Oscillating between Nightmarish Reality and Irrelevant Story - John Barth's Book of Ten Nights and a Night
Oscillating between Nightmarish Reality and Irrelevant Story - John Barth's Book of Ten Nights and a Night

Summary/Abstract: John Barth’s Book of Ten Nights and a Night seems to mark if not a turning point in Barth’s writing, at least an isle of concern for everyday reality, with its complex social and political matters, in the midst of an ocean of playfulness and “irrelevant” storytelling, as the author himself labels his fiction. The eleven stories themselves are light, playful, funny, ironic, in his words, “irrelevant” to the world out there – in one word, entertaining. They self-reflexively turn towards themselves, as the author’s fascination, indeed obsession, with writing and story-telling is as noticeable as ever: virtually all stories, one way or another, revolve around writers and teachers of literature, and they include extensive commentary on writing, yet something is radically different: the real world finally managed to creep into Barth’s writing in a way it had never done before. Even a writer of so “light” novels could not turn his face from the nightmarish Ground Zero, the scene of the 2001 terrorist attacks that literally put an end to the world as Americans knew it. The full horror of September 11 is depicted in the frame of the stories. The moral seems to be that if mankind, if America is to survive such horror, it is going to be through storytelling.

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