“A Bold-Arsed Fraud and Turdsome Lie”: The Use of Fiction to Dismantle Culturally Dominant Narratives in Barth’s “The Sot-Weed Factor”
In The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), his epic retelling of the life of Ebenezer Cooke, the eighteenth-century poet whose best-known work bears the same name, John Barth makes no pretense of sticking to the historical facts. There weren’t many to stick to, actually, in Cooke’s case: scant biographical details were passed down with his poems and elegies (“Ebenezer Cooke”). One of Barth’s achievements in The Sot-Weed Factor is to fill in these historical gaps with fictions that aren’t much more unbelievable than America’s traditional foundational myths. In the process, and with marvelous humor, Barth “deflates” those origin stories — in particular, the one about Pocahontas saving Captain John Smith, as first told by Smith himself in his Generall Historie and then by generations of primary-school teachers to their impressionable young students (Weixlmann 108). Smith’s is only one of many tales about our past the challenging of which has recently been limited in certain American schools. But through the writing (and rewriting) of Cooke’s life, Barth demonstrates the importance of reading (and rereading) history from critical perspectives over clinging to fragile and illusory yet still culturally dominant narratives.
The Sot-Weed Factor’s ambition and scope are vast, its plot seemingly meandering. Written in an English reminiscent of Laurence Sterne and other near-contemporaries of Cooke, its general course follows Ebenezer’s voyage from England to the eastern coast of the “New World,” where his father, Andrew, owns a tobacco plantation. A “rangy, gangling flitch” and self-proclaimed poet who prides himself on (and intends to keep) his virginity, Ebenezer is dubbed Laureate of Maryland by — or so he thinks — Charles Calvert, Lord Baltimore (Barth 3). The role requires him to write a paean of Maryland, which at first seems easy enough. While still crossing the Atlantic, Cooke begins composing lines on the province’s beauty despite not having seen the place in decades. Before he reaches land, however, things begin to slide downhill. Pirates attack his ship, sexually assault the women, and throw Cooke and his servant, Bertrand, overboard, though close to shore. The subsequent series of misfortunes that befall the poet include but are by no means limited to:
- Having his identity stolen by several impersonators, including Bertrand;
- Having his clothes stolen by a lowlife;
- Unwittingly signing away the rights to Malden, his father’s Maryland estate, to one William Smith during a session of an openly corrupt court of law;
- Witnessing the transformation of Malden into a den of thieves and prostitutes;
- Being gaslit by his friend and former tutor, Henry Burlingame III, a protean figure with secretive and questionable motivations;
- Watching helplessly as Joan Toast, a prostitute and the love of his life, is ravaged by poverty and venereal disease.
Each of these events, and others too numerous to mention here, shocks Ebenezer’s psyche, pushes him toward his eventual renunciation and loss of his innocence. (Much of the novel’s humor springs from the sheltered poet’s exposure to the dissolute, dishonest “New World” character. Constantly beset by threats to his virginity, his insistence on maintaining it is less Christlike than Quixotic.) Maryland is not the paradise he’d dreamt of or remembered; it is an Augean stable, a home for criminals, outcasts, and plotters against the province’s loosely established order.
Becoming entangled with the latter leads Cooke to what is arguably the book’s most intriguing invention: John Smith’s Privie Historie, the fictional companion piece to the real explorer’s Generall Historie, published some sixty-odd years before the events in The Sot-Weed Factor. Back in England, the poet had learned from Henry Burlingame III of his one-time mentor’s foggy origins. In his quest to discover them, Burlingame had come across pieces of one Privie Journall, written by his ancestor, Henry Burlingame I, a member of Smith’s party whose hatred of the explorer pervades his writing. In the Journall, Burlingame the First provides a counterpoint to Smith’s grand narrative, going so far as to call it a “lying Historie” (795). Smith’s private writing also gives the lie to his more public chronicle. The version teachers tell their students — the one Smith bequeathed to posterity — has the Captain being rescued from execution by Powhatan’s famous daughter. But in The Sot-Weed Factor, the secret writings tell a different story. Its characters, both explorers and indigenous, are leering, lecherous, always seeking opportunities for sexual conquest. Barth’s alternative account sees Powhatan giving Smith an ultimatum: the Englishman must break his daughter’s hymen, a feat which many men had tried and failed to accomplish, or else he will be put to death. This Smith does not with his own natural endowment but with the aid of an eggplant-based aphrodisiac whose recipe he learned from “the blackamoors of Africka” (798). The concoction does its mysterious work, transforming Smith’s manhood into “a frightful engine” of unnatural proportions (794). His sexual trial with Pocahontas is a public affair, taking place in front of Powhatan and his tribe, and has the air of a sacrifice: in conquering the chief’s daughter, Smith almost kills her, and likely would have but for her father’s intervention (794).
Thus the “civilization” of the “New World” has its roots in rape, rapine, and oppression. Mary Mongommery, “the Traveling Whore o’ Dorset,” tells Ebenezer of her own origin: her mother was assaulted by a clergyman who forced her to say prayers during the violation. Mary relates her traumatic backstory to the poet with a mirth colored by sadness (439). Other victims of this “civilization,” however, are less resigned to it. Ebenezer’s first encounter with an enslaved person sees the man, Drepacca, bound hand and foot, cast overboard by his captors near an island off the coast of Maryland and left for dead (304). Drepacca is a leader of a group of runaway enslaved and indigenous peoples who aim to slaughter every last white colonist in the province. They bear the scars and lashes of white oppression and white violence and plan to respond to it in kind. The prospect of a race war, which Ebenezer comes to fear just as much as the loss of his virginity, hangs over much of the novel’s second half.
In this cauldron of colonized and colonizers, conspiracy theories proliferate. Reflecting the actual historical conditions in late seventeenth-century Maryland, at least to a degree, The Sot-Weed Factor is full of references to popish plots and proposed coups, double agents and colluders, machinations as political as they are religious. (Parties interested in this thematic element could start by looking further into Coode’s Rebellion.) The poet often hears the names of figures partial to revolt — John Coode and “Monsieur Casteene,” to name a couple — but never sees them. For a time, it seems Burlingame, his former tutor, may be posing as one or all of them. As the long-established trust between the two erodes, and as news of Laureate impostors begins to spread across the province, Ebenezer loses his grasp on his identity. The only thing that keeps him tethered to reality is his last resort to critical thought. After yet another of Henry’s bewildering explanations for his strange behavior, Cooke fires back with questions. His response is worth quoting in full:
Then [William] Smith[, the man to whom Ebenezer inadvertently signed his father’s estate away,] is Baltimore’s man and Spurdance [who had previously taken care of it] Coode’s? And how is’t an agent of Baltimore’s is trafficking in whores and opium for Captain Mitchell — which is to say, for Coode? La, methinks expediency, and not truth, is this tale’s warp, and subterfuge the woof, and you’ve weaved it with the shuttle of intrigue upon the loom of my past credulity! In short, ’tis creatured from the whole cloth, that even I can see doth hang all in a piece. ’Tis a fabric of contradictions. (524)
Slowly, he not only comes to realize that his innocence, his childlike credulity, and his unrealistic expectations are untenable; he also sees he’s being lied to: by others and by himself. The reality — or realities — of the situation in Maryland, the series of shocks he’s been exposed to, push him toward his gradual disillusionment. He no longer views the “New World” as a paradise, and it’s around this point in the narrative that he sets to work on his true Marylandiad — “The Sot-Weed Factor” poem as it’s been passed down to us. Barth quotes directly from Cooke’s text as he depicts the poet writing it, after awakening from a hallucinatory dream:
Freighted with Fools, from Plimouth Sound,
To MARYLAND our Ship was bound;
Where we arriv’d, in dreadful Pain,
Shock’d by the Terrors of the Main. (495)
A moment later, he recounts the scene he witnessed in that Maryland court:
The planting Rabble being met,
Their drunken Worships likewise sat,
Cryer proclaims the Noise shou’d cease,
And streight the Lawyers broke the Peace,
Wrangling for Plaintiff and Defendant,
I thought they ne’er wou’d make an End on’t,
With Nonsense, Stuff, and false Quotations
With brazen Lies, and Allegations…. (497)
The injustice of it all disgusts him. But Ebenezer’s new awareness of the harms of colonization extends not only to other colonists: it applies to himself as well. As the poet and his friends are about to be burnt at the stake by the indigenous and formerly enslaved peoples on Bloodsworth Island, he wonders whether he is “not, in short,
bound to his post not merely by the sum of human history, but even by the history of the entire universe, as by a chain of numberless links no one of which was more culpable than any other? It seemed…that he was, and McEvoy [the former pimp of Ebenezer’s love, Joan Toast] was not more nor less to blame than was Lord Baltimore, for example, who had colonized Maryland, or the Genoese adventurer who had discovered the New World to the Old. … [I]t was [the indigenous and enslaved peoples’] exploitation of the English colonists that had rendered them hostile…[and] Ebenezer was a just object for his captors’ wrath, for he belonged…to the class of the exploiters; as an educated gentleman of the western world he had shared in the fruits of his culture’s power and must therefore share what guilt that power incurred. (588–589)
It is Cooke’s previous act of rescuing Drepacca, the enslaved man he found on the beach upon his arrival in Maryland, that saves him and his crew from a fiery doom. With his new realization and his compassion for the oppressed, he makes it his objective to prevent a war from breaking out between exploited and exploiters. At the same time, he plans to strike back at the latter, using legal, peaceful means to retake Malden from the man who’d tricked him out of it. To achieve both goals, he appeals to Governor Francis Nicholson, another historical figure given a fictional second life by Barth. Initially, and importantly, Nicholson deems the poet’s tale a “‘bold-arsed fraud and turdsome lie’” (768). As Barth is known, and frequently critiqued, for the postmodern, self-referential nature of his work (Mazurek), Nicholson’s response can be read in part as Barth commenting on the novel as a whole. The self-reflective irony, of course, is that with the “turdsome lie,” the poet in his tale, like the author in his fiction, is telling the truth.
Beyond telling the truth, though, the poet must live it, or, to borrow a phrase from Václav Havel, to live in it. This requires Ebenezer to acknowledge not only his reality, but reality itself. His half-sister, Henrietta, relates to him The Tale of the Invulnerable Castle, a demonstration of the futility of trying to insulate oneself from reality: Monsieur Edouard was a Count who lived in Maryland and who sought to prevent the “salvages” (the indigenous peoples) from gaining access to his property (725). Edouard built a fortress, first of wood, then of brick; then he shut the windows up with brick and added additional layers of security around the estate to the point that it was dark, airless, and practically unlivable. In the end, the complex “‘burned to the ground from the inside out,’” but not before Edouard murdered the servant who had pointed out the defects in each completed upgrade (731, my emphasis). The absurd lengths to which Edouard went to keep his castle safe are on the same plane as the poet’s comic attempts to retain his virginity.
Toward the novel’s end, however, Ebenezer comes to understand this. Joan Toast, now his wife, though near death, proclaims that she won’t divulge the secret[1] that could save the province from war — unless she gets the rights to Malden. Provided that they consummate their marriage, these rights would then revert to Ebenezer on her passing. Ensuring this would mean not only the loss of his innocence but also the risk of venereal disease, and possibly dying of it. But Ebenezer chooses this anyway, no longer believing in the illusion that his innocence can or should be maintained, much less that it was something to take pride in: “‘the crime I stand indicted for,’” he says, echoing his revelation while tied to the stake, “‘is innocence, whereof the Knowledged must bear the burthen. There’s the true Original Sin our souls are born in: not that Adam learned, but that he had to learn — in short, that he was innocent” (801). Accepting this truth — and reality, unlike Monsieur Edouard — he takes action, based on his new perspective, to make the world a slightly better and more peaceful place.
The lack of biographical facts about Ebenezer Cooke made it possible for Barth to write The Sot-Weed Factor as he did. Barth uses these gaps as entry points from which to launch an experiment in (re)writing and (re)reading culturally dominant narratives. Just as the real Cooke in his poem assails the cruelty and corruption of colonial Maryland, so Barth attacks the sanitization of America’s origin story, with a special focus on Captain John Smith’s Generall Historie. With this work of fiction — with this “turdsome lie” that is also a truth — Barth reminds us that the stories of our past have been recorded and told in ways that may or may not reflect reality, that American history is rich but complicated, filled with as much violence as with the drive for liberty, and that to ignore this violence or to pretend it never happened is as foolish as trying to wall oneself up in a castle forever. We would do well to take heed that, like the poet, we may not be able to halt the march of “civilization,” but that we can, at the very least, and through critical practice and self-reflection, acknowledge its mistakes and then speak out and act for its continuous improvement.
[1] The secret is the novel’s best and longest-running joke. Too long to tell here, it involves John Smith’s eggplant recipe and the micropenis Henry Burlingame III inherited from his grandfather.
Works Cited
Barth, John. The Sot-Weed Factor. New York, Bantam Books, Inc., 1969.
“Ebenezer Cooke.” Literary Maryland Online, http://www.lmo.umd.edu/items/show/59.
Mazurek, Raymond Allan. The Fiction of History: The Presentation of History in Recent American Literature. 1980, Purdue University PhD dissertation.
Weixlmann, Joseph. “‘… such a devotee of Venus is our Capt …’: The Use and Abuse of Smith’s ‘Generall Historie’ in John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor.” Studies in American Humor, vol. 2, no. 2, 1975, pp. 105–115. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42573076?seq=4
