Lost in the Funhouse
Ray Davis (Pseudopodium) suggests that, while such books as Nabokov's Pale Fire and Cortazar's Hopscotch can be appropriately labeled "experimental" fictions, the fiction of John Barth is instead only a "generic" member of a category that has come to be identified as "experimental fiction." Barth's work, presumably, simply makes a number of familiar moves that have been accepted as "experimental" in this generic sense.
I would agree that such a category exists, and that those writers who could be consigned to it do indeed mostly reprise certain recognizable techniques or repeat what have become by now fairly well-worn tropes. But I can't see how Barth belongs to this category. Many if not most of the techniques in question (techniques of self-reflexivity, self-reflexively applied) were actually introduced by Barth in the first place, and the idea that conventional fiction had become "exhausted" in its ability to keep serious fiction afloat--and that a new kind of fiction able to confront this fact head-on was needed--was Barth's idea.
Certainly Barth had his own precursors. In "The Literature of Exhaustion," he cites Nabokov, Borges, and Beckett as the kind of technically adventurous writers whose company he would like to join, and, even further, praises Borges for his recogniton that no writer is truly original--such a writer would be unreadable, would make it so difficult for us to find our literary footing that the effort wouldn't finally be worth the trouble--but in effect is merely commenting on what's already been done. ("Pierre Menard," for example.) Thus Barth acknowledges that all literary writing is, in this broadest sense, generic writing. Moreover, Barth also confesses that he himself is a writer who "chooses to rebel along traditional lines," perhaps only inviting the charge that he's really not very innovative after all, merely imitative of his own favorite innovators--who themselves aren't really innovative, either, etc., etc.
But I really don't see how anyone could read Barth's early work, from The Floating Opera to, say Chimera, and conclude that Barth is not engaged in a fairly earnest kind of literary experimentation. If any of these books seem deriviative at all, they would be the first two, The Floating Opera and End of the Road, which are not only fairly conventional narratives (with a few modernist flourishes) but also embody "existentialist" themes of a kind rather popular in the 1950s/early 1960s. On the other hand, The Sot-Weed Factor clearly shows Barth looking for inspiration elsewhere than modernism, specifically 18th century picaresque narratives. The picaresque had not been entirely abandoned, of course (The Grapes of Wrath), but I think Barth can genuinely be credited with refocusing attention on the picaresque specifically as an alternative to both modernist introspection and the well-crafted realistic story. This may not be sui generis experimentation, but it seems to me that in the context of the time it is undeniably a literary experiment.
Giles Goat-Boy is an even more thoroughgoing effort to reconfigure the mid-century American novel, and to explore more fully the potential of "archetypes" (a la Borges) and of what Robert Scholes called "fabulation." . Although I myself find it less compelling than The Sot-Weed Factor (it's an example of the "art of excess" that's finally just too excessive), again I find it hard to believe that many readers could attempt this novel without finding it quite a singular work of fiction, at least within the context of postwar American literature. Forty years later it can try one's patience, but this is because Barth was trying to do too much, not because he was just working over a formula inherited from his literary forebearers.
But it is Lost in the Funhouse in which Barth most purposefully engages in literary experiment. So singlemindedly does he do so, in fact, that readers who encounter this book now, shorn of the context in which it was both so controversial and so influential, might think it dated, a relic of an era in which experiment in fiction could be so noteworthy. (They would be mistaken to judge it so, however, as it is an example of the sort of fiction that, in Barth's own words, is still "au courant" but also "manage[s] nonetheless to speak eloquently and memorably to our human hearts and conditions, as the greatest artists have always done.") Here readers will find: a story in the form of a cutout Mobius strip; a story narrated by a spermatazoon on its journey of fertilization; a story in which the narrator (the author's recorded voice) pleads with the author himself (standing by) to put it out of its misery; a story narrating its own coming-into-being; a story about speaking in tongues in which each of six brief speeches is "metrically identical" to the Lord's Prayer; a story that takes the notion of story-within-story to its hilarious limits; and stories such as "Life-Story" and "Lost in the Funhouse" itself, perhaps the prototypical and most influential metafictions in postmodern American literature.
Again, perhaps reading such stories after close to forty years of "experimental" fiction by other writers coming to terms with the implications for the future of fiction these very stories themselves brought into the open makes it easier to see how their innovations are to some extent coterminous with the practices of other forward-looking writers throughout literary history, might even by this point seem overused. But that in 1968 Lost in the Funhouse was unlike anything else being done by Barth's contemporaries (with perhaps the exception of his like-minded colleague Robert Coover) seems to me indisputable.
Barth is perhaps legitmately vulnerable in his later work to the charge of repeating himself, of abandoning the kind of focused experimentation to be found in Lost in the Funhouse in favor of a more lighthearted self-reflexivity drawing on Barth's own life and probably more interested in depicting his native Chesapeake Bay region than in advancing the cause of innovative fiction. Books like Letters, The Tidewater Tales, and The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor have their pleasures (I find the latter to be a particularly affecting novel), but certainly Barth's reputation as an important American writer could not really rest on them, however much they add to a critical consideration of Barth's work as a whole. And I do believe Barth will ultimately be judged an important postwar writer, largely because of the accomplishment of a book like Lost in the Funhouse, which, however much it absorbs the influence of writers such as Borges and Nabokov, also transforms that influence into a frequently outrageous kind of comic fiction that discloses the many ways in which storyelling can trip over its own narrative feet, but in the process demonstrates that fiction still has plenty of innate if unexploited resources from which it might continue to draw.
Where 3 Roads Meet
In his review of John Barth's Where 3 Roads Meet, Traver Kauffman maintains that the book consists of a "trio of loosely connected novellas." I have to disagree. That the book is a "trio" is true enough (and the word itself highlights the book's central conceit), but the three novellas it includes are actually very tightly connected, although not through overlapping characters or setting or some other superficial element of continuity. Where 3 Roads Meet is very much a composed book, and anyone who reads it as merely a conveniently collected group of fictions somewhat longer than short stories but too short to be called novels will be missing out on the features of the book most relevant to Barth's purpose.
The book is unified, first and foremost, through the motif named in its title. It acts as both a structural and a thematic device, at the same time foregrounding the image of three roads meeting (for Barth a symbol of fertility, both physical and artistic) and providing a rich source of cross-textual echoes and recurrences that substitute for the narrative momentum that, in typical Barthian fashion, is constantly interrupted and redoubled, seemingly always about to move dramatically forward but never quite doing so. Thus there are corresponding situations/groups of characters: three college students (who also play together in a jazz trio) in the first novella, Tell Me; the three elements in the literary interchange, Tale, Teller, Reader, embodied as characters in the unabashedly metafictional I've Been Told; three sisters (symbolically representing the Three Graces) in the final novella, As I Was Saying.
In Tell Me, the three students are engaged in a love triangle, in I've Been Told (the "story of the Story"), tale and reader are carried successfully by their Dramatic Vehicle (driven by the teller) away from the place where three roads meet to a narrative climax of sorts, while the three sisters tell (in a series of three tapes) how they came to inspire a celebrated writer to compose his trilogy of novels, The Fates. And, of course, Where 3 Roads Meet is itself a more modest reduction of this imaginary trilogy, a triumvirate of fictions that presents to its own readers a place where three roads meet--three ways of exploring the sources and the fascinations of storytelling. (There are even more instances of such tripling, as readers of W3RM will discover.)
These days Barth is most often criticized for failing to "move past" the metafictional game-playing for which he has become perhaps the emblematic figure. But where, exactly, is he to go? Toward some more conventional kind of narrative strategy? Presumably he determined long ago that this was not the direction in which his talents would take him or he would never have abandoned conventional techniques in the first place. Moreover, to call self-reflexivity in fiction a matter of "game-playing" is to undervalue what metafiction is ultimately all about. There is an element of game-playing in John Barth's work--he wants his fiction to be entertaining, if not in the way stories are expected to entertain--but the self-reflexive gesture ("baring the device") is also the first and necessary step in establishing fiction as an aesthetic form whose limits are only the limits of language itself. Once we've acknowledged that a work of fiction does not require a suspension of disbelief, that its possibilities are not exhausted by the orthodox telling of tales, fiction as a literary form becomes that much more malleable, more open to other kinds of formal patterning.
Where 3 Roads Meet participates in this project in its modest way, allowing Barth to reinforce, through the cross-referential scheme I've described, more familiar metafictional devices with an intricate aesthetic design that balances the deconstruction of conventional narrative strategies and a simultaneous construction of alternative structures (much as Barth himself once posed the "literature of replenishment" against his previously elucidated notion of the "literature of exhaustion"). I would not claim that this is one of Barth's best books, although it might provide uninitiated readers with a pretty good introduction to his approach and assumptions. I would even agree with criticisms of Barth's late, mock-heroic style as a bit too mock- and more than a bit too mannered, as exemplified in a passage like this: "An upbeat, firm-willed, independent-spirited lass, be it said, who welcomed [her grandparents'] monitoring, took the loss of her not-much-of-a-mother in stride, comforted he not-all-that-bereft father as best a third- or fourth-grader can, and threw herself into her schoolwork, music lessons, team sports, and bosom-buddyhood with young Al Baumann. To whom she enjoyed mischievously displaying and even offering to his touch the not-yet-budding bosoms that anon would blossom into adolescent splendor."
No one will ever claim John Barth as either a plain stylist or a spinner of conventional yarns (although he does like to spin versions of yarns already spun). But that he is less than a conscientious writer concerned to enhance readers' appreciation of the art of fiction is an unsustainable argument.
At this late stage in his career, John Barth is probably in a kind of no-win situation. Those who identify him as a first-generation postmodernist, and have probably never had much admiration for postmodern fiction, anyway, will see every new work as an example of postmodernism's obsolescence. Thus Gregory Leon Miller proclaims that in Barth's most recent book, The Development, "Emotional moments - mortality is a major theme of the book - are undercut by narrative games that have become cliche, as narrators reveal themselves to be someone other than we were led to believe, and then someone else altogether. . .The tedium of these gestures strongly suggests that it is such postmodern fiction itself - at least in its purest, initially conceived form - that has run its course."
On the other hand, those who do consider themselves admirers of Barth's work are more likely to find a book like The Development, which undeniably is more accessible to the non pomo-inclined, disappointingly ordinary. Thus Christopher Sorrentino concludes that "Barth once talked about embracing 'another order of risk,' in which one would test one’s ability to hold an audience with narrative complexity. Here, though, we have stories about community that, while not without their appeal, are as bland as the homespun Americana of Garrison Keillor."
Although I am more inclined to agree with Sorrentino in his judgment that The Development is "a modest addition to [Barth's] oeuvre," I can't quite agree that the portrayal of the gated community on Maryland's Eastern Shore that is the focus of the nine stories comprising The Development bears comparison to Keillor-type sentimentality. Indeed, to the extent that Miller's criticism has validity--and only here does it have validity--it is true that Barth's fiction rarely lingers over "emotional moments" without resorting to distancing effects such as verbal irony or authorial self-reflexivity. While it might seem "conventional" for John Barth to write a sequence of stories about elderly couples trying to cope with the fact that the horizon line of their lives has come much closer, I don't think either the subject or the setting is inherently "hokum."
Indeed, the most emotionally unsettling moment in The Development occurs at the conclusion of "Toga Party," in which the story's husband and wife protagonists decide to gas themselves in their garage rather than continue on their life's "crappy last lap," as the husband puts it. The story is unsettling precisely because there really has been no emotional preparation for this almost spontaneous decision and because it is carried out with little emotional display:
. . .Already they could smell exhaust fumes. "I love you, Dick."
"I love you. And okay, so we're dumping on the kids, leaving them to take the hit and clean up the mess. So what?"
"They'll never forgive us. But you're right. So what?"
"We'll each be presumed to have survived the other, as the saying goes, and neither of us'll be around to know it."
The car engine quietly idled on.
"Shouldn't we at least leave them a note, send them an e-mail, something?"
"So go do that if you want to. Me, I'm staying put."
He heard her exhale. "Me, too, I guess." Then inhale, deeply.
It is true that this event has emotional resonance throughout the rest of the book--other characters refer to it, its possibility as the final act for these characters as well can't be dismissed--but I don't see how it can be taken as "a virtual Hallmark card for suicide." That people like the Fentons might indeed resort to this kind of clear-eyed suicide in the midst of modern "retirement" only seems to me an equally clear-eyed indictment of the very middle-class lifestyle to which almost all of the characters in the book have readily acceded, to one degree or another. There is a repressed but still palpable disappointment with the outcome of American "success" permeating The Development, not an affirmation of it.
Some of the characters are more resistant to the illusions of the American Way than others. At the end of "Progressive Dinner," about the annual Heron Bay Estates social, we are left with Peter Simpson, an associate dean at the local college:
From the porch Chuck Becker adds loudly, "God bless us all! And God Bless America!"
Several voices murmur "Amen." Looking up and away with a sigh of mild annoyance, Peter Simpson happens at just that moment to see a meteor streak left to right across the moonless, brightly constellated eastern sky.
So what? he asks himself.
Most of the characters are presented as financially comfortable and as having accomplished career success, but many of them don't seem to regard their careers as achieving anything very important. Some are outright failures, as for example George Newett, a creative writing professor at the same local college, who confesses to having published little and who settles for "trying to help others do better" than he did, although "as of this writing no Stratford alum has managed that not-so-difficult achievement." None of them are held up as especially insightful, morally or intellectually. They may indeed be "bland," but this seems to me at least the natural outcome of their author's vision of Heron Bay Esates,the small but representative world John Barth wants to invoke.
Given the extent to which in The Development Barth has trimmed back what Gregory Leon Miller calls the "meta-fictional [sic] flourishes" for which Barth has become, at least to critics like Miller, infamous, it is rather astonishing that Miller would insist on charging it with "excessive self-reflexivity." There are a couple of stories--in particular, "The Bard Award" and "Rebeginnings"--that feature Barth's trademark dual emphasis on telling the story and on relating the story of the storytelling, which makes some of his most notoriously postmodern novels and stories more like narrative puzzles than narratives per se. But for the most part, the stories in The Development are surprisingly straightforward suburban slices-of-life joined together to create a surprisingly earnest work of late-life realism. One suspects that for readers like Miller, Barth could never be less than "excessive" unless he were to stop writing altogether or start being an utterly different kind of writer than the one he's always been.
One "self-reflexive" feature of the book that even Miller does not bring forward for censure, and that might be considered an addition of "narrative complexity," can be found in its title. "The Development," it seems to me, does not refer merely to the housing development itself, nor to the "development" of the characters' lives so far, but to "the development" as one of the elements of narrative. Most of the stories (except, of course, for "Toga Party") consist mostly of "development," most of them beginning in no particularly urgent situation and trailing off before the "tale" could be said to have reached its dramatic apex. "The End," which ostensibly tells the story of HBE's destruction by tornado doesn't actually narrate that catastrophe and registers the deaths of two of the community's members in just a couple of sentences. But this seems to me to reinforce the book's portrayal of the characters' "last lap." As Paul Lafarge puts it in his review of The Development, "The open-endedness of these stories is not mere trickiness. The tired reporters and washed-up teachers of creative writing in Heron Bay Estates are, like Barth himself, close enough to the end of their lives that the autobiographer's paradox is more than a theoretical worry. How do you tell the conclusion of your own story?. . .there is perhaps no better way to face the certainty that your own consciousness will cease, than with a defiant colon, so:"
Barth employs such a strategy of inconclusiveness, it seems to me, with particular skill in this book, so much so that its more subtle effects are apparently lost on his harsher critics who see only the more obvious "meta-fictional" touches.