In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content. THE FUNCTION OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN JOHN BARTH'S CHIMERA Marilyn Edelstein Youngstown State University Much recent American fiction has become increasingly self-conscious, displaying an awareness of itself as fiction, as artifice that diminishes the role of a central human consciousness or self in the fiction.

Chimera September 24, 1972 Chimera By LEONARD MICHAELS CHIMERA By John Barth. Ome writers won't talk about their worked because it's hard to find time enough, in the first place, to work. The problem is vitiated in John Barth's sixth book, 'Chimera,' where talking about it becomes the work, and the more serious problem - verbal suicide - is copiously acknowledged, along with a great deal else, and why not? The work contains the writer's life; his life contains 'Chimera,' and it contains its writer, its 'shape-shifting' hero, inside. Not John Barth. He's outside, photographed on the jacket back, looking witty and cool, wrapped in his own arms as if there's nothing more to say. And there is certainly nothing more to say about 'Chimera' that isn't said in the book itself - even that it consists of three parts retelling three ancient myths (the stories of Scheherazade, Perseus and Bellerophon), complicated together by accretions and repetitions, all in pursuit of a pattern it makes in that very pursuit.

(Does this sound like chasing one's own behind? Well the book says as much.) Given this structural obsession, it can be as boring as a snail and seem compulsively idiosyncratic, though the author is 'sure' that it is 'right.'

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What 'right' has to do with imaginative writing I don't know, but analyses, evaluations and justifications are spared the reader's head and made labors of the page, where the polymorphic, multivocal hero-author speaks up whenever he pleases - even to say he knows what he is doing, has done and will do henceforth. Literally, 'Chimera' is a shut-your-critic's-mouth exhibition of the crafty master's craft. The act of writing in the written.

Imagination imagined, eating itself, saying what it tastes like, good, bad and terrific - and, as if such behavior were basically offensive to a writer, full of self-revulsion. He arrives early, this writer, as a genie conjured talkily up among his characters - Scheherazade (whose life, like his, hangs upon storytelling) and her 'kid sister.' He worships 'Sherry's' storytelling and worries about his own. He's had difficulties in writing. How much can they be ascribed to his 'limitations, his age and stage and personal vicissitudes,' 'how much to the general decline of letters'? However much to either, rhyme and lyrical vagary make his difficulties into thin ironical baloney, and, besides, 'Chimera' is here - dense, pretty fat - by virtue of those difficulties; and the worried writer (not Barth) is everywhere in 'Chimera' making it out of those limitations, age, stage, etc., as well as out of ancient Orientalisms, Greek mythology, sexual impotency and its attendant anti-feminist-anti-homosexual-sado-masochistic-frights; and also out of literary criticism in monologue, dialogue, dramatic analogue; catalogue and logologue.

But mostly, 'Chimera' is made out of the impossibility of sentimental, erotic, yet 'serious' male-female relations either in marriage or romance when the male is a self-conscious hero - an author, say, twisted spiritually into his own reputation, or a married chimera obsessed by chaos in his parts while his wife, in hers, does not become younger looking. (Not me; not Barth. This is in the book called 'Chimera,' the make-believe.) The traditional objective obligations - storytelling - is more than stupendously fulfilled as 'Chimera' spins talkily out through sequential gaps, like the subjective web of the spider's belly. (See the work of politically conservative, anti-feminist, neo-classical Jonathan Swift, who, on the decline of letters, used this image for modern writing.) Like the web, 'Chimera' is an intimate and impersonal thing (very geometrical), a book of itself, about itself.

Touch any strand, and you'll shiver another, but don't answer the phone or you'll never remember where you and it were. But do remember, because it repeats in its changes, getting better each time. This talking 'strategy' projects naturally into metaphors and scenes of sexual impotency, the anti-substantial basis of all three parts.

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Once, the hero limply titillates his girl and himself by speculating why he can do no more. The point not made is - maybe getting it up means giving it away? With extraordinary consistency, while giving so much away, the author-hero-owner of this book seems not really to want to give anything away. In parts of the plot he is shown hoarding his fan mail as well as his genetic juices, and in parts of the style he manages even to return the sounds of his words to himself in rhymes, alliterations and metrical closures. Or, as in this Euphuistical ballet, they are teased out and then hurried back home: 'I can do it. Assuredly I can do it. That I can do it, I cannot doubt.

That I cannot do it, that I can begin to imagine that I cannot do it, that I can begin to wonder whether perhaps after all I cannot do it; that I can begin to begin firmly to believe that I cannot do it; I cannot begin to imagine, I cannot begin to wonder, I cannot begin to begin. Beyond question I can do it. I cannot do it.' But funnily-willy-nilly he gets to his reader, as to his girl, not at all, all in all, through felt retentions and fantastic exfoliations. To make a physiological shape-shift, I'll put it in a sexual analogy, as 'Chimera' often does. The book is fore-play - not for consummation now, but for rejuvenation and reconsummation of the past as it tremendously happened to a better man, the sometime hero, the hero of himself, his metaphorical father. If you suspect a plot bomb lies in that, you're right.

In the last pages it is used to explode the whole book. Almost all the sexual intercourse in the book is 'stallion-wise,' a position appropriate to 'Chimera' insofar as it is about achievements behind, a passion for re-coherence driven into depths of astonishing metaphorical overlap and conflation, where scene, structure, styles and symbolical creatures wind all together in the monster's tissue.

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Allegory never had it so good, especially from an author who indulges the doubt that he ever was himself. But that too is the explicit trick. Jazzed up on impotency, he amazes with potency, an imaginative dialectic in the utterly static. One example: in the first part, where Scheherazade talks to live, the climax comes with a character talking while - to make himself do it convincingly - he makes a girl hold a knife to his penis. This idea should be adopted immediately in creative-writing classes everywhere. The last part, about Bellerophon and Pegasus, booms out of its recapitulations and anticipations to Rebelaisian heights and verification of what 'Chimera' says it says - the author, verbal boss, lately unhorsed, can rise out of his 'drek,' a big imaginative power, one of the best. Evidence of sustained, unadulterated drama is the ultimate mouth-stopper, so the book ends, of course, with the expressed desire to continue talking.

If made uneasy by the book's attacks on recent threats to American manliness - women's rights rhetoric, homosexuality, declining letters - you can accommodate all that as mythic matter (like the author's life) rendered by artfully verbal irresponsibility in a comic mode appropriate to its expression. Kamen rider super climax heroes psp iso google drive. We deserve it, probably, but isn't it too painful to see nice old mythic myths, which really aren't life, sometimes made hideous?

No; declining letters, etc. I've said nothing not said in the book and it says much more. Too briefly: this is the age of the chimera when being right is being unnatural.

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And it always was. Leonard Michaels is author of the story collection 'Going Places.'