Paradox of origin: John Barth's 'Menelaiad.'

- Kirsti Simonsuuri Homer's Original Genius (3)

For the late twentieth-century writers, the myth of origin(ality) is at once a source of excitement and a cause of anxiety. The miraculous spring that nourished Homer's afflatus seems out of reach of today's writers, whose desperate yearning for inspiration only indicates the coming of an age of "exhaustion." The pervasive feeling that exists amongst these writers is the sense of "used-upness" concerning the sort of story they write and its possible repetition of the past. As John Barth observes in "The Literature of Exhaustion," discussing Jorge Luis Borges:

for one to attempt to add overtly to the sum of "original" literature By even so much as a conventional short story, not to mention a novel, would be too presumptuous, too naive; literature has been done long since. . . . His ficciones are not only footnotes to imaginary texts, but postscripts to the real corpus of literature. (Friday 73)

The problem Barth perceives is a state of "depletion" - a fearsome loss of the "prestige of origins" in contemporary literature. "What does one do when all the stories are told?" "How can one be original when origin(ality) is exhausted?" One possibility, as Barth's "Menelaiad" demonstrates, is to turn "exhaustion" of old stories into "replenishment" of new ones, and to acknowledge old stories by "iterating" them in new and creative ways, thereby affirming one's own "re-origination." Re-origination is to parody, to play with the inevitable complicity with a tradition, and to recontextualize ironically the echoing of the past. In Barth's story, tradition is as important as innovation, since for Barth writing is always an "inter-art" that involves the consciousness of literary history. As John Barth himself points out, the effort to assimilate the past and the future can be called a modus operandi of "trans-telling" - "go back to the beginning of things, narrative things, to see to what contemporary uses they might be put" (Glaser-Wohrer 229). As C. B. Harris observes, quoting Mircea Eliade, "The return to origins gives the hope of a rebirth" (116). Trans-telling, however, does not mean to follow, but to enter into a dialogue with the past.

John Barth's "Menelaiad" contains an ancient story from the Iliad and the Odyssey, which has been told and retold throughout the centuries. In defiance of the fact that he is taking the risk of repetition, however, Barth translates the mythological story into a postmodern "trans-tale," a tale that plays with the tension between the past and the present and indicates a paradoxical trans-relation between originality and repetition. The aim of Barth's trans(re)lation of mythology is to show how literature can renew itself by "re-marking" its origin(ality) and by trans-relating the ancient to the present. "This re-mark," according to Jacques Derrida, "can take on a great number of forms and can itself pertain to highly diverse types" (229). Barth's remarking takes the form of re-mythologizing that serves as a means for him to re-work and re-originate the "iterable" contents and forms of myth. In a sense, Barth's re-mythologizing in his postmodern-ancient story suggests what Derrida calls the "paradoxical historicity in the experience of writing." "The writer," Derrida observes, "can be ignorant or naive in relation to the historical tradition which bears him or her, or which s/he transforms, invents, displaces" (54), but the writer must always write against a prior "non-saturable context" of old stories (63). What "Menelaiad" illustrates is the possibility that a storyteller can, instead of keeping silence in the age of exhaustion, turn origin(ality) into a paradox and employ it to re-create new stories.

In re-creating his tale of Menelaus, Barth weaves into the narrative network different versions of the same story in order to re-mark its origin, or rather de-originate it. These versions are layered as different narrative levels within the story, and each level indicates a step further away from the origin. All these levels construct a radically regressive Chinese box, which "dehistoricizes" the narrative voice of Menelaus who trans-tells the iterable tale(s) of his history to himself and to various audiences on different levels. To use Derrida's words, Menelaus's "text is thereby dehistoricized, but historicity is made of iterability." For Derrida, the paradox is that "there is no history without iterability, and this iterability is also what lets the traces continue to function in the absence of the general context or some elements of the context" (64). Apparently, the "iterability" of his-story makes Menelaus not only eternally "dehistoricized" but also recontextualized and developed, since his trans-tale is not the same at each (re)telling. The historical levels in the story confuse themselves, as Menelaus attempts to trans-relate and transcend all the periods of time in his re-telling(s) of the tale(s) of his life (lives).