Books like Lost in the Funhouse

Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth’s collection of fourteen metafictional short-stories could take the cupcake for the most extreme form of self-reflexive postmodern literature ever written. Frame-Tale is ten words long on a Mobius strip, Night-Sea Journey a ten-pager, an occasionally light, occasionally dark brooding on life and death in the tradition of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, and the longest piece in the collection, Lost in the Funhouse, about a young boy on the threshold of his teenage years, a story that awakened my own buried, complex emotions when I was of similar age, a story utilizing metafictional techniques in the telling of a traditional coming-of-age tale. However, to give a reader a more decided taste of John Barth’s scrumptious vanilla with honey cream cheese frosting cupcake collection, I will focus on one of my favorite of these delectable specimens, the title of which is (and let us not be shocked since we are talking metafiction): Title. Here goes with my linking Title with a batch of major themes in the world of the postmodern: Poiumena – Big word, but don’t be put off, it means a story about the very process of creating a story, even the very story we are reading, as in the first short paragraph of Title: “Beginning: in the middle, past the middle, nearer three-quarters done, waiting for the end. Consider how dreadful so far: passionless, abstraction, pro, dis. And it will get worse. Can we possibly continue?” Actually it does continue for another nine pages, and, fortunately, this metafictional story gets better not worse. Better, that is, if you are into metafiction.Irony and Playfulness – The first-person narrator, we can call him John-John (I have no shame as I just used this silly name in a previous John Barth review) tells us directly how he is required to develop a plot and theme by getting down and dirty into some serious conflicts and complications. Of course, big difference between talking about conflicts and actual conflicts, just as there is a big difference between reading about a fistfight and the reality of exchanging blows and coming home with a bloody nose. The authors of metafiction have the smallest number of bloody noses per page compared with all other genres. No kidding – I did the counting myself. Pastiche – In postmodern literature, pasting together various genres or styles. Not to be outdone, John-John pastes together a story with digressions on grammar, direct addresses to the reader, William Faulkner swearwords, reflections on self-reflexive fiction-writing, among others. And, by the way, in one of his other stories collected here, Menelaiad, an entire paragraph consists of quotation marks. Minimalism – As it turns out, this John Barth collection includes a life story compressed into fourteen pages and an autobiography boiled down into six pages. Does it get any more minimal that that? One way minimalism can be defined is the manner in which an author will provide the barest descriptions and ask the reader to fill in the blanks. Again, not to be outdone, in Title, John-John asks us directly to fill in the blank at least once; and in other passages, we are asked indirectly to fill in the blanks. By my latest count, I filled in the blank twenty-seven times. Maximalism – Thou shall leave no literary device unturned. In his author’s Forward to this collection, John Barth informs us writers tend by temperament to be either sprinters or marathoners and how really, really, short fiction is not his long suit. But after tapping many the literary device in a string of doorstopper novels, he wanted to, by golly, get his fiction in those collections of short stories, the kind of books he always uses to teach from. “Not all of a writer’s motives are pure.” Thus we have Title and the other short stories here. Got to hand it to you Sir John, you are a maximalist with a vengeance! Metafiction – A close cousin with a story about a story, metafiction deals with writing about writing. And there is plenty of such in Title, as when we read: “Once upon a time you were satisfied with incidental felicities and niceties of technique: the unexpected image, the refreshingly accurate word-choice, the memorable simile that yields deeper and subtler significances upon reflection, like a memorable smile. Somebody please stop me.” No problem, John-John – I’ll stop you. As the dice below spell out, we have reached the end. I hope this short review provides enough information to enable a reader to judge if Lost in the Funhouse is your cupcake of tea. And that's "T" as in Title.