Recovering from Verbal Suicide: A Genettian Reading of John Barth’s Chimera as A Mosaic of Literary Discourse

Written five years after the publication of Barth’s seminal essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” in 1967, Chimera reflects upon the idea of literary and narrative exhaustion in the contemporary world. Barth has frequently noted the deficiency of realistic literature in exploring contemporary issues, and the inevitability of finding a more inclusive technique that comprises all. The novel reflects Barth’s fascination with the intricacies of narrative complexity and enhances his own views concerning the relationship between the author and his text. What the reader meets in Chimera is a legend-myth with a multiplicity of real and supernatural beings embracing the archetype of the artist struggling for survival. The text under study has been a fertile soil for research and has been handled from multiple perspectives, primarily as a postmodernist manifestation of the contemporary world and the prevailing sense of human disillusionment. Looking from different angle, this article adopts a Genettian reading of Chimera, tracing Gerard Genette’s concepts of transtextuality and metalepsis and their use in the novel as a means of escaping what Barth terms Narrative Exhaustion, manifesting a definite rejection for a rigid temporal position for man and constantly fluctuating among the layers of time.