Postmodern Theories and Texts

John Barth

The Literature of Exhaustion

(from The Friday Book)

"By 'exhaustion' I don't mean anything so tired as the subject of physical, moral, or intellectualdecadence, only the used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities--byno means necessarily a cause for despair. (64)

His examples: Beckett, Borges and Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

[Borges: "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"]

. . . like all of Borges's work, it illustrates in other of its aspects my subject: how an artist may

paradoxically turn the felt ultimacies of our time into material and means for his work --

paradoxically, because by doing so he transcends what had appeared to be his refutation(71).

his own novels as examples

. . .novels which imitate the form of the Novel, by an author who imitates the role of Author (72).

labyrinth

A labyrinth, after all, is a place in which, ideally, all the possibilities of choice (of direction, in thiscase) are embodied, and -- barring special dispensation like Theseus's -- must be exhaustedbefore one reaches the heart.

exhaustion http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/postmodernism/exhaustion...

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