[Morrell is a Canadian educator, nonfiction writer and novelist. Highly acclaimed as a science fiction and fantasy, action, and western writer, he is perhaps best known to popular audiences as the author of the books on which the "Rambo" films starring Sylvester Stallone were based. In the essay below, Morrell discusses those stories in Lost in the Funhouse originally written for tape or live performance. He maintains that although the nonprint media stimulated Barth's interest in oral narrative, Barth ultimately relies on text-based innovations to rejuvenate contemporary fiction.]

The experience of writing two novels so long as The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy had been a great strain on Barth. Together they accounted for almost nine years of his life. Giles alone had taken him more than five, and after that effort, he told an interviewer, he was "not interested in writing another very long book, at least for a while." Instead he wanted to try something quite different, he explained: to compose several small pieces, what he called "fictions." They would have to be arranged in a volume because they would take resonance from each other. But for full effect—and this is what would set them apart from anything else he had written—many would have to be performed on a stage or else recorded on a tape, rather than printed on a page.

The idea had been with him ever since The Sot-Weed Factor was published in 1960. Although not a financial success, that novel had attracted much favorable attention on college campuses, and as a result he had received frequent invitations to read his work at various schools. Sometimes he read sections from the novels he had already published; other times he tested the reception of excerpts from the as-yet-unpublished Giles. But that fiction had been designed to appear in a book, and the more he read in public, the more he considered writing something especially for a voice and an audience. The project was a logical outcome of the determination he had shown in The Sot-Weed Factor to take up old narrative forms and rejuvenate them. After all, the oldest kind of storytelling is oral, and Barth found the virtues of such a medium rare, hence appealing, in an age of print: the dramatic quality of the human voice, plus the intimacy between the storyteller and his audience.

His interest in oral fiction was stimulated when he left Penn State in the fall of 1965 and went to teach at The State University of New York in Buffalo. The English department there had rented the music department's electronic laboratory, and in early 1966, once Barth had finished correcting the proof sheets for Giles, he took advantage of the laboratory to experiment with fiction recorded on tape. The device was ideal for his purposes; it offered a chance to overcome certain limitations of the oral medium as it existed before the twentieth century. For one thing, a tape recorder removed the necessity of having an actual storyteller in the room every time the story is told. For another, it enabled the listener to stop the story at any moment and play back whatever passages he felt like.

To an extent, Barth's goal from the outset of his career had been to concentrate on the sound of his prose. In 1953, when he applied for a position in the English department at Penn State, he summed up his fictional aims: "My object has been to explore sounds, rhythms and ideas more thoroughly, and to develop more rigorously disciplined eyes, ears and attitudes." And years later, speaking of The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy, he remarked to an interviewer, "I think I can be allowed the statement that whatever the faults of my writing, it usually reads pretty well out loud, to the ear" [Alan Prince, "An Interview with John Barth," Prism (Spring 1968)]. All this was appropriate to a writer who had considered a career in music (playing drums and orchestrating) before he decided to be a teacher and a writer.

But what he had in mind now was not just fiction that sounds "pretty well" when read out loud, but fiction that works best when read out loud, that gains part of its drama from being read out loud. For example, he conceived of a story called "Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction," in which the main character and first-person narrator is a story that speaks from a tape machine and talks about itself.

Mother was a mere passing fancy who didn't pass quickly enough; there's evidence also that she was a mere novel device, just in style, soon to become a commonplace, to which Dad resorted one day when he found himself by himself with pointless pen.

Dad, of course, is Barth, and Mother the tape machine (as Barth himself makes clear in a prefatory author's note). And when he presents the story in public, he is on stage in the guise of Dad and author, smoking, drinking coffee, and listening to the story in the machine complain to him about its hard lot. "I don't recall asking to be conceived!" it says. "I see no point in going further…. I'll turn myself off if I can this instant." But it cannot, so it implores Barth to end it. But Barth does not; instead he walks disgustedly off the stage, leaving the story to ramble on about itself until at last its tape flaps abruptly off the reel. The story's life is analogous to one possible view of our own: we did not ask to be born, our existence seems pointless, it goes on too long, we wish to kill ourselves but do not have the means (or if we do, we cannot overcome our instinct to remain alive), thus we drag on, lapsing into nonsense, finally silence. And completing the analogy, Barth, who ignores the plea of his story to end it, is like one fashionable view of God, who having created us has abandoned us, helpless and hopeless, to misery.

Barth underscores the failed nature of this story and its life by noting a partial resemblance between it and ancient heroes. Its conception was unnatural, it says. Its father tried to kill it young, but it survived, and now thinking of itself as blind and crippled, it would like vengeance on the father. "One [parent] hoped I'd be astonishing, forceful, triumphant—heroical in other words," but as the story admits, it turned out merely conventional. Even it "aspired to immortality," but instead of being a "crippled hero" it became a "heroic cripple," not the same thing at all. And that is another point of the story's story, of everyone's story. Our struggle almost makes us heroical, but almost is not good enough. We aspire, but we do not achieve what we intend. We start out hoping, as do our parents generally hope, that we are special, and end up realizing that we are pathetically ordinary. "A change for the better still isn't unthinkable; miracles can be cited. But the odds … aren't encouraging." "The story of our life," a character in a later story says.

Another fiction of this type Barth called "Echo." It too has a voice out of a machine, although this time Barth is not on stage with it. The plot of the story is similar to the myth of its namesake; Barth took most of the incidents from a well-known two-volume survey, The Greek Myths, compiled by Robert Graves. "In the myth, you remember," Barth told an audience at Harvard University on August 13, 1967,

the nymph Echo is raped by Pan and later becomes a master storyteller. Zeus employs her to entertain his wife with her fictions while he slips out and makes free with certain mountain-nymphs. When Hera [Zeus's wife] realizes she's been tricked, she punishes Echo (who hadn't known Zeus was using her) by depriving her of the ability to speak for herself; she can only repeat others' words, though the voice is still her own. Later on she falls in love with Narcissus, the son of Leirope and a minor river-god, and when he rebuffs her she grieves away until nothing's left of her but her voice: pure medium without substance or original content. Narcissus himself, of course, tries to embrace his reflected image and then also pines away for frustration until he becomes a blooming narcotic. Somewhat later the blind prophet Tiresias, who'd foreseen all these events from the beginning and had warned Narcissus's mother that her boy would lead a long happy life if he never came to know himself, meets his own death beside the same spring where Narcissus blossoms and Echo laments. To the myth I've added one refinement: in her final state Echo loses her individual voice as well, and repeats the words of others in their own voices.

The solitary voice from the machine is, then, a perfect representation of Echo's bodiless condition. But since Barth presents her in her "final state" where she can speak only the words of others in their own voices, the audience cannot be certain whose words and voice are on the tape, those of Tiresias, Narcissus, or, at the extreme, Barth. Accordingly the story is extra-rich, able to be approached and appreciated from several equally valid points of view. If Echo is arranging the words and voice of another in order to tell her own story, then the tale is about love and its disastrous consequences. If she is repeating the words and voice of Narcissus, then the tale is about self-love and its disasters. If she is repeating the words and voice of Tiresias, then the tale is about cruel knowledge and the burdensome foresight that everything will turn out badly for everyone in the end. Finally, if Echo is repeating the words and voice of Barth, then the viewpoints of Echo, Narcissus, and Tiresias are headspinningly co-existent.

Barth wrote "Autobiography" and "Echo" exclusively for monophonic tape, but the electronics laboratory at Buffalo also gave him the opportunity to work with multitrack tape, and the principal result of this medium was the story "Title." It is about an imaginary writer debating with himself, and in Barth's favorite performance of the story, the debate is carried on by recorded stereo voices. The narrator says something to himself through a speaker on one side of the stage, then answers himself from the speaker on the other side, and all the while Barth himself stands between the two speakers, listening to what the voices say to each other. As for the debate, it "has to do with three things simultaneously," Barth told that Harvard audience on August 13, 1967:

the narrator's difficulties with his lady-friend; his difficulties with the story he's trying to compose; and the difficult situation he feels his art-form and his civilization to be in too. The question is raised whether one might "go on," at least provisionally—in a love affair, say, or an art-form, or a society—by making the difficulty one's subject. The answer is equivocal.

The difficulties of the imaginary author are the result of his failure to find meaning in his love affair, his art, his civilization. Yet he recognizes that these things are not themselves meaningless, that they only appear that way to him, and so he tries to make some sense out of them. "Everything leads to nothing," he says. "The final question is, Can nothing be made meaningful?" At least in terms of the story he's having trouble with, he comes up with an answer: he can write a meaningful story about the impossibility of writing a meaningful story. As it happens, though, he never writes that story; he merely debates with himself about writing it. Even if he did write it, the result would be redundant, for the kind of story he would write is very close to the story in which he is a character: "Title." Barth has managed quite a trick—through the voices of the imaginary author, he has talked about writing a meaningful story about the impossibility of writing a meaningful story, and in the process he has written the story he talked about. "You tell me it's self-defeating to talk about it instead of just up and doing it; but to acknowledge what I'm doing while I'm doing it is exactly the point." And more, as will be clear in a moment, Barth has matched his technique with his subject matter: he stands on stage between the two voices, looking like some devilish magician, and as the voices debate he interrupts them, censoring their remarks and replacing what he has cut out either with the phrase "fill in the blank" or else with senseless grammatical expressions. "I'll fill in the blank with this noun here in my prepositional object" is one statement when Barth is done censoring it. The technique conforms with the subject matter because it dramatizes the impossibility of saying anything meaningful; an absolute example of that impossibility, of course, would be to write nothing at all, instead to provide blank tape or pages, or better yet, no tape or pages. But that silence would not be fiction, and since Barth is above all a fictionist, he demonstrates the trouble one can have filling the blank of nothingness by acknowledging that he himself cannot do it, by telling his audience to "fill in the blank" for themselves, the blank of this title, "Title," this sentence, this art, this civilization, this life. And paradoxically, by acknowledging that he cannot fill in the blank, by dramatizing that he cannot, he has actually done it, brilliantly.

Yet, however successful Barth was at writing fiction for the recorded voice, he did not restrict himself to that medium very long. "God knows I have the greatest love for the voice," he maintained to an interviewer, but he was, he had to admit, a "print-oriented bastard…. I'm thinking more and more about what print can do that nothing else can do" [Douglas M. Davis, "The End Is a Beginning for Barth's 'Funhouse,'" National Observer (16 September 1969)], and by way of illustration he had ready several stories that made as brilliant use of print as "Title" did of voice.

One of them, "Petition," is especially suited for print since it is a letter, something which in its natural state has to be read on a page. As Barth is well aware, the letter format is a traditional way to tell a story. [He told Davis:]

The other day a student came to me and said he wasn't going to pretend anything anymore, that henceforth his fiction would deal only in printed documents. But that's precisely how the novel began: Richardson with his letters, saying they were real, not a story.

The epistolary technique is not a frequent one these days, of course, and that would be a reason why Barth chose it: the traditional can become innovative if it is taken up after a comparatively long period of disuse. Another reason why Barth chose it would be the dramatic contrast between the apparent authenticity of the document (it is addressed to Prajadhipok, the King of Siam, who was indeed, as the letter states, at Ophir Hall in White Plains, New York, on April 21, 1931, preparing to undergo an eye operation) and the patently made-up subject matter (a man with his belly attached to the small of his twin brother's back is in love with a female contortionist to whom his brother is consort). The letter-writer describes his situation with his brother:

I am slight, my brother is gross. He's incoherent but vocal; I'm articulate and mute. He's ignorant but full of guile; I think I may call myself reasonably educated, and if ingenuous, no more so I hope than the run of scholars. My brother is gregarious…. For my part, I am by nature withdrawn, even solitary.

The differences between them are now so intolerable that the brother in back is writing to the King in hopes "that at your bidding the world's most accomplished surgeons may successfully divide my brother from myself." If his plea is unsuccessful, he determines to kill himself and his brother with him. The relation between these two brothers is analogous to many things; [in his "No Exit," Partisan Review 36, No. 2 (1969)] Tony Tanner has suggested that the incoherent brother is, for example,

like life itself, constantly shrugging off the attempts of language to circumscribe it within particular definitions. Language, in the form of the articulate brother, would be happy to pursue its inclination to ponder its elegant patternings in pure detachment from the soiling contacts of reality. But they are brothers, divided yet related—neither one nor two.

Perhaps better, the brothers are somewhat like the mind and the body, one pondering while the other eats, humps, defecates. "To be one: paradise! To be two: bliss! But to be both and neither is unspeakable," the narrator concludes, describing as it were the condition of a mind living within a body which too has a life of its own, yet a mind that is dependent on a body for its life. It is true that the narrator is not yet within his brother's body; still he senses that this is what is going to happen. He feels his brother straining to suck him in, and he has a fair idea that one day he will be inside like the woman he loves who lives within the body of the woman his brother humps.

Another story that Barth wrote especially for the printed medium is "Lost in the Funhouse." It is about a thirteen-year-old boy, Ambrose, who has gone with his family to enjoy a holiday at the Ocean City amusement park on the Atlantic coast of Maryland. While there, Ambrose gets lost in the funhouse and is some time threading the maze back out, and this incident is explicitly meant to symbolize many things: that Ambrose is becoming aware of himself, his sexuality, his mind, his world, his life, and that he is confused by it all. The problems of a sensitive adolescent are hardly original subject matter; they are indeed, as the narrator goes far to admit, tiresomely familiar. But here they have special interest because of the manner in which they are presented. The narrator employs such devices of print as italics, dashes, and plot diagrams to draw attention to his technique. He points out the effectiveness or failure of various descriptions; he digresses to explain the functions of his metaphors; he criticizes the action for its lack of clarity, direction, and pace. The following passage is typical:

En route to Ocean City [Ambrose] sat in the back seat of the family car with his brother Peter, age fifteen, and Magda G―, age fourteen, a pretty girl and exquisite young lady, who lived not far from them on B―Street in the town of D―, Maryland. Initials, blanks, or both were often substituted for proper names in nineteenth-century fiction to enhance the illusion of reality. It is as if the author felt it necessary to delete the names for reasons of tact or legal liability. Interestingly, as with other aspects of realism, it is an illusion that is being enhanced, by purely artificial means.

The storyteller is trying to present old material in a new way, and he does so by emphasizing the conventions of fiction rather than concealing them. "The technique is advanced, as you see, but the situation … is conventionally dramatic" is what the narrator of "Title" says about a story he is trying to write, and that remark might just as well have been made by the narrator of this story; it is a close description of what is going on here where technical advancement takes the form of technical—as opposed to philosophical or moralistic—intrusion. Still, as with other stories by Barth, the technique is more than just a presentation of the subject matter; it is a representation of that subject matter, for the narrator too, like Ambrose, is lost. His sentences go wrong, he says. His plot "winds upon itself, digresses, retreats, hesitates, sighs, collapses, expires." He is as self-conscious of his style as Ambrose is of growing up, until in his final paragraph what he writes about Ambrose comes to have strong bearing also on himself, his art, and his attitude toward life. And that paragraph, one cannot help feeling, is about the most autobiographical Barth ever wrote.

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.

"Lost in the Funhouse" has interest for us in another way besides the graphic use it makes of print. It is the title piece for the volume in which it and these other short fictions eventually were included. When Barth wrote the story in April of 1967, he once told a friend, he had been working on the book it would be in for over a year but had not yet settled on a title. For a time he considered Still-Life in the double sense of a still form of life and still there is life in this writer, in this art, in this civilization, but soon he rejected the phrase, having seen it too often in print. Then the title of the story "Lost in the Funhouse" struck him with so many implications that he put it on the cover of the book where it now applied less to Ambrose and more to Barth as well as the reader. Both are lost in the labyrinth of the world; to pass the time, the one creates his own more pleasurable labyrinths while the other gets lost in them.

"Lost in the Funhouse" has one more interest for us, and that is the character Ambrose. He occurs in two other Funhouse stories, "Ambrose His Mark" and "Water-Message"; he was also the main character in The Seeker or The Amateur, that novel Barth started between The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy and never completed, from which these two stories are salvaged. The Seeker (we recall from Barth's introduction to Giles) was about a man so detached from life that he stayed in the top room of a high tower, spying down on human affairs through a giant camera obscura as well as every kind of telescope and microscope. As the first page of the story's corrected typescript shows, this character's original name was Dan. But Barth wanted a richer name, one that would connect with light and thus relate to the camera in the tower. He asked his Penn State colleague Philip Young for a suggestion, and Young thought of Ambrose, after the famous Ambrose Lightship outside New York harbor. Young was ready to suggest an ancient connotation too, the food the Olympian gods ate to preserve their immortality; but he never got the chance to say that, because as Young remembers it, "Jack just threw up his hands and said 'Ambrose! Ambrosia!' and was off."

That conversation took place in early 1960, although it was not until 1967 when Barth wrote "Lost in the Funhouse" that he worked out a spot for those two connotations of Ambrose, demoting the food of the gods to the rank of dessert:

In the maze … our hero found a name-coin someone else had lost or discarded: AMBROSE, suggestive of the famous lightship and of his late grandfather's favorite dessert, which his mother used to prepare on special occasions out of coconut, oranges, grapes, and what else.

Back in 1960, however, what he did was find another association with Ambrose—the saint of the same name—and used it as the high point in an early chapter he was then writing for The Seeker. Soon after, when he gave up on the novel, he saw enough unity of theme and action in the chapter to turn it into a short story, which he called "Ambrose His Mark," letting it stand on its own.

The story has to do with how Ambrose came to be called that. His mother, it seems, never bothered to name him; Honig or Honey was the closest she came. One day while she was nursing the child in the backyard, a swarm of bees settled on them, and the family decided that the swarm had been attracted by the bee-shaped birthmark near the child's eyes. Honey was thus an apter nickname than anyone had suspected. But it would not do for a proper name, so Uncle Konrad, who was convinced that the incident with the bees was "as clear a naming-sign as you could ask for," studied the encyclopedias he peddled for a living and learned that bees had swarmed over many famous people: Plato, Sophocles, Xenophon, and Ambrose the saint. Only the last seemed to the family an acceptable name for the boy; they even hoped it was a kind of prediction that the child would grow up to be a famous orator like Saint Ambrose. Yet whereas the bees had swarmed over the saint's mouth, the bees in this case had swarmed over the child's eyes, so that the family hoped that this modern-day Ambrose might with luck become not only a great speaker but also a clear seer.

Their hope turned out to be more like a curse. In another Ambrose story, "Water-Message," the boy has grown to grade-school age, possessed of a way with words and much awareness. But these gifts only merit him the nickname "Sissy" and the frustration of knowing there is a great deal that he does not know. He is curious about sex and confused by it, a confusion that is represented by a grove of honey locusts, webbed with vines, described as a jungle and a labyrinth, where he likes to play. It is a confusion that will get worse as he grows older, that will be represented in the later story "Lost in the Funhouse" by another labyrinth, also related to sex, the amusement park maze where he gets lost. At the end of this story "Water-Message," however, he has no idea that things will get worse. In the shallows near a beach, he finds a note in a bottle and reads:

             TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
                      YOURS TRULY

Like "Title," then, the story involves filling a blank, and Ambrose fills it optimistically, if somewhat obscurely:

Ambrose's spirit bore new and subtle burdens. He would not tattle on Peter for cursing and the rest of it. The thought of his brother's sins no longer troubled him or even much moved his curiosity. Tonight, tomorrow night, unhurriedly, he would find out from Peter just what it was they had discovered …, and what-all done: the things he'd learn would not surprise now nor distress him, for though he was still innocent of that knowledge, he had the feel of it in his heart, and of other truth.

The one real truth he does not feel is that the future will always be a blank, that he will never learn the absolute knowledge he expects, that he will forever be as confused and uncertain as now. [In a footnote the critic adds: "'Water-Message' was first published in Southwest Review (September 1963). For inclusion in The Funhouse, Barth revised it ('to make it less sentimental and obvious' he once told a friend), and to a degree he changed the tone of the conclusion. The revised version ends optimistically with Ambrose deciding that his confusion will pass, that he will learn about life soon enough; but the original version ends with Ambrose almost depressed. He does not find the blank letter that is in the revised version. Rather he comes upon the note 'It was Bill Bell,' and having been very curious about what great truth the message might contain, he is let down by its triviality, its meaninglessness. 'The heart of Ambrose Mensch bore a new and subtle burden: neither despair nor yet disappointment, but a sweet melancholy.' Now he no longer is anxious to learn about sex and life in general, for he has the feel 'of other, yet father-reaching truth,' the presumable 'Barthian' truth that whatever he learns will be no more satisfying and meaningful than the water-message 'It was Bill Bell.'"] In "Lost in the Funhouse" he has some experience with that truth, and although there are only these three Ambrose stories, which never depict him past adolescence, it is not hard to figure that he will continue to be Lost in one way or another. He will end up a man very like the rest of the articulate "characters" in the Funhouse (the spermatozoon making its "Night-Sea Journey," for example, or the story telling its "Autobiography," or the back-brother submitting his "Petition," or Menelaus composing his "Menelaiad," or the nameless minstrel writing his "Anonymiad"), led on and let down by love, dissatisfied by how he lives and what he writes, eager to come to an end, yet desperate to fill as much time as he can with his words.

Having taken up these Ambrose stories and several others on their own, we then ought also to group them with the rest and consider them all as the whole they make up. That the stories are meant to be considered as parts of a whole is something Barth emphasizes in his introductory "Author's Note."

This book differs … from most volumes of short fiction…. It's neither a collection nor a selection, but a series; though several of its items have appeared separately in periodicals, the series will be seen to be have been meant to be received "all at once" and as here arranged.

For instance, the structure of the book is cyclical. The first tale, "Night-Sea Journey," concerns a spermatozoon swimming toward its half-understood destination, all the while brooding about its origins and purpose. The last tale, "Anonymiad," concerns a minstrel from ancient Greece who has been marooned on a barren island where he scribbles yarns on goatskin, floating them out to sea in wine jugs. The spermatozoon's account of its life, the minstrel's version of his life—these things echo each other and to a degree are linked, the spermatozoon possibly the start from which the minstrel sprang (as it is possibly the start of every main character in the book), its monologue about its life possibly one of the yarns that the minstrel wrote down and launched. Barth intended these stories to be complexly related, and in order that his intentions would be clear, he prefaced Lost in the Funhouse with a device he called a "Frame-Tale." On one side of a page are the words Once upon a time there; on the other side are the words was a story that began. If the reader follows the instruction Barth provides, if he cuts a strip from the page and twists it once in the middle and joins the ends, then he holds what is known as a Moebius strip. It is circular; it is involuted, somewhat like a three-dimensional figure 8; it is continuous: "Once upon a time there was a story that began once upon a time there was a story that began once upon a time there was a story that began…." The device resembles the way the last story, its yarn afloat, leads the reader back into the first story, its main character aswim; it "becomes a metaphor," Barth [told Davis], for the content of the book."

In general that content has to do with characters who recognize the insufferable facts of life (the kind of facts presented in "Two Meditations" where we are told that things always get worse, that we help to make them worse, that even when we recognize the process we can do nothing to prevent it), and who then turn to storytelling to preserve their sanity ("Ill fortune, constraint and terror, generate guileful art; despair inspires," we are told in "Glossolalia"). In respect to this twofold reaction by the characters, the book can be more or less divided: up to "Lost in the Funhouse," and after it. The main characters of "Night-Sea Journey," "Autobiography," and "Petition" bemoan their lot and plead for a change; alternating with their stories are "Ambrose His Mark" and "Water-Message," in which Ambrose has not yet realized how insufferable life can be. But then in "Lost in the Funhouse" he comes to be like the characters who came before: unable to deal with the facts, which are in this case represented by the facts of sex. Those other characters go no further than to complain and beg for help, however, whereas Ambrose decides on a remedy, and that is to reject the funhouse of life in favor of constructing funhouses of fiction, and his decision marks the turning point in the book.

Henceforth the main concern will be with moving out of the world into the world of fiction. In the next story, "Echo," for example, the title character "turns from life and learns to tell stories," but she discovers that her storytelling funhouse is as difficult to get around in as the other kind that Ambrose is lost in. For the gods have fixed her so that she can speak only in the words and voices of others, and that means she is doomed to wrestle with the basic narrative problems of viewpoint (the multiple voices she must work with) and time scheme (the past, present, and future that Barth reminds us in note 4 are embodied in one of her voices, Tiresias the prophet). She is doomed as well to wrestle with another problem that all storytellers are faced with: how to say what has already been said (she is an echo, after all) and yet say it in a fresh and new and valid way. After "Echo" there come the "Two Meditations" and the most explicit statement of the facts that The Funhouse has to offer: that the world is falling apart and we cannot stop it. And in the next piece, "Title," the main character finds that not only the world is falling apart, but also his personal life and his narrative art. "The worst is to come. Everything leads to nothing…. The final question is, Can nothing be made meaningful?" A shift from living to fictioning evidently brings about the same agony of understanding that one had in life. In the next piece, "Glossolalia," six speakers respond to such facts as rape and murder by riddling and hymning and warbling with as much attention to their sound patterns as to their glossed-over sense. But they have not removed the facts, they have only hidden them, and in the next piece, "Life-Story," the two converge, as indeed the title indicates. The main character suspects that he is a fictional character and that the fiction he is in is quite the sort he least prefers, he wants to write a story about his condition but he cannot find a way to do it; the problems of his fiction and the problems of the fiction he is in mirror each other and merge. Then in the next-to-last piece, "Menelaiad," the main character more than suspects that he is in a story: he has been changed by a trick of Proteus into his voice telling his story and in short time he will actually be nothing but his story. Still he is not dismayed, he says, and he is the sole character so far who is not. His life having become art, he is virtually immortal, what the story in "Autobiography" aspired to be but knew it never would be. Finally in "Anonymiad," a nameless minstrel has been forcibly removed from life and marooned on a lonely isle where he lives in the fiction he writes and for a time is content like Menelaus. But then he runs out of goatskin to write upon, and exhausted from his labor he is impatient to return to life and the girl he once knew, whom he wishes were there with him. And that urge brings us full circle, like the Moebius strip, to where the book began with the sperm and the beginning of life and the awful facts. The pattern of the book tells us that if the minstrel ever gets purely to living again he will shortly be put off by the facts of life and take to fictioning again until one day exhausted by his labor he will be impatient to return to life again. And so on. Circles and wheels and the Moebius strip comes round.

The book's shift from living in the world to living in the world of fiction is accomplished by other shifts. The early narrators tend to be young, the later ones old. The early fictional forms tend to be traditional, like an autobiography and a letter; the later ones tend to be innovative, like the story "Title," which deals in part with the death of the short story genre. The early times and settings tend to be contemporary and realistic; the later ones tend to be mythic and fantastic. And these shifts are related: the more the characters mature, the more they leave off the problems of living in favor of the problems of writing, and leave off the present real world in favor of an imaginary, timeless, literary one. In addition, the narrators tend to become more self-conscious as they go along, feeling ever more impotent and frustrated, losing body and mass and turning into the sound of their words.

That is especially evident in the next-to-last story, "Menelaiad." It is about Menelaus and how he ruined his life by examining it too much: not understanding why his wife, Helen, loved him, he asked her over and over why she loved him until he became so great a nuisance that she ran off with Paris and caused the Trojan War. The structure of the story is like a set of Chinese boxes, a tale within a tale within a tale to the seventh degree, for the narrator, Menelaus, tells the reader how one night he told the sons of Nestor and Odysseus how he told Helen how he told Proteus how he told the daughter of Proteus how he rehearsed to Helen how he destroyed their love. Going through this complex story for the first time, the reader is often hard pressed to figure out who is saying what to whom; and the difficulty the reader has keeping hold of all the tales within tales is much like the difficulty Menelaus has had keeping hold of himself. "I'm not the man I used to be," Menelaus says, and he is right. Once, returning home from the Trojan War, he had to grapple with the shape-change Proteus in order to force the god to give him directions, and Proteus tricked him, ending his chain of transformations by turning into Menelaus. Now, with the body of Menelaus long since wormed, Proteus survives in the voice of Menelaus. And when his voice is no longer, we are told, Proteus will yet continue as the story of how Menelaus tried to understand love. And when even the story is no longer, Proteus will still go on in "terrifying last disguise" as the story's bitter theme: "the absurd, unending possibility of love."

Lastly, in "Anonymiad" we read all that is left, to an extent all that ever was, of a nameless joyless minstrel. It gathers various themes of Lost in the Funhouse—disastrous innocence, foolish love, paralyzing self-knowledge. It depicts again the terrible loneliness that comes to the writers in this book. And it sums up both Barth's career to date and the attitude he at times has had toward his calling. That is, the minstrel imagines that the opera he floated to sea has gone down undiscovered, much as Barth's Floating Opera went mostly unread for years. He recalls his works in a series that loosely resembles the order of Barth's own books: his "long prose fictions of the realistical, the romantical, and the fantastical," roughly corresponding with The Floating Opera plus The End of the Road, The Sot-Weed Factor, and Giles Goat-Boy; a long comic history that never survived (The Seeker); a major novel in which tragedy and satire were combined, words which the minstrel claims derive from the root word for goat (Giles Goat-Boy again). But in his middle years (Barth was thirty-eight when Lost in the Funhouse was published), the minstrel senses himself running down.

I was older and slower, more careful but less concerned; as my craft improved, my interest waned, and my earlier zeal seemed hollow as the jugs it filled. Was there any new thing to say, new way to say the old? The memory of literature, my own included, gave me less and less delight; the "immortality" of even the noblest works I knew seemed a paltry thing. It appeared as fine a lot to me, and as poor, to wallow … in the stews as to indite the goldenest verses ever and wallow in the ages' admiration.

He comes out of his mood to write his "Anonymiad," a work that he hopes will be "neither longfaced nor idiotly grinning, but adventuresome, passionately humored, merry with the pain of insight, wise and smiling in the terror of our life." And he fails: nothing he ever tried quite turned out the way he hoped. So too with Barth and Lost in the Funhouse, some critics would say; however good the book is, they seem to feel that it is not as good as Barth wanted. Addressing an audience at the Library of Congress (May 1, 1967), Barth once remarked that if the pieces in Lost in the Funhouse

are to be successful by my personal standards, they have to be more than just clever: if my writing was no more than the intellectual fun-and-games that Time magazine makes it out, I'd take up some other line of work. That's why one objects to the word experiment, I suppose: it suggests cold technique, and technique in art, as we all know, has the same sort of value that it has in love: heartless skill has its appeal, as does heartfelt ineptitude; but passionate virtuosity's what we all wish for, and aspire to. If these pieces aren't also moving, then the experiment is unsuccessful.

But for some critics, a few pieces are more clever than moving. Those critics are mostly Americans, unused to recent independent developments in European fiction very similar to The Funhouse—Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics (trans. 1968), for example. And it may be that these critics will warm to The Funhouse the more they are acquainted with and used to other books of its type. For now, at least, we can say that a good many of its pieces ("Night-Sea Journey," for example, "Lost in the Funhouse," "Menelaiad," and "Anonymiad") are moving and eloquent far out of proportion to their size. And at least one of these, the title piece, "Lost in the Funhouse," seems in retrospect the most important, progressive, trend-defining American short fiction of its decade.