ABSTRACT

Though he says so only in parenthesis, for Barth the novel's time is up as a major art form, and meta fiction is one way that the novelist can respond to this predicament: the novelist becomes a kind of critic by writing a novel about the 'used-upness' of novelistic forms, or a novel which imitates a novel rather than the world. Barth was certainly right to proclaim in this essay that this state of exhaustion was no cause for despair, and recent literary history has vindicated the claim that the exhausted possibilities of the novel have proved a source of vitality in fiction. To explain the vitality that derives from novelistic exhaustion Barth surveys experimental techniques, particularly in the work of Borges and Beckett, which extend the horizons of the novel into philosophical realms, concerned with the representation of representation, the contamination of reality by dreams, the metaphysically disturbing effect of the regressus in infinitum produced by the story-within-a-story, and the process whereby characters in a novel become authors or readers within the fiction, reminding us of the fictitious aspect of our existence. This celebration of one writer / critic (Borges) by another became a seminal formulation of the case for the reciprocity between fiction and theory.