Chimera
by John Barth
Summary
Three novellas, three myths, and one question run through all of them: what does a storyteller do when the story is over?
Dunyazadiad retells the Thousand and One Nights from below, through Scheherazade's kid sister Dunyazade, who sat at the foot of the bed for a thousand and one nights watching the performance that kept her sister alive. Into their plotting Barth inserts, with complete shamelessness, himself: a genie from the future, a middle aged American writer who worships Scheherazade and trades her the stories she needs, since he knows how they all come out. It is the most charming thing this famously tricky writer ever did, and the best short introduction to what metafiction is actually for.
Perseid gives us Perseus at forty, hero of the Medusa story, now heavy, stalled and retelling his own myth in the spiral galleries of a temple, trying to work out where the momentum went. Bellerophoniad, the longest and knottiest, does the same for Bellerophon, tamer of Pegasus, a man who has followed the heroic pattern to the letter and suspects he is a counterfeit, a perfect imitation of a hero rather than the thing itself.
The three parts coil around each other like the chimera's three animals, repeating motifs, swallowing their own tails, and arguing that middles, of lives and of stories, are the hard part.
Around three hundred pages, dense, bawdy and playful.
Best for readers who enjoy watching fiction think about itself, and want postmodernism at its warmest rather than its coldest.
Historical Context & Significance
Chimera shared the National Book Award for Fiction in 1973 with John Williams's Augustus, the first time the fiction prize was split, and a neater contrast is hard to invent: the most self conscious experiment on the shelf dividing the honor with a stately epistolary novel about a Roman emperor. The judges' inability to choose between them says everything about where American fiction stood in 1973.
John Barth was by then the standard bearer of American metafiction, after The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy, and his 1967 essay The Literature of Exhaustion, arguing that the old narrative forms were used up and that their usedupness was itself the new material, served as the movement's manifesto; Chimera is that essay dramatised.
The novellas grew from his lifelong obsession with Scheherazade, the storyteller's storyteller. Metafiction's stock has risen and fallen since, but Dunyazadiad has kept its place in anthologies as the movement's most likeable monument.