The tobacco dealer

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The tobacco dealer , English original title The Sot-Weed Factor , is a novel first published in 1960 by the American writer John Barth (* 1930 ). In 1967 a new version of this novel, revised by the author and shortened by 50 pages, appeared, which is considered to be one of the major works of American postmodernism .

The plot is based on the satirical verse epic of the same name, published in 1708 , in which the obscure English poet Ebenezer Cook (approx. 1667–1732) described his unpleasant experiences after his emigration to the North American colony of Maryland. Cook, about whose life hardly anything is known historically, is also the narrator of Barth's work, and here too - mostly in the company of his devious servant - he finds himself in numerous awkward, often grotesque situations in which he in particular repeatedly defends his virginity got to. As in many baroque picaresques (such as Potocki's Die Handschrift von Saragossa ), the plot often vanishes in intricate excursions and changes in narrative levels and instances; In particular, the novel addresses the absurdity of its plot in numerous metafictional explanations and is therefore basically designed as an " anti- novel ".

content

Barth's fictional character of Ebenezer Cook (also alternative spelling Cooke ) was born in 1666 with his twin sister Anna in the North American colony of Maryland. After the mother died in childbirth, the father returned to England and left the children in the care of Henry Burlingame as guardian until Ebenezer attended university. Ebenezer breaks off his studies, however, and is supposed to be prepared in a London office to take over his father's property in Maryland. Although he has not yet written a single line, the young Ebenezer feels called to be a poet and spends most of his free time in the tavern . There he met the prostitute Joan Toast, who he left untouched. He loses a contest with his friends over Joan and his father is forced to pay off his debts. Burlingame named him Poeta laureatus in the mask of Baron Baltimore , the former owner of the colony . Thereupon Ebenezer leaves England with the intention of composing the praises of the colony in a Marylandiad and as a poet to maintain his chastity . Already on the crossing and then during his stay in Maryland, Ebenezer has to endure numerous unimaginable adventures. In the end he loses his innocence to Joan, who has meanwhile been horribly disfigured by drugs and venereal diseases, whom he had in the meantime married without knowing it, and thus regains the inherited property.

Interpretative approach

Despite various reviews of the youth of the protagonist Ebenezer Cook and the early history of the English colony of Maryland as well as several perspectives on the further fate of the characters in the epilogue , the novel concentrates on over 800 pages in great epic breadth mainly on the years 1694 / 95, the crossing to Maryland and the adventures Cook has to endure to take over Malden, his father's property.

On the one hand, Barth takes up the tradition of the historical-critical novel , as developed, for example, by William Makepeace Thackeray in The History of Henry Esmond (1852), but on the other hand he also draws on the genre of the adventure novel , which, for example, in Tobias Smollett's Roderick Random ( 1748) was formed. However , Barth parodies these forerunners in his work; With a skilful imitation of the language of his predecessors, Barth leads the reader through a colorful abundance of love adventures, pirate raids or Indian attacks. The reader remains tense, but at the same time he is repeatedly misled by unbelievable coincidences that call into question the expected reliability or credibility of the narrator .

During the trip, Baths Cook experienced numerous adventures that raise two questions: that of his identity and that of his former tutor Henry Burlingame, and that of his innocence. Cook becomes involved in the clashes of the political parties as a supposed supporter of Lord Baltimore; his life is constantly threatened. He escapes because others usually pretend to be him without his knowledge. In the same way that others claim to be Cook, Lord Baltimore assumes a variety of other roles. Barth's play with the masks, which repeatedly questions the identity of those involved, runs through the entire novel. In the end, Cook's adversary, John Code, cannot be identified; Burlingame disappears and Cook doesn't know who his tutor was or what became of him.

This questioning of identities is based on an image of man, according to which man is “the fool of chance” and the “toy of aimless nature”, nothing more than a “fly in the winds of chaos” ( “Chance's fool, the toy of aimless nature - a mayfly flitting down the winds of chaos ” , p. 372).

If man knew his destiny, he would inevitably go mad. He can only protect himself from this by not worrying about it. But he can seize the nothingness that makes up his soul and shape it according to his will (p. 373). In this nihilistic view man becomes the creator of his own identity. The protagonist of the novel creates this for himself by preserving his innocence as the highest value and his ambition to become a poet. This ambition, in turn, is the basis of Cook's innocence. Burlingame, on the other hand, tries to gain its identity by deciphering its origin. In this way, the identity of the characters in the novel is consistent with their respective search for them. Burlingame disappears from the scene as a person after he has found out his origin; Cook becomes a meaningless writer after being forced to sacrifice his innocence and becoming a laurel-winning poet ; H. was appointed poeta laureatus .

Cook's story of his innocence begins when he resists the temptations of the prostitute Joan Toast: In the end, however, he marries Joan after she has followed him and experienced unimaginable adventures, most of which ended in rape. Ebenezer Cook not only marries her formally, but also consummates it in order to get back his father's property, which had meanwhile fallen to Joan. In his role as a poet, on the other hand, Cook believes that he shouldn't get involved in real life, but in the end he realizes his big mistake: "This was the great mistake I made in starting: the poet must fling himself into the arms of life" (P. 511). In order not to have to reveal his innocence as the emblem of his distance from real life, he had endangered others and, in particular, had driven Joan to doom for good. The consummation of the marriage with Joan is therefore not only motivated by the recovery of the paternal property, but also a penance for the guilt committed to Joan (p. 801). Ironically , at this point in the novel the story of the Fall becomes that of the necessity of the Fall. The stories of the two come to an end with the death of Joan giving birth to their child and Ebenezer's syphilis , who was infected by Joan.

In the story of Burlingame, which is also described in detail in the novel, besides determining identity and origin, it is also about the history of the country in particular and the understanding of history in general. When Burlingame Ebenezer explained the freedom in the colonies (p. 181), he interpreted the newly postulated lack of history of the New World in such a way that the historian first creates the history of this world, just as the individual creates his identity create.

This feasibility of the story is further illustrated in the novel using the discrepancy between Captain John Smith's General Historie of Virginia of 1624 and his secret diary, which of course was fictitiously designed by Barth. In the epilogue, the “author” draws the conclusion or lesson that we would all more or less invent our past. In a pictorial comparison, the past events are referred to as “clay or clay in the moment of the present”, which we would have to “model” for ourselves (“ we all invent our past ... the happenings of former times are as clay in the present moment that ... the lot of us must sculpt ", p. 805). The reality represented in the printed history is revealed as a myth in Smith's secret diary, which Burlingame tracks down . The reality that emerges from the diary is in turn just a new myth that serves to "cover up the chaos with which man is forced to live".

The basic senselessness of a world without God is also reflected in the other branches of the story and themes of the novel . In this chaos, man lives as a plaything of powers that he cannot control. Despite people's attempts to assert themselves in the chaotic world by trying to make sense of it, the fate of the characters in the novel only shows their sinking into chaos or insignificance.

Cook ends up working for or with a certain Nicholas Lowe when the Burlingame last appeared to him. Until the end of his life, he assumed that Burlingame was hiding behind Lowe. In this respect, the world that man creates for himself appears in Barth's novel “not as a will and idea in the Schopenhauer sense, but as a mere fixed idea”. Through the parody of the literary form of the adventure and history novel, The Scot-Weed Factor turns "historical and fictional worlds portrayed as experienced into play material" from which correlations or identities are created in a paranoid form, the realities of which are repeatedly canceled out.

Factory history background

His third novel The Sot-Weed Factor occupies a central position in Barth's literary oeuvre . On the one hand, Barth takes up the nihilism theme of the early novel and develops it further; on the other hand, he tries here for the first time to realize the conception of the novel as a commentary and an imitation and makes a radical departure from realistic tendencies.

In doing so, he imitates and parodies different elements of the genre , which are put together in a hybrid mixture. By reviewers and interpreters Barth's novel has therefore not been classified differently for no reason, and partly as a farce or burlesque epic , partly as anti-Roman , as well as a historical novel or anti-historical novel or parody of the historical novel. In certain respects, all of these classifications and designations apply, but without doing justice to the work as a whole.

The title of the novel suggests Barth's concept of creating a kind of mammoth commentary on the verse satire of the same name by the now little known poet Ebenezer Cook (e), in which the original poem is imaginatively reproduced together with its historical assumptions. The protagonist gets caught up in the intrigue of colonial politics, discards his planned epic, the Marylandiad, under the impression of harsh reality, and instead writes a ridiculous poem. In doing so, Barth rewraps the Sot-Weed Factor with which the historical Ebenezer Cook (e) intended to take revenge on the inhospitable inhabitants of the colony in his day. In his rewording, Barth takes over some passages of the eponymous poem in the wording of the original, changes others and also adds new lines in the original Hudibrastic meter .

The structure of The Sot-Weed Factor anticipates the narrative or structural pattern of the “ride” in Giles Goat-Boy (1966) as a mythical quest . In Giles, however, Barth deliberately processed theories of mythology research that imitate and parody the monomyth , while in The Sot-Weed Factor the object of imitation is primarily the picaresque novel of the 18th century. For example, Fieldings Tom Jones is outdone by an even more nested and complex plot structure. In addition to the straight-line main plot, there are numerous subplots that initially run next to each other like in a tangle, cross each other and seem to start or break off at will, but in the end turn out to be a sophisticated whole in which every episode or character has its place.

In the same way, a large number of typical motifs from the repertoire of the novel in the 18th century, such as uncertain origins, the search for identity, role play or disguises, kidnappings as well as seductions and rape, are recorded and developed in an opulent abundance. At the same time, Ebenezer's disillusionment or maturation process reveals elements of the educational novel , which also refer to Tom Jones (1749) or Smollett's Roderick Random (1748) or Peregrine Pickle (1751). The Sot-Weed Factor also competes linguistically with the novel of the 18th century: the characters speak the English of the Restoration period; the fictional diaries of Captain John Smith and Henry Burlingame's grandfather are philologically exact and yet parodic in Elizabethan English.

Although Barth's third novel differs markedly in style and milieu from the two previous novels, The Sot-Weed Factor shows a striking thematic continuity. Barth himself describes the novel as a continuation of the nihilism series he began with The Floating Opera ; modern nihilism is here anachronistically linked to the cultural milieu at the beginning of the 18th century.

A favorite motif of Barth, the erotic love triangle between two men and a woman, reappears grotesquely in the latent, but partly openly admitted love affair between Ebenezer, his twin sister Anna and Burlingame. Ebenezer and Burlingame, like the male protagonists in The Floating Opera and The End of the Road , embody intellectual doppelgangers who ostensibly represent antithetical varieties of nihilism; the woman functions as a “catalyst for the intellectual and latently erotic conflict between men”. However, the conventional triangular relationship finally turns into a farce when Burlingame bluntly declares his love for both twins and sees therein the principal embodiment of a cosmic dualism.

reception

Barth's novel is understood by various critics as " nihilistic comedy " (Eng. "Nihilistic comedy "). From such a point of view, the paradox of this comedy is that because of the futility of making sense of life and reality, life apparently only becomes possible through the denial of such futility.

The well-known Americanist Hubert Zapf emphasizes the successful design of the "in conventional narrative created and unused possibilities of the rogue and adventure novel " in The Sot-Weed Factor and points out that in addition to the genre-specific reference in Barth's novel, there is also an intertextual reference literary and mythological source texts. The poem of the same name by the actual poet Ebenezer Cook from the early 18th century is taken up by Barth to fictitiously supplement the scanty facts about this writer in his work. According to Zapf, with this “post-modern replenishment”, Barth creates a “kind of metafictional biography in the context of American colonial history”.

According to Zapf, "the ideal of the American Dream , which is associated with the colony of Maryland , the poet's naive innocence and his desire to write a 'Marylandiad' ... are undermined by constant parodies ". According to Zapf, Barth also provides an exemplary example of the “principle of reduction to an essential core” and “expansion in the rampant role-play” that comes into play in postmodern character design with his design of the relationship between the main characters, which is conceived as a triangular relationship.

expenditure

  • The Sot-Weed Factor . Doubleday, New York 1960. (American first edition)
  • The tobacco dealer . German by Susanna Rademacher. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1970. (German first edition)

Secondary literature

  • Christopher Conti: Nihilism Negated Narratively: The Agency of Art in The Sot-Weed Factor . In: Papers on Language & Literature 47: 2, 2011, pp. 141-61.
  • Brian W. Dippie, "His Visage Wild; His Form Exotick": Indian Themes and Cultural Guilt in John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor . In: American Quarterly 21: 1, 1969, pp. 113-121.
  • Alan Holder: "What Marvelous Plot ... What Afoot?" History in Barth's "The Sot-Weed Factor" . In: American Quarterly 20: 3, 1968, pp. 596-604.
  • Franz Link: Experimental Storytelling - The Sot-Weed Factor, 1960 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 325-328.
  • Robert Scott, "Dizzy with the Beauty of the Possible": The Sot-Weed Factor and the Narrative Exhaustion of the Eighteenth-Century Novel . In: Debra Taylor Bourdeau and Elizabeth Kraft (Eds.): On Second Thought: Updating the Eighteenth-century Text . Delaware University Press, Newark 2007, ISBN 9780874139754 , pp. 193-209.
  • Marcin Turski: The Experience of the Frontier in John Barth 'The Sot-Weed Factor . In: Studia Anglica Posnanensia 30, 1996, pp. 183-189.
  • Heide Ziegler: John Barth's 'Sot-Weed Factor' Revisited: The Meaning of Form . In: Amerikastudien / American Studies 25, 1980, pp. 199–206.
  • Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in single representations (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 412). Kröner, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See The Sot-Weed Factor . On: The John Barth Information Center . Retrieved July 21, 2014.
  2. ↑ See Franz Link: Experimental Narrative Art - The Sot-Weed Factor, 1960 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 325.
  3. ↑ See Franz Link: Experimental Narrative Art - The Sot-Weed Factor, 1960 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 325.
  4. ↑ See also Franz Link: Experimental Narrative Art - The Sot-Weed Factor, 1960 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 326.
  5. ↑ See Franz Link: Experimental Narrative Art - The Sot-Weed Factor, 1960 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 326.
  6. ↑ See Franz Link: Experimental Narrative Art - The Sot-Weed Factor, 1960 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 326 f.
  7. ^ Franz Link: Experimental Narrative Art - The Sot-Weed Factor, 1960 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 327.
  8. ^ Franz Link: Experimental Narrative Art - The Sot-Weed Factor, 1960 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 327 f.
  9. ↑ Cf. Dieter Schulz: John Barth . Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1972, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , pp. 371-390, here p. 376.
  10. ↑ Cf. Dieter Schulz: John Barth . Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1972, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , pp. 371-390, here pp. 376f.
  11. ↑ Cf. Dieter Schulz: John Barth . Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1972, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , pp. 371-390, here pp. 377f.
  12. ↑ Cf. Dieter Schulz: John Barth . Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1972, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , pp. 371-390, here pp. 378f.
  13. ↑ See Franz Link: Experimental Narrative Art - The Sot-Weed Factor, 1960 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 328.
  14. ↑ Hubert Zapf : Postmodernism (60s and 70s) - John Barth, The Scot-Weed Factor . In: Hubert Zapf u. a .: American literary history . Metzler Verlag, 2nd act. Edition, Stuttgart and Weimar 2004, ISBN 3-476-02036-3 , p. 338 ff., Especially p. 339.