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John Barth. Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera. Boston. Little, Brown. 1994. 398 pages. $23.95. ISBN 0316082627.
As a postmodern autobiographical fiction, Once Upon a Time textualizes the incidents of an author's life, finding meaning in those events, however conventional these may be in "actual" experience. In a life lived through his highly wrought artistic texts, John Barth finds that the true eventfulness of time is largely, although not entirely, located in the artist's consciousness. In this textualized autobiography, even the quotidian implements of writing (a prized fountain pen, carefully though unsuccessfully guarded against loss; a venerable notebook, miraculously recovered and restored after its theft and immersion in salt water) occupy this artist's thinking more critically than the ordinary crises of lived experience which the text decenters.
On the threshold of his sixtieth birthday, beginning to contemplate an eventual, though...