존 바스의 『연초 도매상』

John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor: Creative Writing through Parody of History

Starting from his manifested intention to make up a plot that is fancier than Tom Jones, John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor is a historical or mock-historical novel inspired by the satirical poem of Ebenezer Cooke, who actually did exist, but about whom little is known. To fulfill the task to outdo his precursor, Barth deploys the true facts of American colonial history and the eighteenth-century notions of the dynamic picaresque, twisting and integrating them into a massive fiction by using parody as a real critical technique which reflects his own moral vision. This paper aims to illuminate the way Barth deals with history, by analyzing two leading characters, Ebenezer Cooke and Henry Burlingame III, and two main documents of the past, A Secret Historie and The Privie Journal. Ebenezer is the American Adam, a central figure of the theme of innocence, and Burlingame is a shape-shifter constantly searching for his true identity. Unorthodox records of Captain John Smith and Henry Burlingame give modern readers a glimpse into American history as it was, including a very different version of the Pocahontas episode. What Barth seeks through a network of intricate incidents and relations in this long, expansive novel is the manipulation of the past to prove history to be as fictive as his own work. In the process, Barth re-invents the universe of the eighteen-century English novels and attempts to imitate art and life with his full potential for artistic development.