John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse (New York, NY, Anchor Books, a division of Random House: 1988), first published 1968.
What does it mean to find a "typo" in an avowedly experimental work of fiction? How is one to sort out the deliberate eccentricities from the copy-editor's mistakes? Would it even make sense to speak of there being a misspelling in an edition of, say, Finnegans Wake?
Identifying errata in Barth's celebrated and groundbreaking collection of postmodern metafiction, Lost in the Funhouse, presents some of these same difficulties. Still, even after making allowances for such idiosyncratic but accepted variants as "enounce," and even after acknowledging that there are more than a few instances in these stories where the author plainly intended to repeat phrases or pass off odd locutions, as some of his narrative experiments--even then, I find, there are a few places in the current print edition where the misspellings appear to serve no literary function, and which I feel confident in stating were mere errata. For the convenience of future editors, I list them below.
I perform this service most of all to serve my inner obsessive compulsions; but I hope it also serves to make it easier to bring out future editions of the book. For this is a great work that deserves the attention of future generations. To be sure, some of Barth's experiments have aged better than others. If one feels, in reading a story about the author's inability to think up a story, say, that one has encountered the same thing from the laziest student in a creative writing exercise, then all one can say is that someone had to be the first to do it, and if such involuted jokes now seem trite in literature, it's only because Barth first put them into print.
More importantly, for all that these stories are occasionally accused of excessive postmodern cleverness, the experiment is always in the service of themes that are timeless and universal--hence, fundamentally unpretentious at root. Running through the stories in different ways is a persistent conflict between the will to life-- the Id, the Dionysian impulse to procreate and enjoy-- and an intellectualized revulsion against the project of perpetuating the human species, given the necessary misery than life entails--a sense that "love" and "life" are fundamentally cruel at heart, because they pass on the despair and existential anguish to future generations and keep the brutal comedy going.
Thus, for example, the stories feature a set of conjoined twins, one of whom lives the life of the mind, the other of whom--literally and figuratively--is responsible for all of their shared lower functions. Another story describes the journey of a spermatozoon that is having an existential crisis as it contemplates its ultimate annihilation and self-transcendence when it merges with the egg. Another--the title story in fact-- offers us a protagonist who realizes that the "point of the funhouse" at an ocean-front resort is to encourage the pairing-off of couples, and who realizes in despair that it is his purpose in life to make funhouses--read, literary creations of the sort we are presently enjoying--for others to mate and copulate in, but never to enter them himself. Everywhere we see a divorce, or at least conflicted dialogue, between superego and id, intellect and passion.
In short, the ambivalent attitude to love and life, the sense that the redemption of human life may exist in nothing other than creating new life with others, but also that to perpetuate human life and create more of it is only to prolong the misery of the species and inject more existential anguish into a world that offers no final answers--this tension appears time and again in the stories, under multitudinous guises. But what then are we to make of the author's own self-conscious participation in the ordinary process of living, loving, and procreating? Why did he not follow the spermatazoon's advice to "terminate this aimless, brutal business"? To the extent we glimpse the author at all in these tales, after all, he is leading a fairly conventional existence, with marriage and family.
Here, perhaps, is the root of the other fundamental anxiety driving this set of stories. In one of the collection's especially reflexive stories, the author even observes that among his primal fears is the terror of "impotence creative and sexual." We've covered the sexual angst of the book above; but what of the creative? Here, it is partly the author's own self-confessedly bourgeois existence that gives him concern. Is leading a normal life not fundamentally fatal to the artistic enterprise? Must creation not be wrung from experience, which is inseparable from suffering, and therefore defeated ipso facto wherever life runs in accepted and commodious channels?
And here we find the second great theme of the collection, which is explored through the lens of a ancient Greek bard in one tale who sails away from his home and lover in order to gain fodder for his storytelling, but ends up isolated and marooned at sea--but also more directly through the reflexive stories in this collection that discuss, in the very act of demonstrating it, the phenomenon that Barth elsewhere characterized--in a related essay-- as the "exhaustion" of literature. Perhaps life itself, in the democratic West's midcentury, had attained so fundamentally stable and comfortable a form--perhaps we had become such a conventional, prosperous, and agreeable middle class society--that real experience had become impossible, real suffering had been banished, and therefore literature had, as Barth put it in that same essay, fundamentally "shot its bolt"?
It is a common criticism of Barth and the other postmodern authors of his generation, after all, that they inhabited an ivory tower that kept them at a safe distance from life and therefore robbed them of anything meaningful and true to say about the human experience--forcing them therefore to write merely about the act of writing itself, in a sterile recursive loop. Gore Vidal in an essay on this topic once lambasted this set of authors as a generation of "schoolteachers," and indeed, most of them were academics throughout their careers. The sinecure of the mid-century professor in the groves of academe now seems one of near-Confucian-scholar-bureaucrat privilege and ease, compared to the state of the academic job market today, and so it's easy to see what Vidal had in mind. Such an existence, we feel inclined to scoff, was not "real life."
One likewise grasps Mordecai Richler's point when he confessed in an essay to the shame he felt at the relative triviality of the concerns and themes of his generation of writers, when compared to those of the generation before them--swashbuckling revolutionaries and politically-engagé world-historical travelers like André Malraux and Arthur Koestler. Placing the writings of a generation that fought the fascists in Spain next to those of a generation that taught nineteen-year-olds in a cozy college town for several decades does force a stark comparison. This is perhaps partly what was on Barth's mind when he has his anonymous Greek minstrel describe his sense of being left out of the main currents of life: he speaks, for instance, of the Trojan war as something fundamentally irrational, and yet admits he longed to be a part of it as a way to understand reality-- a means of pursuing what he elsewhere calls "the siren Experience."
But if the experience of Barth's generation is precisely that they were denied experience--that they were left out of the real struggle of life-- then that is precisely the material out of which they must make their literature. And this, ultimately, is Barth's decision and his lesson. Paralyzed at first by the apparent impossibility of literature in a world that has abolished experience and relegated the artist to a life of indolent comfort and satiety, he eventually comes to see that the impossibility of literature under such conditions is precisely the theme and subject of the new sort of literature to which those conditions must give rise. If the exhaustion of literature is to yield new literary forms, they must be the literature of exhaustion.
As Barth writes in one of the more reflexive and essayistic stories in the collection: "The final possibility is to turn ultimacy, exhaustion, paralyzing self-consciousness [...] against itself to make something new and valid, the essence whereof would be the impossibility of making something new." (The story then goes on to ironically reject such a suggestion, but Barth himself forwarded the same idea in his earlier essay on the "Literature of Exhaustion," where he appears to endorse it.) To make the impossibility of saying something new into saying something new is Barth's great project in this collection of stories. That is what he here attempts to give us.
And since, in my view, he largely succeeded, and this work therefore deserves further reprintings and the attention of future generations of readers, I offer the above-mentioned errata now. I offer my apologies and retraction if any of these were intentional on experimental grounds, and I simply missed the point:
p. 66 "the eginning [sic]"
p. 91 "she'd lie awake thing about him[...]" sic--should be "thinking"
p. 92 "and to Wester Civilization"
p. 133 "perhaps the salin were better men" sic--should be "slain"
p. 134 "To matters worse" sic--missing the "make"
p. 135 "wrath-of-Archilles"
p. 148 "As as his king and skipper"
p. 173 "impoissible"
No comments:
Post a Comment