The Literature of Exhaustion  

"Every man is not only himself," says Sir Thomas Browne: "Men are lived over again." At one point during my tenure at Penn State, a fellow with the same name as mine in that big-university small town was arrested on charges of molesting a young woman. His interesting defense was that he was a Stanislavsky Method actor rehearsing for the role of rapist in an upcoming student-theater piece. For some while after, his fans occasionally rang me up by mistake. One of them, when enough conversation had revealed his error, said "Sorry: You're the wrong John Barth."--"The Literature of Exhaustion" (1967) by John Barth, incipit of a later introduction to that essay

"A catalogue I received some time ago in the mail, for example, advertises such items as Robert Filliou’s Ample Food for Stupid Thought, a box full of postcards on which are inscribed “apparently meaningless questions,” to be mailed to whomever the purchaser judges them suited for; Ray Johnson’s Paper Snake, a collection of whimsical writings, “often pointed,” once mailed to various friends (what the catalogue describes as The New York Correspondence School of Literature); and Daniel Spoerri’s Anecdoted Typography of Chance, “on the surface” a description of all the objects that happen to be on the author’s parlor table — “in fact, however . . . a cosmology of Spoerri’s existence.”"--"The Literature of Exhaustion" (1967) by John Barth

"Not long ago, incidentally, in a footnote to a scholarly edition of Sir Thomas Browne (The Urn Burial, I believe it was), I came upon a perfect Borges datum, reminiscent of Tlön’s self-realization: the actual case of a book called The Three Impostors, alluded to in Browne’s Religio Medici among other places. The Three Impostors is a nonexistent blasphemous treatise against Moses, Christ, and Mohammed, which in the seventeenth century was widely held to exist, or to have once existed. Commentators attributed it variously to Boccaccio, Pietro Aretino, Giordano Bruno, and Tommaso Campanella, and though no one, Browne included, had ever seen a copy of it, it was frequently cited, refuted, railed against, and generally discussed as if everyone had read it — until, sure enough, in the eighteenth century a spurious work appeared with a forged date of 1598 and the title De Tribus Impostoribus."--"The Literature of Exhaustion" (1967) by John Barth

"I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources."-- A Universal History of Iniquity by Jorge Luis Borges, preface to the 1954 edition