[Barth's aesthetic] embodies a conscious attempt to go beyond Joyce—by going backwards. Like the protagonist of his "Perseid," who must return to Joppa, the scene of his youthful heroics, if he is to go forward with his life, Barth roots his strategy in the Shakespearean realization that fiction is "a kind of true representation of the distortion we all make of life." It is crucial, he feels, to attempt to deal with the discrepancy between art and Reality, and he finds that the most effective way to do so is "to acknowledge right off the bat 'this is artifice'—which, of course, is among other things a sly way of getting around the artifice. It's an old gambit,… particularly popular in Renaissance drama: life is a play, the world's a theatre, existence is a dream, etc., etc." He reasons that "… by continually rubbing the audience's nose in the artificial aspect of what you're doing, you're really deliberately confusing the issue you're pretending to clarify, transcending the artifice by insisting on it." Barth's primary vehicle for putting this strategy into practice is his extremely baroque plotting. (p. 193)
Barth's novella ["Perseid"] is elaborately framed and sports an intricate plot. Relying on various accounts of the Perseus myth, Barth retells the story and extends it by reinterpreting certain actions of the original and by inventing a second quest which Perseus undertakes during middle age and which results in his metamorphosis into the constellation Perseus. At the outset of the novella, Perseus, estellated in the Northern Hemisphere, is telling the reader of telling the New Medusa (in Barth's version of the tale, the girl was reassembled after her beheading by Perseus on his youthful mythic quest) of the time he told an Egyptian girl, Calyxa, about setting out at age forty to relive the heroic quest of his youth. The complexity of the frame pales in comparison to the way in which the plot unravels itself. Graven scenes depicting key events in Perseus' life spiral around and behind the wall of the chamber in the shrine in which Perseus finds himself. The scenes are represented on two sets of seven panels, the second set being "correspondent to the first in relative proportions, but of grander breadth," and the sixth panel of each set being "septuple in proportions similar to the whole's." One set of seven portrays Perseus' initial quest; the next seven relate his middle-aged journey. Whereas the first set is commissioned from extant myth, the last seven panels are of Barth's imagining. The reader, like Perseus, is exposed to only one panel at a time. (p. 196)
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