John Barth's Artist in the Funhouse

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In the following essay, a small portion of which was included in CLC-3, he discusses the story sequence of Lost in the Funhouse as demonstrative of a Künstlerroman.
SOURCE: "John Barth's Artist in the Funhouse," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. X, No. 4, Fall, 1973, pp. 373-80.

In the "Author's Note" that prefaces the first American edition of Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth maintains with wonderful solemnity that the book is "neither a collection nor a selection, but a series." It is sometimes difficult to know when such instances of Barth's solemnity are to be taken seriously, but this seems to be one of them. At least when reviewers of the book tended to disregard the note and to see the volume as unified only in a loose manner by Barthian humor and by an intermittent concern with literary "exhaustion," the author developed a seven-point addendum to his original note, the first point affirming that his claim for a serial structure "means in good faith exactly what it says." His regnant intention in Funhouse, he maintains, is to turn "as many aspects of the fiction as possible … into dramatically relevant emblems of the theme." Although the critics have not generally conceded it, Barth's claim for Funhouse is not excessive: at the same time that the individual units of the book are generally self-contained, they contribute both conceptually and stylistically to an organic life of the whole. Like Malamud's Pictures of Fidelman, Funhouse is a story sequence that approaches the form of a Künstlerroman, recording the search of an artist for a viable mode of fiction and shaping that search into a significant and balanced action that is, indeed, emblematic of Barth's theme.

Three stories that concern themselves with a character named Ambrose afford the most immediate key to the sequence, for they are ordered chronologically and trace the growth of a vocation to art. In "Ambrose His Mark," the first story of the three, the title character is an infant for whom an appropriate name has not yet been found. When a swarm of bees settles upon him, he is named for Saint Ambrose, the fourth century bishop to whom a swarm of bees imparted the power of honeyed speech. At the end of the story, we understand that Ambrose has been "marked" by the bees and that he is destined to be a word-man. In "Water-Message," the second story of the three, Ambrose is a fourth grader, alienated already from other people by his special sensibility. He spends his time spining fictions to impress a younger boy and to rationalize his extreme timidity, for his life outside of the fictions is a constant embarrassment to him. At the climax of the story Ambrose opens a bottle washed up by the sea and finds in it a paper inscribed with an address at the top ("To whom it may concern") and a complimentary close at the bottom ("Yours truly"). Suddenly, we are told, Ambrose's spirit "bore new and subtle burdens," and we understand that it is Ambrose's destiny to write on the blank lines of the paper. His vocation as a word-man, then, is specifically to literature. In "Lost in the Funhouse," the last story of the three, an adolescent Ambrose tries unsuccessfully to mimic the attitudes and passions of ordinary men on a family trip to the Ocean City boardwalk. When he becomes lost in the funhouse, he envisions himself telling stories for the rest of his life, a constructor of funhouses for others, "though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed." The call to literature is heard, then, and accepted reluctantly. Ambrose will become a storyteller.

A stylistic evolution in this set of stories suggests that Ambrose is already developing as a storyteller and that he is consistently, in fact, the teller of his own story. While his personal narration of the first Ambrose story is apparently replaced by more objective modes of narration in "Water-Message" and "Funhouse," we note that the ostensibly detached narrators of those stories have an interest in Ambrose's emotional states and difficulties that grows with Ambrose's incresing self-awareness. Furthermore, we note that the later narrators show a passion for phrase-making that keeps pace with Ambrose's developing passion for language. In the second story, for instance, the omniscient narrator is much more interested in Ambrose's point of view than Ambrose is himself in the first story, and he begins to italicize phrases such as "more weary than exultant," suggesting a delight in verbal postures equal to Ambrose's own delight at that stage of his development. In "Funhouse," the narrator identifies so closely with Ambrose that the narration is almost a stream of consciousness; the narration is thick with italicized, quoted, and pat phrases; and the narrator of the story is so adolescently self-conscious that his identity with Ambrose is almost certain. Ambrose, it seems, is becoming a literary sophisticate and is developing his fictions about himself from a calculated detached viewpoint.

The stories with which the three Ambrose stories are alternated both complement and develop this Künstlerroman structure. The first story of the sequence, "Night-Sea Journey," is a wonderful tour de force in which an Existential sperm meditates eloquently on the meaning of a strange impulse which drives him on to "Her who summons." Its position at the head of the Ambrose stories suggests that "Night-Sea Journey" dramatizes the prenatal period of Ambrose's life, and this impression is reinforced when the voice of the sperm reflects a deeply literary consciousness: the sperm elaborates a whole series of fictions about the night-sea journey, for instance; he is capable of such an elegant accentuation as "my drownéd friend"; and "A poor irony" is the literary sort of observation that comes easily to him. Furthermore, when the sperm declaims "I am he who abjures and rejects the night-sea journey!" he postures verbally in the same manner that Ambrose is to develop in "Funhouse" and subsequent stories. Thus, it seems natural to understand "Night-Sea Journey" as an integral element of the Künstlerroman, depicting the storyteller as vocationally determined in his prenatal existence.

The third story of the sequence, "Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction," is another tour de force, capturing a fiction in the process of composing its own autobiography, free for the nonce of both authorial and mechanical manipulation, and yet ironically unable to end itself. "Bear in mind," the fiction has been instructed, and it does exactly that, dramatizing in its very donnée that fiction tends necessarily to a life of its own and to an inordinate degree of self-reflection. The dramatization of these tendencies anticipates the self-conscious story telling of "Funhouse" and it prepares us for Ambrose's later attempt to become so very mannered that the conventions of storytelling will displace him as both speaker and central subject. Appropriately, the fiction of "Autobiography" wonders if it is "still in utero"—still "hung up in delivery," for "Autobiography" creates the illusion of Ambrose's autobiography stepping out prolepticly and beginning to tell itself. Although Ambrose does not make an obvious appearance in the fiction, then, the theme of "Autobiography" is a structural clue to the developing fictions of his autobiography, and it is an integral part of the total Künstlerroman that his fictions become.

"Petition," the fifth story of the sequence, purports to be an unsigned letter from a Siamese twin. In wonderfully formal diction, the author of the letter petitions the king of Siam to arrange for a separation from his brother on the grounds that his brother is trying to kill him and thereby reserve for himself the affection of a female contortionist with whom the twins have established a ménage à trois. Following as it does upon "Water-Message," the unsigned letter of "Petition" recalls the unsigned letter that Ambrose finds in a bottle and which, we understand, he is to sign himself. Indeed, in a very real sense Ambrose is the ultimate author of "Petition." If the twin feels threatened by sexual rivalry with his brother, Ambrose handles sexual matters awkwardly in "Water-Message" and "Funhouse," and his older brother Peter is an annoying rival in both of these stories. In "Water-Message," it is Peter's club that embarrasses Ambrose when he naively suggests that Tommy James and Peggy Robbins have been "smooching," and it is Peter who insists that Ambrose leave the clubhouse when a contraceptive is discovered. In "Funhouse," Peter is an overt rival for the affections of Magda G―, and he is annoyingly informed about walking through the funhouse with a girl. Given these similarities of structure and situation, "Petition" seems to be a projection of Ambrose's rivalry with his brother into an imaginative and very literary fiction, continuing the tendency in "Night-Sea Journey" and "Autobiography" for aspects of a Künstlerroman to become autonomous fictions. Just as Ambrose soothes his wounded vanity at the end of "Water-Message" by the discovery of the blank letter and of all the possibilities that it presents, so, we understand, "Petition" is a writing on that blank paper and an integral part of the total Künstlerroman. "Petition" shows a self-sufficient fiction at one level of Ambrose's consciousness, just as "Night-Sea Journey" shows the creation of various fictions by his prenatal consciousness.

"Echo" follows "Lost in the Funhouse" in the sequence, and recounts the legend of Tiresias, Echo, and Narcissus from a viewpoint that could belong to any one of the three characters and which flaunts that ambiguity. "Overmuch presence appears to be the storyteller's problem," the narrator remarks midway through the story, and so he withdraws into a Chinese box, announcing cryptically the regnant theme of the story: "None can tell teller from told." As its ambiguous title suggests, the story is itself an "echo," recalling to the reader that the narrators and subjects of the various stories are identical as early as "Autobiography," and that Ambrose as both teller and subject of the stories has created fictions that pretend to be their own teller and subject. "Echo" develops, then, a fiction emblematic of the ambiguities of narration in the first six stoires of the sequence. It gives dramatic shape and substance to that inversion of the storytelling process upon itself that is suggested by the Moebius strip of the "Frame-Tale," that is metaphorically figured in the title of the sequence, and that is formulated and traced in the stories. In the development of the sequence, it serves to crystallize the vectors of the Künstlerroman at the point where the fictions with Ambrose as their explicit subject give way to experimental fictions with Ambrose as their implicit subject.

"Two Meditations," which follows "Echo" in the sequence, is composed of two brief fictions subtitled "Niagara Falls" and "Lake Erie." "Niagara Falls" records a series of bizarre correspondences, and "Lake Erie" records a series of equally bizarre consquences. While the inherent interest of these fictions is not great, their position in the sequence makes them richly suggestive. Following upon the dilemma of a narrator's "overmuch presence" in "Echo," they ask to be understood as fictions "stripped down" in an effort to eliminate authorial presence. Interestingly, and importantly, the type of fiction they represent corresponds to a type of fiction already devised by Ambrose. When Ambrose walks on the boardwalk in Ocean City, for instance, he composes a fiction in which soldiers on leave in a penny arcade shoot at miniature German submarines as a German U-boat commander squints through his periscope at American ships silhouetted by the glow of the arcade. The correspondence between Ambrose's fiction and the types of fiction in "Two Meditations" helps the reader to appreciate the latter as a further manifestation of Ambrose's Künstlerroman, as achieved and self-sufficient fictions with Ambrose as their determinedly effaced author. This understanding of "Two Meditations" is the key to understanding all of the subsequent stories of Lost in the Funhouse. "Two Meditations" inaugurates a series of fictions all of which are properly understood as attempts to write fiction, given the difficulty that fictions tend reductively to Künstlerroman, the artist and his conventions always peeping through with "overmuch presence." Because Ambrose is effacing himself so vigorously, it is wholly proper that he make no overt appearance in the remaining stories. Indeed, he has no need to. The blending of "Autobiography," "Petition" and "Echo" into the series of Ambrose stories has prepared us to understand the last five stories of the sequence according to a similar process of blending.

"Title" (which Barth calls a "triply schizoid monologue") takes as a fiction exactly the opposite tack of "Meditations." A type of authorial frenzy is implied by this dialectical arrangement of the two fictions, and the authorial strategy of "Meditations" appears retrospectively futile in consequence. Indeed, the strategy of "Title" is characterized by an attempt to implement as much self-consciousness as possible and to expel self-consciousness by an inundation of consciousness. "To write this allegedly ultimate story," the narrator says, "is a form of artistic fill in the blank, or artistic form of same, if you like. I don't." By overwhelming us with the narrative processes of which he is a victim, and by continually disparaging them, the narrator attempts to salvage at least a sense of superiority to the processes that betray his presence. As in "Autobiography," however, a strong sense of taedium vitae colors the narration; and, in his desperate attempts to call a halt to this mode of fiction, the narrator discredits his own strategy as surely as his turning to this strategy has discredited his tack in "Meditations." "O God comma I abhor self-consciousness," the narrator concludes. "I despise what we have come to; I loathe our loathsome loathing…." Clearly, this signifies that the fiction has once again turned back upon itself: sneering at the affectations of fiction is simply another variety of fictive affectation, and Ambrose is still lost in the funhouse.

"Glossolalia," the next fiction of the sequence, represents a new tack in this series of attempts to overcome fiction's betrayal. It consists of six statements by six different speakers (Barth notes that they are Cassandra, Philomela, the man mentioned in I Corinthians 14, the Queen of Sheba's talking bird, an unidentified psalmist, and the author), and the statements are notable primarily for their metrical similarity to The Lord's Prayer. Ecstatic, impersonally shaped speech, then, becomes the next attempt to create acceptable fictions. It is not successful. The metrical gimmick is calculatedly sterile, "more dismaying than delightful" as Barth puts it, and it suggests a merely perverse attempt to impose impersonal form upon language—an attempt so perverse that it reflects actually a highly subjective imposition of form. And again, the authorial voice discredits the method. In the last of the speeches, the "author" suggests that "ill fortune, constraint and terror [all of which apply to his immediate situation] generate guileful art." Again, he remarks apropos of himself that "prophet-birds seem to speak sagely but are shrieking their frustration." The language of ectasy, like all other modes of speech in Funhouse, is formal gimmickery, then; it becomes an aspect of an ultimate Künstlerroman inasmuch as the artistic life of the author is inescapably reflected in it, and it is a part of our immediate Künstlerroman in that it betrays the continuing need of Ambrose to escape from himself in his fictions.

"Life-Story" follows "Glossolalia" in the sequence and attempts a synthetic solution, combining absolute immediacy of reference with a third person distancing. Thus, the immediate act of composing the fiction becomes the subject of the fiction, while the narrator speaks detachedly of what his "author" is doing. As one might expect, the narrator finds himself no more successful with this method of controlling his presence than with the methods of the four previous stories: he addresses the reader impatiently as a "dogged uninsultable, print-oriented bastard" and, disgusted with his fiction, asks, "Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where's your shame?" Interestingly, the continual attempt of Ambrose to transmute into fiction is now complicated by the narrator's (Ambrose's, and, by clear suggestion, Barth's) uncomfortable suspicion that he is merely a character in the fiction, and "in quite the sort [of fiction] one least prefers." Although Ambrose might be disconcerted, this development is partially what he has struggled for in the four preceding stories, transforming the narrator's presence into a wholly integral part of the fiction. The authorial presence, of course, has not been assimilated into the fiction, and, in fact, it is more delinquent in this story than in any other in the sequence. The narrator acknowledges the authorial presence from within the fiction, but he has little sense of what his author is doing with the fiction. For all the narrator knows, he is involved in a Bildungsroman, an Erziehungsroman, or a roman fleuve ("!") Delightfully, Ambrose's frantic attempts to find a proper place in the funhouse by eliminating or integrating the "overmuch presence" that is an embarrassment to him in so many ways has involved him finally in the most familiar order of literary schizophrenia: as the narrator he is reduced to a simple character in the fiction and as the author he finds himself relegated to an unstable, uncontrollable, and eminently visible presence not wholly outside of the fiction. The Moebius strip has brought Ambrose back to approximately the stance of author and narrator in "Night-Sea Journey," and the difficulty of writing a fiction that does not reduce itself to a Künstlerroman has merely been confused en route. "Life-Story" effectively undercuts the narrator's attempts to rid himself of his overmuch presence by ingenious and esoteric strategies, then, and it represents the termination of that effort in Ambrose's Künstlerroman.

"Menelaiad," the penultimate story of the sequence, dramatizes Ambrose's attempt to deal with his presence in a more traditional way. His new tack is an Homeric-Conradian effort to obscure authorial presence by an intricate nest of speakers, modulated by an overtone of Joycean myth-grounding. But, as we might expect, the method betrays itself once again. As we listen to Menelaus relate to Telemachus what he had already told Helen he had previously related to Proteus with regard to what he had told Eidothea, our heads quite properly begin to spin, and when these nested speeches involve a quotational knot such as ["'(") ('(("What?"))') (")'"], the narrative method has clearly invalidated itself as a technique for masking authorial presence. As in "Title" and "Glossolalia," the effort to write "objective" fiction results in intolerably subjective gimmickry. And so it is that Ambrose steps in at the end of "Menelaiad" as, in frustration, he stepped in at the end of "Glossolalia," only to insist with cavalier logic that he is not dismayed. Repudiating all that he has struggled for in the previous fictions, he pretends satisfaction that he will survive only as a persona, as "Proteus's terrifying last disguise, Beauty's spouse's odd Elysium: the absurd, unending possibility of love." It is the possibility of love, we are preposterously asked to believe, that narrates the story. Ambrose's desperation has turned momentarily into either self-delusion or chicanery.

"Anonymiad" is the appropriate conclusion to the sequence. Invoking a goatherd as its speaker, it affects a return to the very dawn of written composition and simply refuses to become embroiled in the problems that are the subject of the sequence. Clearly, however, the speaker of "Anonymiad" is a sort of composite Ambrose. Like the Ambrose in "Petition," he is in love with a Thalia. Like the Ambrose in "Water-Message," he finds a blank message that might be his own washed up by the sea. Like the Ambrose of "Funhouse" and "Life-Story," he is intensely conscious of literary technique and provides a running commentary on his own devices. Like the Ambrose of several stories, he goes through a period of contriving "a precarious integrity by satirizing his own dilemma," only to reject "whimsic fantasy" ("Petition"), "grub fact" ("Two Meditations"), and "pure senseless music" ("Glossolalia"). "Adversity generates guileful art," he comments, playing upon his terminal remarks in "Glossolalia" and making evident the continuity of voice in the sequence. The Ambrose of "Anonymiad" has a new contempt for the esoteric problems of literature, however, and a new fervor for simply getting the thing done. At the very beginning of the fiction, for instance, the speaker open-mindedly parallels ending his life, commencing his masterpiece, returning to sleep, and invoking his muse. The four understandings of fiction suggested by these processes are neither distinct nor the same, we are given to understand, and we are free to understand this fiction as evidencing any one and any combination of them. Again, the speaker cannot take seriously "the pretension of reality" any more than he can take himself seriously. He is "the contrary of solipsistic," yet he is surprised when the kings and queens of his fiction correspond to actual kings and queens. The real drama of fiction, he insists, "is whether he can trick this tale out at all." Electing henceforth to use the first person anonymous as his point of view, he no longer questions if such a viewpoint is a contradiction in terms and a betrayal of his presence: the only thing that finally matters to him, as he makes clear in the climactic last paragraph, is that the "Anonymiad" gets written.

The Künstlerroman ends, then, with Ambrose disdaining his earlier attempts to understand and master the funhouse of fiction, and the Moebial involution is complete with his return to a simple making of fiction. The storyteller must remain "lost in the funhouse," continually embarrassed by his suspicion that the real operators are looking at him through peepholes, that old-timers at the entrance have counseled him falsely, and that older brothers and wiry little Seamen who have never contemplated a theory of funhouses are healthier and more expert for their ignorance. Fictions are not the escape from personality that Ambrose (and Eliot before him) would like them to be, for all fictions are finally Künstlerroman, things very like funhouses, and no place for the adolescently sensitive.

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