Books: Fables for People Who Can Hear with Their Eyes

LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE by John Barth. 201 pages. Doubleday. $4.95.

Many things can happen in John Earth’s funhouse, but getting lost is not likely to be one of them. Whenever the rubber spiders and indiscreetly aimed jets of air become too threatening, the lights suddenly flash on and Proprietor Barth himself ambles in and starts explaining about the machinery. Those who take their funhouses seriously may grow confused and exasperated. But readers of The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy are familiar with Barth’s impulses toward farce, his intellectual mobility, shaggy doggerel and merry nihilism. These people are apt to accept the clever gimmickry as one would a party favor.

Möbius Strip. Some of the book’s 14 pieces, nearly half of which have previously appeared in magazines, were designed for what is currently called mixed-media performance. To begin with, there is a do-it-yourself Möbius strip that reads (when cut, twisted and joined as instructed): “Once Upon A Time There Was A Story That Began Once Upon A Time There Was A Story That Began . . .” It could go on indefinitely, though once around is enough for anyone to get Barth’s point about the cyclical nature of storytelling—or yarning, as he would undoubtedly prefer to call it.

Then there is Autobiography, which is meant for monophonic tape and a “visible but silent author.” Menelaiad, on the other hand, “depends for clarity on the reader’s eye and may be said to have been composed for ‘printed voice,’ ” which may or may not mean that it is to be read aloud—silently.

The reader, the most antiquated piece of equipment in a mixed-media production, gets only the book. Barth says he originally planned to insert audio tapes in a number of hollowed-out pages, but dropped the idea as too gimmicky. There was no mention of providing each reader with a visible but silent author. Thanks mainly to Barth’s enormous vitality and virtuosity, however, most of the pieces do quite well in print. Basically, Barth is firmly fixed in the Gutenberg galaxy.

Taken together, as Barth urges they should be, these fictions interreact to produce a series of constantly changing and enticingly illusive forms. Like the sea god Proteus, who avoided foretelling the future by changing his form every time he was pinned down, Barth keeps his artistic assets as liquid as possible.

Petition, for example, is a powerfully conceived, expertly executed traditional story about a Siamese twin who believes that his brother is planning to kill him. By turns funny and pathetic, it shudders with the paranoia that ensues when one loses his sense of humor about an unalterable condition. Title is an experimental fiction that is the last word in self-consciousness as a literary mode. The protagonist is the story itself, continually stumbling over its own beginning, middle and end, and recovering to see if anybody is still watching. “To acknowledge what I’m doing while I’m doing it is exactly the point,” it proclaims.

Another bit of Barth cunning is to turn daily life into mythology while turning mythology into domestic comedy. Ambrose His Mark, Water-Message and the title story, Lost in the Funhouse, contain elements of autobiography, though the characters and events have an Olympian quality. Menelaiad and Anonymiad, bawdy colloquializations of the Aeneid, are reminiscent of Barth’s historical burlesque The Sot-Weed Factor.

What Barth is really up to can perhaps best be seen—or rather heard—in Glossolalia. He uses the mystical notion of speaking in tongues as a pointed metaphor in his guerrilla war against static literary forms. More a soothsayer’s scripture than prose fiction, the piece mimics the ancient ritual that attempts to divine the truth with spontaneous word patterns and nonsense syllables. Concludes Barth: “The sense-lessest babble, could we ken it, might disclose a dark message, or prayer.”

Illusive Meaning. In his own mischievous and amiable way, Barth is seeking what has been called “the coincidence of apposites,” those meanings that are beyond the ability of value-burdened words to express fully. Sometimes an illusive meaning can be momentarily grasped with an oxymoron—the joining of two mutually contradictory words. Barth’s “printed voice” belongs in this category, along with Capote’s “nonfiction novel” and Detroit’s “hardtop convertible.” Clearly—or un-clearly—Lost in the Funhouse is a work of highly significant irrelevance.