John Barth: Lost in the Funhouse (1968)

John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse is metafiction’s degree zero. Barth’s “pieces” take literary self-reflexivity to a solipsistic extreme that few other authors have attempted to match. The pattern is quickly established with the first piece, “Frame-Tale,” which instructs the reader to construct a Mobius Strip by tearing out the page and twisting and then taping its sides together, creating an endless story that reads: “Once Upon a Time There was a Story That Began Once Upon a Time. . . .” Most of the pieces that follow continue this attack on linear literary realism (as well as on the conventions of modernism) by either persistently commenting on the techniques used by traditional literature, even while subversively using them, or offering up disembodied, self-composing discourses that reflect on their textual being. The title piece, “Lost in the Funhouse,” insistently adds meta-comments on everything from the naming of cities in 19th-century fiction to the proper use of physical descriptions. These comments not only puncture any tendencies toward realism, but also directly obstruct the linear development of the plot. For example, the piece comments near its beginning on the purpose of beginnings: “The function of the beginning of a story is to introduce the principal characters, establish their initial relationships, set the scene for the main action, expose the background of the situation if necessary, plant motifs and foreshadowings where appropriate, and initiate the first complication or whatever of the ‘rising action.’” But as these meta-comments multiply, the plot gets sidetracked, producing the fear that the story will never really get started, not to mention completed: “So far there’s been no real dialogue, very little sensory detail, and nothing in the way of a theme. . . . We haven’t even reached Ocean City yet: we will never get out of the funhouse.” Later on, as the protagonist, Ambrose, wanders, lost in the funhouse, the text contemplates different possible endings, dividing itself into a kind of garden of forking paths. By including diagrams of the arcs of conventional narratives, Barth only pushes the text further from any conventional conclusion. The result is an echo of Beckett: “This can’t go on much longer; it can go on forever.” “[T]he plot doesn’t rise by meaningful steps but winds upon itself, digresses, retreats, hesitates, sighs, collapses, expires. The climax of the story must be its protagonist’s discovery of a way to get through the funhouse. But he has found none, may have ceased to search.” The pleasures of traditional literary forms are lost from sight, but the protagonist manages to resign himself to the conditions of life in the metafictional funhouse: “He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he’s not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator – though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.” The piece “Title” most explicitly defends Barth’s dismantling of literary tradition. The text regularly underscores the excessive reflexivity of the contemporary writer through interventions such as randomly substituting grammatical terms for syntactical elements: “The novel is predicate adjective, as is the innocent anecdote of bygone days when life made a degree of sense and subject joined to complement by copula.” “Title” offers three possibilities (besides silence and extinction) for literature in this late, reflexive era: “The first is rejuvenation: having become an exhausted parody of itself, perhaps a form . . . may rise neoprimitively from its own ashes. A tired prospect. The second, more appealing I’m sure but scarcely likely at this advanced date, is that moribund what-have-yous will be supplanted by vigorous new: the demise of the novel and short story . . . needn’t be the end of the narrative art.” The third possibility, “a temporary expedient,” “is to turn ultimacy, exhaustion, paralyzing self-consciousness and the adjective weight of accumulated history. . . . Go on. Go on. To turn ultimacy against itself to make something new and valid, the essence whereof would be the impossibility of making something new.” In his manifesto for metafiction, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” Barth explains his argument more fully. Expressing an admiration for Beckett and, especially, Borges, Barth praises the latter’s “Pierre Menard” as “a remarkable and original work of literature, the implicit theme of which is the difficulty, perhaps the unnecessity, of writing original works of literature. His artistic victory, if you like, is that he confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work.” For Barth, the most interesting literature takes its limiting conditions – in this case, the impossibility of creating something new – and makes them the foundation for new works. The piece “Life-Story” pre-emptively responds to potential accusations that Barth’s metafiction is hollow and pleasureless. The speaker is a writer who has come to “suspect that the world is a novel, himself a fictional personage.” Despite this metafictional theme, the speaker hopes to “to tell his tale from start to finish in a conservative, ‘realistic,’ unself-conscious way.” Like his wife and child, he hates the avant-garde, preferring the traditional comforts of a writer like Updike. So when it slowly dawns on him that he is a character in a Barth story, he states, “It’s particularly disquieting to suspect not only that one is a fictional character but that the fiction that one’s in – the fiction one is – is quite the sort one least prefers.” He more strongly states his distaste for this kind of fiction in an outburst: “Another story about a writer writing a story! Another regressus in infinitum! Who doesn’t prefer art that at least overtly imitates something other than its own processes? That doesn’t continually proclaim ‘Don’t forget I’m an artifice!’?” Ultimately, the reader’s attention is held responsible for his intolerable existence: “You dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it’s you I’m addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You’ve read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don’t go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where’s your shame?”