Essay

In the 1960’s postmodernism was seen to be ‘literature that reacts against earlier modern principles’ (www.dictionary.com) modern principles being the established literary novel.  Critics condemned postmodernism as it did not follow traditional forms; the reliability of language, verisimilitude and the omniscient narrator.  Barth, an American novelist, claimed that the traditional novel, for example the classic bourgeois novel, ‘were used up, stale and outmoded’ (Barth 1969).  Barth urged writers to create new forms ‘acquiring a self-conscious about the nature of literary language and artistic structure’ (Sim 1999)  Barth’s use of new forms, meta-fiction, meant that he wrote to please the reader using various literary techniques, but in his own way, thus pleasing the reader and fulfilling his own artistic needs. This means that the mimetic traditions of conventional texts have been changed to let the author express more ‘authentic meaning’ so that the true picture of reality can be shown. 

Lost in the Funhouse written by Barth, is about a young boy named Ambrose who enters a funhouse and finds that it is ‘a place of fear and confusion’ (Barth 72:1969). As Ambrose wanders aimlessly through the maze trying to find a way out, he knows the funhouse is constructed with different passageways for exiting the labyrinth.  He is also constructing different scenarios about his life whilst in the funhouse, about the many roles he might play in life like ‘being married and have children of your own, and to be a loving husband and father’ (Barth 84;1969) He is trying to find his way in life as well as finding a way out of the labyrinth. His idea of reality and fiction are intertwined because of the disorientation he is feeling as ‘he wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has.  Then he wishes he were dead. But he’s not’ (Barth 1969) It is the construction of the narrative that makes reading this novel difficult. The novel has been constructed just like the funhouse has been constructed.   It is these metafictional aspects that make us uncomfortable and possibly frustrated at understanding the novel. The use of constructed text shows that the fictional world is unreliable.  The language shifts between every day to ‘alternate-world contexts (Waugh 1984) and this causes the real and the fictional world to intersect and be hard to distinguish fiction from reality.  Derrida explains that the problem is in the ‘relation between language and the world and the anxiety of choosing between these interpretations’.  We the reader, choose to understand a novel through our own social and historical understanding of the world so we all interpret things differently.  Linda Hutcheon coined the term historiographic metafiction and this means that the literary texts that have an understanding or knowledge of the past, refer to its artificiality.  The texts are seen to be self- reflexive.  So the use of self-reflexivity shows that the nature of Lost in the Funhouse is to obscure the world of reality from the world of fiction, to disorientate the reader. 

When reading Lost in the Funhouse it can be seen that through the use of polyphony, it is hard to hear which narrator is actually telling the story.  The heteroglossic telling of the novel causes confusion, and this is what a postmodern novel does.  It draws you in to a web of narrators all talking to the reader, getting the reader to pick apart fact from fiction.  Tanner describes Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse as a novel that is ‘non progressive mutterings of a voice wandering through the lexical playing fields of narrative form’ (Tanner 1971) This is shown to us throughout the novel with the use of polyphony and heteroglossic narration.  The use of polyphony

                A girl of fourteen is the psychological coeval of a boy of fifteen

                or sixteen; a thirteen year old boy, therefore, even one precocious
                in some  other respects, might be her emotional junior

We have the narrator making us think about the external world, the world around us, through the use of polyphony. Is it the omniscient narrator?  Ambrose?  We have multiple narrators that are all vying for attention

                You think you’re yourself, but there are other persons inside you...

This sense of always having someone else in your head, that there is more than one voice occupying your thoughts is disturbing.  When reading Lost in the Funhouse there is that sense of never having your just your own thoughts to listen to, there is always someone there waiting to disturb your concentration.  It could be the author talking to you

           Talking soberly of unimportant or irrelevant matters and listening

           consciously to the sound of your own voice are useful habits for
           maintaining control in this difficult interval

or is it the character Ambrose talking to himself?  Or is the writer just stating a fact? This is what happens when there are too many voices in the novel, we the reader, do not know who is speaking.  So, ‘for whom is the funhouse fun?

There are many references to the arguments made in The Literature of Exhaustion in the novel Lost in the Funhouse. Barth claims that the novels of the nineteenth century are used up, there is no more writing to be done, everything that has been written has been read.  To create something new, we can rework what has been written and add metafictional devices to create ‘new human work’.  Barth refers to nineteenth century fiction ‘The 42^nd Parallel by John Dos Passos’ (Barth 73), and ‘Ulysses by James Joyce’ (Barth 74), this way he is rewriting a novel.  He is making old work, ‘new human work’ by making reference to others.  Barth claims he is not being mimetic because he has rewritten the work with ‘ironic intent’.  The title of the novel is ironic as it is shown to be lost in life as well as the funhouse. It can be seen that Lost in the Funhouse is a bildungsroman, a coming of age novel.  Lost in the Funhouse is about a young boy named Ambrose who enters a funhouse but in reading the novel we can see that it is also about the young boy entering adolescence he is ‘at that awkward age’ (Barth 72).  Ambrose tries to find his way around the funhouse and also in his way in life.  To create the ontological layers of the story Barth has mirrors surrounding the funhouse.  I believe this to be Ambrose’s fractured mind as he is confused about where he is going in life as well as the funhouse.  He is caught in the labyrinthine experience and so creates different dimensions of reality through the use of mirrors

           Ambrose watches them disagree; Ambrose watches him watch.

           In the funhouse mirror-room you can’t see yourself go on forever,
           because no matter how you stand, your head gets in the way.  Even
           if you had a glass periscope, the image of your eye would cover up
           the thing you really wanted to see

What is it that Ambrose wants to see?  A way out? a way forward?  Barth creates the illusion of reality by intertwining Ambrose’s fear of becoming lost and what the future holds.  It is Barth’s way of chiding nineteenth century fiction by saying the reader is always in the way, and the way round this is to involve the reader in the novel.  Barth also ridicules the ‘outdated’ or ‘used upness’ of traditional novels by over using italics in the novel.  There appears to be no obvious reason but this is why he does it.  Barth is purposely over using literary conventions

                  A fine metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech, in addition
                to its obvious “first order” relevance to the thing describes,
                  will be seen upon reflection to have a second order of
                significance...

and being pedantic in the telling of what literary conventions do.  Barth constantly refers to how novels work and using ellipses in names and places ‘B_______ street in the town of D_____, Maryland’ (Barth 73).  He is doing this to disrupt the flow of the novel. The story continually goes off on tangents.  He is doing this to poke fun at the traditional novel.  In the mean time he is trying to create ‘new human work’.

To summarise, Barth is trying to show how the novel is a construct, therefore the world we live in is a construct. The metafictional aspects are Barth's way of making us, the reader, uncomfortable and possibly frustrated at figuring out the structure of the narrative before us.  Lost in the Funhouse is a novel of a young boy and his journey through the funhouse.  It is also a journey through the structure of the novel. The getting lost because of the construction of language and the labyrinthine possibilities on the routes you could take.  Our world, according to Waugh ‘is mediated through language…and the more it shifts from every day to alternative –world contexts’ (Waugh 1994) the more disorientating the relationship between the real world and fictional world becomes. Reality of the language and of the world are shown to us through the use of Barthes ‘fictional world and to the world outside the text’.  The intertwining of these paths is confusing for the reader as we have to decipher what is real and what is fictional.  Therefore it can be seen that Barth constantly disrupts the flow of the story to show how easy it can be to construct and deconstruct reality.  Using Barth’s Literature of Exhaustion Barth further shows how novels need not be outdated as ‘new human work’ can be sought with the use of metafictional devices, however confusing this may be for the readers.

John Barth

John Barth is an American novelist who specialised in postmodernism and metafiction.  Barth claimed that the conventional styles of literary representation had been ‘used up’.  The literary conventions of the 1960’s had been over used and there was nothing original about a novel.  John Barth wrote a manifesto called The Literature of exhaustion in which he claimed metafiction is the answer to the ‘used upness’ of the novel.  Barth claims that experimental techniques in literature by writers like Borges and Beckett had revitalised the novel as an art form. These writers were interested in the ‘representation of representation’ (Currie 1995) of the novel and believed that this was mimetic but was done with ‘ironic intent’ to create ‘new human work’ (Currie 1995)  Mimetic not only in the artificiality of the art itself but also in life.

Secondly, that the ‘contamination of reality by dreams’ (Currie 1995) is a reality that begins to impose itself to our existence and will eventually destroy our previous reality.  The story appears to have an alternate reality to our own. Borges claims that this is a way of showing that the ‘medium is the message’.

Finally, the writers idea of ‘the metaphysically disturbing effect of the regressus in infinitum  roduced by the story within the story and the process whereby the characters in a novel become authors or readers within the fictitious aspect of our existence’ (Currie 1995).  These metafictional devices are seen in postmodern fiction as they cause chaos in their understanding.  The regressus in infinitum is ‘the process of going back endlessly: tracing each happening to a preceding step (mises.org). This happens when the story would not have a linear telling, we would have analepsis and prolepsis throughout the telling of a story.  The novel would than confuse the reader into who was doing the telling, the author or the characters or both.  To further confuse matters, the novel would refer to itself in the novel.  All these metafictional devices are attempting to confuse your idea of reality, to make you question yourself as to what is the real reality? In your world and in the novel?

In conclusion, Literature of Exhaustion is about how every story that is ever told, has already been told.  There are no stories to write because all the stories have been written.  The only way to make any impact on the novel is to metafictionalise it, to make your mark on the story. 

Currie, M. (1995)  Metafiction Longman: London

www.mises.org

'In the funhouse mirror-room you can’t see yourself go on forever, because no matter how you stand, your head gets in the way.  Even if you had a glass periscope, the image of your eye would cover up the thing you really wanted to see'

 (Lost in the Funhouse) 

Polyphony and heteroglossia!

  Mikhail Bakhtin

When reading a novel with heteroglossic or polyphonic text we immediately think of the originator of the concept Mikhail Bakhtin.  Bakhtin was a Russian formalist theorist who employed the term heteroglossia. Heteroglossia means ‘differentiated speech’ (Vice 1997) and is known to be Bakhtin’s key term for describing the ‘complex stratification of language; genre, register, sociolect, dialect and the mutual inter- animations of these forms’. (Vice 1997)  This just means that language is spoken differently by everybody.  Each person speaks with their own style of register and dialect. It is these ‘inter animations’ or ways of speaking collectively that contribute to heteroglossia. It can be seen that heteroglossia is a term used in the real world as the speech that is used is from everyday life. Bakhtin states that when heteroglossia is used in texts, it is seen as ‘textual polyphony, inter character dialogism, the unofficial carnival life of the people and the grotesque realism’ (Vice 1997) His theory of heteroglossia is synonymous with the carnivalesque. The literature of carnival that is known to be different in style and register compared to that of the conventional novel.  It is seen to ‘interrupt the texts ontological’ layers with ‘inserted genres’ (McHale 1987) like theatrical dialogues and mise en abyme.  The effect of using heteroglossia in a novel is to create confusion and chaos.  Bakhtin shows how reading a novel is not just about the words on the page but shows how the use of language, speech and register affect the way we read a novel.

 

Shields, C.M (2007) Bakhtin Primer. Peter Lang Publishing
Vice, s. (1997)  Introducing Bakhtin. Manchester University Press.
 

Heteroglossia!!

The Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody

Polyphonic Spree - Lithium with Sock Puppets

Patricia Waugh

This blog is about the problems that can arise when reading postmodern fiction.  The difficulty is in separating fiction from reality when reading meta fictional novels. Patricia Waugh is a postmodernist critic who wrote Metafiction, and she explains that ‘meta fiction is a term given to fictional writing…in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality…and the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text’ (Waugh 1984) this means that the real world and the fictional world can be hard to distinguish. When reading a novel we find ourselves questioning the reliability of the text, whether it is real or not. We then find ourselves questioning everything around us, not just what we are reading. Waugh further explains that although the writer does not set out to confuse the reader about what is real and what is fictional, ultimately it is the reader that will construct an 'imaginative reality' from the text.  Waugh further states that meta fiction, ‘self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its own status as an artefact’ (Waugh 1984) This account of meta-fiction shows that fiction and reality are constructed and that authors use post modernistic concepts to show how fabricated the novel is.  To illustrate meta fiction postmodern writers use literary devices to emphasise the fact that the novel is a construct by deconstructing the narrative style.  Our world, according to Waugh ‘is mediated through language…and the more it shifts from every day to alternative –world contexts’ (Waugh 1984) the more disorientating the relationship between the real world and fictional world becomes. Therefore I believe that the traditional novel has been subverted with the complexity of meta fictional styles to create pandemonium for the reader.

Waugh, P. (1984)  Metafiction. Methuen