Word: fabulist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Classed as a black humorist in the '50s, Barth was hailed as a fabulist in the '60s. He was actually becoming a school of one. Following hints in his own work and examples out of Beckett, Borges and Nabokov, he evolved assumptions that increasingly governed his fiction. Among them: the number of stories to tell is finite and dwindling; print has been rendered passe by film and electronics; realism is an irrational goal for the writer (What is real? Whose reality is it?); art rehashes art. Barth's response was to exalt artifice and make telling...
...sultans of Victorian academic painting, the Friths and Poynters and Alma-Tademas, served theirs a century ago-as storytellers. Modern art was supplied with mythmakers, from Picasso to Barnett Newman. But it had few masters of the narrative impulse, and Magritte, a stocky, taciturn Belgian, was its chief fabulist. His images were stories first, paintings second, but the stories were not narratives in the Victorian manner, or slices of life or tableaux of history. They were snapshots of the impossible, rendered in the dullest and most literal way: vignettes of language and reality locked in mutual cancellation. As a master...
...death in 1896, the man's reputation had shrunk to a few yards of chintz and flowered wallpaper. This forceful and articulate genius had receded into a green limbo where Pre-Raphaelite ghosts lisped harmlessly to one another. He was posthumously seen as a backward-looking fabulist, a quaint Victorian period piece. The visions of a great radical socialist were diminished and finally lost. Yet in life they absorbed his greatest energies. "There is no salvation for the unemployed," he wrote in 1887, "but in the general combination of the workers for the freedom of labor-for the REVOLUTION...
...only way they can communicate is through the pictures and symbols on a pack of tarot cards. That seems the borrowed inspiration of a green writer who has been rifling Borges or Nabokov-a novelist who depends on conjury, not creativity. Yet the tarot notion comes from Italian Fabulist Italo Calvino, 53, who has been producing such chimerical conceptions in his books for over 30 years. What is more important, he has consistently fleshed them out in original, whimsical and unsettling ways...
...Cleveland, he heard his father tell of his grandfather who had been a slave. The family took religion very seriously (says Blue, "My daddy wore the Bible out with his eyes,"), and religion remains a very strong facet of Blue's life. Blue began his career as a fabulist by telling stories to his retarded brother, who could neither read nor write, and later died in an institution. One of the few blacks in his neighborhood, Blue recalls a rough childhood. "I'm like a flower who grew up in rocky soil," he says...