Created by John Barth in the mid-to-late period of his life, Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera (hereinafter referred to as Once Upon a Time) is one of Barth’s significant novels which explore various possibilities of literary creation. Once Upon a Time was claimed as “a memoir bottled in a novel” by its author, and the reality and fictionality intertwined by recourse to unusual narrative techniques which are probably unfamiliar to readers who are accustomed to read realistic works. In order to make clearer sense of the ways the author utilizes to achieve the dynamic unity of the reality and fictionality in the novel, this article employs theories of unnatural narratology to illustrate those unusual narratives on the basis of close reading of the literary text of the novel. On the ground of the analyses of the interaction between reality and fictionality based upon unnatural narratives, such as the unusual genre, the multiple identities of “I”, and the temporal loop, this article concludes that factuality and fictionality or life and art are complementary to each other, as the author of the novel describes that they are “coaxial esemplasy”.
References
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[2]
Barth, J. (1956). The Floating Opera. Appleton Century Crofts, Inc.
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Barth, J. (1958). The End of the Road. Doubleday & Company, Inc.
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Barth, J. (1984) The Literature of Exhaustion in Barth’s The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction (pp. 62-76). The Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Barth, J. (1994). Once Upon a Time: A floating opera. Little, Brown Company Limited.
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Bowen, Z. (1999). Setting the Mobius Strip Straight: John Barth’s Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 40, 195-202.
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Doležel, L. (1999). Fictional and Historical Narrative: Meeting the Postmodernist Challenge in David Herman’s Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (pp. 247-273). Ohio State University Press.
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Harris, C. B. (1994). Review of Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14, 203-204.
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Hornby, S. A. (2009). Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary (7th ed.). The Commercial Press and Oxford University Press.
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Marie-Laure, R. (1997). Postmodernism and the Doctrine of Panfictionality. Narrative, 5, 165-187.
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Richardson, B. (2006). Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Ohio State University Press.
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Richardson, B. (2015). Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History and Practice. Ohio State University Press.
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Shang, B. (2015). On Unnatural Narratology. Foreign Literature, 2, 95-111.
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Song, M. (2011). The Innovation of Narrative Techniques in Once Upon a Time by John Barth. Foreign Languages and Their Teaching, 4, 88-91.
