Lost in the Funhouse

Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice

First edition
Author	John Barth
Country	USA
Language	English
Publisher	Doubleday
Publication date	1968
Media type	Print

Lost in the Funhouse (1968) is a short story collection by American author John Barth. The postmodern stories are extremely self-conscious and self-reflexive and are considered to exemplify metafiction.

Though Barth's reputation rests mainly on his long novels, the stories "Night-Sea Journey", "Lost in the Funhouse", "Title" and "Life-Story" from Lost in the Funhouse are widely anthologized. The book appeared the year after the publication of Barth's essay The Literature of Exhaustion, in which Barth said that the traditional modes of realistic fiction had been used up, but that this exhaustion itself could be used to inspire a new generation of writers, citing Nabokov, Beckett, and especially Borges as exemplars of this new approach. Lost in the Funhouse took these ideas to an extreme, for which it was both praised and condemned by critics.

Overview

Each story can be considered complete in itself, and in fact several of them were published separately before being collected. Barth insists, however, on the serial nature of the stories, and that a unity can be found in them as collected. Barth shows his pessimism in the stories, and says he identifies with "Anonymiad".

Background

When Barth began attending Johns Hopkins University in 1947, he enrolled in one of only two creative writing courses available in the US at the time. He went on to become one of the first full-time professors of creative writing. The stories in Lost in the Funhouse display a professorial concern with fictional form.

Lost in the Funhouse was Barth's first book after the 1967 "The Literature of Exhaustion", an essay in which Barth claimed that the traditional modes of realistic writing had been exhausted and no longer served the contemporary writer, but that the exhaustion of these techniques could be turned into a new source of inspiration. Barth cited a number of contemporary writers, such as Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, and especially Jorge Luis Borges, as important examples of this. The essay later came to be seen by some as an early description of postmodernism. Barth has described the stories of Lost in the Funhouse as "mainly late modernist" and "postmodernist".

Influences

Jorge Luis Borges was a primary influence, as acknowledged by Barth a number of times, most notably in "The Literature of Exhaustion". Beckett was another influence.

Publication history

Written between 1966 and 1968, several of the stories had already been published separately.

Barth has said he has written his books in pairs: the realistic, existential novels, The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, were followed by the long, mythical novels, The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy. Lost in the Funhouse came out in 1968, and was followed in 1972 by Chimera, a collection of three self-aware, interrelated, metafictional novellas.

Stories

Lost in the Funhouse opens with a "story" which can be cut and pasted to form an endless Möbius strip

The book opens with "Frame-Tale"—a "story" in which "ONCE UPON A TIME THERE" and "WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN" are printed vertically, one on each side of the page. This is intended to be cut out by the reader, and its ends being fastened together, after being twisted once in a Möbius strip. This results in a regressus ad infinitum, a loop with no beginning or end. "Night-Sea Journey" follows, the first-person story of a human spermatozoon on its way to fertilized an egg. The tale allegorically recapitulates the story of human life in condensed form.

In "Petition", one half of a pair of Siamese twins, joined at the stomach to his brother's back, writes a petition in 1931 to Prajadhipok, King of Siam (now Thailand), protesting his brother's not acknowledging his existence.

In "Menalaiad", Barth leads the reader in and out of seven metaleptic layers. Menalaus' despairs as his story progresses through layer after layer of quotation marks, as one story is framed by another and then another.

"Autobiography", which is "meant for monophonic tape and visible but silent author",...

Three of the stories--"Ambrose, His Mark"; "Water-Message"; and the title story, "Lost in the Funhouse"—all concern a young boy named Ambrose and members of his family. The first story is told in first person, leading up to describing how Ambrose received his name. The second is told in third-person, written in a deliberately archaic style. The third is the most metafictional of the three, with a narrator commenting on the story's form and literary devices as it progresses.

"Life-Story" is another metafictional commentary on its own telling. In what is apparently an argument between a couple with problems in their relationship, Barth rejects giving details of names and descriptions, instead just using the words "fill in the blank."

In keeping with the book's subtitle--"Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice"—the "Author's Note" by Barth indicates the various media through which a number of these stories can be conveyed. In particular, he notes that recorded and/or live voice can be used to convey "Night-Sea Journey," "Glossolalia," "Echo," "Autobiography," and "Title."

List of stories

1. "Frame-tale"
2. "Night-sea Journey"
3. "Ambrose His Mark"
4. "Autobiography"
5. "Water-message"
6. "Petition"
7. "Lost in the Funhouse"
8. "Echo"
9. "Two Meditations"
10. "Title"
11. "Glossolalia"
12. "Life-story"
13. "Menelaiad"
14. "Anonymiad"

Reception

Lost in the Funhouse was nominated for the National Book Award (Barth would win the award for his next book, Chimera, in 1973).

Among Barth's detractors, John Gardner wrote in On Moral Fiction that Barth's stories were immoral and fake, as they portrayed life as absurd.

Max F. Schulz has said that "Barth's mature career as a fabulist begins with Lost in the Funhouse", and David Morrell called the story "Lost in the Funhouse" "the most important, progressive, trend-defining American short fiction of its decade".

Legacy

Though Barth's reputation is for his long novels, the stories "Night-Sea Journey", "Lost in the Funhouse", "Title" and "Life-Story" from Lost in the Funhouse are widely anthologized. Lost in the Funhouse has come to be seen to exemplify metafiction.

The story "Lost in the Funhouse" had an overt influence on David Foster Wallace in the final novella of Girl with Curious Hair, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way". The protagonist takes a creative writing course at a school near Johns Hopkins, taught by a Professor Ambrose, who says he "is a character in and the object of the seminal 'Lost in the Funhouse'".