Notes on "Lost in the Funhouse" (author, John Barth)

In reading this layered collection for the first time, I'm struck by how much more I'll be able to get from it if and when I deepen my grounding in both critical theory and the works to which this book alludes. I'll have some questions and comments on which of the theory books to read at the bottom of this post.

The author's explicit intention seems to be to have us file this book under “meta-fiction”: the book is as much about the many layered process of continual story creation as it is a collection of stories. I'm struck by the structure of the collection as a whole and it's thematic drive, the way in which all of the entries in the collection return to the same images and themes. One image is the image of things swarming towards a goal, be it the protagonist-as-sperm-cell in “Night-Sea Journey”, the honey bees in “Ambrose, His Mark”, or the crowds of people swarming to Ocean City. In “Lost in the Funhouse”, one of young Ambrose's epiphanies, rightly or wrongly, is that all of the sights and sounds and doings of Ocean City are either funhouse misdirections from, or funnels to, the essential sexual experience that most of the people are really there to have.

There is a recurring theme of paternity and authorship. In the Ambrose stories, there is an implied triangular relationship between Ambrose's mother and his father and uncle. Who really is his father? Who really is the author of a story? If there is an author telling a story, who or what is telling the story that contains the author? Barth gets into that theme right away in “Night-Sea Voyage”. There is a narrator sperm cell who gives us his experience of this voyage, and even a “prophet” sperm cell who senses the purpose and probable futility of their urgent voyage, and perhaps the similar futility, occurring at a higher level, of the “God” who created the sperm cell, himself created or produced by larger forces which in turn, etc, etc. (I noticed just now why it is such a convenience for Barth to cut his sentences off...)  The prophet sperm cell is - of course - put to death by the others.

Barth returns to this kind of recursive thinking throughout the book, although it is expressed most directly in the first story and in "Menelaiad". In "Menelaiad", Barth nests the narration of the story more and more deeply in the quoted voices of one character recounting what another character has recounted. Barth divides this story into subsections, each numbered according to the level of the recursion they are in, so that when Menelaus talking to himself (1) tells Telemachus and Peisistratus (2) what he told then-Helen on the ship heading home from Troy (3) what Proteus (4) has asked him, etc etc. (Prior sentence cut off intentionally, a la Barth.) The effect seems to be to strain the mechanisms of story telling so much that we can begin to see cracks in the funhouse wall of written language, we can see its own pulleys and levers (as Ambrose does in the title story). This was a striking effect for me, because having had that particular image implanted in “Lost in the Funhouse”, I saw it arising naturally as a metaphor in my experience of reading “Menelaiad”.

Barth has a field day whenever a moment arises when all characters, at all levels of the nesting, make the same comment or express surprise at the same time. There is no convention for this, so Barth makes up his own, trying to solve the problem differently each time. Barth hilariously deals with the all-levels-exclamation one time by bracketing quoted exclamations together so that characters within the same level are grouped together. Another time, he simply nests an exclamation point in seven levels of quotation marks, throwing in (I'm not sure why) parentheses, also. At one point he backs out of the nesting the old-fashioned way: I cried”'”, I cried'”, I cried”, I cry.

In the story “Lost in the Funhouse”, it is unclear to me whether I am reading an author intentionally breaking into the narrative with meta-fiction asides to his reader, or whether I am meant to read this as the sensibility of the closely followed protagonist, Ambrose, or whether I am meant to see Ambrose as the author. This fuzziness I take as an intentional effect produced by Barth, for soon after, in “Title” he writes of “the obvious possibility that the narrator and his companion may be mistaken for the narrator and his companion".

Also, as I began to see it, just as the funhouse is shown as a metaphor for the creation of stories, the language and culture based reality in which both the author and his protagonist operate is also shown to be a funhouse, a funhouse filled with misdirections, leanings, and distortions in perception. Barth does sell me on this endless layering of levels of story telling, so that you do sense how the author himself is in a story, the story told by, at the least, his culture and language, with probably the additional layers of the forces that produce language and culture implied behind other layers as well.

Another theme is of course the protean nature of stories and Barth gives us Proteus, himself. But he doesn't stop with just form-changing in stories: he returns to the brackish waters that contain story and storyteller and listener and melts the boundaries between them. The climax of the Menelaiad is when Menelaus realizes that Proteus may have changed into Menelaus-holding-Proteus and thus caused both to cease to exist. But yet, a "Menelaus" is still there, telling the story (and wondering about this).

I'm interested in how Barth is able to shift from one level of attendance in a story to another – to speak first to a reader, and then to a meta-reader about the methods he's using to speak to the first reader - without having us lose the thread of his stories themselves, but I can't say I can point to a specific technique he employs. It seems he chooses different techniques for different entries in this collection. In the title story, he has his narrator talk about how one might write the story about the incidents described, while in Menelaid, he doesn't speak directly to the reader but still changes this “level of attendance” using the nested narrators. I find the approach used in the title story the most effective, and the ambiguity around who's doing the “meta” talking (is it the author or is it Ambrose in free indirect style?) gives the experience of reading the story more texture.

Language was something else that stood out for me. The narrator of his Ambrose stories creates new comparative adjectives by adding “er” to roots. Thus, his face grew “ashener” or a fortune telling booth was “dilapiter”. In the Menelaiad, all narrators, Menelaus (who ultimately tells us the story), Menelaus with Helen, Proteus, and so forth all seem to speak in the same voice. There is, for one thing, a propensity for words compounded into new word forms by dashes (e.g., “whisked in a dream-dark boat, sleep-skippered”). The dashed compound words create striking rhythms and in some ways they recall Gerard Manly Hopkins. Could it have been an intentional reference to that poet's work and style? More likely, may it have referred to the style of “The Odyssey”?

Which brings me to the need for more grounding in theory on my part. I have several decent books, one of my favorites is “In Search of Authority” by Steven Bonnycastle, although that is more of a survey, I have found it to be extremely useful. How would I approach bringing critical theory into my studies as a writer?As for the Odyssey, I've gotten into some Ovid, have been through the Iliad more than once, but not the Odyssey. Which classics are the most important? That one, of course, is unavoidable, but what others?  (I think here, the Google ranking algorithm, which ranks links by what links to them, makes sense: the most important classics are those that the greatest number of other important works allude to and/or are influenced by.)