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In contemporarycriticisma myth has emerged, whereinnarrativeliterature, released from its bondage to novelistic convention and mimetic
tradition, becomes the freeplay of language speakingto itself, infinitely
reflecting and rewriting its own structures. The "text," figured in the
criticalmythology as "parafiction,""surfiction,""metafiction,"ecriture,
"antinovel," nouveau roman, nouveau nouveau roman, and so forth,
is envisioned as an "absence"undercutting the sense of presence that
language evokes. Thus, according to Sollers, a text "n'apparait que
pour s'effacer et reciter cette apparition qui s'efface ("appears only
in order to erase itself and to recitethis apparitionwhich erasesitself").1
By constantly playing upon the tension between words as signifiers
and words as signs, the "text"purportedlydenies any dimension beyond
language. Drawing upon an ethical vocabulary of oppositions such
as pure and impure, free and fixed, new and'old, fluid and rigid, the
criticism substitutesa heroics of text and language for the older heroics
of creative genius and imagination.2 The "text" heroically foregoes
the old securities of presence-signification, thematic unity, totalizing form - and accepts the existentialist challenge to confront the lack
of a center at the heart of language and to dwell in that void. Hence,
runs the deconstructionist myth, the lack of meaning at the center of
'Phillippe Sollers, L'ecritureet l'experience des limites (Paris: Editions du Seuil,
1968), p. 51; my translation.
2Raymond Federman, in his essay "Imagination as Plagiarism" (New Literary
History, 7, No. 3 [Spring 1976], 563-78), sees a shift from the traditional notion of
imagination as invention to a "new"view of imagination as imitation, copying, proliferation; with this shift, the old myths of originality and of a center of meaning
are left behind.
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?1985 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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of narrativetheory. The critichas found a heroicvocation for himself and his subject,that of the liberatorand rebel.Ecriturebecomes,
for Derrida,"l'affirmationnietzscheenne,l'affirmationjoyeusedu jeu
du monde et de l'innocencedu devenir,l'affirmationd'unmonde de
signessans faute, sansverite,sans origine,offert a une interpretation
active."9
More importantlyfor readersof postmodernfiction, the criticism is short-sighted:in its enthusiasticattackon the myth of correct
interpretation,and its consequentattentionto the play of language,
it obscuresthe doublenatureof all fiction, includingself-reflexivefiction. When postmoderncriticismclaimsthat the lack of meaningof
the "text"is its meaning,that the lack of referentialvalueto language
is its truth,it dissolvestwo types of tensionessentialto narrative:the
linguistictension betweenreferenceand self-reference,and the narrativetension betweenmimesisand poesis. Self-reflexivefiction certainly does confront us with the fact that languageand convention
are merelysurfaces.Yet the complexityof this type of fiction is due
in part to the fact that it simultaneouslycreates and undermines
presences.To turn from the criticismback to the fiction itself is to
experienceas readershow self-reflexivenarrativeconstantlycultivates
this tension. 0
For instancesof this lost tension, we need only look at the many
criticalstudiesof John Barth'sfictionthat cite his workas an example
of the "empty"postmodern"text."Whileone vein of the criticismhas
focusedon Barth'svisionof existentialabsurdity,1 the dominantcriti9"Nietzschean affirmation, the joyous affirmation of the world and of the
innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without any defect, truth,
or origin, a world which is available to active interpretation." Jacques Derrida,
L'ecriture et la difference (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967), p. 427; my translation.
O?JonathanCuller stresses this tension in his discussion of the various ways in
which readers "naturalize"a text: "Ourmajor device of order is, of course, the notion
of the person or speaking subject, and the process of reading is especially troubled
when we cannot construct a subject who would serve as source of the poetic
utterance. . . . it is more fruitful to stress the impersonality of writing and the meaning that is produced by the attempt to construct a fictional persona than to speak
of the disappearanceof the subject."StructuralistPoetics (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press,
1975), p. 170. While Culler is speaking of lyric poetry here, I find his observation
equally applicable to narrative.
I Two representativeexamples will suffice. Harold Farwell, "John Barth'sTenuous
Affirmation: 'The Absurd, Unending Possibility of Love,'" The Georgia Review,
28, No. 2 (Summer 1974), 290-306, sees a central tension "between cynical doubt
and an all-encompassing affirmation of possibilities." Jerry Powell, "John Barth's
Chimera: A Creative Response to the Literature of Exhaustion," Critique, 18, No.
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cal approach for the past ten years has been a focus on Barth's narrative and linguistic nihilism. James Rother, for instance, sees Barth's
fiction as a recurrent demonstration of language's power to "abolish
determinismsof beginning and end,"'2and Tony Tannernotes the characteristic "nonprogressive mutterings" of a voice wandering through
the "lexicalplayfields"of narrativeform.13For Beverly Gross, Barth's
fiction "existsto announce its own inadequacy," and "proclaim[s].. .
the impossibility of narrative."14Even Campbell Tatham, arguing for
the relevance of Barth's fictional world to the world outside the text,
can grant it only the most limited sort of relevance: "Barth's novels
are commentaries on theories of the novel; insofar as novels are a part
of life, Barth's novels are a commentary on a part of life."'5 This is
a slim defense indeed against charges of self-reflexive emptiness.
Christopher Morris has attempted to shift the critical discussion
away from debate about Barth'saffirmations or negations- from concerns with what Morris calls the "inescapablenexus of Barth'snihilism"
versushis "grim'resolutions'of absurdityor tautology"- and to address
the problem of language. 6 His deconstructionist reading merely reinforces the argument for Barthian nihilism, however. For Morris, the
central motif in Lost in the Funhouse is "the rupturebetween the visual
and perceptibleworld, centered in the self, and the world of language,
which exists without a center." Language is "wholly independent of
everything outside it, even the speaker who uses it." Consequently the
work expresses Lacan's idea of the "loss of the subject . . . at the
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reply)"(C, p. 267). However fascinated Scheherazadeand the Genieanother of Barth's avatars -may be with questions of fictional technique, with the relations between frame and tale, such questions are
for Dunyazade less important than what the stories are about. As
the narrator of "Life-Story" puts it, "What sort of story is it whose
drama lies always in the next frame out?"22The question is rhetorical:
no kind of story, he implies- at least no story we can care much about.
"If Sinbad sinks it's Scheherazade who drowns; whose neck one
wonders is on her line?" (LF, p. 117). The problem with "scientific
fictions" and postmodern "texts"is that they sacrifice passion for the
arid pleasures of technique. In the maze of literature-as-signs, of
ecriture blanche, what Barth refers to as the "felt ultimacies" of our
lives are lost. The postmodern writer'ssophistication regardingliterary
form is such that not only must all forms seem derivative, but all statements seem the foregone conclusion of the writer's choice of a given
form. As the narrator of the "Anonymiad," having invented writing
and made the discovery of fiction, fills jug after jug with (in order
of their historical appearance) the various subgenres of narrative and
then "run[s] out of world and material" (LF, p. 187), he finds himself
in the postmodernist dilemma: "as my craft improved, my interest
waned, and my earlier zeal seemed hollow as the jugs it filled. Was
there any new thing to say, new way to say the old?" (LF, p. 188).
The answerto that question is "yes,"a response proposed by Barth
in the Funhouse where the narrator of "Life-Story" realizes that his
lack of "ground-situation"may in fact be his "ground-situation," and
where the interlocutor in "Title"suggests that the narrator try to "turn
ultimacy against itself to make something new and valid, the essence
whereof would be the impossibility of making something new" (LF,
pp. 115, 106). It is, of course, a paradoxical"yes,"and one that requires
us to think of fiction's statements differently from the way in which
we ordinarily think of statements. For the writer must address his and
our situation; and yet self-consciousness turns all statements ironic,
self-negating. Barth's fiction reflects an awareness that the relation
between words and what we would have them say is always ironic.
That awareness creates a state of self-alienation that rendersus unable
to complete a statement or a story, to connect with a listener or a lover.
What Barth stages, then, is the drama of the erosions of self-consciousness and the struggle against those erosions. While it is true that
he points out the absence at the heart of language, he gives us another
22Lostin the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice(New York: Bantam,
1969), p. 117. Further references, abbreviated as LF, are cited in the text.
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sort of presence:namely,our resistanceto that absence.The collapsibilityof language,the arbitrarinessof fictions, the infiniteregressof
statement,aremerelythe stagefor the drama.Self-reflexivitycreates
a labyrinthof mirrorsthat turns fiction into "text";but the quest in
theFunhouseis for a contextthatwillenablefictionto resistthatreduction and to counterthat loss.
Self-consciousnessis exploredon two planesin Lost in the Funhouse, the existentialandthe linguistic,whichcometogetheras problems of narrativevoice. Existentiallyits effects are felt as a loss or
dispersalof self, a themepresentin Barth'searlier,nonreflexivefiction.
In Chimera and Lost in the Funhouse, self-consciousness becomes an
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becomesoutside. In the hall of mirrors,the reflectionsand refractions go on infinitely, blurringand distortingAmbrose into notAmbrose.As the self-reflexive
languageundermineslanguage'sreferential function, it underminesour sense of the narratoras person. We
have a sense of a mind informingthe story, but it is not strictlypersonal: Ambrose"deceiveshimself' and us "into supposinghe [is] a
person"(LF, p. 90), for he existsonly as self-consciousnessassuming
a rangeof voices, some personaland some conventional.Our sense
of narrator-as-person
is replacedby narrator-as-voices.
The dilemmasof self-consciousnesscontinuein the second half
of Lost in the Funhouse, crypticallyimaged in the next story as
Narcissus'sdilemma:self-absorption.Whatlies behind"Echo"is the
effort to anchorvoice in person, to limit the obsessivechain of selfreflectionso that storycan begin. "Title"and "Life-Story"
initiatethe
out
of
the
way
labyrinthby expressingthe narrativeproblemas an
existentialone. Whereasin the title story the tension betweenvoice
as personand voice as languageis neverresolved,here the narrative
voice is clearlypersonaleven at the height of self-reflexivity.Even
as the languageundercutsitself, underminesstatement,and creates
absences,those processesare made humanlysignificantthroughthe
narrators'personalsituations-being "fullof voices,"self-absorbed,
awareof theirown "absenceof presence,"unableto connectwithanything but echoes.
In "Title,"the soundand furyof self-multiplyingvoice has come
to signifynothingand to state that fact. The story is at once a demonstrationof the emptinessof self-reflexivelanguageand a dramaof
the narrator'seffortsto fill that emptiness:"Everything
leadsto nothing. ...
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deal realer.It's as if they live in some room of our house that we can'tfind
the door to, thoughit's so close we can hearechoes of theirvoices. Experience has madethemwise insteadof bitter;knowledgehas mellowedinstead
of souringthem;in theirfortiesand fifties, evenin theirsixties,they'regayer
and strongerand more authenticthan they were in their twenties;for the
twenty-year-oldsthey haveonly affectionatesympathy.So? Whyaren'tthe
couplein this storythat man and woman, so easy to imagine?(LF, p. 107)
If those voices could replace this self-conscious one, if fiction would
recognize that people still live their lives "in more or less conventionally dramatic fashion, unfashionable or not" (LF, p. 109)-that
is, in a mannerresemblingfiction's conventions of linearplot, of motive
and character-then this love affair and fiction would presumably be
saved. But this is wishful thinking, for even as the narrator states,
"that my dear is what writers have got to find ways to write about
in this adjective adjective hour," he demonstrates its impossibility.
Carried away by the force of his assertions, he loses hold on his statement and ends in the same self-reflexive quandary. This is the hour
of "adjective adjective," of "accursedself-consciousness," of mimetic
fiction's bad faith. The force of "Title"is in the human implications
of the linguistic (and fictional) problem-the real poignancy of that
vision of a couple aging together in the fullness of affection, as set
against the abrasive hostility to which these voices are driven by their
self-absorption and their frustration with it. The self-consciousness
that prevents them from speaking humanly to each other is precisely
what makes the story speak humanly to us.
"Life-Story" continues the effort to get beyond reflexivity, first
of all by critiquing it. For one thing, self-reflexivity is a convention
of twentieth-century literature: "Another story about a writer writing
a story! Another regressus in infinitum!" (LF, p. 114). It's dreary, a
tiresome mode for both writer and reader: "Who doesn't prefer art
that at least overtly imitates something other than its own processes?"
(LF, p. 114). The fictiveness of fiction is an obvious truth, hardly
enough to sustain even the shortest of tales: "Self-consciousness can
be a bloody bore."23The question, as the narratorof "Life-Story"comments, is one regarding the human implications of that truth: "what
were to be the consequences of D's . . . disproving or verifying his
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The lines betweenwere blank, as was the space beneaththe complimentaryclose. (C, p. 268; LF, p. 53)
But their reactions are opposite: Ambrose feels the thrill of new knowledge and "other truth"; Bellerophon sees a blank. In terms of statement, Bellerophon is of course right. But for Ambrose, the message
consists in the fact of its occurrence. He sees it as an act of address:
Pastthe riverandthe Bay, fromcontinentsbeyond,thismessengerhadcome.
Borneby currentsas yet uncharted,nosed by fishes as yet unnamed,it had
bobbedfor agesbeneathstrangestars.Thenout of the oceansit had strayed;
past cape and cove, black can, red nun, the word had wanderedwilly-nilly
to his threshold.(LF, p. 52)
It is literally "his truly," a message of concern to one who feels shut
off from others and from those mysteries. Bellerophon sees a blank
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