The Fiction of Correspondence: Letters and History
Were he French, John Barth might have titled his 1979 novel LETTERS with a similarly self-reflexive pun to emphasize its preoccupation with textuality and the American past: "histoire."1 English may demand that we choose between "history" and "story," but the French term broadmindedly embraces both, extends the range of signification even to "idle story, untruth, falsehood," and suspends questions of verifiability or referentiality. History, in LETTERS, plays across this entire range of textual possibility even as it spans three centuries of American revolution and social unrest, Indian conspiracy, diplomatic intrigue, and civil rights struggle, and crosses and recrosses borders from the Niagara Frontier and Chesapeake backwaters to Elba and St. Helena. "While I don't conceive the work in hand to be a historical novel," writes the Author to one of the seven characters whose correspondence constitutes LETTERS, "I evidently do have capital-// History on my mind" (431)Â—a history at