Lost in the Funhouse

  by John Barth

  THE FLOATING OPERA

  THE END OF THE ROAD

  THE SOT-WEED FACTOR

  GILES GOAT-BOY

  CHIMERA

  LETTERS

  SABBATICAL: A ROMANCE

  THE FRIDAY BOOK

  THE TIDEWATER TALES

  First Anchor Books Edition, 1988

  Copyright © 1963, 1966, 1968, 1969, 1988 by John Barth

  Seven Additional Author’s Notes Copyright © by John Barth

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday in 1968. The Anchor Books edition is published by arrangement with Doubleday.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  “Night-Sea Journey” first appeared in ESQUIRE magazine, June 1966.

  “Ambrose His Mark” first appeared in ESQUIRE magazine, February 1963.

  “Autobiography” first appeared in The New American Review, #2.

  “Water Message” first appeared in the SOUTHWEST REVIEW, published by Southern Methodist University, Summer 1963.

  “Lost in the Funhouse” is reprinted by permission of the Atlantic Monthly Company, Copyright © 1967 by the Atlantic Monthly Company. It appeared in the November 1967 issue of THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

  “Title” is reprinted by permission of Yale University, Copyright © 1967 by Yale University. It first appeared in the Winter 1968 issue of the YALE REVIEW.

  “Petition” first appeared in ESQUIRE magazine, July 1968.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Barth, John.

  Lost in the funhouse : fiction for print, tape, live voice/by John Barth.—Anchor books ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3552.A75L6 1988 87-26214

  813′.54—dcl9

  ISBN 0-385-24087-2

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5250-1

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1

  LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE

  Foreword to the Anchoi Books Edition

  Short fiction is not my long suit. Writers tend by temperament to be either sprinters or marathoners, and I learned early that the long haul was my stride. The form of the modern short story—as defined and developed by Poe, Maupassant, and Chekhov and handed on to the twentieth century—I found in my apprentice years to be parsimonious, constraining, constipative. Much as I admired its great practitioners, I preferred more narrative elbow room.

  The premodern tale is another matter: especially the tale cycle, as told by the likes of Scheherazade and Boccaccio. I virtually began my narrative career with one of those, but set it aside for the even more hospitable space of the novel and the more hospitable project rhythms of the novelist. Your congenital short-story writer faces the blank-faced muse once every few weeks (in the case of early Chekhov, every few days). Your congenital novelist prefers to dream up a world once every few years; to plant and people it and dwell therein for maybe a whole presidential term—or the time it takes a new college freshman to complete the baccalaureate—before reconfronting the interterrestrial Void.

  But after a dozen years of writing and publishing the novels reprinted in this Anchor Books series—The Floating Opera, The End of the Road, The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy—in the mid-1960s I found myself hankering to re-attempt the short form, for assorted reasons:

  For one thing, Less really is More, other things equal. Even quite expansive novels, if carefully written, have their own economy and rigor; but Sot-Weed and Giles are long novels indeed, and writing them increased my respect for the mode that comes least naturally to me. The clown comes to want to play Hamlet, and vice versa; the long-distance runner itches to sprint. Just as there are musical ideas that won’t do for a symphony but are just right for a song, there are narrative ideas suitable only for a short story: quick takes, epiphanies that even a novella would attenuate, not to mention a novel. Over the years, I had accumulated a few such narrative ideas in my notebooks.

  Moreover, I teach stories as well as telling them, and like most writing coaches I find the short story most useful for seminar purposes. You can hold a short story in your hand, like a lyric poem; see it whole; examine the function of individual sentences, even individual words, as you can’t readily do with Bleak House or War and Peace. (This pedagogical convenience, together with the proliferation of creative writing programs in the U.S.A., must be largely responsible for the happy resurgence of the American short story—at a time when, paradoxically, the popular audience has never been smaller.) But those model stories I was teaching came from classroom anthologies in which (novels being hard to excerpt coherently, and excerpts being formally less useful than complete works), my own fiction was seldom included. I consoled myself, maybe flattered myself, with the consideration that such eminent non-short-story-writing contemporaries as Ralph Ellison and William Styron were likewise seldom included—but I wanted to be in those anthologies. Not all of a writer’s motives are pure.

  It was about this time that I came across the writings of the great Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, whose temper was so wedded to the short forms that, like Chekhov, he never wrote a novel, and whose unorthodox brilliance transformed the short story for me. Writers learn from their experience of other writers as well as from their experience of life in the world; it was the happy marriage of form and content in Borges’s ficciones—the way he regularly turned his narrative means into part of his message—that suggested how I might try something similar, in my way and with my materials.

  The result was Lost in the Funhouse (I was in fact, at age thirteen or so, once briefly mislaid in a boardwalk funhouse, in Asbury Park, New Jersey; end of autobiographical reference). Incorrigibly the novelist, I decided at the outset to write not simply some short stories but a book of short stories: a sequence or series rather than a mere assortment. Though the several stories would more or less stand alone (and therefore be anthologizable), the series would be strung together on a few echoed and developed themes and would circle back upon itself: not to close a simple circuit like that of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, emblematic of Viconian eternal return, but to make a circuit with a twist to it, like a Möbius strip, emblematic of—well, read the book.

  The series was written and assembled between 1966 and 1968. The first Doubleday edition (1968) was prefaced by the Author’s Note which follows; to subsequent editions I appended “Seven Additional Author’s Notes,” set here at the end (I was busy by then with a novel that pretends to have seven authors). The reader may skip all these frames and go directly to the first story … called “Frame-Tale.” It happens to be, I believe, the shortest short story in the English language (ten words); on the other hand, it’s endless.

  The High Sixties, like the Roaring Twenties, was a time of more than usual ferment in American social, political, and artistic life. Our unpopular war in Vietnam, political assassinations, race riots, the hippie counterculture, pop art, mass poetry readings, street theater, vigorous avantgardism in all the arts, together with dire predictions not only of the death of the novel but of the moribundity of the print medium in the electronic global village—those flavored the air we breathed then, along with occasional tear gas and other contaminants. One may sniff traces of that air in the Funhouse (“Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice”). I myself found it more invigorating than disturbing. May the reader find these stories likewise.

  John Barth

  1987

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Au
thor

  Title Page

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  FRAME-TALE

  NIGHT-SEA JOURNEY

  AMBROSE HIS MARK

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  WATER-MESSAGE

  PETITION

  LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE

  ECHO

  TWO MEDITATIONS

  TITLE

  GLOSSOLALIA

  LIFE-STORY

  MENELAIAD

  ANONYMIAD

  SEVEN ADDITIONAL AUTHOR’S NOTES

  About the Author

  Author’s Note (1968)

  This book differs in two ways from most volumes of short fiction. First, it’s neither a collection nor a selection, but a series; though several of its items have appeared separately in periodicals, the series will be seen to have been meant to be received “all at once” and as here arranged. Most of its members, consequently, are “new”—written for this book, in which they appear for the first time.

  Second, while some of these pieces were composed expressly for print, others were not. “Ambrose His Mark” and “Water-Message,” the earliest-written, take the print medium for granted but lose or gain nothing in oral recitation. “Petition,” “Lost in the Funhouse,” “Life-Story,” and “Anonymiad,” on the other hand, would lose part of their point in any except printed form; “Night-Sea Journey” was meant for either print or recorded authorial voice, but not for live or non-authorial voice; “Glossolalia” will make no sense unless heard in live or recorded voices, male and female, or read as if so heard; “Echo” is intended for monophonic authorial recording, either disc or tape; “Autobiography,” for monophonic tape and visible but silent author. “Menelaiad,” though suggestive of a recorded authorial monologue, depends for clarity on the reader’s eye and may be said to have been composed for “printed voice.” “Title” makes somewhat separate but equally valid senses in several media: print, monophonic recorded authorial voice, stereophonic ditto in dialogue with itself, live authorial voice, live ditto in dialogue with monophonic ditto aforementioned, and live ditto interlocutory with stereophonic et cetera, my own preference; it’s been “done” in all six. “Frame-Tale” is one-, two-, or three-dimensional, whichever one regards a Möbius strip as being. On with the story. On with the story.

  ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN

  FRAME-TALE

  Cut on dotted line.

  Twist end once and fasten

  AB to ab, CD to cd.

  NIGHT-SEA JOURNEY

  “One way or another, no matter which theory of our journey is correct, it’s myself I address; to whom I rehearse as to a stranger our history and condition, and will disclose my secret hope though I sink for it.

  “Is the journey my invention? Do the night, the sea, exist at all, I ask myself, apart from my experience of them? Do I myself exist, or is this a dream? Sometimes I wonder. And if I am, who am I? The Heritage I supposedly transport? But how can I be both vessel and contents? Such are the questions that beset my intervals of rest.

  “My trouble is, I lack conviction. Many accounts of our situation seem plausible to me—where and what we are, why we swim and whither. But implausible ones as well, perhaps especially those, I must admit as possibly correct. Even likely. If at times, in certain humors—stroking in unison, say, with my neighbors and chanting with them ‘Onward! Upward!’—I have supposed that we have after all a common Maker, Whose nature and motives we may not know, but Who engendered us in some mysterious wise and launched us forth toward some end known but to Him—if (for a moodslength only) I have been able to entertain such notions, very popular in certain quarters, it is because our night-sea journey partakes of their absurdity. One might even say: I can believe them because they are absurd.

  “Has that been said before?

  “Another paradox: it appears to be these recesses from swimming that sustain me in the swim. Two measures onward and upward, flailing with the rest, then I float exhausted and dispirited, brood upon the night, the sea, the journey, while the flood bears me a measure back and down: slow progress, but I live, I live, and make my way, aye, past many a drownèd comrade in the end, stronger, worthier than I, victims of their unremitting joie de nager. I have seen the best swimmers of my generation go under. Numberless the number of the dead! Thousands drown as I think this thought, millions as I rest before returning to the swim. And scores, hundreds of millions have expired since we surged forth, brave in our innocence, upon our dreadful way. ‘Love! Love!’ we sang then, a quarter-billion strong, and churned the warm sea white with joy of swimming! Now all are gone down—the buoyant, the sodden, leaders and followers, all gone under, while wretched I swim on. Yet these same reflective intervals that keep me afloat have led me into wonder, doubt, despair—strange emotions for a swimmer!—have led me, even, to suspect … that our night-sea journey is without meaning.

  “Indeed, if I have yet to join the hosts of the suicides, it is because (fatigue apart) I find it no meaningfuller to drown myself than to go on swimming.

  “I know that there are those who seem actually to enjoy the night-sea; who claim to love swimming for its own sake, or sincerely believe that ‘reaching the Shore,’ ‘transmitting the Heritage’ (Whose Heritage, I’d like to know? And to whom?) is worth the staggering cost. I do not. Swimming itself I find at best not actively unpleasant, more often tiresome, not infrequently a torment. Arguments from function and design don’t impress me: granted that we can and do swim, that in a manner of speaking our long tails and streamlined heads are ‘meant for’ swimming; it by no means follows—for me, at least—that we should swim, or otherwise endeavor to ‘fulfill our destiny.’ Which is to say, Someone Else’s destiny, since ours, so far as I can see, is merely to perish, one way or another, soon or late. The heartless zeal of our (departed) leaders, like the blind ambition and good cheer of my own youth, appalls me now; for the death of my comrades I am inconsolable. If the night-sea journey has justification, it is not for us swimmers ever to discover it.

  “Oh, to be sure, ‘Love!’ one heard on every side: ‘Love it is that drives and sustains us!’ I translate: we don’t know what drives and sustains us, only that we are most miserably driven and, imperfectly, sustained. Love is how we call our ignorance of what whips us. ‘To reach the Shore,’ then: but what if the Shore exists in the fancies of us swimmers merely, who dream it to account for the dreadful fact that we swim, have always and only swum, and continue swimming without respite (myself excepted) until we die? Supposing even that there were a Shore—that, as a cynical companion of mine once imagined, we rise from the drowned to discover all those vulgar superstitions and exalted metaphors to be literal truth: the giant Maker of us all, the Shores of Light beyond our night-sea journey!—whatever would a swimmer do there? The fact is, when we imagine the Shore, what comes to mind is just the opposite of our condition: no more night, no more sea, no more journeying. In short, the blissful estate of the drowned.

  “ ‘Ours not to stop and think; ours but to swim and sink.…’ Because a moment’s thought reveals the pointlessness of swimming. ‘No matter,’ I’ve heard some say, even as they gulped their last: ‘The night-sea journey may be absurd, but here we swim, will-we nill-we, against the flood, onward and upward, toward a Shore that may not exist and couldn’t be reached if it did.’ The thoughtful swimmer’s choices, then, they say, are two: give over thrashing and go under for good, or embrace the absurdity; affirm in and for itself the night-sea journey; swim on with neither motive nor destination, for the sake of swimming, and compassionate moreover with your fellow swimmer, we being all at sea and equally in the dark. I find neither course acceptable. If not even the hypothetical Shore can justify a sea-full of drownèd comrades, to speak of the swim-in-itself as somehow doing so strikes me as obscene. I continue to swim—but only because blind habit, blind instinct, blind fear of drowning are still more strong than the horror of our journey. And if on occasion I hav
e assisted a fellow-thrasher, joined in the cheers and songs, even passed along to others strokes of genius from the drownèd great, it’s that I shrink by temperament from making myself conspicuous. To paddle off in one’s own direction, assert one’s independent right-of-way, overrun one’s fellows without compunction, or dedicate oneself entirely to pleasures and diversions without regard for conscience—I can’t finally condemn those who journey in this wise; in half my moods I envy them and despise the weak vitality that keeps me from following their example. But in reasonabler moments I remind myself that it’s their very freedom and self-responsibility I reject, as more dramatically absurd, in our senseless circumstances, than tailing along in conventional fashion. Suicides, rebels, affirmers of the paradox—nay-sayers and yea-sayers alike to our fatal journey—I finally shake my head at them. And splash sighing past their corpses, one by one, as past a hundred sorts of others: friends, enemies, brothers; fools, sages, brutes—and nobodies, million upon million. I envy them all.

  “A poor irony: that I, who find abhorrent and tautological the doctrine of survival of the fittest (fitness meaning, in my experience, nothing more than survival-ability, a talent whose only demonstration is the fact of survival, but whose chief ingredients seem to be strength, guile, callousness), may be the sole remaining swimmer! But the doctrine is false as well as repellent: Chance drowns the worthy with the unworthy, bears up the unfit with the fit by whatever definition, and makes the night-sea journey essentially haphazard as well as murderous and unjustified.

  “ ‘You only swim once.’ Why bother, then?

  “ ‘Except ye drown, ye shall not reach the Shore of Life.’ Poppycock.

  “One of my late companions—that same cynic with the curious fancy, among the first to drown—entertained us with odd conjectures while we waited to begin our journey. A favorite theory of his was that the Father does exist, and did indeed make us and the sea we swim—but not a-purpose or even consciously; He made us, as it were, despite Himself, as we make waves with every tail-thrash, and may be unaware of our existence. Another was that He knows we’re here but doesn’t care what happens to us, inasmuch as He creates (voluntarily or not) other seas and swimmers at more or less regular intervals. In bitterer moments, such as just before he drowned, my friend even supposed that our Maker wished us unmade; there was indeed a Shore, he’d argue, which could save at least some of us from drowning and toward which it was our function to struggle—but for reasons unknowable to us He wanted desperately to prevent our reaching that happy place and fulfilling our destiny. Our ‘Father,’ in short, was our adversary and would-be killer! No less outrageous, and offensive to traditional opinion, were the fellow’s speculations on the nature of our Maker: that He might well be no swimmer Himself at all, but some sort of monstrosity, perhaps even tailless; that He might be stupid, malicious, insensible, perverse, or asleep and dreaming; that the end for which He created and launched us forth, and which we flagellate ourselves to fathom, was perhaps immoral, even obscene. Et cetera, et cetera: there was no end to the chap’s conjectures, or the impoliteness of his fancy; I have reason to suspect that his early demise, whether planned by ‘our Maker’ or not, was expedited by certain fellow-swimmers indignant at his blasphemies.