Like Nothing Nameable

By GUY DAVENPORT

LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice. By John Barth.

n his new and thoroughly confusing work of fiction John Barth seems at first blush to be like a great architect making a batch of doll houses just to show that his virtuosity includes mastery over the elegant trifle and the deft sketch. This, of course, is exactly what we were not expecting from the author of "Giles Goat-Boy" and "The Sot-Weed Factor," the two most wildly rambunctious novels in American literature.
A useful analogy is the story of the Imperial master of cavalry who one day was asked to exhibit his horsemanship to an array of visiting field marshals and kings. Famous as he was for teaching cadets to make a horse to everything short of flying, he chose on this occasion to mount a glossy charger and ride him in a perfect walk before his distinguished and (one hopes) admiring spectators. So Mr. Barth gives us 14 prose designs, none of which is quite like anything for which we have a name handy.
The first is a standard mathematics puzzle that must be snipped from the book, twisted 180 degrees, and joined end-to-end. The result is a Mobius strip: the two sides of the original piece of paper having mysteriously become a single continuous surface, so that the text reads, "ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN ONCE UPON A TIME ..." and so on. The last text is about a Bronze Age bard skilled in the tales of his tribe. His patron is Agamemnon, his city Mycenae. The Trojan War breaks out; our bard is then by a fluke stranded on a small island in the Aegean, where for want of something better to do, being without audience, he invents the alphabet so that he can write down an even more astounding invention, namely fiction. Even though he cannot know what is happening at Troy, he can imagine it. From what he knows of the principal characters, he assumes that Clytemnestra strikes in a surprise move, and with Helen, as her cook rules the combined kingdoms of Troy and Hellas with a high hand.
Most of these peculiar exercises are concerned with what happens (as Wittgenstein would say) when a writer writes. He writes for an unseen audience that in turn must read an unseen author. He writes, moreover, in a tradition; that is, with a set of rules. If, for instance, he quotes a character, he places the character's words in double inverted commas; if within that quotation the character speaking quotes another character, the quotation within the quotation is indicated by single inverted commas. A quotation within a quotation within a quotation reverts to double inverted commas, and so on, alternating double and single forever, if anyone were to choose to be so complex.
Mr. Barth chooses to be nearly so complex in a story called "Menelaiad," where at one point the hero Menelaus, husband of Helen of Troy, is telling us what he told Telemachus what he told Helen what he told Proteus what he told Eidothea the sea-nymph. There are details of the story told to Eidothea which he cannot tell to Proteus, just as he does not care to tell Helen all that he told Eidothea, and here he is telling it all to us (to us!) as he told it in Sparta to Telemachus, who, because Helen is listening close by, cannot be told everything, either. Quite literally, one finds oneself reading quotation marks more carefully than one reads the text. And then we discover that it isn't Menelaus we've been listening to ... but here I must send you to the text.
There are stories here about how a story might be written; upon finishing one, have we read a story or merely listened to an author talking about a story? It is not the author who is taking 14 difficult and unusual stances in this curious book; it is rather 14 unfamiliar situation sin which the reader finds himself. That the writer wrote these unclassifiable pieces is from the reader's point of view wholly fortuitous; that we are reading them is a deliberate act, and at one point the writer asks us if we know just what we are doing. The answer is that we don't but we're trying to find out.
The conventions by which we read are ancient; most literate people have mastered them by age 11. Mr. Barth in his four novels has written within these conventions, enriching them with a new vigor. In this new book, which ought to be regarded as a kind of sketchbook, he is trying out alternatives to these conventions. In "Night-Sea Journey" and "Autobiography" he frankly uses modes invented by Samuel Beckett. He is interested in other sketches to test the McLuhan formula that the medium is the message by sinking his matter into prose, that is, for all we can see, simply prose. For the sake of contrast, two of the pieces, "Ambrose His Mark" and "Water-Message," are in traditional modes.
For all his hankering to experiment, Mr. Barth does not change his style, one of the most plastic and delightful in American writing today. Nor finally is he really experimenting with form; almost helplessly he writes a story even when he is squirming like Houdini to transmute form into as strange a permutation as he can. His real interest is in the reader and in the metaphysical plight of imagination engaging with imagination. Critics are so many buzzing flies to a writer: his real critics are his readers, the Caliph to his Scheherezade.
Mr. Barth has served his readers as handsomely as the best of storytellers. Now he chooses to philosophize with us, between novels, and we find that we are on trial. We must not only read, but also think about what we are doing. Literature, Mr. Barth seems to say, is so much tushery if you want to be blunt about it; nevertheless, the world has been in love with it for several millennia, never quite aware of what it is. It is Mr. Barth's privilege to look into the mater, and to make us look too, but he seems to have made himself as uncomfortable as the reader invisibly across from him.