The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
John Barth · a novel in three parts and an author’s apology · Doubleday, 1960 · scored on Barth’s English as first published, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Comic historical novel in pastiche of the English prose of about 1700; picaresque, mock epic and parody of historiography in one design
Mythos
The holy fool on a quest into a wasteland he means to praise; Proteus, the trickster of every face, in search of a father; the divided twins; the founding romance of Smith and Pocahontas retold as a confidence trick
Phase
From London at the end of the seventeenth century to the Province of Maryland after the Protestant rising of 1689, through the loss of an estate and its recovery by marriage
Presentation
Fiction; three parts, the middle far the longest, under long descriptive chapter titles, with interpolated documents read in installments, verse by the hero, and an author’s apology to the reader on his treatment of history
Register
From the balanced period of the opening sentence and the Hudibrastic couplet to oath, invective, bedroom farce, the forged journal and the debate on history
Scale
A would-be laureate, his twin and their tutor, a London prostitute, and a whole colonial province, from the coffee-house to the Indian village
Governing Proposition
A London innocent who holds himself a virgin and a poet is made laureate of Maryland and sails to praise the province, loses his family’s estate there to men who know the world, and earns it back only by marrying the prostitute he refused; beside him his old tutor, a master of disguise, pieces together his own birth from a secret history of Captain John Smith. The wager of the novel is that innocence is a refusal to know for which others pay, that the founding of an American province rested on fraud, and that a history told in the forged voice of its own period can show the record itself to be a fiction made by interested hands.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The novel opens on a man summed up in one sentence of period syntax. Ebenezer Cooke, among the fops of the London coffee-houses at the end of the seventeenth century, is “more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent”. The sentence is the book’s method in small. It is built as a writer of about 1700 would build it, balanced and periodic, and it passes a verdict on its hero before he has done anything. Everything that follows is told in that voice, the English of the age in which the story is set, held without a lapse into the modern across the length of a very long book, under chapter titles that run, in the manner of Fielding and Smollett, to several lines.
Ebenezer has a twin sister, Anna, and a father, Andrew. The twins were taught by a tutor, Henry Burlingame, a man who does not know who his parents were and who can take on any face. Ebenezer settles who he is in two claims: he is a virgin, and he is a poet, and the second rests on the first. In London he meets Joan Toast, a prostitute, and refuses her. He takes the refusal for a triumph of principle. It is the hinge of his life. Innocence, for him, is a virtue and a vocation, and the rest of the book shows it to be something else: a refusal to know, for which others pay.
He is made laureate of the Province of Maryland, and sets out to take up the family’s estate there, Malden, with his valet Bertrand. He means to write a Marylandiad, an epic in praise of the province. The historical Ebenezer Cooke, born about 1665 and living after 1732, was a real colonial poet, and what he published, in London in 1708, was not an epic of praise but The Sot-Weed Factor: or, a Voyage to Maryland. A Satyr, a satire in Hudibrastic verse on the province and its people. The novel takes its title from that poem, and its plot from the distance between the poem the man meant to write and the poem he wrote.
Movement II
The voyage and the province fill the middle part of the book, far the longest of the three. The pattern is the picaresque’s: captures and escapes, identities exchanged and exchanged again, tales told by strangers, reversals by the dozen. Friends prove to be enemies in disguise, and enemies friends. Planters, whores, pirates, Indians and runaway slaves cross the hero’s path, each with a story. Ebenezer meets every turn with the same confidence and is wrong every time, and the repetition is the argument: in this world every person is a role, and only the innocent take a role for a self.
Maryland fleeces him. The province he came to praise runs on tobacco and debt, on indenture and slavery, on fraud at law and at the counter, and on land taken from its first peoples. Ebenezer, who will not learn how men deal with one another, loses Malden to men who know exactly how. His innocence, which he took for a shield, is the means by which he is robbed. The poem of praise sours as he goes: the verse he writes on the way, in couplets bad in exactly the way a hero’s verse should be, turns from celebration toward complaint.
Joan Toast follows him to the province and pays for him. Refused in London, she goes down in Maryland into disease and addiction. The book gives her fall at the same comic speed as everything else, and that is its risk. The rape and the slaughter of the province are told as farce. The farce makes them readable and blunts what the book knows about them: its argument, that the innocent are spared at others’ expense, is carried at a speed that keeps the reader from feeling the expense.
Movement III
Through the long middle two documents are read in installments. One is a secret history attributed to Captain John Smith, whose Generall Historie of 1624 gave the English-speaking world the story of Pocahontas. The other is a journal of Sir Henry Burlingame. They come in pieces, from witnesses with an interest in what they record, so that the past reaches the novel as it reaches a historian. Each is forged in its own spelling and its own voice, and each is a piece of the evidence for the book’s other plot, Burlingame’s search for his birth.
What the secret history tells is the founding romance turned inside out. In Smith’s published account Pocahontas is the princess who saves the captain. Here their meeting is a bawdy confidence trick, told out of Smith’s own vainglory, and the deflowering of Pocahontas becomes the hinge on which Burlingame’s descent turns. The national myth is not decoration. The most private question in the book, who Burlingame’s father was, is answered from its most public legend, rewritten as a joke, and the last installment’s disclosure is outrageous and complete.
Around the documents the politics of the province run in the same key. The plot turns on Charles Calvert, third Baron Baltimore, the proprietor; on John Coode and the Protestant rising of 1689; and on Governor Francis Nicholson. Every faction forges, every party goes in disguise, and Burlingame, the master of disguise, moves among them. In his long debates with Ebenezer he argues that history is a story whose authors hide, and that a self is a sequence of roles. Ebenezer, who believes in one self and one truth, is the one person in the province who cannot see what kind of world he is in.
Movement IV
Burlingame’s search ends in the forest. He follows the evidence of the journals to an Indian village in the Maryland woods, and finds his blood there. The man of every face has an ancestry after all, and it lies among the people whom the province’s founding legend made into a romance and its history into the dispossessed. Proteus finds a father. The quest for parentage, the oldest of recognition plots, ends not in an English house but in the land the English took.
Ebenezer earns Malden back by marrying Joan Toast. The woman his innocence refused in London is the price of the experience he has refused ever since, and the book makes him pay it. The estate lost by a man who would not know the world is recovered by a man who has had to learn it. Whether what he has learned is wisdom, or another posture struck by a man who has always struck them, the book leaves open.
The twins are the book’s other figure. Ebenezer and Anna are two halves of one being, the divided androgyne, and Burlingame’s desire for both of them, and for everything, makes him the book’s lover of the whole world as he is its man of every face. The women stand mostly in the men’s need of them. Anna is drawn through her brother and her tutor, and Joan through the man who refused her and the men who used her. The book sees what this costs them more clearly than it gives them selves of their own.
Movement V
The poem of praise becomes the satire. The Marylandiad Ebenezer set out to write turns, over the length of the book, into the poem that history kept: Cooke’s Hudibrastic satire of 1708 on the province that fleeced him. The novel accounts for a real poem by inventing the life behind it, and the account is itself a satire on accounts, a history whose evidence is as interested as any history it mocks.
The ending turns grave. Joan dies, and the book, which has run at comic speed through rape and massacre, slows for her. The hero’s reckoning with what his innocence has cost reaches a plain gravity, and a closing epitaph lifts the end toward elegy. The comic physics that governed the rest does not wholly bear the weight: coincidence and the exchanged identity were built for farce, and the grief comes from another order. After the story the author steps forward with an apology to the reader for his treatment of history, defending his liberties with the record. A novel that has argued that every history is written by an interested hand ends by declaring its own interest.
The book was Barth’s third novel, after The Floating Opera (1956) and The End of the Road (1958), two short novels of ideas, and before Giles Goat-Boy (1966) and Lost in the Funhouse (1968). With Catch-22 and V. it stands at the opening of what criticism of the 1960s called black humour and later postmodernism, and it made Barth a central figure of that decade. In 1967 he revised the text, and in the same year published “The Literature of Exhaustion”. Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997), a mock-eighteenth-century novel of colonial Maryland and its borders, stands in its line. Barth’s standing has fallen since the 1980s, and the book is read now mainly in the academy and by its admirers; it is in print, and it is taught.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the book is built to strain it: a picaresque in which abundance is part of the joke. The spine is required: the laureateship granted, the estate of Malden lost by the hero’s innocence, the poem of praise turned into a satire, the marriage that earns the estate back. Burlingame’s search for his parentage, carried by the installments of the Smith and Burlingame journals, is required too, since it is the book’s other half and its argument about history. Between those fixed points the long middle part multiplies captures, escapes, exchanged identities and tales told by strangers, and much of that multiplication is the argument itself: the law that every person is a role, restated until it is believed. What holds the axis is the remainder, episodes that could change places, or go, without the knowledge changing. The design licenses them; it does not compel them.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: innocence is not a virtue but a refusal to know, and others pay for it. It is enacted, not only said. Ebenezer guards his virginity as the ground of his poetry and of his self, refuses Joan Toast in London, and by that refusal and his ignorance of the world loses his estate to men who know it, while Joan, following him, goes down into disease and addiction. The book makes him earn experience by marrying her. A second disclosure runs beside it: the province of his planned epic rests on fraud, tobacco debt, indenture, slavery and the dispossession of its first peoples, and its founding romance, Smith and Pocahontas, is a bawdy confidence trick. Held below the bar because much of the meaning is said aloud by Burlingame, and because the farce that carries the rape and the slaughter blunts what the book knows of their cost.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The register is comic, and elevation comes as the comic sublime of excess more than as transport or terror. The heights are real: Burlingame’s long debates on the nature of history and of the self, Proteus speaking; the installments of Smith’s secret history, whose last disclosure is outrageous and complete; the contests of rhetoric and invective; and the hero’s discovery of what his innocence has cost, which reaches a plain gravity late in the book. Joan’s death and the closing epitaph lift the end toward elegy. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is frequency and register: the usual mode is farce at a run, level by design, and for long stretches the book entertains rather than rises. A summit of wonder in a comic epic is possible, as Rabelais and Cervantes show; this book reaches it seldom.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Myth built, in a parodic key, and the plot bears it. The hero is the holy fool on a quest, Parzival, Candide and Don Quixote at once, an innocent sent into a wasteland he means to praise, and his fall from innocence is the action. Burlingame is Proteus, the trickster who wears every face, and his search for a father ends in the forest among the Indians, an ancestry found. The twins are the divided androgyne, and Burlingame’s desire for both of them, and for everything, is the book’s figure of a lover of the whole world. The national myth is load-bearing: the deflowering of Pocahontas, retold from Smith’s own vainglory, is the hinge of Burlingame’s descent and so of the plot. Held below the bar by the key: every pattern is built in order to be travestied, so the myth is raised and disarmed at once, and its bearers are types more than particulars.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the English comic novel of the eighteenth century, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, with Cervantes and Rabelais behind it, and Cooke’s own Hudibrastic satire of 1708 as the seed. The turn is in what the book does with it in 1960: an American novel written at great length in the diction of about 1700, about a real and obscure colonial poet, that rewrites the founding of a province as bawdy farce and makes the falsity of the historical record its subject. Against the realist, Jewish-American and Beat fiction of its moment that was a departure, not an accent, and it made the historical novel a parody of historiography before that practice had a name. The stake was real: a writer known for two short novels of ideas set out on a long, archaic book unsaleable on its face. Held off the top because pastiche borrows by design: the means are the masters’, and the swerve lies in their use.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The pastiche is the instrument: a book arguing that history is a fiction written by interested hands is told in the very voice of the period’s histories, with forged documents, partisan journals and a narrator who apologises at the end for his liberties, so that the form performs the claim. The journals of Smith and Burlingame, given in installments, enact the recovery of the past as the recovery of lies, and Burlingame’s birth is assembled from them as a historian assembles a past, from interested witnesses. The three parts trace a fall and a return: England, the province that fleeces, the estate earned. The verse shows the poem of praise turning into the satire that history kept. Held below the top because the picaresque frame is also a container: the middle part’s episodes could be reordered, and the exchanged identity, repeated often, becomes a mechanism.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over sixty-six years, real and mainly academic. The book has been read as parody of the eighteenth-century novel, as a critique of American innocence, as the first large example of what was later called historiographic metafiction, as an existential comedy of the self as a role, and through its relation to the historical Cooke and to Smith’s text. Its open questions are real: who Burlingame is under his faces; whether the history the book gives is truer than the official one or only funnier; whether the hero’s last knowledge is wisdom or another posture. What holds the axis is that the plot’s puzzles are built to be solved, and are solved by the end; that the comic surface, its jokes once known, yields less on a second reading than its size promises; and that the re-examination has thinned, much of it treating the book as an instance of a movement rather than as itself.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The field is the American novel of its decade. The force is real: the book showed that the American novel could leave realism by going backward, through pastiche of an older form, and that the historical novel could take the record itself as its target. With Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and Pynchon’s V. (1963) it stands at the opening of what American criticism of the 1960s called black humour and later postmodernism, and it is the eldest of the three. Held below the top because the redirection is shared with them, was carried in part by Barth’s essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967) and by his later fictions, and because the novel’s own descendants are easier to assert than to document. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a reputation through the 1960s that made Barth a central figure of the period, and a recognised place as precursor of Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997) and of the comic historical travesty in American fiction.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Survival is weighed over sixty-six years, form first, then fabric, then presence. Form: the text survives whole, as Barth published it in 1960 and as he revised it in 1967, with nothing lost; the revision is the author’s and charges nothing. Fabric: there is none to charge. Presence is where the charge falls. The book has stayed in print and is taught in courses on American postmodern fiction, but it is read now mainly in the academy and by its admirers, its author’s standing has fallen since the 1980s, and its general readership is narrower than that of Catch-22 or Lolita, novels of the same years. Its archaic surface is not fixed to 1960, but its comic rape and its caricatured Indians and Africans are, and they have cost it readers. The charge holds the figure below what the span gives a widely read book, without taking it lower.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on Barth’s English, with no translation between. The command is of a pastiche sustained at great length without a lapse into the modern: the diction, syntax, oaths and invective of about 1700, chapter titles in the manner of Fielding and Smollett, Hudibrastic couplets bad in exactly the way the hero’s verse should be, and forged documents with their own spelling and voice. The opening sentence sets the tone in one turn of period syntax, sizing up its hero as “more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent”. The plot’s machinery is engineered to its last revelation, and the set pieces, the debates, the invectives and the journal installments, are built with precision. Three charges hold it below the top: prolixity, the joke extended past its life in many scenes; a tonal monotony, the same comic speed for a lost purse or a massacre; and persons who are mostly types, Joan and Anna drawn through the men’s need of them.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a London coffee-house of fops in the first chapter, and an Indian village in the Maryland forest where Burlingame finds his blood; or the laureate’s Hudibrastic verse and the political plot of Coode and Baltimore. One law governs them: every person is a role, every record a forgery made by someone with an interest, and innocence is the one posture that cannot see it. The coffee-house wits and the forest village obey it alike, and the verse and the politics are two forgeries of one province. The pastiche voice holds a very wide range, from bedroom farce to colonial politics, piracy, slavery, theology and poetics, without a seam. Charged: the law runs on comic physics, coincidence and exchanged identity, and when the book turns grave, at Joan’s end and in the hero’s late reckoning, the physics shifts under it; and the treatment of violence as farce sits uneasily with the cost the book claims to disclose.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Many orders, and the theme of innocence and fraud joins them. Consciousness, in the hero’s self-regard and its undoing. The family, in the twins and their father and in Burlingame’s lineage. Labour and money, in tobacco, factors, debt, indenture and the estate. The state, in the Calverts, Coode’s rising and the governor. Law, in the courts of the province. History as a discipline, in the journals and the apology. Race and conquest, in the Indians and the enslaved. Sex everywhere; poetry and its social office in the laureateship; the sea and the voyage. They are integrated, not listed. Held below the top because most orders are held at the depth of caricature: the enslaved and the Indians are comic types, women are seen through male appetite, the natural order is scenery, and the sacred is absent except as cant.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve and The Imperishable at 8.6, then Pressure on Tradition at 8.5. An American novel of 1960 written in the diction of about 1700 that made the falsity of the historical record its subject before that practice had a name; a text whole as its author published and revised it, in print and taught after sixty-six years; and, with Catch-22 and V., the opening of a decade’s turn away from realism, of which it is the eldest.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 7.2, held by register and frequency: the usual mode is farce at a run, level by design, and the heights, Burlingame’s debates, the last disclosure of Smith’s secret history, the hero’s late reckoning and Joan’s death, come seldom. Next above it, The Inevitable at 7.5: episodes of the long middle part that could change places, or go, without the knowledge changing. Then The Bottomless Well at 7.6: puzzles built to be solved, a comic surface that yields less on a second reading than its size promises, and a re-examination that has thinned.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.5, meeting its threshold of 7.5 exactly. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.4, The Living Form at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 8.6, The Imperishable at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.5 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 fall a tenth short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.2, three tenths below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.9. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.2, from a sum of 97.8, in the band of Tier IV, short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, published by Doubleday in 1960: his third novel, after The Floating Opera (1956) and The End of the Road (1958). It is scored as the novel as Barth published it in 1960, in three parts, with its chapter titles, its interpolated documents, its verse and its closing apology to the reader, which are part of the work. Barth issued a revised text in 1967; the revision is the author’s own, and no axis turns on the difference between the two texts. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Barth’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the judgment on the hero in the opening sentence. The historical Ebenezer Cooke and his The Sot-Weed Factor: or, a Voyage to Maryland. A Satyr (London, 1708), Captain John Smith’s Generall Historie (1624), and the Maryland of Charles Calvert, John Coode and Francis Nicholson are the record the novel travesties, and are not part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the page and word counts, the titles of the three parts and of particular chapters, the wording of passages known only in paraphrase, the text that later paperbacks follow, the extent of the 1967 revision and the book’s place on published lists, are not given. Citations are by part and episode.