Boisterous, Hilarious, Satirical, Epic Frolic Set in Seventeenth Century London and Colonial MarylandA Goodreads buddy described this book as "a rollicking tale". Good description.Don't expect brevity or logic here.I already knew Barth was a formidable and unique writer, since I'd read and loved Lost in the Funhouse a long time ago.The Sot-Weed Factor is an entirely different type of novel. So Barth, like the most brilliant writers, is extremely versatile and has proven he can write well in completely different styles. Barth's lengthy novel, written with very authentic dialogue (and, in the texts-within-the texts, written style) of the times, tracks the innumerable adventures of one Ebenezer Cooke, who was born in England in 1666 and died in Maryland in 1732 (or at least that's the arc of the novel). Our hero is based on a real poet, Ebenezer Cook (sometimes spelled Cooke) who lived around the same time and wrote a biting satirical poem scourging life in Maryland entitled "The Sot-Weed Factor". (In the idiom of that time, a sot-weed factor is a tobacco dealer). Little is known of the real Ebenezer Cook. This real poem and poet are obviously the source of Barth's title and his main character. The poem is also the source of certain basic plot elements. But that's like saying a vegetable is the source of a culinary masterpiece or a simple tune is the source of a complex jazz piece. Barth, our chef/jazzman (expressing himself through his characters) creates complex riffs on the original undreamed of by the real Cook.Ebenezer Cooke is a genuine horse's ass at the beginning of the novel. He's pompous, pretentious, and hoarding his innocence (both of life and of sex) like it's gold (although at least in the beginning of the book, he's quite reserved). Only later on does he start trumpeting his virtues. He's about to flunk out of Cambridge, since he's started dabbling with writing verse . Ebenezer is also paralyzed by a lack of direction. His problem is that he finds every path in life equally appealing and cannot decide between them.In the book's opening paragraph, Barth describes Ebenezer thus:"IN THE LAST YEARS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THERE WAS TO BE found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point"Ebenezer gets a surprise visit in his Cambridge rooms from his former tutor, Henry Burlingame. Burlingame had disappeared for no apparent reason after teaching Ebenezer and his twin sister, Anna, at the estate of their father, Andrew, in St. Giles in the Fields. Burlingame was a fantastic teacher and curious about all subjects and the world in general. Ebenezer's indecision about his life's path is in part a result of Burlingame's eclectic tutelage, that made all life paths seem equally desirable.Burlingame, hearing that Ebenezer is about to be kicked out of Cambridge, explains his disappearance (Andrew Cooke had presumed that Burlingame had designs on Anna, and fired him on the spot). He also proposes a business venture: that Ebenezer should join him in London in a tutoring business. "Unhappy day!" laughed Ebenezer. "I've no skill in any craft or tradewhatever. I cannot even play Flow My Tears on the guitar. I can do nothing/'"Then 'tis plain you'll be a teacher, like myself.""'Sheart! Twould be the blind leading the blind!""Aye,* smiled Burlingame. "Who better grasps the trials of sightlessnessthan he whose eyes are gone?""But what teach? I know something of many things, and enough ofnaught.""I'faith, then the field is open, and you may graze where you list.""Teach a thing I know naught of?" exclaimed Ebenezer."And raise thy fee for't," replied Burlingame.Ebenezer decides he's no teacher, and goes home to face his father. Andrew Cooke decrees that Ebenezer must apprentice as a clerk for a time in London and then sail to Maryland to oversee Andrew Cooke's estate there, Malden.Ebenezer has no talent for or interest in, clerking either: "He would begin to add a column of totally meaningless figures and realize five minutes later that he'd been staring ata wen on the neck of the boy in front of him, or rehearsing in his mind areal or imaginary conversation between himself and Burlingame, or drawingmazes on a bit of scratch-paper. For the same reason, though he hadby no means the troublemaker's temperament, his untamable fancy morethan once led him to be charged with irresponsibility: one day, for example, scarcely conscious of what he was about, he involved himself entirely in a game with a small black ant that had wandered across the page."He spends several years in London and "fares unspectacularly" in Barth's words.He then gets himself into more trouble (he seems to have a knack for getting into trouble and dragging everyone around him into it). He falls in love with a whore, the humorously named Joan Toast, and refuses to pay John McEvoy, her pimp and lover, on the grounds that he cannot bring himself to pay for a woman he has fallen in love with.McEvoy then mails a letter to Andrew declaring that Ebenezer has been spending time with whores, not advancing in his job, etc. As a result, Andrew sends Ebenezer to Maryland.Before Ebenezer leaves London, he dresses up in his best (and humorously depicted) finery and pays a call on Lord Baltimore, persuading him to make him Poet Laureate of Maryland.Ebenezer commences to have many misadventures, including multiple captures by pirates, several near drownings, being robbed of all his worldly goods (several times), being captured by Indians, etc. He also commits a petty theft of his own after nearly getting in a duel with a stationery/book seller who drives him crazy by offering him too many notebook options (slim cardboard quarto with unlined paper, thick leather quarto with lined paper, etc.) Ebenezer hates options because, since they are all equally attractive to him, he can never choose between them. He encounters various shady characters (such as the aptly named Captains Slye and Scurry), shysters, quacks, shady lawyers, golden-hearted whores and disreputable women, pirates, thieves, spies, traitors, imposters, rebellious Natives and slaves, Indian kings, etc. But others often take Eben himself for a madman.The novel is a comedy of errors (albeit with a somewhat sobering postscript).The themes of trickster, criminals, and especially disguises and mistaken and faked identities pervade the entire book (as well as that of twins). We also have changes in social and cultural identities occurring on a regular basis (certain characters switch between being Indians and being English colonists; others morph from being servants to being gentlemen (and vice versa). Burlingame disappears and reappears at regular intervals in both England and Maryland. He assumes various disguises and identities (many of which don't become obvious until later in the book). He's a master trickster. He's also clearly a spy, although for whom is not clear until the novel's end. Orphaned Burlingame is also obsessed with finding his parentage and origins. Ebenezer helps with this task.The Laureateship causes multiple problems. It engenders numerous "Ebenezer Cooke" impersonators, who of course, also cause Ebenezer trouble.Also, coincidences abound (many of which strain credulity, but credulity is not the point here). Or as Barth puts it:” Lest it be objected by a certain stodgy variety of squint-minded antiquarians that he has in this lengthy history played more fast and loose with Clio, the chronicler's muse, than ever Captain John Smith dared, the Author here posits in advance, by way of surety, three blue-chip replies arranged in order of decreasing relevancy. In the first place be it remembered, as Burlingame himself observed, that we all invent our pasts, more or less, as we go along, at the dictates of Whim and Interest; the happenings of former times are a clay in the present moment that will-we, nill-we, the lot of us must sculpt... Moreover, this Clio was already a scarred and crafty trollop when the Author found her; it wants a nice-honed casuist, with her sort, to separate seducer from seduced. But if, despite all, he is convicted at the Public Bar of havingforced what slender virtue the strumpet may make claim to, then the Authorjoins with pleasure the most engaging company imaginable, his fellow fornicators, whose ranks include the noblest in poetry, prose, and politics"Ebenezer runs into many of the same people he met in London (or who showed up in others' tales) again and again in Maryland. Many of them turn out to have (previously unknown) connections to others in Ebenezer's life. Ebenezer also encounters new characters in Maryland , such as Mary Mungommery "The Travelling Whore of Dorchester" and Harvey Russecks, a trapper. There are a couple of key players who (possibly---we are never certain) never actually appear in person in the novel. We are not really sure if they exist or not. The themes of shifting and uncertain identities were also explored by Barth in Lost in the Funhouse There's plenty of meta here. There are innumerable (and very entertaining) tales within tales. In fact, it seems like almost every person Ebenezer encounters has a yarn to tell. There are also a couple of manuscripts (memoirs) within the novel, not to mention Ebenezer's poetry. Maybe that's why Barth insists this is "postmodern", although I really don't see that it is. Ebenezer does evolve through the novel. He goes from being a terrible poet to a pretty good one. He also realizes that the innocence he's set such store on is not worth as much as he thought. Innocence (and its loss) is also a theme throughout the book.This is a kind of picaresque novel crossed with a Bildungsroman. And it's remiscent of novels of that time period, such as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Anyway, this novel is hilarious and great fun to read, although I do admit it seemed a bit long (although its length is probably appropriate for its epic sweep).Kevin Pariseau does an absolutely masterful job of reading the audio and voicing the different characters. I read along in the Kindle book and the PDF version, both of which are available free online, since I think this novel might now be in the public domain.Here's a link to the original poem: http://pages.uoregon.edu/rbear/sotwee...Thanks to Ian Pagan-Szary for this link. Also thanks to Ian for suggesting we do a "buddy read" on this, which inspired me to tackle this long book sooner rather than later.
Well-loved books from my pastRating: 5 golden stars of five, with a rapturous yodel cluster The Publisher Says: Considered by critics to be Barth's most distinguished masterpiece, The Sot-Weed Factor has acquired the status of a modern classic. Set in the late 1600s, it recounts the wildly chaotic odyssey of hapless, ungainly Ebenezer Cooke, sent to the New World to look after his father's tobacco business and to record the struggles of the Maryland colony in an epic poem. On his mission, Cooke experiences capture by pirates and Indians; the loss of his father's estate to roguish impostors; love for a farmer prostitute; stealthy efforts to rob him of his virginity, which he is (almost) determined to protect; and an extraordinary gallery of treacherous characters who continually switch identities. A hilarious, bawdy tribute to all the most insidious human vices, The Sot-Weed Factor has lasting relevance for readers of all times. My Review: The book description is a bit weak-kneed, but I can't find a better one, and I detest writing the book reports with a passion.A couple months ago, I started a re-read of this book that did not go well. I sighed. I snorted. I rolled my eyes, and cut up rough whenever we got into the book's faux-antique Englysshe. I was responding to it like it was a phauntaiysee nawvelle with majgickq and other such borderline-criminal goins-on. I put it aside, and I forgot it, except to renew it online from the Port Washington liberry.Damn me anyway! Why can't I listen to my REAL self?! John Barth, my Real Self murmured, John Barth of The Floating Opera and this book which you adored thirty years ago, he deserves better than this, to which Angry Self replied, “Shut up you! Seven hundred plus pages of this phauntaaahsticall-ness will make us homicidal! Why not encourage me to read Dickens or Tolkien if all you want to is encourage me to massacre random strangers? Silence! Begone!”Damn me! What an ass! I read the first six chapters and tossed the book aside! But...I did keep renewing it....And today, today with two days left on my final renewal, to-goddam-day I pick the book up again. And I read the first paragraph/line. And oh damn me! Damn me! How beautiful, how simply and completely perfect it is, and how I wish I could boil Angry Me in oil!In the last years of the seventeenth century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.Oh. Oh oh oh oh. I just had a crisis.Now I *could* just power through the seven hundred-plus remaining pages in the next two days, ignoring all other beings and duties...to the detriment of our carpets, as the dog would be on her own re: eliminatory functions, and the complete bumfuzzlement of my houseys as I would not be showing up at the station to fetch them...but it's not on. It's just not. This isn't a book to be got through, it is a book to be appreciated, savored, delighted in.I will await the tides of fortune washing a copy of my own back up on the shores of my private liberry. It is worth the wait. The rapturous narcosis of my first immersion has returned. Thirty years are as but a moment. John Barth is still there, his words as gorgeously deployed as ever they were. Delightful. Delightful.Damn me anyway! This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
What do You think about The Sot-Weed Factor (2005)?
Joel bought me something several years ago for xmas. I already owned it. He kept that copy and asked, teeth gritted, what I wanted. I suggested this and read it over the holidays, particularly one hungover party at my parents'. Punning and ribald, it must be situated just below Pynchon, specifically Mason and Dixon. It is disquieting how polarizing otherwise literate people are concerning Mason and Dixon. One should read the Sot-Weed Factor if at all concerned with the undulating comic possibilities of the Pox.
—Jonfaith
This book is kind of nuts.In a good, hilarious way, I mean."I am Ebenzer Cooke, Poet and Laureate of this province.""Well, I was once called the Traveling Whore o' Dorset, but I don't boast of't." Ebenzer Cooke has been waving his title in everyone's faces. So have been many others. Maryland is infested with poet laureates called Ebenzer Cooke. Henry Burlingame, on the other hand, is singlehandedly filling many shoes as he goes on a Mission Impossible-esque spree of changing disguises. Joan Toast is diligently working at supplying pox to the Indians. King Hicktopeake's ravenous Queen had been keeping, not only the king, but all men in the town perpetually fatigued. Highly confusing provincial politics and conspiracies are constantly afoot. An uproarious cast of characters is strewn all over the province. Their paths often criss-cross in such ways as to make it look like a bad case of Twister - where the proprietorship of hands, feet, torsos is difficult to ascertain. Hilarity ensues.Unlearned in matters of the real world, Ebenezer Cooke soars high on wings of fancy and blissful ignorance. When forced to come up with an improvised bum-swab, he summons his knowledge of philosophy, history and literature. He has a way of jumping out of frying pan to land straight into the fire, a bit of a 'wrong place wrong time' syndrome. When he is is lucky enough, someone comes along to pull him out of the ditch, only to drop him into a bog later."His chair rose from the floor, passed through the roof of Malden, and shot into the opalescent sky. As for Maryland, it turned blue and flattened into an immense musical surface, which suavely slid northwestwards under seagulls."Perhaps my favorite thing about The Sot-Weed Factor is how it upholds the tradition of oral storytelling. Several episodes are incidents being leisurely related by one character to another, each story-teller adding a bit of his/her own color to the story. Some even care to drop a nugget of wisdom or two.“Only the wittol can know he is no cuckold and only a dead man is safe from death.”Some of the stories being told are incredible enough to find a place in 'Ripley's Believe it or Not'. Many of the episodes that I was convinced could only be tall tales concocted to fool Ebenezer, turned out to be true. While some things I had believed, were revealed to be made-up truths. Who am I to call Ebenzer gullible then! There is no telling how the tide will turn in Barth's world. One small happenstance can set a contraption in motion leading to big, comic consequences.Barth's ribald, irreverent, comic adventure has a lot going for it. Except the length, methinks. After a point, it does exude a 'joke being told one time too many' feeling. In any case, I did make it to the end of the story where the oh so polite author apologized. Ebenzer's ordeal ended and he had a chance to lie down to rest and perhaps sink back into his dreams and reveries. “To me she is a woman. To you she’s a hallucination.”___________________________________I am willing to turn a blind eye if someone*** wants to steal a bunch of pages from my copy. This thing is too damn long. Though tons of fun, too.*** Jay Rubin - wink wink nudge nudge.
—Megha
This may be the funniest book I have ever read. The story follows Ebenezer Cooke, who actually existed, and actually wrote a poem called The Sot-Weed Factor. The novel itself is Mr. Barth's imagining of what led Eben to write such a disillusioned satire about his terrible experience in Maryland. He is vexed along the way by a revolving door cast of characters, gets a lesson in Maryland history (my personal favorite scene, because it's basically about how Virginia and Pennsylvania have been trying to fuck over Maryland for as long as they have existed - a stance I maintain in the present), comes across what amounts to the Very Secret Diary of Captain John Smith of Pocahontas fame... the latter is also quite a comedic treat, although absurd and irreverent, but damn, it is hilarious. This is a long book - over 700 pages, and it took a long time to read because it is written in the style of an 18th-century historical novel. Eben's idiotic and ridiculous adventures are worth the wait. One particular scene where the characters come across a court that makes a complete mockery of justice may well be the most a book has ever made me laugh.
—Mark
