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.