golden stars of five, with a rapturous yodel cluster
The Publisher Says: Considered by critics to be Barth's most distinguished masterpiece, The Sot-Weed Factor has acquired the status of a modern classic. Set in the late 1600s, it recounts the wildly chaotic odyssey of hapless, ungainly Ebenezer Cooke, sent to the New World to look after his father's tobacco business and to record the struggles of the Maryland colony in an epic poem. On his mission, Cooke experiences capture by pirates and Indians; the loss of his father's estate to roguish impostors; love for a farmer prostitute; stealthy efforts to rob him of his virginity, which he is (almost) determined to protect; and an extraordinary gallery of treacherous characters who continually switch identities. A hilarious, bawdy tribute to all the most insidious human vices, The Sot-Weed Factor has lasting relevance for readers of all times.
My Review: The book description is a bit weak-kneed, but I can't find a better one, and I detest writing the book reports with a passion.
A couple months ago, I started a re-read of this book that did not go well. I sighed. I snorted. I rolled my eyes, and cut up rough whenever we got into the book's faux-antique Englysshe. I was responding to it like it was a phauntaiysee nawvelle with majgickq and other such borderline-criminal goins-on. I put it aside, and I forgot it, except to renew it online from the Port Washington liberry.
Damn me anyway! Why can't I listen to my REAL self?! John Barth, my Real Self murmured, John Barth of The Floating Opera and this book which you adored thirty years ago, he deserves better than this, to which Angry Self replied, “Shut up you! Seven hundred plus pages of this phauntaaahsticall-ness will make us homicidal! Why not encourage me to read Dickens or Tolkien if all you want to is encourage me to massacre random strangers? Silence! Begone!”
Damn me! What an ass! I read the first six chapters and tossed the book aside! But...I did keep renewing it....
And today, today with two days left on my final renewal, to-goddam-day I pick the book up again. And I read the first paragraph/line. And oh damn me! Damn me! How beautiful, how simply and completely perfect it is, and how I wish I could boil Angry Me in oil!
Oh. Oh oh oh oh. I just had a crisis.
Now I *could* just power through the seven hundred-plus remaining pages in the next two days, ignoring all other beings and duties...to the detriment of our carpets, as the dog would be on her own re: eliminatory functions, and the complete bumfuzzlement of my houseys as I would not be showing up at the station to fetch them...but it's not on. It's just not. This isn't a book to be got through, it is a book to be appreciated, savored, delighted in.
I will await the tides of fortune washing a copy of my own back up on the shores of my private liberry. It is worth the wait. The rapturous narcosis of my first immersion has returned. Thirty years are as but a moment. John Barth is still there, his words as gorgeously deployed as ever they were.
Delightful. Delightful.
Damn me anyway!
Rating: 5 golden stars of five, with a rapturous yodel cluster
The Publisher Says: Considered by critics to be Barth's most distinguished masterpiece, The Sot-Weed Factor has acquired the status of a modern classic. Set in the late 1600s, it recounts the wildly chaotic odyssey of hapless, ungainly Ebenezer Cooke, sent to the New World to look after his father's tobacco business and to record the struggles of the Maryland colony in an epic poem. On his mission, Cooke experiences capture by pirates and Indians; the loss of his father's estate to roguish impostors; love for a farmer prostitute; stealthy efforts to rob him of his virginity, which he is (almost) determined to protect; and an extraordinary gallery of treacherous characters who continually switch identities. A hilarious, bawdy tribute to all the most insidious human vices, The Sot-Weed Factor has lasting relevance for readers of all times.
My Review: The book description is a bit weak-kneed, but I can't find a better one, and I detest writing the book reports with a passion.
A couple months ago, I started a re-read of this book that did not go well. I sighed. I snorted. I rolled my eyes, and cut up rough whenever we got into the book's faux-antique Englysshe. I was responding to it like it was a phauntaiysee nawvelle with majgickq and other such borderline-criminal goins-on. I put it aside, and I forgot it, except to renew it online from the Port Washington liberry.
Damn me anyway! Why can't I listen to my REAL self?! John Barth, my Real Self murmured, John Barth of The Floating Opera and this book which you adored thirty years ago, he deserves better than this, to which Angry Self replied, “Shut up you! Seven hundred plus pages of this phauntaaahsticall-ness will make us homicidal! Why not encourage me to read Dickens or Tolkien if all you want to is encourage me to massacre random strangers? Silence! Begone!”
Damn me! What an ass! I read the first six chapters and tossed the book aside! But...I did keep renewing it....
And today, today with two days left on my final renewal, to-goddam-day I pick the book up again. And I read the first paragraph/line. And oh damn me! Damn me! How beautiful, how simply and completely perfect it is, and how I wish I could boil Angry Me in oil!
In the last years of the seventeenth century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.
Oh. Oh oh oh oh. I just had a crisis.
Now I *could* just power through the seven hundred-plus remaining pages in the next two days, ignoring all other beings and duties...to the detriment of our carpets, as the dog would be on her own re: eliminatory functions, and the complete bumfuzzlement of my houseys as I would not be showing up at the station to fetch them...but it's not on. It's just not. This isn't a book to be got through, it is a book to be appreciated, savored, delighted in.
I will await the tides of fortune washing a copy of my own back up on the shores of my private liberry. It is worth the wait. The rapturous narcosis of my first immersion has returned. Thirty years are as but a moment. John Barth is still there, his words as gorgeously deployed as ever they were.
Delightful. Delightful.
Damn me anyway!
Read
April 8, 2023Video review: https://youtu.be/Ty1HnAILEQQ
October 14, 2012
What a fun book. I'd like to compare it to Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream, but alas it's already been done. The song's plot is not all that far from what John Barth is up to in The Sot-Weed Factor, but Barth is far more (dare I say it) exhausting.
This is a mock history of the real life poet Ebenezer Cooke, who wrote the Hudibrastic poem "The sot-weed factor: or, A voyage to Maryland. A satyr. In which is describ'd the laws, government, courts and constitutions of the country, and also the buildings, feasts, frolicks, entertainments and drunken humours of the inhabitants of that part of America. In burlesque verse".
That title is sort of a plot outline for the novel, with the million little twists and turns left out.
On one level Barth is a serious storyteller, but he pushes his writing to the outer limits of the sensible - as in this delightful chapter heading, "The Poet Wonders Whether the Course of Human History Is a Progress, a Drama, a Retrogression, a Cycle, an Undulation, a Vortex, a Right- or Left-Handed Spiral, a Mere Continuum, or What Have You. Certain Evidence Is Brought Forward, but of an Ambiguous and Inconclusive Nature."
If you read this book with a straight face it's very satisfying - but a silly grin with occasional laughter works too.
Ah, except for poor Joan Toast.
It's like this song - you can laugh...or just go with it.
There are stories within stories, characters within characters, plots within plots. Books within books.
Things either go horribly wrong or wondrously right, as if there were an outside hand always intervening.
Before you call him drowned??
Get the ebook here.
This is a mock history of the real life poet Ebenezer Cooke, who wrote the Hudibrastic poem "The sot-weed factor: or, A voyage to Maryland. A satyr. In which is describ'd the laws, government, courts and constitutions of the country, and also the buildings, feasts, frolicks, entertainments and drunken humours of the inhabitants of that part of America. In burlesque verse".
That title is sort of a plot outline for the novel, with the million little twists and turns left out.
Barth's meticulous attention to historical detail and his excellent imitation of the tone and style of the 18th c. novel had me believing this world. Slightly. The plot is outrageous! There is a crazy coincidence on nearly every page. And it's so dense and complicated that you need a chart to figure it all out.
On one level Barth is a serious storyteller, but he pushes his writing to the outer limits of the sensible - as in this delightful chapter heading, "The Poet Wonders Whether the Course of Human History Is a Progress, a Drama, a Retrogression, a Cycle, an Undulation, a Vortex, a Right- or Left-Handed Spiral, a Mere Continuum, or What Have You. Certain Evidence Is Brought Forward, but of an Ambiguous and Inconclusive Nature."
If you read this book with a straight face it's very satisfying - but a silly grin with occasional laughter works too.
Ah, except for poor Joan Toast.
It's like this song - you can laugh...or just go with it.
There are stories within stories, characters within characters, plots within plots. Books within books.
Things either go horribly wrong or wondrously right, as if there were an outside hand always intervening.
From how many ships must a man get tossed,
John Barth
Before you call him drowned??
Get the ebook here.
April 10, 2015
Sextants and Parallels
John Barth took four years to write this epic Epic, and published it at the age of 30 in 1960.
I more or less spent four days inside its four walls over Easter (I was determined to gobble it up before the chocolate Easter eggs were finished!), but I could spend a lifetime (or what little remains of it) recounting its marvels.
This was my third Barth novel. I loved the first two. But this one totally blew my mind, both in terms of ambition and execution.
Swords and Cannons
I have my favourite novelists, just as I have my favourite novels. I'm reluctant to canonise authors, let alone entire oeuvres, or even individual novels. Hence, despite my favourites, I've always been reluctant to claim that there might be such a thing as a Great American Novel (which is little more than a marketing term), let alone one whose glory extends beyond the boundaries of the United States.
Yet, having just finished this work, I'm tempted to argue that it's the best American novel written in the twentieth century. The only thing that holds me back is the fact that I haven't read Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon", which explores the past like this novel.
Art and Wile
One of the reasons for my enthusiasm is how the work fits into the history of the novel.
It's at once a parody and an homage. But it also passes itself off as a pretty amazing iteration of what it seeks to parody.
I read and enjoyed a lot of voluminous, early English novels in my youth, before I became more impatient with my time. Midway through my life, I briefly doubted the virtue of length and maximalism, arguing that, if a writer had 900 pages in them, then why couldn't they split them into three discrete works?
This experience has persuaded me that, at least in Barth's case, I should trust the author's assessment of appropriate length:
"The tale is no marvel of brevity...yet it must be told."
In this tale, Barth immerses us, sometimes over our heads, in both a world and a worldview, and it's a delightenment.
There were times when the pace of the novel seemed to slow, and I wondered why there were still hundreds of pages to go. However, each time, in retrospect, it seemed as if Barth was merely slowing down to take a corner. Once through it, he accelerated, and the tale was off again, even if sometimes on a different tangent.
Raillery and Bookish Converse
Barth argues that this is when he discovered what we now call Post-Modernism. He might be right, insofar as the movement embraces imitation.
He would say later that novels like "The Sot-Weed Factor" are "novels which imitate the form of the Novel, by an author who imitates the role of Author."
Pranks and Larks
What I love about this assertion is the degree of mischief implicit in it.
If we have read any of these earlier novels (from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries), readers will be familiar with the form adopted by their authors (especially the chapter headings that sometimes sound like head notes in reports of legal cases).
Yet we also know that how they were written and what they wrote about reflected the time in which they were written.
Barth might attempt to write in this manner, but he is/was still a twentieth century (schizoid) man writing in the form of an eighteenth century novelist.
To an extent he was a passenger in someone else's vehicle.
He might have donned the garb, and he might have looked the part, but he and we are both conscious that it's a pretence.
Aye, there's the rub!
But what a pretence!
Gerrit Dou imitates an ear-ringed Barth
Ink and Quill
How to describe this fiction then?
"Dear God! 'Tis marvellous. What a comedy! 'Twas a marvelous tale, well told, and as nicely pointed as one of Aesop's. A pretty tale indeed, if not a virtuous. Aye, spread the word!"
Wags and Wits
Barth cautions us against taking authors too seriously or at their word:
"'Tis a great mistake for a tale-teller to philosophise and tell us what his story means; haply it doth not mean what he thinks at all, at least to the rest of us."
On first appearance, this might seem to warn us against emphasising too much the author's literary or philosophical intentions.
To this extent, it urges us to enjoy the author's play (authors and characters alike can "play this world like a harpsichord"), not just their earnestness.
Spin and Tangle
However, it also suggests that an author doesn't necessarily understand the true effect or import of their own tale.
My book is not necessarily what I intended. Ironically, it might be no more than what I realised.
Still, a tale requires a listener, just as much as a speaker, so we don't know its meaning, until we know how it has been heard.
A tale, therefore, is constructed by both author and reader.
What's important, too, is how well the tale is told. Its appeal is in the telling. It doesn't have to be perfect, as long as it is fit for purpose or is entertaining.
Being a tale, it's also delivered in parts. We might enjoy some parts more than others:
"Tales are like tarts, that may be ugly on the face of 'em and yet have a worthwhile end."
Innocence and Experience
For all the bawdy humour, the novel deals incidentally, at least, with serious issues.
At heart, it's a tale of innocence and experience.
The virgin poet Ebenezer Cooke and his twin sister, Anna, are the innocents. Their former tutor and friend, Henry Burlingame III, is the experienced one.
There is a creative tension between the three, although Henry is the primary source of it: like the author himself, "he makes game of my innocence".
Needless to say, the game encompasses twins, coupling and couplets! Entwining, swiving and rhyming abounds! And so it should! Pretty or not, it makes no claim to virtue.
Preachment and Practice
Of course, innocence comes before experience. Hence, innocence is associated with virginity; the loss of it with the fall and subsequent worldly experience:
" 'Twas carnal knowledge, knowledge of the flesh, that caused man's fall."
In Henry's case, it also motivated and drove his engagement with the world:
"Yet anon I lost [my virginity], and so committed me to the world; 'twas then I vowed, since I was fallen from grace, I would worship the Serpent that betrayed me, and ere I died would know the taste of every fruit the garden grows!"
Sneak and Subterfuge
So begins Ebenezer's quest to learn about the (new) world (of Maryland), if not necessarily lose his virginity.
Still, everywhere he goes in this not quite Virgin Maryland, he encounters Henry in his various (dis-)guises:
"He loves the world, and comprehends it at first glance - sometimes even sight unseen - yet his love is flavoured with a similar contempt, from the selfsame cause, which leads him to make game of what he loves."
Sundry Trials and Impostures
Henry, who ironically has "nor wealth, nor place, nor even parentage", is far more relaxed with the world. He doesn't strive to understand it in its totality. He seeks only to understand himself within it:
"One must needs make and seize his soul, and then cleave fast to't, or go babbling in the corner; one must choose his gods and devils on the run, quill his own name upon the universe, and declare, " 'Tis I, and the world stands such-a-way!" One must assert, assert, assert, or go screaming mad."
Henry confronts real life every moment of the day, often masked or impersonating an other:
"I know you not from one hour to the next...The world's a happy climate for imposture."
Factions and Intrigues
Personality is fluid and fragmented. Nothing is whole. Each of us has a "driven and fragmented spirit." We have to reinvent or rediscover ourselves step by step on the journey through life. Henry advises Ebenezer:
"You must embrace your Self as Poet and Virgin, regardless, or discard it for something better. In either case don't seek whole understanding - the search were fruitless, and there is no time for't."
Ostensibly, the novel is the tale of Ebenezer's education. However, his rival is equally educated over the course of the novel, for all his worldliness and playfulness.
Idlers and Ne'er-Do-Wells
Like most in the American colonies, Henry is an orphan. The absence of a father means the absence of a father figure, and therefore a source of authority.
Just as orphans might lack a heritage, some lack a moral compass. These are the men who colonised the New World:
"The plain fact is, the greatest part are castaways: rebels, failures, jailbirds and adventurers. Cast such seed on such soil, and 'twere fond to seek a crop of dons and courtiers..There is a freedom there that's both a blessing and a curse, for't means both liberty and lawlessness. 'Tis more than just political and religious liberty - they come and go from one year to the next. 'Tis philosophic liberty I speak of, that comes from want of history. It throws one on his own resources, that freedom - makes every man an orphan like myself and can as well demoralise as elevate."
Morals and Metaphysics
America's origins are therefore both de-moralised and demoralised.
When Ebenezer arrives in Maryland, it is fast going from sot-weed (tobacco) to pot (well, opium, actually).
Ebenezer's poetry, his culture, his civilisation is no solution. It's too removed from reality:
"Literature...availed him not, for though it afforded one a certain sophistication about life and a release from one's single mortal destiny, it did not, except accidentally, afford solutions to practical problems."
Shifting and Confounded
For all Man's love of Reason, there is no order or logic in Life. History too is a fabrication, ours:
"We all invent our pasts, more or less, as we go along, at the dictates of Whim and Interest; the happenings of former times are a clay in the present moment that will-we, nill-we, the lot of us must sculpt. Thus Being does make Positivists of us all. Moreover, this Clio was already a scarred and crafty trollop when the Author found her."
Toss and Tempest
Ultimately, Life is a tempest, that tosses us around on the waters: "This thing we call civilisation...'tis a bumboat-load o' judges, dons and poets, on a dark and vasty main o'erwracked with storms".
Life is beyond our control, and that of our factors and agents. We might be a character on its stage, but it tells its own tale, fearless of outcome or coincidence or absurdity We don't write Life; it writes us:
"Life is a shameless playwright."
But so were Rabelais and Shakespeare, and so is Barth. All three of them have writ large about Life for our reading pleasure.
Their subject matter is the stuff of life, drawn both dramatic and comic, tragic and farcical. In Barth's twinned words (many of which I've used for my sub-headings), this novel contains within: fops and fools, love and candor, lust and pride, trysts and secret meetings, hypocrisy and lewd delight, gasps and titters.
Some might equal these tales and their telling, but none are better. At least, none that come to mind.
Detail of Back Cover and Spine Illustration by Owen Wood
ADDED EXTRAS:
[Couplets and Eulogies]
John Barth took four years to write this epic Epic, and published it at the age of 30 in 1960.
I more or less spent four days inside its four walls over Easter (I was determined to gobble it up before the chocolate Easter eggs were finished!), but I could spend a lifetime (or what little remains of it) recounting its marvels.
This was my third Barth novel. I loved the first two. But this one totally blew my mind, both in terms of ambition and execution.
Swords and Cannons
I have my favourite novelists, just as I have my favourite novels. I'm reluctant to canonise authors, let alone entire oeuvres, or even individual novels. Hence, despite my favourites, I've always been reluctant to claim that there might be such a thing as a Great American Novel (which is little more than a marketing term), let alone one whose glory extends beyond the boundaries of the United States.
Yet, having just finished this work, I'm tempted to argue that it's the best American novel written in the twentieth century. The only thing that holds me back is the fact that I haven't read Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon", which explores the past like this novel.
Art and Wile
One of the reasons for my enthusiasm is how the work fits into the history of the novel.
It's at once a parody and an homage. But it also passes itself off as a pretty amazing iteration of what it seeks to parody.
I read and enjoyed a lot of voluminous, early English novels in my youth, before I became more impatient with my time. Midway through my life, I briefly doubted the virtue of length and maximalism, arguing that, if a writer had 900 pages in them, then why couldn't they split them into three discrete works?
This experience has persuaded me that, at least in Barth's case, I should trust the author's assessment of appropriate length:
"The tale is no marvel of brevity...yet it must be told."
In this tale, Barth immerses us, sometimes over our heads, in both a world and a worldview, and it's a delightenment.
There were times when the pace of the novel seemed to slow, and I wondered why there were still hundreds of pages to go. However, each time, in retrospect, it seemed as if Barth was merely slowing down to take a corner. Once through it, he accelerated, and the tale was off again, even if sometimes on a different tangent.
Raillery and Bookish Converse
Barth argues that this is when he discovered what we now call Post-Modernism. He might be right, insofar as the movement embraces imitation.
He would say later that novels like "The Sot-Weed Factor" are "novels which imitate the form of the Novel, by an author who imitates the role of Author."
Pranks and Larks
What I love about this assertion is the degree of mischief implicit in it.
If we have read any of these earlier novels (from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries), readers will be familiar with the form adopted by their authors (especially the chapter headings that sometimes sound like head notes in reports of legal cases).
Yet we also know that how they were written and what they wrote about reflected the time in which they were written.
Barth might attempt to write in this manner, but he is/was still a twentieth century (schizoid) man writing in the form of an eighteenth century novelist.
To an extent he was a passenger in someone else's vehicle.
He might have donned the garb, and he might have looked the part, but he and we are both conscious that it's a pretence.
Aye, there's the rub!
But what a pretence!
Gerrit Dou imitates an ear-ringed Barth
Ink and Quill
How to describe this fiction then?
"Dear God! 'Tis marvellous. What a comedy! 'Twas a marvelous tale, well told, and as nicely pointed as one of Aesop's. A pretty tale indeed, if not a virtuous. Aye, spread the word!"
Wags and Wits
Barth cautions us against taking authors too seriously or at their word:
"'Tis a great mistake for a tale-teller to philosophise and tell us what his story means; haply it doth not mean what he thinks at all, at least to the rest of us."
On first appearance, this might seem to warn us against emphasising too much the author's literary or philosophical intentions.
To this extent, it urges us to enjoy the author's play (authors and characters alike can "play this world like a harpsichord"), not just their earnestness.
Spin and Tangle
However, it also suggests that an author doesn't necessarily understand the true effect or import of their own tale.
My book is not necessarily what I intended. Ironically, it might be no more than what I realised.
Still, a tale requires a listener, just as much as a speaker, so we don't know its meaning, until we know how it has been heard.
A tale, therefore, is constructed by both author and reader.
What's important, too, is how well the tale is told. Its appeal is in the telling. It doesn't have to be perfect, as long as it is fit for purpose or is entertaining.
Being a tale, it's also delivered in parts. We might enjoy some parts more than others:
"Tales are like tarts, that may be ugly on the face of 'em and yet have a worthwhile end."
Innocence and Experience
For all the bawdy humour, the novel deals incidentally, at least, with serious issues.
At heart, it's a tale of innocence and experience.
The virgin poet Ebenezer Cooke and his twin sister, Anna, are the innocents. Their former tutor and friend, Henry Burlingame III, is the experienced one.
There is a creative tension between the three, although Henry is the primary source of it: like the author himself, "he makes game of my innocence".
Needless to say, the game encompasses twins, coupling and couplets! Entwining, swiving and rhyming abounds! And so it should! Pretty or not, it makes no claim to virtue.
Preachment and Practice
Of course, innocence comes before experience. Hence, innocence is associated with virginity; the loss of it with the fall and subsequent worldly experience:
" 'Twas carnal knowledge, knowledge of the flesh, that caused man's fall."
In Henry's case, it also motivated and drove his engagement with the world:
"Yet anon I lost [my virginity], and so committed me to the world; 'twas then I vowed, since I was fallen from grace, I would worship the Serpent that betrayed me, and ere I died would know the taste of every fruit the garden grows!"
Sneak and Subterfuge
So begins Ebenezer's quest to learn about the (new) world (of Maryland), if not necessarily lose his virginity.
Still, everywhere he goes in this not quite Virgin Maryland, he encounters Henry in his various (dis-)guises:
"He loves the world, and comprehends it at first glance - sometimes even sight unseen - yet his love is flavoured with a similar contempt, from the selfsame cause, which leads him to make game of what he loves."
Sundry Trials and Impostures
Henry, who ironically has "nor wealth, nor place, nor even parentage", is far more relaxed with the world. He doesn't strive to understand it in its totality. He seeks only to understand himself within it:
"One must needs make and seize his soul, and then cleave fast to't, or go babbling in the corner; one must choose his gods and devils on the run, quill his own name upon the universe, and declare, " 'Tis I, and the world stands such-a-way!" One must assert, assert, assert, or go screaming mad."
Henry confronts real life every moment of the day, often masked or impersonating an other:
"I know you not from one hour to the next...The world's a happy climate for imposture."
Factions and Intrigues
Personality is fluid and fragmented. Nothing is whole. Each of us has a "driven and fragmented spirit." We have to reinvent or rediscover ourselves step by step on the journey through life. Henry advises Ebenezer:
"You must embrace your Self as Poet and Virgin, regardless, or discard it for something better. In either case don't seek whole understanding - the search were fruitless, and there is no time for't."
Ostensibly, the novel is the tale of Ebenezer's education. However, his rival is equally educated over the course of the novel, for all his worldliness and playfulness.
Idlers and Ne'er-Do-Wells
Like most in the American colonies, Henry is an orphan. The absence of a father means the absence of a father figure, and therefore a source of authority.
Just as orphans might lack a heritage, some lack a moral compass. These are the men who colonised the New World:
"The plain fact is, the greatest part are castaways: rebels, failures, jailbirds and adventurers. Cast such seed on such soil, and 'twere fond to seek a crop of dons and courtiers..There is a freedom there that's both a blessing and a curse, for't means both liberty and lawlessness. 'Tis more than just political and religious liberty - they come and go from one year to the next. 'Tis philosophic liberty I speak of, that comes from want of history. It throws one on his own resources, that freedom - makes every man an orphan like myself and can as well demoralise as elevate."
Morals and Metaphysics
America's origins are therefore both de-moralised and demoralised.
When Ebenezer arrives in Maryland, it is fast going from sot-weed (tobacco) to pot (well, opium, actually).
Ebenezer's poetry, his culture, his civilisation is no solution. It's too removed from reality:
"Literature...availed him not, for though it afforded one a certain sophistication about life and a release from one's single mortal destiny, it did not, except accidentally, afford solutions to practical problems."
Shifting and Confounded
For all Man's love of Reason, there is no order or logic in Life. History too is a fabrication, ours:
"We all invent our pasts, more or less, as we go along, at the dictates of Whim and Interest; the happenings of former times are a clay in the present moment that will-we, nill-we, the lot of us must sculpt. Thus Being does make Positivists of us all. Moreover, this Clio was already a scarred and crafty trollop when the Author found her."
Toss and Tempest
Ultimately, Life is a tempest, that tosses us around on the waters: "This thing we call civilisation...'tis a bumboat-load o' judges, dons and poets, on a dark and vasty main o'erwracked with storms".
Life is beyond our control, and that of our factors and agents. We might be a character on its stage, but it tells its own tale, fearless of outcome or coincidence or absurdity We don't write Life; it writes us:
"Life is a shameless playwright."
But so were Rabelais and Shakespeare, and so is Barth. All three of them have writ large about Life for our reading pleasure.
Their subject matter is the stuff of life, drawn both dramatic and comic, tragic and farcical. In Barth's twinned words (many of which I've used for my sub-headings), this novel contains within: fops and fools, love and candor, lust and pride, trysts and secret meetings, hypocrisy and lewd delight, gasps and titters.
Some might equal these tales and their telling, but none are better. At least, none that come to mind.
Detail of Back Cover and Spine Illustration by Owen Wood
ADDED EXTRAS:
[Couplets and Eulogies]
October 19, 2018
When we heap obloquy on Satan, is't not ourselves we scold, for that we secretly admire his Heavenly insurrection?
I knew naught of John Barth till I read this. He was a Marylander by birth and here, his third novel, he writes an historical fiction of earliest Maryland. There are recognizable names, and recognizable vignettes, but Barth takes liberties. It is, instead, an historical farce, and so perforce more honest.
We Americans are a self-loathing lot. That Satan thing, supra. We take an odd pride in the swamp that spawned us. And so we beshit ourselves, not always figuratively.
Barth gets that, and he portrays it brilliantly through the language of that time. It's never false, often hilarious, and in combination, profound: think not we crave a swiving pure and simple at any time as do men always.
Still, there was a lot here that made me wince. I speak generally about the atrocities Barth heaps on every woman character, even as he writes them strong and wise and generous; and I speak specifically about The Rite of Holy Eggplant, which was as juvenile as it was implausible.
No man is what or whom I take him for, says our protagonist. It's true of the plot, certainly, and beyond that, too, it canst be gainsaid.
I knew naught of John Barth till I read this. He was a Marylander by birth and here, his third novel, he writes an historical fiction of earliest Maryland. There are recognizable names, and recognizable vignettes, but Barth takes liberties. It is, instead, an historical farce, and so perforce more honest.
We Americans are a self-loathing lot. That Satan thing, supra. We take an odd pride in the swamp that spawned us. And so we beshit ourselves, not always figuratively.
Barth gets that, and he portrays it brilliantly through the language of that time. It's never false, often hilarious, and in combination, profound: think not we crave a swiving pure and simple at any time as do men always.
Still, there was a lot here that made me wince. I speak generally about the atrocities Barth heaps on every woman character, even as he writes them strong and wise and generous; and I speak specifically about The Rite of Holy Eggplant, which was as juvenile as it was implausible.
No man is what or whom I take him for, says our protagonist. It's true of the plot, certainly, and beyond that, too, it canst be gainsaid.
June 13, 2015
Boisterous, Hilarious, Satirical, Epic Frolic Set in Seventeenth Century London and Colonial Maryland
A Goodreads buddy described this book as "a rollicking tale". Good description.
Don't expect brevity or logic here.
I already knew Barth was a formidable and unique writer, since I'd read and loved Lost in the Funhouse a long time ago.
The Sot-Weed Factor is an entirely different type of novel. So Barth, like the most brilliant writers, is extremely versatile and has proven he can write well in completely different styles.
Barth's lengthy novel, written with very authentic dialogue (and, in the texts-within-the texts, written style) of the times, tracks the innumerable adventures of one Ebenezer Cooke, who was born in England in 1666 and died in Maryland in 1732 (or at least that's the arc of the novel). Our hero is based on a real poet, Ebenezer Cook (sometimes spelled Cooke) who lived around the same time and wrote a biting satirical poem scourging life in Maryland entitled "The Sot-Weed Factor". (In the idiom of that time, a sot-weed factor is a tobacco dealer). Little is known of the real Ebenezer Cook. This real poem and poet are obviously the source of Barth's title and his main character. The poem is also the source of certain basic plot elements. But that's like saying a vegetable is the source of a culinary masterpiece or a simple tune is the source of a complex jazz piece. Barth, our chef/jazzman (expressing himself through his characters) creates complex riffs on the original undreamed of by the real Cook.
Ebenezer Cooke is a genuine horse's ass at the beginning of the novel. He's pompous, pretentious, and hoarding his innocence (both of life and of sex) like it's gold (although at least in the beginning of the book, he's quite reserved). Only later on does he start trumpeting his virtues. He's about to flunk out of Cambridge, since he's started dabbling with writing verse . Ebenezer is also paralyzed by a lack of direction. His problem is that he finds every path in life equally appealing and cannot decide between them.
In the book's opening paragraph, Barth describes Ebenezer thus:
"IN THE LAST YEARS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THERE WAS TO BE found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point"
Ebenezer gets a surprise visit in his Cambridge rooms from his former tutor, Henry Burlingame. Burlingame had disappeared for no apparent reason after teaching Ebenezer and his twin sister, Anna, at the estate of their father, Andrew, in St. Giles in the Fields. Burlingame was a fantastic teacher and curious about all subjects and the world in general. Ebenezer's indecision about his life's path is in part a result of Burlingame's eclectic tutelage, that made all life paths seem equally desirable.
Burlingame, hearing that Ebenezer is about to be kicked out of Cambridge, explains his disappearance (Andrew Cooke had presumed that Burlingame had designs on Anna, and fired him on the spot). He also proposes a business venture: that Ebenezer should join him in London in a tutoring business.
"Unhappy day!" laughed Ebenezer. "I've no skill in any craft or trade
whatever. I cannot even play Flow My Tears on the guitar. I can do nothing/'
"Then 'tis plain you'll be a teacher, like myself."
"'Sheart! Twould be the blind leading the blind!"
"Aye,* smiled Burlingame. "Who better grasps the trials of sightlessness
than he whose eyes are gone?"
"But what teach? I know something of many things, and enough of
naught."
"I'faith, then the field is open, and you may graze where you list."
"Teach a thing I know naught of?" exclaimed Ebenezer.
"And raise thy fee for't," replied Burlingame.
Ebenezer decides he's no teacher, and goes home to face his father. Andrew Cooke decrees that Ebenezer must apprentice as a clerk for a time in London and then sail to Maryland to oversee Andrew Cooke's estate there, Malden.
Ebenezer has no talent for or interest in, clerking either:
"He would begin to add a column of totally meaningless figures and realize five minutes later that he'd been staring at
a wen on the neck of the boy in front of him, or rehearsing in his mind a
real or imaginary conversation between himself and Burlingame, or drawing
mazes on a bit of scratch-paper. For the same reason, though he had
by no means the troublemaker's temperament, his untamable fancy more
than once led him to be charged with irresponsibility: one day, for example, scarcely conscious of what he was about, he involved himself entirely in a game with a small black ant that had wandered across the page."
He spends several years in London and "fares unspectacularly" in Barth's words.
He then gets himself into more trouble (he seems to have a knack for getting into trouble and dragging everyone around him into it). He falls in love with a whore, the humorously named Joan Toast, and refuses to pay John McEvoy, her pimp and lover, on the grounds that he cannot bring himself to pay for a woman he has fallen in love with.
McEvoy then mails a letter to Andrew declaring that Ebenezer has been spending time with whores, not advancing in his job, etc. As a result, Andrew sends Ebenezer to Maryland.
Before Ebenezer leaves London, he dresses up in his best (and humorously depicted) finery and pays a call on Lord Baltimore, persuading him to make him Poet Laureate of Maryland.
Ebenezer commences to have many misadventures, including multiple captures by pirates, several near drownings, being robbed of all his worldly goods (several times), being captured by Indians, etc. He also commits a petty theft of his own after nearly getting in a duel with a stationery/book seller who drives him crazy by offering him too many notebook options (slim cardboard quarto with unlined paper, thick leather quarto with lined paper, etc.) Ebenezer hates options because, since they are all equally attractive to him, he can never choose between them. He encounters various shady characters (such as the aptly named Captains Slye and Scurry), shysters, quacks, shady lawyers, golden-hearted whores and disreputable women, pirates, thieves, spies, traitors, imposters, rebellious Natives and slaves, Indian kings, etc. But others often take Eben himself for a madman.
The novel is a comedy of errors (albeit with a somewhat sobering postscript).
The themes of trickster, criminals, and especially disguises and mistaken and faked identities pervade the entire book (as well as that of twins). We also have changes in social and cultural identities occurring on a regular basis (certain characters switch between being Indians and being English colonists; others morph from being servants to being gentlemen (and vice versa).
Burlingame disappears and reappears at regular intervals in both England and Maryland. He assumes various disguises and identities (many of which don't become obvious until later in the book). He's a master trickster. He's also clearly a spy, although for whom is not clear until the novel's end. Orphaned Burlingame is also obsessed with finding his parentage and origins. Ebenezer helps with this task.
The Laureateship causes multiple problems. It engenders numerous "Ebenezer Cooke" impersonators, who of course, also cause Ebenezer trouble.
Also, coincidences abound (many of which strain credulity, but credulity is not the point here). Or as Barth puts it:
” Lest it be objected by a certain stodgy variety of squint-minded antiquarians that he has in this lengthy history played more fast and loose with Clio, the chronicler's muse, than ever Captain John Smith dared, the Author here posits in advance, by way of surety, three blue-chip replies arranged in order of decreasing relevancy. In the first place be it remembered, as Burlingame himself observed, that we all invent our pasts, more or less, as we go along, at the dictates of Whim and Interest; the happenings of former times are a clay in the present moment that will-we, nill-we, the lot of us must sculpt... Moreover, this Clio was already a scarred and crafty trollop when the Author found her; it wants a nice-honed casuist, with her sort, to separate seducer from seduced. But if, despite all, he is convicted at the Public Bar of having
forced what slender virtue the strumpet may make claim to, then the Author
joins with pleasure the most engaging company imaginable, his fellow fornicators, whose ranks include the noblest in poetry, prose, and politics"
Ebenezer runs into many of the same people he met in London (or who showed up in others' tales) again and again in Maryland. Many of them turn out to have (previously unknown) connections to others in Ebenezer's life. Ebenezer also encounters new characters in Maryland , such as Mary Mungommery "The Travelling Whore of Dorchester" and Harvey Russecks, a trapper.
There are a couple of key players who (possibly---we are never certain) never actually appear in person in the novel. We are not really sure if they exist or not.
The themes of shifting and uncertain identities were also explored by Barth in Lost in the Funhouse
There's plenty of meta here. There are innumerable (and very entertaining) tales within tales. In fact, it seems like almost every person Ebenezer encounters has a yarn to tell. There are also a couple of manuscripts (memoirs) within the novel, not to mention Ebenezer's poetry. Maybe that's why Barth insists this is "postmodern", although I really don't see that it is.
Ebenezer does evolve through the novel. He goes from being a terrible poet to a pretty good one. He also realizes that the innocence he's set such store on is not worth as much as he thought. Innocence (and its loss) is also a theme throughout the book.
This is a kind of picaresque novel crossed with a Bildungsroman. And it's remiscent of novels of that time period, such as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.
Anyway, this novel is hilarious and great fun to read, although I do admit it seemed a bit long (although its length is probably appropriate for its epic sweep).
Kevin Pariseau does an absolutely masterful job of reading the audio and voicing the different characters. I read along in the Kindle book and the PDF version, both of which are available free online, since I think this novel might now be in the public domain.
Here's a link to the original poem: http://pages.uoregon.edu/rbear/sotwee...
Thanks to Ian Pagan-Szary for this link. Also thanks to Ian for suggesting we do a "buddy read" on this, which inspired me to tackle this long book sooner rather than later.
A Goodreads buddy described this book as "a rollicking tale". Good description.
Don't expect brevity or logic here.
I already knew Barth was a formidable and unique writer, since I'd read and loved Lost in the Funhouse a long time ago.
The Sot-Weed Factor is an entirely different type of novel. So Barth, like the most brilliant writers, is extremely versatile and has proven he can write well in completely different styles.
Barth's lengthy novel, written with very authentic dialogue (and, in the texts-within-the texts, written style) of the times, tracks the innumerable adventures of one Ebenezer Cooke, who was born in England in 1666 and died in Maryland in 1732 (or at least that's the arc of the novel). Our hero is based on a real poet, Ebenezer Cook (sometimes spelled Cooke) who lived around the same time and wrote a biting satirical poem scourging life in Maryland entitled "The Sot-Weed Factor". (In the idiom of that time, a sot-weed factor is a tobacco dealer). Little is known of the real Ebenezer Cook. This real poem and poet are obviously the source of Barth's title and his main character. The poem is also the source of certain basic plot elements. But that's like saying a vegetable is the source of a culinary masterpiece or a simple tune is the source of a complex jazz piece. Barth, our chef/jazzman (expressing himself through his characters) creates complex riffs on the original undreamed of by the real Cook.
Ebenezer Cooke is a genuine horse's ass at the beginning of the novel. He's pompous, pretentious, and hoarding his innocence (both of life and of sex) like it's gold (although at least in the beginning of the book, he's quite reserved). Only later on does he start trumpeting his virtues. He's about to flunk out of Cambridge, since he's started dabbling with writing verse . Ebenezer is also paralyzed by a lack of direction. His problem is that he finds every path in life equally appealing and cannot decide between them.
In the book's opening paragraph, Barth describes Ebenezer thus:
"IN THE LAST YEARS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THERE WAS TO BE found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point"
Ebenezer gets a surprise visit in his Cambridge rooms from his former tutor, Henry Burlingame. Burlingame had disappeared for no apparent reason after teaching Ebenezer and his twin sister, Anna, at the estate of their father, Andrew, in St. Giles in the Fields. Burlingame was a fantastic teacher and curious about all subjects and the world in general. Ebenezer's indecision about his life's path is in part a result of Burlingame's eclectic tutelage, that made all life paths seem equally desirable.
Burlingame, hearing that Ebenezer is about to be kicked out of Cambridge, explains his disappearance (Andrew Cooke had presumed that Burlingame had designs on Anna, and fired him on the spot). He also proposes a business venture: that Ebenezer should join him in London in a tutoring business.
"Unhappy day!" laughed Ebenezer. "I've no skill in any craft or trade
whatever. I cannot even play Flow My Tears on the guitar. I can do nothing/'
"Then 'tis plain you'll be a teacher, like myself."
"'Sheart! Twould be the blind leading the blind!"
"Aye,* smiled Burlingame. "Who better grasps the trials of sightlessness
than he whose eyes are gone?"
"But what teach? I know something of many things, and enough of
naught."
"I'faith, then the field is open, and you may graze where you list."
"Teach a thing I know naught of?" exclaimed Ebenezer.
"And raise thy fee for't," replied Burlingame.
Ebenezer decides he's no teacher, and goes home to face his father. Andrew Cooke decrees that Ebenezer must apprentice as a clerk for a time in London and then sail to Maryland to oversee Andrew Cooke's estate there, Malden.
Ebenezer has no talent for or interest in, clerking either:
"He would begin to add a column of totally meaningless figures and realize five minutes later that he'd been staring at
a wen on the neck of the boy in front of him, or rehearsing in his mind a
real or imaginary conversation between himself and Burlingame, or drawing
mazes on a bit of scratch-paper. For the same reason, though he had
by no means the troublemaker's temperament, his untamable fancy more
than once led him to be charged with irresponsibility: one day, for example, scarcely conscious of what he was about, he involved himself entirely in a game with a small black ant that had wandered across the page."
He spends several years in London and "fares unspectacularly" in Barth's words.
He then gets himself into more trouble (he seems to have a knack for getting into trouble and dragging everyone around him into it). He falls in love with a whore, the humorously named Joan Toast, and refuses to pay John McEvoy, her pimp and lover, on the grounds that he cannot bring himself to pay for a woman he has fallen in love with.
McEvoy then mails a letter to Andrew declaring that Ebenezer has been spending time with whores, not advancing in his job, etc. As a result, Andrew sends Ebenezer to Maryland.
Before Ebenezer leaves London, he dresses up in his best (and humorously depicted) finery and pays a call on Lord Baltimore, persuading him to make him Poet Laureate of Maryland.
Ebenezer commences to have many misadventures, including multiple captures by pirates, several near drownings, being robbed of all his worldly goods (several times), being captured by Indians, etc. He also commits a petty theft of his own after nearly getting in a duel with a stationery/book seller who drives him crazy by offering him too many notebook options (slim cardboard quarto with unlined paper, thick leather quarto with lined paper, etc.) Ebenezer hates options because, since they are all equally attractive to him, he can never choose between them. He encounters various shady characters (such as the aptly named Captains Slye and Scurry), shysters, quacks, shady lawyers, golden-hearted whores and disreputable women, pirates, thieves, spies, traitors, imposters, rebellious Natives and slaves, Indian kings, etc. But others often take Eben himself for a madman.
The novel is a comedy of errors (albeit with a somewhat sobering postscript).
The themes of trickster, criminals, and especially disguises and mistaken and faked identities pervade the entire book (as well as that of twins). We also have changes in social and cultural identities occurring on a regular basis (certain characters switch between being Indians and being English colonists; others morph from being servants to being gentlemen (and vice versa).
Burlingame disappears and reappears at regular intervals in both England and Maryland. He assumes various disguises and identities (many of which don't become obvious until later in the book). He's a master trickster. He's also clearly a spy, although for whom is not clear until the novel's end. Orphaned Burlingame is also obsessed with finding his parentage and origins. Ebenezer helps with this task.
The Laureateship causes multiple problems. It engenders numerous "Ebenezer Cooke" impersonators, who of course, also cause Ebenezer trouble.
Also, coincidences abound (many of which strain credulity, but credulity is not the point here). Or as Barth puts it:
” Lest it be objected by a certain stodgy variety of squint-minded antiquarians that he has in this lengthy history played more fast and loose with Clio, the chronicler's muse, than ever Captain John Smith dared, the Author here posits in advance, by way of surety, three blue-chip replies arranged in order of decreasing relevancy. In the first place be it remembered, as Burlingame himself observed, that we all invent our pasts, more or less, as we go along, at the dictates of Whim and Interest; the happenings of former times are a clay in the present moment that will-we, nill-we, the lot of us must sculpt... Moreover, this Clio was already a scarred and crafty trollop when the Author found her; it wants a nice-honed casuist, with her sort, to separate seducer from seduced. But if, despite all, he is convicted at the Public Bar of having
forced what slender virtue the strumpet may make claim to, then the Author
joins with pleasure the most engaging company imaginable, his fellow fornicators, whose ranks include the noblest in poetry, prose, and politics"
Ebenezer runs into many of the same people he met in London (or who showed up in others' tales) again and again in Maryland. Many of them turn out to have (previously unknown) connections to others in Ebenezer's life. Ebenezer also encounters new characters in Maryland , such as Mary Mungommery "The Travelling Whore of Dorchester" and Harvey Russecks, a trapper.
There are a couple of key players who (possibly---we are never certain) never actually appear in person in the novel. We are not really sure if they exist or not.
The themes of shifting and uncertain identities were also explored by Barth in Lost in the Funhouse
There's plenty of meta here. There are innumerable (and very entertaining) tales within tales. In fact, it seems like almost every person Ebenezer encounters has a yarn to tell. There are also a couple of manuscripts (memoirs) within the novel, not to mention Ebenezer's poetry. Maybe that's why Barth insists this is "postmodern", although I really don't see that it is.
Ebenezer does evolve through the novel. He goes from being a terrible poet to a pretty good one. He also realizes that the innocence he's set such store on is not worth as much as he thought. Innocence (and its loss) is also a theme throughout the book.
This is a kind of picaresque novel crossed with a Bildungsroman. And it's remiscent of novels of that time period, such as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.
Anyway, this novel is hilarious and great fun to read, although I do admit it seemed a bit long (although its length is probably appropriate for its epic sweep).
Kevin Pariseau does an absolutely masterful job of reading the audio and voicing the different characters. I read along in the Kindle book and the PDF version, both of which are available free online, since I think this novel might now be in the public domain.
Here's a link to the original poem: http://pages.uoregon.edu/rbear/sotwee...
Thanks to Ian Pagan-Szary for this link. Also thanks to Ian for suggesting we do a "buddy read" on this, which inspired me to tackle this long book sooner rather than later.
February 7, 2022
¿Estás buscando un desafío posmoderno? Pues este tocho escrito por John Barth en 1960, pero que imita el estilo de los clásicos y cuyo tema es en realidad la literatura en sí, presenta un buen reto lector.
Es difícil resumir las impresiones que deja un libro tan complejo, tan barroco, tan excesivo. Básicamente es la historia por la historia, contar historias sin parar, a cual más estrafalaria. Se ríe de todo, hasta de los aspectos más trágicos de la condición humana. Respeto cero.
Creo que sí yo conociera bien los clásicos la habría disfrutado más, ya que es como una revisión/sátira/reescritura de un montón de obras, poesía épica incluida. Picaresca, piratas, aventuras coloniales, Tristam Shandy, El Quijote, novelas bizantinas, creo que bebe de toda la literatura anterior, la lía, la profana y la lleva al extremo. Después hace un paquetito de 1200 páginas y se la entrega al amable lector. Los clásicos están siempre presentes: alusiones, guiños, citas, remedos, burlas, caricaturas... de todo se puede encontrar y seguramente yo me he perdido el 80%. También la filosofía y la religión tienen una parte importante en esta obra, que satiriza las luchas e intrigas derivadas de las diferentes facciones.
El libro retrata un mundo que, a finales del siglo XVII, está en conflicto permanente: Europa contra las colonias, las diferentes colonias entre sí y contra las tribus indias, que también están enfrentadas. La lucha es incesante y el protagonista, Ebenezer Cooke, una especie de Quijote desnortado que se aplica el titulo de Poeta Laureado de Maryland, se ve envuelto en multitud de enredos, que ponen de manifiesto su ingenuidad y su incapacidad para actuar racionalmente. Lo divertido es que dicho poeta existió, y algunos de sus versos - su barroca Marylandiada - aparecen en el texto. Barth escribe la crónica del nacimiento de una nación, de un Nuevo Mundo, pero en vez de ser una epopeya heroica, todo lo que encontramos es suciedad, miseria, ignorancia, avaricia y violencia - homo homini lupus.
Es una obra desbordante, que explora los límites y los extremos, sobre todo del buen gusto y de la verosimilitud, pero de alguna manera se mantiene como un todo coherente y te saca más de una sonrisa. Diferente. Le pongo 4 estrellas porque algunas parte son agotadoras, pero mérito lo tiene y mucho.
Es difícil resumir las impresiones que deja un libro tan complejo, tan barroco, tan excesivo. Básicamente es la historia por la historia, contar historias sin parar, a cual más estrafalaria. Se ríe de todo, hasta de los aspectos más trágicos de la condición humana. Respeto cero.
Creo que sí yo conociera bien los clásicos la habría disfrutado más, ya que es como una revisión/sátira/reescritura de un montón de obras, poesía épica incluida. Picaresca, piratas, aventuras coloniales, Tristam Shandy, El Quijote, novelas bizantinas, creo que bebe de toda la literatura anterior, la lía, la profana y la lleva al extremo. Después hace un paquetito de 1200 páginas y se la entrega al amable lector. Los clásicos están siempre presentes: alusiones, guiños, citas, remedos, burlas, caricaturas... de todo se puede encontrar y seguramente yo me he perdido el 80%. También la filosofía y la religión tienen una parte importante en esta obra, que satiriza las luchas e intrigas derivadas de las diferentes facciones.
El libro retrata un mundo que, a finales del siglo XVII, está en conflicto permanente: Europa contra las colonias, las diferentes colonias entre sí y contra las tribus indias, que también están enfrentadas. La lucha es incesante y el protagonista, Ebenezer Cooke, una especie de Quijote desnortado que se aplica el titulo de Poeta Laureado de Maryland, se ve envuelto en multitud de enredos, que ponen de manifiesto su ingenuidad y su incapacidad para actuar racionalmente. Lo divertido es que dicho poeta existió, y algunos de sus versos - su barroca Marylandiada - aparecen en el texto. Barth escribe la crónica del nacimiento de una nación, de un Nuevo Mundo, pero en vez de ser una epopeya heroica, todo lo que encontramos es suciedad, miseria, ignorancia, avaricia y violencia - homo homini lupus.
Es una obra desbordante, que explora los límites y los extremos, sobre todo del buen gusto y de la verosimilitud, pero de alguna manera se mantiene como un todo coherente y te saca más de una sonrisa. Diferente. Le pongo 4 estrellas porque algunas parte son agotadoras, pero mérito lo tiene y mucho.
September 25, 2017
Unlike many other reviewers, I did not have the experience of being pleasurably catapulted headlong into the world of Ebenezer Cooke and his associates. In fact, I struggled with this novel for hundreds of pages before I started to enjoy it. I dislike the particular style the book parodies and resembles, and found the plot and characters to be overtly silly, the adventures unbelievable. It took a long time for me to suspend my cynicism and allow myself just to roll with the punches.
While the style never really stopped feeling like a chore to read, what won me over was simply the incredible story , whose endless twists and turns cannot but eventually ensnare and immerse even a resistant reader. By the end I was cheering for poor Ebenezer, and hoping for neat and satisfying conclusion to his misadventures.
I ended up enjoying The Sot-Weed Factor despite myself, but was left with the feeling that the enjoyment was mostly superficial. The book does present some matter for contemplation, but on the whole there are not too many layers to tease apart. In this regard I think the novel is limited by its adherence to Seventeenth Century literary styles, which though charming in themselves, are perhaps not as nuanced or flexible as modern ones. For me, The Sot-Weed Factor was wonderfully constructed fun, if somewhat frivolous.
While the style never really stopped feeling like a chore to read, what won me over was simply the incredible story , whose endless twists and turns cannot but eventually ensnare and immerse even a resistant reader. By the end I was cheering for poor Ebenezer, and hoping for neat and satisfying conclusion to his misadventures.
I ended up enjoying The Sot-Weed Factor despite myself, but was left with the feeling that the enjoyment was mostly superficial. The book does present some matter for contemplation, but on the whole there are not too many layers to tease apart. In this regard I think the novel is limited by its adherence to Seventeenth Century literary styles, which though charming in themselves, are perhaps not as nuanced or flexible as modern ones. For me, The Sot-Weed Factor was wonderfully constructed fun, if somewhat frivolous.
December 3, 2024
Звичайно, 5 з 5. Такий твір! Шедевр. Книга з розряду, коли прочитав, хочеш знову почати перечитувати, зупинятися на місцях, які, можливо, пройшли повз при першому читанні. Дуже щемливо було наприкінці, шкода, що розстаюся з Ебенезером Куком та його історією життя, його несподіваними пригодами. Наївний, дотепний, справедливий, добрий, чесний Ебенезер - поет! У книзі дуже багато влучних слівців, оповідок, прислів'їв, розповідей... Написано легко, дуже гарний переклад, просто чудово допомагає уявити панораму подій тих часів... Пригоди, пірати, повії, мандри, випробування, політика (куди ж без неї)... Багато цікавих персонажів, образів вимальовує автор. Чудовий постмодерністський роман Джона Брата, який вартує прочитати 💯💞👍
December 26, 2012
We sit here on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the worms will care, when anon they make a meal of you, whether you spent your moment sighing wigless in your chamber, or sacked the golden tombs of Montezuma? Lookee, the day’s nigh spent; ’tis gone careering into time forever… We are dying men: i’faith, there’s time for naught but bold resolves!
It kills me when I go to the movies and I'm sitting next to some little kid that has to study my reaction to the story for their cue to laugh or whatever reaction is appropriate. I'll start to look at the kid to see if they are doing what I'm doing. I'll get distracted looking at the adult they are with and wondering what relationship dynamic they share that they aren't studying what they are doing. Why choose me? Then there's that feeling when someone is watching you and you feel pressured to give them that big laugh. They'll repeat the joke if you didn't laugh hard enough. Didn't you get it? It's hilarious! These feelings aren't conducive for that blissful wrapped up in a story feeling that I can't get enough. I don't want to be prodded into laughing over endless dick and fart jokes. I want to roll over and go to sleep and not wake up with a vegetable poking me into a further vegetated state.
I can't remember the last time that I really laughed. I mean a full on bellyaching sidesplitting laugh. It may be me. My goodreads friends list seem to love this one to pieces. The whole thing and the ensuing of hilarity. If it were a film I'd expect the sound bites to read something like "The thrill ride of the summer!" and "I laughed until I cried!" Reviews all over the internet suggest it is a book to be loved. Ribald, raunchy, corset poppin', romps, sweaty, sheets, rolling, rollicking, over the side, walk the plank, tied up, buttered up, tarred, feathered, skinned, scalped, pokered, buggered, roped, raped, underneath, hole, fit it, in, penis, vagina, poop. Blah blah blah. It was okay enough, at first. I started out wondering why this blank faced young man was looking at everyone else in the movie theatre for his cue to look like he felt about anything. I didn't really find it hilarious but I wasn't desperately bored, yet. Have you ever read series fiction? And you have to get through a lot of boring bits that reiterate information from previous volumes? One that I used to read before I got bored with it was Michelle Sagara's Elantra series (an excellent example, if you are familiar with it, because I doubt it'll ever end, or at least it seemed that way when I gave up). Every damned time I had to sit through scenes of the lead character being late to everything. She's always late! Look, she's a klutz! Scene after scene of this. In case you forgot (which I hadn't). The Sot-Weed Factor is one book. I got really damned bored reading about stuff that just happened as if I had read about it years ago in an earlier volume when I hadn't because it was the same book that I was reading at that time (I read it while waiting all day and into night for emergency car service. If I had had ANY other book with me I would have given up). I guess it is probably a satire of serial series too? You know how back in the day (or now, if it is the awful The Hobbit film(s)) they would stretch out stories beyond (en)durability to milk out the most money? Yeah. I felt like I was rereading books that I read in my teen series or early twenties. I probably would be less moany about this one if I wasn't writing a review of it. It's the energy it takes to have a reaction to something and finding out you didn't really care that much. I don't feel like writing reviews of Tristam Shandy or any of the J.P. Donleavy books. I'm really reminded of Philip from Of Human Bondage. It's a "history" of a life, same as that book, and the hero is a cypher for a parade of other people's stories. I liked Megha's nicer way of seeing it that it was an echo of the storytelling nature of lives past. To me it felt like going from soap box to soap box to espouse whatever the author felt like talking about, and not much of a life for the hero. He's always looking to everyone else and then he writes about it. He would probably hold a quill to his lip and dream dreamy dreams about love and life and not understand any of it because he never lived any of it.
Ebeneezer depressed me. I just saw him as some dick waving asshole confronting the prostitute Joan with his "virtue". It is supposed to be like this! Tell me what it is supposed to be like, somebody. Somebody live up to something so I don't have to get in the dirt. The poor girl on the ship that he is disappointed was not a virgin when the other guy rapes her before he had meant to rape her himself. (Like Phillip's entitlement to a hot girl despite his bum leg. It amazes me he's not seen as a dick for wanting a hot girl instead of the supposedly ugly girls who loved him but Mildred was evil because she wanted a hot guy instead of him.) I don't know. This is innocence? I saw a monster face hiding behind not having one. He wonders about his own halted desires and stilted virtues. Sure, he notices it to talk about it. Talking a lot and making claims on the future and meaning isn't innocence to me. Of course, the fictional Ebeneezer Cooke (there was a real one) likes to run around and call himself a poet (I grew so tired of how often Barth refers to him as "the poet" as a name). Names aren't art. Innocence would be living in spite of it and art would be making something in spite of it, or just having something else to live in along with it. Some place to go. What was all of these hijinks and antics and adventures and scenes scenes scenes saying? No, don't look at the face of the person next to you, Mariel. You didn't like it that much.
His twin sister moves between serenity of listening to her father, or her brother, or their tutor Burlingame. Another no expression. She has Burlingame's baby and their neighbors believe it is her brother's child. They have to live with faces coming up with conclusions.
I was interested from time to time in the horrors of indentured servitude. I am fascinated by the corruption and cruelty enacted on fellow men in "contracts" (not feeding people to "save money"). But then I never thought that colonization was a pure thing without warts on the ass. I sort of cared about Mary and the Inn-keeper's daughter. They tried to live anyway (mirroring the wet nurse who fell into trouble with a man because another authority male figure kept her locked up from life. So they took lives for their own). I liked that Joan could live as herself and like sex anyway, even as Ebeneezer hearing the story of the rape by trickery from her uncle (after her first bleeding) tells her that she should feel the horror and shame. I don't care about what anyone says anyone else should be feeling. There wasn't anyone alive then who didn't have to live with something. I guess I don't give any kind of damn about satirizing other novels. If they aren't living their life that says a lot more about them than it does about their teachers or parents or that life wasn't handed to them on a clean silver platter. I was just happy to finish it and never have to read it again.
At least the prostitutes were diseased. It is refreshing to read about prostitutes in novels that aren't just dream girls for some man, no matter what Ebeneezer thought. It sucks and they do get haggard and have sexually transmitted diseases (Thomas Pynchon in Inherent Vice I am talking to you). Of course, I don't need an enormous book to tell me that either. I would have been better off reading a book about the colony of Maryland and imagining stories out of that myself then trying to squint and imagine history and stories out of why aren't you laughing? I just made another sex joke.
P.s. I read The Sound and the Fury that is an intensely style focused novel obsessed with virginity after reading this intensely stylized novel about a man obsessed with his own virginity. Uh oh. Is this a sign of my wet blanket existence going further into my future? I never find Kristen's penis drawings funny. She thought I thought they were obscene and that's why I disliked them. I just didn't feel anything at all. Pubic hair in the pictures was too intimate for me, though. I can imagine it getting into food, for some reason. Burlingame's suggestion for vegetables and penis will ruin this vegetarian's appetite. I just don't find it funny. I feel nothing. I don't want to think about not feeling anything like I'm lacking. I just don't have the same sense of humor. Maybe this book is for everyone else and I'm on another ship going to another colony where they scalp Princess Tiger Lilly.
September 21, 2012
This book is kind of nuts.
In a good, hilarious way, I mean.
"I am Ebenzer Cooke, Poet and Laureate of this province."Ebenzer Cooke has been waving his title in everyone's faces. So have been many others. Maryland is infested with poet laureates called Ebenzer Cooke. Henry Burlingame, on the other hand, is singlehandedly filling many shoes as he goes on a Mission Impossible-esque spree of changing disguises. Joan Toast is diligently working at supplying pox to the Indians. King Hicktopeake's ravenous Queen had been keeping, not only the king, but all men in the town perpetually fatigued. Highly confusing provincial politics and conspiracies are constantly afoot. An uproarious cast of characters is strewn all over the province. Their paths often criss-cross in such ways as to make it look like a bad case of Twister - where the proprietorship of hands, feet, torsos is difficult to ascertain. Hilarity ensues.
"Well, I was once called the Traveling Whore o' Dorset, but I don't boast of't."
Unlearned in matters of the real world, Ebenezer Cooke soars high on wings of fancy and blissful ignorance. When forced to come up with an improvised bum-swab, he summons his knowledge of philosophy, history and literature. He has a way of jumping out of frying pan to land straight into the fire, a bit of a 'wrong place wrong time' syndrome. When he is is lucky enough, someone comes along to pull him out of the ditch, only to drop him into a bog later.
"His chair rose from the floor, passed through the roof of Malden, and shot into the opalescent sky. As for Maryland, it turned blue and flattened into an immense musical surface, which suavely slid northwestwards under seagulls."Perhaps my favorite thing about The Sot-Weed Factor is how it upholds the tradition of oral storytelling. Several episodes are incidents being leisurely related by one character to another, each story-teller adding a bit of his/her own color to the story. Some even care to drop a nugget of wisdom or two.
“Only the wittol can know he is no cuckold and only a dead man is safe from death.”Some of the stories being told are incredible enough to find a place in 'Ripley's Believe it or Not'. Many of the episodes that I was convinced could only be tall tales concocted to fool Ebenezer, turned out to be true. While some things I had believed, were revealed to be made-up truths. Who am I to call Ebenzer gullible then! There is no telling how the tide will turn in Barth's world. One small happenstance can set a contraption in motion leading to big, comic consequences.
Barth's ribald, irreverent, comic adventure has a lot going for it. Except the length, methinks. After a point, it does exude a 'joke being told one time too many' feeling. In any case, I did make it to the end of the story where the oh so polite author apologized. Ebenzer's ordeal ended and he had a chance to lie down to rest and perhaps sink back into his dreams and reveries.
“To me she is a woman. To you she’s a hallucination.”
___________________________________
I am willing to turn a blind eye if someone*** wants to steal a bunch of pages from my copy. This thing is too damn long.
Though tons of fun, too.
*** Jay Rubin - wink wink nudge nudge.
February 1, 2015
"No pleasure pleasures me as doth a well-spun tale, be't sad or merry, shallow or deep! If the subject's privy business, or unpleasant, who cares a fig? The road to Heaven's beset with thistles, and methinks there's many a cow-pat on't. As for length, fie, fie!" He raised a horny finger. "A bad tale's long though it want but an eyeblink for the telling, and a good tale short though it take from St. Swithin's to Michaelmas to have done with't. Ha! And the plot is tangled, d'ye say? Is't more knotful or bewildered than the skein o' life, that a good tale tangles the better to unsnarl? Nay, out with your story, now, and yours as well, sir, and shame on both o' ye thou'rt not commenced already! Spin and tangle till the Dogstar sets i' the Bay; a tale well wrought is the gossip o' the gods, that see the heart and point o' life on earth; the web o' the world; the Warp and the Woof. . . I'Christ, I do love a story, sirs!" (P. 614)
Down the rabbit hole we go!
Barth's comic genius finds full flowering in this crazy comedy. The Sot-Weed Factor works big time because herein Barth's many obsessions find complete synergy—a Marylandiad to his beloved Maryland & Chesapeake Bay/ Choptank River area (Barth's "native turf, or bog"), his love of the sea leading to full-on mad pirate capers, a fondness for Epic tales/Episodic novels leading to story upon story upon story in a glorious, pitch-perfect 17th century prose. This is a shining exemplar of Maximalist literature where only more is more.
The Sot-Weed of the title refers to the tobacco plant which was a prized cash crop in the colonies & the Factor is a snide reference to the merchant/middleman that plagues this book's universe. The title comes from the real Ebenezer Cooke's* Hudibrastic poem of the same name. Unlike the panegyrical epics, Barth's Marylandiad becomes an expose of the coming-to-America narrative: "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!"
In plainest terms, TS-WF is about Barth's otherworldly, idealistic &, at times, maddeningly naive hero, Poet & Maryland Laureate, Ebenezer Cooke's education in the ways of the world. In this mythical journey, he meets & interacts with a variety of characters who all teach him some lesson or another. It's a novel of (perilous) adventures & growth harkening back to the picaro tradition of Don Quixote & that proto-pomo novel, Tristram Shandy.
There is also a parallel track related to Ebenezer's tutor & mentor, Henry Burlingame's search for his parental roots in the backdrop of intense political intrigue & counter- intrigue stretching from England to the American colonies. In the vast narrative canvas; dispossessed native Indians & Black slaves, and the illicit trade in redemptioners also find representation. The brave New World sadly carrying on the rot & corruption of the old Europe.
Still, never thought Historical fiction could be so much Fun Fun Fun!
Barth shows us the inside of *history*, taking us into the bedchambers of Henry More, and Newton, and giving us a peek into the Secret Historie of Captain John Smith, all in the good cause of raising some great laughs—this is a satiric extravaganza & a farcical parody, remember?
Unlike Vollmann who spends the better part of his life researching material for his works; Barth's method is a practical one—in an essay discussing LETTERS, & TS-WF, Barth says:
"Both are more or less "historical" fiction, and for both I did a respectable amount of homework on the historical periods involved. But it was a novelist's homework, not a historian's, and novelists are the opposite of icebergs: Eight-ninths of what I once knew about this region's history, and have since forgotten, is in plain view on the surface of those two novels, where it serves its fictive purposes without making the author any sort of authority. Since The Sot-Weed Factor isn't finally "about" Colonial Maryland at all, any more than LETTERS is really "about" the burning of Washington in 1814 or the
burning of Cambridge in 1967, I'm already uncertain which of their historical details are real and which I dreamed up."** That's typical Barth!
The American history esp. in terms of Barth's native place Maryland & Chesapeake Bay area & other relevant places like Jamestown & Virginia, have been well aligned with the then political happenings in England. The political intrigues, at times, get too tangled to follow, however, to Barth's credit, all the strands are neatly tied in the course of the narrative with a great flourish. One almost imagines the huge cast appearing at the end, taking a bow to the sound of deafening applause!
Highlights:
In a 789-page book, there are too many glorious moments to be recounted here. Sharing a few Highlights:
Part 2:
Chapter 3: The Laureate Learns the True Identity of Colonel Peter Sayer: Ebenezer & Burlingame's lengthy discussion on the nature of self/identity—no detail in this book is superfluous; every event, every thought expressed has a bearing on the plot. Barth narratively demonstrates the ideas expressed herein: how do you prove your identity when so many versions of your self are parading about!
Chapter 6: Burlingame's Tale Carried Yet Farther; the Laureate Reads from The Privie Journall of Sir Henry Burlingame and Discourses on the Nature of Innocence.: a delight from beginning to end, written in Elizabethan English, a fictional account of Captain John Smith's iconic meeting with Powhatan. Shd prepare me for Argall, though I think Vollmann's treatment would be very different from Barth's rip-roaring comedic take. I had no idea Pocahontas' name meant that!
Chapter 9: Further Sea-Poetry, Composed in the Stables of the King o' the Seas:TS-WF is not only a Shandian spawn; but also a Rabelaisian codpiece! Read here the hero's dilemma regarding his soiled state:
"it was to literature he must turn for help, and should have sooner, for literature alone of all the arts and sciences took as her province the entire range of man's experience and behavior -- from cradle to grave and beyond, from emperor to hedge-whore, from the burning of cities to the breaking of wind -- and human problems of every magnitude: in literature alone might one find catalogued with equal care the ancestors of Noah, the ships of the Achaians -- "And the bum-swipes of Gargantua!" he exclaimed aloud"
But there are no white necked goose in his vicinity & so he concludes:"Good Rabelais surely meant it as a jest."(...) Literature too, he concluded with heavy heart, availed him not, for though it afforded one a certain sophistication about life and a release from one's single mortal destiny, it did not, except accidentally, afford solutions to practical problems."
See also Chapter 25 for a Rabelaisian account of Captain John Smith's arrival in Maryland.
Chapter 12: The Laureate Discourses on Games of Chance and Debates the Relative Gentility of Valets and Poet Laureates. Bertrand Sets Forth the Anatomy of Sophistication and Demonstrates His Thesis: In this book, many a times, minor characters steal the thunder—they are that colourful & well-fleshed out: Joan Toast, Boabdil, Mary Mungummory, Billy Rumbly aka Cohunkowprets, Tom Tayloe, Richard Sawter, & so many more!
Ebenezer's valet Bertrand would give any employer nightmares. He is the evil incarnation of Bertie Wooster's Man Friday, Jeeves. Go straight to this chapter if you need any convincing to read this book.
Chapter 15: The Rape of Cyprian... A ship loaded with whores, bound for the colonies to service the sex-starved men there, is, accosted by a pirate ship...I'll leave the rest to your imagination just as Barth has done here.
Chapter 21:The Laureate Yet Further Attends the Swine-Malden: Some barnyard antics, "cosmophilic love" & a pleasant surprise.
Chapter 27:The Laureate Asserts That Justice Is Blind, and Armed With This Principle, Settles a Litigation: Court proceedings in the Dorset County as you've never witnessed before! Shades of Swift & Sterne.
Chapter 28: If the Laureate Is Adam, Then Burlingame Is the Serpent: Rum & wrath together make a deadly combination!
Part 3, Chapter 2:A Layman's Pandect of Geminology Compended by Henry Burlingame, Cosmophilist: Eben' extremely close relationship with his twin Anna, mirrors Barth's with his twin sister so much so that we get a whole chapter on it!
*******************
Readers are often dismayed by the sexist approaches in Barth's fiction. Just recall the GR debates around Giles Goat-Boy!
Here too, one comes across such Wtf moments—e.g., Ebenezer's meeting with the prostitute Joan Toast in his room & her blow-by-blow account of her sexual initiation by her uncle (which would seem like a horrible case of sexual abuse to most readers, but Joan, contrary to all expectations, clearly delights in her newly discovered sexual heaven). Or take for example, Henry Berlingame's romp with a mother-daughter duo after he has rescued them from his pirate fellows.
But there's really nothing offensive about them because they are always context based. Remember, Gass singled out a key passage from The Sot-Weed Factor, in his Blue book as, an ideal example of how sex should be handled in fiction:
"LET US begin with a brief account of what happened when pirates overtook the whoreship Cyprian,
. . . the scene on deck was too arresting for divided attention: the pirates dragged out their victims in ones and twos, a-swoon or awake, at pistol-point or by main strength. He saw girls assaulted on the decks, on the stairways, at the railings, everywhere, in every conceivable manner. None was spared, and the prettier prizes were clawed at by two and three at a time. Boabdil appeared with one over each shoulder, kicking and scratching him in vain: as he presented one to Captain Pound on the quarter-deck, the other wriggled free and tried to escape her monstrous fate by scrambling up the mizzen ratlines. The Moor allowed her a fair head start and then climbed slowly in pursuit, calling to her in voluptuous Arabic at every step. Fifty feet up, where any pitch of the hull is materially amplified by the height, the girl's nerve failed: she thrust bare arms and legs through the squares of the rigging and hung for dear life while Boabdil, once he had come up from behind, ravished her unmercifully. Down on the shallop the sail maker clapped his hands and chortled; Ebenezer, heartsick, turned away.
Barth is satisfied to say that the girl was ravished unmercifully, but so little is this whole scene tinged with blue that a lively newspaper might carry the account. Rape is on the rise, we read, nearly every day. Now Ebenezer Cooke's servant, Bertrand, an unreliable rogue, is a little distance behind him 'watching with undisguised avidity.' If he had written the passage we would have had a lengthy description of the great Moor's member. Our camera would zoom toward the netted wench until it passed, with him, into her womb. Nor should we find poor Bertram's interest odd, since most of us share it, and, like Gullivers in Brobdingnag, inflate the objects of our greed, deify the origins of every itch, enlarge our lusts, as a coin in the palm of a miser becomes the whole orb of the earth. The deck of the Cyprian, however, is not in the world. It needs no hull beneath it, then, no ocean even. It has been wisely noted, in this regard, that we are quite obliged to eat, but there are some perfectly splendid books that never mention the matter."
Barth's women enjoy sex as much as his men do, nothing wrong with that really!
Sex is important to this book because our hero is a twenty-eight-year old virgin who is almost paranoid about his "essence" & treats it as a religious virtue
"Yet 'tis no vulgar curiosity, (...) the fall of virgins always is instructive, nor doth the world e'er weary of the tale. And the harder the fall, the better.(...) My conclusion is, that mankind sees two morals in such tales: the fall of innocence, or the fall of pride. The first sort hath its archetype in Adam; the second in Satan."
His tutor & companion, Burlingame's rejoinder to that is: "thine own fall, when it comes, must needs be glorious, inasmuch as thou'rt both innocent and proud." But he hopes Eben would learn a useful lesson from that. We surely do, that, *innocence* beyond a certain age becomes a burden & folks who don't learn from their mistakes perhaps deserve all the kicks life deals them. Eben's ordeals though take on a metaphysical colour: "the crime of innocence, whereof the Knowledged must bear the burthen. There's the true Original Sin our souls are born in: not that Adam learned, but that he had to learn -- in short, that he was innocent." Ah, poor guy!
In a supreme irony,
I haven't read any writer giving such a cruel send up to his leading man!
Barth is really something!
Ps. How I wish William Kohler knew about "The Rite of the Sacred Eggplant"(!)—he would've been a happy man ;-)
****************
(*) Ebenezer Cooke: Poet Laureate
"Although Ebenezer Cook1 (c. 1667-I733?) is known today mainly by his notoriety as the dubious hero of John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor (New York, 1960), he was in his own time infamous as the mock poet laureate of Maryland. Ebenezer Cook composed the original Sot-Weed Factor (London, 1708)-a satirical poem supposedly describing the conditions, customs, manners, and people of the colony-in the jingling, humorous rhyme Samuel Butler used in Hudibras. The Sot-Weed Factor burlesques America's crude frontier life and slyly ridicules English assumptions about America."
http://newfoundpress.utk.edu//pubs/le...
(**) From the famous essay Historical Fiction, Fictitious History, and Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs, or, About Aboutness.
Quotes:
Down the rabbit hole we go!
Barth's comic genius finds full flowering in this crazy comedy. The Sot-Weed Factor works big time because herein Barth's many obsessions find complete synergy—a Marylandiad to his beloved Maryland & Chesapeake Bay/ Choptank River area (Barth's "native turf, or bog"), his love of the sea leading to full-on mad pirate capers, a fondness for Epic tales/Episodic novels leading to story upon story upon story in a glorious, pitch-perfect 17th century prose. This is a shining exemplar of Maximalist literature where only more is more.
The Sot-Weed of the title refers to the tobacco plant which was a prized cash crop in the colonies & the Factor is a snide reference to the merchant/middleman that plagues this book's universe. The title comes from the real Ebenezer Cooke's* Hudibrastic poem of the same name. Unlike the panegyrical epics, Barth's Marylandiad becomes an expose of the coming-to-America narrative: "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!"
In plainest terms, TS-WF is about Barth's otherworldly, idealistic &, at times, maddeningly naive hero, Poet & Maryland Laureate, Ebenezer Cooke's education in the ways of the world. In this mythical journey, he meets & interacts with a variety of characters who all teach him some lesson or another. It's a novel of (perilous) adventures & growth harkening back to the picaro tradition of Don Quixote & that proto-pomo novel, Tristram Shandy.
There is also a parallel track related to Ebenezer's tutor & mentor, Henry Burlingame's search for his parental roots in the backdrop of intense political intrigue & counter- intrigue stretching from England to the American colonies. In the vast narrative canvas; dispossessed native Indians & Black slaves, and the illicit trade in redemptioners also find representation. The brave New World sadly carrying on the rot & corruption of the old Europe.
Still, never thought Historical fiction could be so much Fun Fun Fun!
Barth shows us the inside of *history*, taking us into the bedchambers of Henry More, and Newton, and giving us a peek into the Secret Historie of Captain John Smith, all in the good cause of raising some great laughs—this is a satiric extravaganza & a farcical parody, remember?
Unlike Vollmann who spends the better part of his life researching material for his works; Barth's method is a practical one—in an essay discussing LETTERS, & TS-WF, Barth says:
"Both are more or less "historical" fiction, and for both I did a respectable amount of homework on the historical periods involved. But it was a novelist's homework, not a historian's, and novelists are the opposite of icebergs: Eight-ninths of what I once knew about this region's history, and have since forgotten, is in plain view on the surface of those two novels, where it serves its fictive purposes without making the author any sort of authority. Since The Sot-Weed Factor isn't finally "about" Colonial Maryland at all, any more than LETTERS is really "about" the burning of Washington in 1814 or the
burning of Cambridge in 1967, I'm already uncertain which of their historical details are real and which I dreamed up."** That's typical Barth!
The American history esp. in terms of Barth's native place Maryland & Chesapeake Bay area & other relevant places like Jamestown & Virginia, have been well aligned with the then political happenings in England. The political intrigues, at times, get too tangled to follow, however, to Barth's credit, all the strands are neatly tied in the course of the narrative with a great flourish. One almost imagines the huge cast appearing at the end, taking a bow to the sound of deafening applause!
Highlights:
In a 789-page book, there are too many glorious moments to be recounted here. Sharing a few Highlights:
Part 2:
Chapter 3: The Laureate Learns the True Identity of Colonel Peter Sayer: Ebenezer & Burlingame's lengthy discussion on the nature of self/identity—no detail in this book is superfluous; every event, every thought expressed has a bearing on the plot. Barth narratively demonstrates the ideas expressed herein: how do you prove your identity when so many versions of your self are parading about!
Chapter 6: Burlingame's Tale Carried Yet Farther; the Laureate Reads from The Privie Journall of Sir Henry Burlingame and Discourses on the Nature of Innocence.: a delight from beginning to end, written in Elizabethan English, a fictional account of Captain John Smith's iconic meeting with Powhatan. Shd prepare me for Argall, though I think Vollmann's treatment would be very different from Barth's rip-roaring comedic take. I had no idea Pocahontas' name meant that!
Chapter 9: Further Sea-Poetry, Composed in the Stables of the King o' the Seas:TS-WF is not only a Shandian spawn; but also a Rabelaisian codpiece! Read here the hero's dilemma regarding his soiled state:
"it was to literature he must turn for help, and should have sooner, for literature alone of all the arts and sciences took as her province the entire range of man's experience and behavior -- from cradle to grave and beyond, from emperor to hedge-whore, from the burning of cities to the breaking of wind -- and human problems of every magnitude: in literature alone might one find catalogued with equal care the ancestors of Noah, the ships of the Achaians -- "And the bum-swipes of Gargantua!" he exclaimed aloud"
But there are no white necked goose in his vicinity & so he concludes:"Good Rabelais surely meant it as a jest."(...) Literature too, he concluded with heavy heart, availed him not, for though it afforded one a certain sophistication about life and a release from one's single mortal destiny, it did not, except accidentally, afford solutions to practical problems."
See also Chapter 25 for a Rabelaisian account of Captain John Smith's arrival in Maryland.
Chapter 12: The Laureate Discourses on Games of Chance and Debates the Relative Gentility of Valets and Poet Laureates. Bertrand Sets Forth the Anatomy of Sophistication and Demonstrates His Thesis: In this book, many a times, minor characters steal the thunder—they are that colourful & well-fleshed out: Joan Toast, Boabdil, Mary Mungummory, Billy Rumbly aka Cohunkowprets, Tom Tayloe, Richard Sawter, & so many more!
Ebenezer's valet Bertrand would give any employer nightmares. He is the evil incarnation of Bertie Wooster's Man Friday, Jeeves. Go straight to this chapter if you need any convincing to read this book.
Chapter 15: The Rape of Cyprian... A ship loaded with whores, bound for the colonies to service the sex-starved men there, is, accosted by a pirate ship...I'll leave the rest to your imagination just as Barth has done here.
Chapter 21:The Laureate Yet Further Attends the Swine-Malden: Some barnyard antics, "cosmophilic love" & a pleasant surprise.
Chapter 27:The Laureate Asserts That Justice Is Blind, and Armed With This Principle, Settles a Litigation: Court proceedings in the Dorset County as you've never witnessed before! Shades of Swift & Sterne.
Chapter 28: If the Laureate Is Adam, Then Burlingame Is the Serpent: Rum & wrath together make a deadly combination!
Part 3, Chapter 2:A Layman's Pandect of Geminology Compended by Henry Burlingame, Cosmophilist: Eben' extremely close relationship with his twin Anna, mirrors Barth's with his twin sister so much so that we get a whole chapter on it!
*******************
Readers are often dismayed by the sexist approaches in Barth's fiction. Just recall the GR debates around Giles Goat-Boy!
Here too, one comes across such Wtf moments—e.g., Ebenezer's meeting with the prostitute Joan Toast in his room & her blow-by-blow account of her sexual initiation by her uncle (which would seem like a horrible case of sexual abuse to most readers, but Joan, contrary to all expectations, clearly delights in her newly discovered sexual heaven). Or take for example, Henry Berlingame's romp with a mother-daughter duo after he has rescued them from his pirate fellows.
But there's really nothing offensive about them because they are always context based. Remember, Gass singled out a key passage from The Sot-Weed Factor, in his Blue book as, an ideal example of how sex should be handled in fiction:
"LET US begin with a brief account of what happened when pirates overtook the whoreship Cyprian,
. . . the scene on deck was too arresting for divided attention: the pirates dragged out their victims in ones and twos, a-swoon or awake, at pistol-point or by main strength. He saw girls assaulted on the decks, on the stairways, at the railings, everywhere, in every conceivable manner. None was spared, and the prettier prizes were clawed at by two and three at a time. Boabdil appeared with one over each shoulder, kicking and scratching him in vain: as he presented one to Captain Pound on the quarter-deck, the other wriggled free and tried to escape her monstrous fate by scrambling up the mizzen ratlines. The Moor allowed her a fair head start and then climbed slowly in pursuit, calling to her in voluptuous Arabic at every step. Fifty feet up, where any pitch of the hull is materially amplified by the height, the girl's nerve failed: she thrust bare arms and legs through the squares of the rigging and hung for dear life while Boabdil, once he had come up from behind, ravished her unmercifully. Down on the shallop the sail maker clapped his hands and chortled; Ebenezer, heartsick, turned away.
Barth is satisfied to say that the girl was ravished unmercifully, but so little is this whole scene tinged with blue that a lively newspaper might carry the account. Rape is on the rise, we read, nearly every day. Now Ebenezer Cooke's servant, Bertrand, an unreliable rogue, is a little distance behind him 'watching with undisguised avidity.' If he had written the passage we would have had a lengthy description of the great Moor's member. Our camera would zoom toward the netted wench until it passed, with him, into her womb. Nor should we find poor Bertram's interest odd, since most of us share it, and, like Gullivers in Brobdingnag, inflate the objects of our greed, deify the origins of every itch, enlarge our lusts, as a coin in the palm of a miser becomes the whole orb of the earth. The deck of the Cyprian, however, is not in the world. It needs no hull beneath it, then, no ocean even. It has been wisely noted, in this regard, that we are quite obliged to eat, but there are some perfectly splendid books that never mention the matter."
Barth's women enjoy sex as much as his men do, nothing wrong with that really!
Sex is important to this book because our hero is a twenty-eight-year old virgin who is almost paranoid about his "essence" & treats it as a religious virtue
"Yet 'tis no vulgar curiosity, (...) the fall of virgins always is instructive, nor doth the world e'er weary of the tale. And the harder the fall, the better.(...) My conclusion is, that mankind sees two morals in such tales: the fall of innocence, or the fall of pride. The first sort hath its archetype in Adam; the second in Satan."
His tutor & companion, Burlingame's rejoinder to that is: "thine own fall, when it comes, must needs be glorious, inasmuch as thou'rt both innocent and proud." But he hopes Eben would learn a useful lesson from that. We surely do, that, *innocence* beyond a certain age becomes a burden & folks who don't learn from their mistakes perhaps deserve all the kicks life deals them. Eben's ordeals though take on a metaphysical colour: "the crime of innocence, whereof the Knowledged must bear the burthen. There's the true Original Sin our souls are born in: not that Adam learned, but that he had to learn -- in short, that he was innocent." Ah, poor guy!
In a supreme irony,
I haven't read any writer giving such a cruel send up to his leading man!
Barth is really something!
Ps. How I wish William Kohler knew about "The Rite of the Sacred Eggplant"(!)—he would've been a happy man ;-)
****************
(*) Ebenezer Cooke: Poet Laureate
"Although Ebenezer Cook1 (c. 1667-I733?) is known today mainly by his notoriety as the dubious hero of John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor (New York, 1960), he was in his own time infamous as the mock poet laureate of Maryland. Ebenezer Cook composed the original Sot-Weed Factor (London, 1708)-a satirical poem supposedly describing the conditions, customs, manners, and people of the colony-in the jingling, humorous rhyme Samuel Butler used in Hudibras. The Sot-Weed Factor burlesques America's crude frontier life and slyly ridicules English assumptions about America."
http://newfoundpress.utk.edu//pubs/le...
(**) From the famous essay Historical Fiction, Fictitious History, and Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs, or, About Aboutness.
Quotes:
June 29, 2015
HEAR YE, HEAR YE! I am starting a rebellion against all who do not want to wear periwigs.
I feel that these are a classy way to display ones self, as well as carrying a sword to defend one's honor. I shall call my new land BARTHLANDIA. The national book shall be The Sot-Weed Factor, we shall eat eggplant every Friday, and drink away our sorrows with rum with much merry making. Our national currency shall be poetry, and ALL of the elected officials shall be elected through eating contests, (Kobaysahi shall reign forever!) Our day of national celebration will be every May 27, in honor of the terrific, witty writer, John Simmons Barth.
This was an amazing read, and told as a bildungsroman story. It is a funny read, and it is full of love, honor, hate, deception, REBELLION, pirates, kidnapping, opium, Indians, sot-weed(my pipe smoking increased significantly with this read), hell, its full of life.
I am hard pressed to decide what to like most about it, but I would choose the characters, and it has a slew of amazing characters. In his the Paris Review interview, in 1985, Barth was asked, about his perusing of the libraries at John Hopkins:
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2910/the-art-of-fiction-no-86-john-barth
I have to disagree with Ole John, here. I think he has some of the best characters I have ever had the pleasure to read about, hell, many of characters "played" multiple characters themselves. Even Ebenezer's father at one point was afraid he would change in front of his eyes:
I think he is a master of character development. I loved his develoment of Ebenezer; I thought that Eben grew throughout the novel, and I did not like him at first, but he grew on me. Mary Mungummory is a sage of the world, and boy does she know whats going on in the world. Burlingame, a mastermind, thats all you need to know.
Barth's story telling was great; he used stories within stories to tell his story. His use of Early Modern English used worried me at first, but grew on me throughout. I wish I spoke as well as these here folks.
I would have rather read this in American Literature during high school rather than some of the other things that are required. It was funnny, and was not difficult to read. EVERYONE WILL READ THIS ONCE THE REBELLION IS OVER!
I feel that these are a classy way to display ones self, as well as carrying a sword to defend one's honor. I shall call my new land BARTHLANDIA. The national book shall be The Sot-Weed Factor, we shall eat eggplant every Friday, and drink away our sorrows with rum with much merry making. Our national currency shall be poetry, and ALL of the elected officials shall be elected through eating contests, (Kobaysahi shall reign forever!) Our day of national celebration will be every May 27, in honor of the terrific, witty writer, John Simmons Barth.
This was an amazing read, and told as a bildungsroman story. It is a funny read, and it is full of love, honor, hate, deception, REBELLION, pirates, kidnapping, opium, Indians, sot-weed(my pipe smoking increased significantly with this read), hell, its full of life.
I am hard pressed to decide what to like most about it, but I would choose the characters, and it has a slew of amazing characters. In his the Paris Review interview, in 1985, Barth was asked, about his perusing of the libraries at John Hopkins:
Interviewer: In browsing the libraries, was it the concept of simply telling stories that fascinated you, or was it the characters that came through the works you read?
Barth: It was not the characters. Perhaps I would be a better novelists in the real of characterization had it been.
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2910/the-art-of-fiction-no-86-john-barth
I have to disagree with Ole John, here. I think he has some of the best characters I have ever had the pleasure to read about, hell, many of characters "played" multiple characters themselves. Even Ebenezer's father at one point was afraid he would change in front of his eyes:
"From time to time he cast(Andrew Cooke) great frowning glances at his children, as if they might vanish before his eyes or change into someone else." p. 712
I think he is a master of character development. I loved his develoment of Ebenezer; I thought that Eben grew throughout the novel, and I did not like him at first, but he grew on me. Mary Mungummory is a sage of the world, and boy does she know whats going on in the world. Burlingame, a mastermind, thats all you need to know.
Barth's story telling was great; he used stories within stories to tell his story. His use of Early Modern English used worried me at first, but grew on me throughout. I wish I spoke as well as these here folks.
I would have rather read this in American Literature during high school rather than some of the other things that are required. It was funnny, and was not difficult to read. EVERYONE WILL READ THIS ONCE THE REBELLION IS OVER!
Here moulds a posing fopping Actor,
Author of THE SOT-WEED FACTOR,
Falsely prais'd. Take Heed, who sees this
Epitaph; looke ye to Jesus!
Labour not for Earthly Glory:
Fame's a fickle slut, and whory
from Thy Fancy's chast couch drive her:
He's a fool who'll strive to swive her!
E.C., Gent, Pt& Lt of Md
November 30, 2021
Magisterial. How old was JB when he wrote this?
Not quite 30.
Staggering, his knowledge of the period. Unbelievable, his mastery not only of its vocabulary, but of its cadences, its self-conception, its emerging literary conventions, its structure of feeling.
Read it. I dare you to be disappointed in any way.
Not quite 30.
Staggering, his knowledge of the period. Unbelievable, his mastery not only of its vocabulary, but of its cadences, its self-conception, its emerging literary conventions, its structure of feeling.
Read it. I dare you to be disappointed in any way.
September 15, 2012
Health Warning!
This novel is nothing like Sorrentino’s 1983 novel Blue Pastoral. After extensive talks with leaders of the Nathan “N.R.” Public Evisceration & Associated Critical Dismantling-For-Jollies Corporation, we at the MJ Nicholls 20-Second Knocked-Off Reviews-for-the-sake-of-them Organisation & Affiliated Dunces Inc. would like to issue an apology for anyone who read a certain review of Blue Pastoral and emerged from the experience with the opinion this novel in any way resembled Sorrentino’s 1983 novel Blue Pastoral, which—of course—it doesn’t. The Sot-Weed Factor is a faithful homage to the picaresque novel à la Henry Fielding or Tobias Smollett, it is not like the extended homage to the Oxen of the Sun section of Ulysses that comprises Sorrentino’s patchy 1983 novel Blue Pastoral. We would like to apologise for this misunderstanding and reassure the reader The Sot-Weed Factor can be read exclusively on its own merits, not merely as a false comparison point with a lesser novel published in 1983 by Sorrentino entitled Blue Pastoral. Thank you.
This novel is nothing like Sorrentino’s 1983 novel Blue Pastoral. After extensive talks with leaders of the Nathan “N.R.” Public Evisceration & Associated Critical Dismantling-For-Jollies Corporation, we at the MJ Nicholls 20-Second Knocked-Off Reviews-for-the-sake-of-them Organisation & Affiliated Dunces Inc. would like to issue an apology for anyone who read a certain review of Blue Pastoral and emerged from the experience with the opinion this novel in any way resembled Sorrentino’s 1983 novel Blue Pastoral, which—of course—it doesn’t. The Sot-Weed Factor is a faithful homage to the picaresque novel à la Henry Fielding or Tobias Smollett, it is not like the extended homage to the Oxen of the Sun section of Ulysses that comprises Sorrentino’s patchy 1983 novel Blue Pastoral. We would like to apologise for this misunderstanding and reassure the reader The Sot-Weed Factor can be read exclusively on its own merits, not merely as a false comparison point with a lesser novel published in 1983 by Sorrentino entitled Blue Pastoral. Thank you.
October 13, 2015
Local man rewrites Maryland history.
'Dsheart, b' Truth, but I do believe that the gentleman known as John Barth Esquire was surely bit in the arse by Clio herself, which Fine Lady curst him with such a fever and ague and ashivering that could ne'er be shaken off, but only worked up and out, out into a tale the size of an Ocean and Beyond, encompassing a whole World, nay a Galaxy, nay a Cosmos no less, of the Incautious, the Devious, the Opportune, the Cockamamy, the Resourceful, the Shameless, the Salvage, the Exalted, the Craven, the Duplicitous and e'en, rare though 'tis, the Prudent.
In sooth I mun allow that this be no pap for pups bare past the age of pissing their own nest. 'Twere not the stuff of moral tales to sweet the tongue of thy purse-lipped aunt (heaven forfend!), but a stronger, rougher brew mor'n likely to turn the heads of ye as art unaccustomed to such heady delights, and turn the stomach beside. For 'tis true that here the men are driven by lust and take their pleasures where they can, and, indeed, no less where they can't. Such a lurching parade of caulking the fantail, bumping the bacon, swiving from turnip to Twycross, from stump to stoolbutt, from betsy to bitstern; such a lurching parade of cod and wand and egg-plant, of rogering and basting and spiking.
What knowledge is it that is root and stem of all? 'Twas carnal knowledge that caused man's fall!
Prithee, let us go no farther. Take pity on the one who tries, i'Faith, to hold out agin the tide that washes o'er him. Canute did no better than he; valiant, hopeless. Ebenezer Cooke, Poet and Virgin.
"'Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion! Innocence is like youth, which is given us only to expend and takes its very meaning from its loss."
September 26, 2017
I read this several years back so cannot make a real review. A prospective reader asks about the kind of humor it contains and whether it suffers from an ailment of early (1960) postmodern literature from being "bizarre to the point of fantasy." A definite "no" to that.
This is the story of a new English immigrant, Ebenezer Cooke, who has become a tobacco merchant (aka sot-weed factor) in colonial Maryland at the beginning of the 19th century. He is absurd in feeling special virtue over his celibacy, but that doesn't stop him being curious over the power of lust. The man is delusional enough to aspire to writing a heroic poem about the presumed noble virtues of the colony (a real Cook did so, but nothing is know of him). He is puffed up over his own importance like a Don Quixote and self-blinded to the human misery and venality around him like a Candide. He makes a tour of the towns and country, interviewing people and intersecting with their capers as an innocent abroad.
The viciousness and lechery of folks like Miles Standish, corruption of the governing class, and wisdom of prostitutes eventually gets through to his thick head. But we love him anyway as the sweet idiot he is at heart. He eats dirt to meditate on his new land. He actually does have poetry in his soul, overblown but sincere. Barth's cleverness and mastery of language come through his voice in these quotes stolen from the few by readers at the review page:
“Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?”
“The difference here 'twixt simple and witty folk, if the truth be known, is that your plain man cares much for what stand ye take and not a fart for why ye take it, while your smart wight leaves ye whate'er stand ye will, sobeit ye defend it cleverly.”
I see the book as a national treasure. I don't know why it didn't make the 1001 Books You Should Read list. I also don't know why I haven't taken up "Giles Goat Boy" yet.
This is the story of a new English immigrant, Ebenezer Cooke, who has become a tobacco merchant (aka sot-weed factor) in colonial Maryland at the beginning of the 19th century. He is absurd in feeling special virtue over his celibacy, but that doesn't stop him being curious over the power of lust. The man is delusional enough to aspire to writing a heroic poem about the presumed noble virtues of the colony (a real Cook did so, but nothing is know of him). He is puffed up over his own importance like a Don Quixote and self-blinded to the human misery and venality around him like a Candide. He makes a tour of the towns and country, interviewing people and intersecting with their capers as an innocent abroad.
The viciousness and lechery of folks like Miles Standish, corruption of the governing class, and wisdom of prostitutes eventually gets through to his thick head. But we love him anyway as the sweet idiot he is at heart. He eats dirt to meditate on his new land. He actually does have poetry in his soul, overblown but sincere. Barth's cleverness and mastery of language come through his voice in these quotes stolen from the few by readers at the review page:
“Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?”
“The difference here 'twixt simple and witty folk, if the truth be known, is that your plain man cares much for what stand ye take and not a fart for why ye take it, while your smart wight leaves ye whate'er stand ye will, sobeit ye defend it cleverly.”
I see the book as a national treasure. I don't know why it didn't make the 1001 Books You Should Read list. I also don't know why I haven't taken up "Giles Goat Boy" yet.
February 18, 2017
One of the best books I've ever read. I'll need a while to think about it before trying to articulate my thoughts. I'll just say that it was much better than I could ever have hoped, and I think it's required reading for anyone at all into long, postmodern novels.
May 20, 2016
Poesy/Prosey perfection. More fun than a barrel-full 'o brandy, and saucier than the Traveling Whore 'O Dorset on a particularly randy morn.
June 21, 2011
This true American masterpiece is written like a 17th century literary novel. The style could well be Fielding, except that Barth is even more hilarious.At a time when minimalist novelists seem to be in vogue, I revelled in the intelligent richness of the elaborate quixotic tale woven by Barth. When a novelist can write as well as peers like Saul Bellow or V.S. Naipaul, then a maximalist style like Barth's is to be savoured. Poor chaste poet laureate, Ebenezer Cooke, encounters harsh reality at every turn, including capture by pirates and Indians. His dreams drive him to ridiculous ends where his ambitions are constantly confounded by greater existential powers. "The road to Heaven's beset with thistles, and methinks there's many a cowpat on't." The dialogue is delicious and well-constructed with an authenticity and wit and bawdy truth. You have to marvel at the construction of such credible characters as Joan Toast, Bertrand, Boabdil, Andrew, Pocahontas and the pirate captain. Barth's dialogue on various letters of the alphabet, the trading of ancient insults and the scene where Ebenezer fears drowning in Chesapeake Bay were uproariously funny. Barth obviously knows the Eastern Shore near the Choptank River intimately: it's a lovely setting for his novel. For any true lover of great American literary novels, The Sotweed Factor should be on your must-read list.
February 3, 2023
La Marylandiade
Mille e passa pagine divorate in 3 settimane, un record per me (anche se ammetto che la zona rossa aiuta...).Il succo del romanzo è in questa frase che si trova nella parte iniziale :
“Noi siamo qui seduti su una cieca roccia che naviga nello spazio; e tutti quanti corriamo a capofitto verso la tomba. Credi tu che ai vermi importerà qualcosa, quando avran fatto di te un pasto, se tu hai passato il tuo momento a sospirare senza parrucca in camera tua, o se invece hai saccheggiato le auree città di Montezuma?”
Il nostro protagonista Ebenezer Cooke (poeta, vergine, onesto, innocente e credulone) si troverà ad abbandonare la sua comoda e monotona vita londinese a causa di uno scandalo e si troverà scaraventato in una mirabolante avventura nell'ancora pseudo selvaggio Maryland.Ad accompagnarlo una miriade di personaggi tra cui il suo antico tutore e guida spirituale, il mefistofelico Henry Burlingame (scaltro, doppiogiochista, lussurioso, ambiguo), sua antitesi per eccellenza.
«Henry Burlingame mi disse un giorno» fece freddamente «che nella filosofia morale gli scolastici parlano di moralità di motivo e moralità di fatto. Con ció essi intendono che un uomo può fare una buona azione per una ragione cattiva, o una mala azione con intenzione buona.» Colpí un'altra pianta, ne frustò una quarta. «Ora, la gente semplice suole sempre apprezzare il fatto e trascurare il motivo, e la gente dotta trascura il fatto e scruta l'anima di chi agisca. Burlingame dichiarò che la differenza fra l'agro pessimista e il vero gentiluomo sta qui: che l'uno giudicherà le buone azioni in base alla moralità di motivo e le cattive in base alla moralità di fatto, sí da condannare le une e le altre, mentre il gentiluomo al contrario, ed ha sempre una ragione per perdonare i suoi simili sviati.»
Un romanzo in stile seicentesco ma ironico, satirico, una lettura frizzante e divertente che tiene incollati alla pagine, con uno stile di scrittura stupendo (grandissimo merito va alla traduzione di Bianciardi).
Ciao Ebenezer Cooke, Poeta e Laureato del Maryland, mi mancherai!
La notte era tempestosa, ma non sgradevole: un vento caldo e umido irrompeva da sud-ovest, faceva schiumare il fiume, piegava i pini come giunchi e portava la nuvolaglia sulle stelle. Ambedue alzarono gli occhi alla splendida vista. Dimentica la parola cielo - disse Burlingame distrattamente, balzando sul suo castrato - E’ una benda sui tuoi occhi. Non c'è “cupola del cielo” lassù.
Ebenezer sbattè le palpebre due o tre volte: con l'aiuto di queste istruzioni, per la prima volta vide il cielo notturno. Le stelle non erano più punti su un nero emisfero appeso come tetto sulla sua testa; il rapporto fra di loro egli lo vedeva adesso in tre dimensioni, delle quali quella che sentiva più profondamente era la profondità. La lunghezza e la larghezza dello spazio fra stella e stella parevano trascurabili al confronto: ciò che lo colpiva era il fatto che alcune stelle erano più vicine, altre più lontane, e altre inimmaginabilmente remote. Vedute in questa maniera, le costellazioni perdevano completamente il proprio senso, si rivelava il loro carattere spurio, e anche il falso presupposto del navigatore, ed Ebenezer si sentì privo di orientamento. Non riusciva più a pensare il su e il giù: le stelle erano semplicemente là fuori, sotto come sopra di lui, e il vento pareva urlare non dalla baia ma dal firmamento medesimo, dagli sterminati corridoi dello spazio. Follia – sussurrò Henry.
Lo stomaco di Ebezener era in agitazione; vacillò sulla sella e si coprì gli occhi. Per un vertiginoso istante gli parve d’essere a capo sotto sul fondo del pianeta a guardare le stelle giù anziché su, e che soltanto stringendo la gambe al sottopancia della roana e tenendosi forte al pomo della sella con ambedue le mani potesse evitar di precipitare a capofitto in quelle vaste distese.
Ah Signore, sarebbe faccenda facile scegliere una Vocazione, se uno avesse tutto il Tempo per viverci dentro! Io sarei cinquantanni Avvocato, cinquanta Medico, cinquanta Chierico, cinquanta Soldato! Si, e cinquanta Ladro, e cinquanta Giudice! Tutte le Strade sono Strade belle, amata Sorella, nessuna più d'un'altra, sì che con una Vita sola da spendere io sono un uomo col sedere nudo dal Sarto coi Soldi per un solo paio di Brache, o uno Studioso dal Libraio col Danaro per un solo Libro: sceglierne dieci non sarebbe un Guaio; sceglierne uno, impossibile! Tutti i Mestieri, tutte le Arti, tutte le Professioni sono meravigliose, ma nessuna è più bella di tutte le altre messe insieme. Non posso scegliere, dolce Anna: infra tante Seggette le Brache mi cascano per Terra!
Ho imparato che gli uomini fan sempre così, accreditano agli altri i peccati che essi non hanno il coraggio oppure i mezzi per commettere.
«Non traverserei la strada per una puttana» disse Ebenezer fermamente. «Ma per un principio traverserò l'oceano! Per te, forse, Joan Toast è una puttana; per me è un principio.»
La differenza fra la gente semplice e la gente di spirito, se vogliamo la verità, è che al vostro uomo semplice preme molto la posizione che prendete e nulla affatto il perché la prendete, mentre l'uomo sveglio vi concede tutte le posizioni che volete, purché le difendiate abilmente.
Il buon uomo si dibatte, ma la fanciulla ha forza, ed inoltre egli ha i piedi legati. Ella mette mano sulla candela, e mirabile lictu, più se ne smoccola più cresce la cera! A fatica Padre FitzMaurice convoca il suo latino, eppure è così inteso a fare almeno una conversione prima della morte che balbetta una benedizione. In risposta la pagana gli lecca un orecchio, al che Padre FitzMaurice attacca a dire Paternoster in gran furia più preoccupato ormai della conservazione della propria Grazia, che dell'istituzione della sua parrocchia.bMa non appena egli è così impegnato, zac; ella copre la sua candela con lo spegnimoccolo che i preti debbono rifuggire, il quale lungi dallo spegnere il fuoco, lo alimenta a maggior calore e brillantezza. Insomma, laddove egli aveva sperato di guadagnare una conversa, è lo stesso Padre FitzMaurice ad essere convertito, in minor tempo di quel che basta a scrivere un sillogismo.
Mille e passa pagine divorate in 3 settimane, un record per me (anche se ammetto che la zona rossa aiuta...).Il succo del romanzo è in questa frase che si trova nella parte iniziale :
“Noi siamo qui seduti su una cieca roccia che naviga nello spazio; e tutti quanti corriamo a capofitto verso la tomba. Credi tu che ai vermi importerà qualcosa, quando avran fatto di te un pasto, se tu hai passato il tuo momento a sospirare senza parrucca in camera tua, o se invece hai saccheggiato le auree città di Montezuma?”
Il nostro protagonista Ebenezer Cooke (poeta, vergine, onesto, innocente e credulone) si troverà ad abbandonare la sua comoda e monotona vita londinese a causa di uno scandalo e si troverà scaraventato in una mirabolante avventura nell'ancora pseudo selvaggio Maryland.Ad accompagnarlo una miriade di personaggi tra cui il suo antico tutore e guida spirituale, il mefistofelico Henry Burlingame (scaltro, doppiogiochista, lussurioso, ambiguo), sua antitesi per eccellenza.
«Henry Burlingame mi disse un giorno» fece freddamente «che nella filosofia morale gli scolastici parlano di moralità di motivo e moralità di fatto. Con ció essi intendono che un uomo può fare una buona azione per una ragione cattiva, o una mala azione con intenzione buona.» Colpí un'altra pianta, ne frustò una quarta. «Ora, la gente semplice suole sempre apprezzare il fatto e trascurare il motivo, e la gente dotta trascura il fatto e scruta l'anima di chi agisca. Burlingame dichiarò che la differenza fra l'agro pessimista e il vero gentiluomo sta qui: che l'uno giudicherà le buone azioni in base alla moralità di motivo e le cattive in base alla moralità di fatto, sí da condannare le une e le altre, mentre il gentiluomo al contrario, ed ha sempre una ragione per perdonare i suoi simili sviati.»
Un romanzo in stile seicentesco ma ironico, satirico, una lettura frizzante e divertente che tiene incollati alla pagine, con uno stile di scrittura stupendo (grandissimo merito va alla traduzione di Bianciardi).
Ciao Ebenezer Cooke, Poeta e Laureato del Maryland, mi mancherai!
La notte era tempestosa, ma non sgradevole: un vento caldo e umido irrompeva da sud-ovest, faceva schiumare il fiume, piegava i pini come giunchi e portava la nuvolaglia sulle stelle. Ambedue alzarono gli occhi alla splendida vista. Dimentica la parola cielo - disse Burlingame distrattamente, balzando sul suo castrato - E’ una benda sui tuoi occhi. Non c'è “cupola del cielo” lassù.
Ebenezer sbattè le palpebre due o tre volte: con l'aiuto di queste istruzioni, per la prima volta vide il cielo notturno. Le stelle non erano più punti su un nero emisfero appeso come tetto sulla sua testa; il rapporto fra di loro egli lo vedeva adesso in tre dimensioni, delle quali quella che sentiva più profondamente era la profondità. La lunghezza e la larghezza dello spazio fra stella e stella parevano trascurabili al confronto: ciò che lo colpiva era il fatto che alcune stelle erano più vicine, altre più lontane, e altre inimmaginabilmente remote. Vedute in questa maniera, le costellazioni perdevano completamente il proprio senso, si rivelava il loro carattere spurio, e anche il falso presupposto del navigatore, ed Ebenezer si sentì privo di orientamento. Non riusciva più a pensare il su e il giù: le stelle erano semplicemente là fuori, sotto come sopra di lui, e il vento pareva urlare non dalla baia ma dal firmamento medesimo, dagli sterminati corridoi dello spazio. Follia – sussurrò Henry.
Lo stomaco di Ebezener era in agitazione; vacillò sulla sella e si coprì gli occhi. Per un vertiginoso istante gli parve d’essere a capo sotto sul fondo del pianeta a guardare le stelle giù anziché su, e che soltanto stringendo la gambe al sottopancia della roana e tenendosi forte al pomo della sella con ambedue le mani potesse evitar di precipitare a capofitto in quelle vaste distese.
Ah Signore, sarebbe faccenda facile scegliere una Vocazione, se uno avesse tutto il Tempo per viverci dentro! Io sarei cinquantanni Avvocato, cinquanta Medico, cinquanta Chierico, cinquanta Soldato! Si, e cinquanta Ladro, e cinquanta Giudice! Tutte le Strade sono Strade belle, amata Sorella, nessuna più d'un'altra, sì che con una Vita sola da spendere io sono un uomo col sedere nudo dal Sarto coi Soldi per un solo paio di Brache, o uno Studioso dal Libraio col Danaro per un solo Libro: sceglierne dieci non sarebbe un Guaio; sceglierne uno, impossibile! Tutti i Mestieri, tutte le Arti, tutte le Professioni sono meravigliose, ma nessuna è più bella di tutte le altre messe insieme. Non posso scegliere, dolce Anna: infra tante Seggette le Brache mi cascano per Terra!
Ho imparato che gli uomini fan sempre così, accreditano agli altri i peccati che essi non hanno il coraggio oppure i mezzi per commettere.
«Non traverserei la strada per una puttana» disse Ebenezer fermamente. «Ma per un principio traverserò l'oceano! Per te, forse, Joan Toast è una puttana; per me è un principio.»
La differenza fra la gente semplice e la gente di spirito, se vogliamo la verità, è che al vostro uomo semplice preme molto la posizione che prendete e nulla affatto il perché la prendete, mentre l'uomo sveglio vi concede tutte le posizioni che volete, purché le difendiate abilmente.
Il buon uomo si dibatte, ma la fanciulla ha forza, ed inoltre egli ha i piedi legati. Ella mette mano sulla candela, e mirabile lictu, più se ne smoccola più cresce la cera! A fatica Padre FitzMaurice convoca il suo latino, eppure è così inteso a fare almeno una conversione prima della morte che balbetta una benedizione. In risposta la pagana gli lecca un orecchio, al che Padre FitzMaurice attacca a dire Paternoster in gran furia più preoccupato ormai della conservazione della propria Grazia, che dell'istituzione della sua parrocchia.bMa non appena egli è così impegnato, zac; ella copre la sua candela con lo spegnimoccolo che i preti debbono rifuggire, il quale lungi dallo spegnere il fuoco, lo alimenta a maggior calore e brillantezza. Insomma, laddove egli aveva sperato di guadagnare una conversa, è lo stesso Padre FitzMaurice ad essere convertito, in minor tempo di quel che basta a scrivere un sillogismo.
April 21, 2017
So my dad hipped me to The Sot-Weed Factor (which, in 2010s parlance translates to The Tobacco Farmer) several years ago and I couldn't find it anywhere, so I decided to just do the audiobook thing. I think the longest audiobook I had read up until this point was about 21 hours. TSWF clocks in at a whopping forty-one hours! Needless to say I had my work cut out for me.
It goes like this: Ebenezer Cooke (a real guy) is born in London and given his father's tobacco (sot-weed) farm in Maryland. Cooke prizes two things above all else: his virginity and his poetry. This book tracks his many adventures, and the many stories told to him along the way.
I will say a few things about my experience with the book: because of the language and the meandering plot, it is a very easy tale to sort of lose track of from time to time. But all the stories are interesting. Even if they are not relevant to Eben himself, they always have a narrative thrust, and more often than not they have a huge twist that is crucial to Eben's own journey.
I am kind of amazed by John Barth, not only for creating what has to be one of the earlier postmodern novels (e.g. the unreliable narrator, the flawed protagonist, the constant digressions into meta story-within-a-story mode, etc.), but for this guy to come up with so many stories within the course of one book is a gift of genius.
Not only that, but Barth's utter facility with the language -- given that it is a pastiche of 17th century literature, written in that style and with the same florid verbiage -- is absolutely incredible. The fact that a dummy like me didn't get lost within the verbal gymnastics is a testament to Barth's dexterity with words.
The story is also a devastating satire, if not of the colonial 1690s, then of the character of Ebenezer Cooke, a dilettante who somehow becomes a credible poet (meaning that Barth, if being a genius wasn't enough, is also a credible poet). Cooke's obsession with maintaining his "innocence" is a running theme and running joke, and yet the character remains remarkably consistent until the tail end, when he finally finds the cynicism that the era demands.
For about a month this book became a sort of running commentary while I was driving, shopping, walking outside or working. It is one of the most daunting books I've ever read (I still have yet to finish Pale Fire or Ulysses), and I actually kind of miss it now that I've finished it.
I give it four stars instead of five only because it is somewhat indulgent in spots, spinning out long tales that could have been halved, without diminishing the narrative. Also, there are so many speaking parts and characters that I was pretty much lost by the end. Still, the story is so fragmented that I was able to pick back up with it like any TV show. The Sot-Weed Factor is one hell of a literary achievement.
It goes like this: Ebenezer Cooke (a real guy) is born in London and given his father's tobacco (sot-weed) farm in Maryland. Cooke prizes two things above all else: his virginity and his poetry. This book tracks his many adventures, and the many stories told to him along the way.
I will say a few things about my experience with the book: because of the language and the meandering plot, it is a very easy tale to sort of lose track of from time to time. But all the stories are interesting. Even if they are not relevant to Eben himself, they always have a narrative thrust, and more often than not they have a huge twist that is crucial to Eben's own journey.
I am kind of amazed by John Barth, not only for creating what has to be one of the earlier postmodern novels (e.g. the unreliable narrator, the flawed protagonist, the constant digressions into meta story-within-a-story mode, etc.), but for this guy to come up with so many stories within the course of one book is a gift of genius.
Not only that, but Barth's utter facility with the language -- given that it is a pastiche of 17th century literature, written in that style and with the same florid verbiage -- is absolutely incredible. The fact that a dummy like me didn't get lost within the verbal gymnastics is a testament to Barth's dexterity with words.
The story is also a devastating satire, if not of the colonial 1690s, then of the character of Ebenezer Cooke, a dilettante who somehow becomes a credible poet (meaning that Barth, if being a genius wasn't enough, is also a credible poet). Cooke's obsession with maintaining his "innocence" is a running theme and running joke, and yet the character remains remarkably consistent until the tail end, when he finally finds the cynicism that the era demands.
For about a month this book became a sort of running commentary while I was driving, shopping, walking outside or working. It is one of the most daunting books I've ever read (I still have yet to finish Pale Fire or Ulysses), and I actually kind of miss it now that I've finished it.
I give it four stars instead of five only because it is somewhat indulgent in spots, spinning out long tales that could have been halved, without diminishing the narrative. Also, there are so many speaking parts and characters that I was pretty much lost by the end. Still, the story is so fragmented that I was able to pick back up with it like any TV show. The Sot-Weed Factor is one hell of a literary achievement.
January 9, 2025
Good Lord, this was a wild ride! Such contrived serendipity that I could lay hands on this paperback. Perfect in all senses. Rarely would I call a book perfect, unless it's Moby Dick or Brothers Karamazov. Right thing to do now is to read hightlights of Moby Dick and then pick up Mason and Dixon, if I am brave enough to read a brick after another. John Barth is one more author whose bibliography I intend to consume. If nothing Sot-Weed Factor is funny, and we get to follow Ebenezer Cooke, who indeed is an actual person, who indeed wrote Marylindiad [here]. Although there are multiple tales inside tales, and tangents everywhere, Barth keeps it all tied through Ebenezer who rarely goes away from the sight, unlike Pynchon who fires in all tangents and lets most of them go. With pirates, sailors, poets, prostitutes, Ebenezer, omnipresent Birlingame, maidens, and 17th century american politics, sot-weed factor is one perfect tale.
October 7, 2021
Just as enjoyable as I remember it being when I 1st read it just over 40 years ago.
This time around I'm fresh from a read of Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling so can see where Barth has got some of his inspiration from.
Ebenezer Cooke - self-styled Poet Laureate of Maryland sets off from London to the New World to write a Marylandiad praising the various wonders of this new land. However things do not go as planned. Not only is this a bawdy romp with lots going on (pirate, prostitutes, corrupt judges, an uprising of the natives) it also manages to wedge in some interesting philosophical/moral discussions as well.
This time around I'm fresh from a read of Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling so can see where Barth has got some of his inspiration from.
Ebenezer Cooke - self-styled Poet Laureate of Maryland sets off from London to the New World to write a Marylandiad praising the various wonders of this new land. However things do not go as planned. Not only is this a bawdy romp with lots going on (pirate, prostitutes, corrupt judges, an uprising of the natives) it also manages to wedge in some interesting philosophical/moral discussions as well.
September 11, 2022
I don't have anything really intelligent or insightful to comment about John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor except to say that it was an unrelenting pleasure to read from frontis to the last, and I will be thinking about good old Eben and his journey for a long time. I think what is striking is how well the style of 17th-century literature still works, even here a further 60 years removed from Barth's contrivance. Made me thirst for other classics (semi) contemporaneous to its style (or at least, pre-Victorian), a feeling I've not had since I read Sterne's 18th-century masterwork, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.
Anyway, a rollicking good time to be had here with its myriad swashbucklers, swivings, swindlers, swappers, and silly scenarios.
Anyway, a rollicking good time to be had here with its myriad swashbucklers, swivings, swindlers, swappers, and silly scenarios.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 541 reviews