[Barth's aesthetic] embodies a conscious attempt to go beyond Joyce—by going backwards. Like the protagonist of his "Perseid," who must return to Joppa, the scene of his youthful heroics, if he is to go forward with his life, Barth roots his strategy in the Shakespearean realization that fiction is "a kind of true representation of the distortion we all make of life." It is crucial, he feels, to attempt to deal with the discrepancy between art and Reality, and he finds that the most effective way to do so is "to acknowledge right off the bat 'this is artifice'—which, of course, is among other things a sly way of getting around the artifice. It's an old gambit,… particularly popular in Renaissance drama: life is a play, the world's a theatre, existence is a dream, etc., etc." He reasons that "… by continually rubbing the audience's nose in...