John Barth
Paperback | Pages: 205 pages Rating: 3.7 | 5335 Users | 337 Reviews
Point Books In Favor Of Lost in the Funhouse
| Original Title: | Lost in the Funhouse |
| ISBN: | 0385240872 (ISBN13: 9780385240871) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Literary Awards: | National Book Award Finalist for Fiction (1969) |
Interpretation Conducive To Books 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.
Present About Books Lost in the Funhouse
| Title | : | Lost in the Funhouse |
| Author | : | John Barth |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Anniversary Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 205 pages |
| Published | : | March 1st 1988 by Anchor Books (first published 1968) |
| Categories | : | Short Stories. Fiction. Literature. American |
Rating About Books Lost in the Funhouse
Ratings: 3.7 From 5335 Users | 337 ReviewsColumn About Books Lost in the Funhouse
Barth is such a lyrical writer, especially compared to most of the brooding postmodernist set. Just look at the opening story, "Night-Sea Journey." Gorgeous in its imagery, rich with philosophical inquiry, it's worthy of Calvino.And Barth doesn't limit himself, he gracefully steps from style to style, going from that to weird biographies to formal experiments to lyrical, haunting childhood tales. Above all, the whole thing is a big, long mash note in love with the writing process.I get theLost In The Funhouse; Fiction For Print, Tape, Live Voice is John Barth's response to a gauntlet Marshall McLuhan was throwing down back in the heady days of the sixties regarding the immanent demise of the work of art as printed text and the subsequent decline in the fortunes of the Gutenberg family. Sound familiar? As it is his first collection of short fiction (anomalous), no matter one's response to the Funhouse, please do pick up one of his long works, the form in which his muse sings much
As critics decried the Death of the Novel, Death of the Story, Death of the Author, Death of et cetera, Barth took it upon himself to revel in the debris, causing further destruction in the process. Despite being billed as a connected series, this collection covers a lot of relatively unconnected ground, veering between personal narrative, self-reflexive formal pyrotechnics, and re-constructed mythology. It's all very clever, but the content, for me, sometimes fails to keep pace with the
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. John Barth, Lost in the FunhouseDarwin ate (U) his mark. (A.) Once upon a time there was a review that began: (B.) (view spoiler)[(b.)Once upon a time there was a review that began (a.) (hide spoiler)] Barth wrote a novel for himself. He wrote a novel to himself. He doesn't care about you. He is not writing for you. He is not going to make you
I read this over a span of several weeks, really. When I saw that the title page had "Fiction for print, live tape, and voice," I was intrigued and had to go find out what that meant. There are instructions by the author of which stories should be read out loud and which ones should have come recorded onto tape, of course none of them are. So the first thing I did was read the out loud ones out loud, which was a blast.Then I got into the character of Ambrose, who appears in a few stories. I love
Disappointing. This soi-disant landmark in experimental fiction was stuffed with endless exercises in indulgence, vague and rambling stories, pretentious non-sequiturs and assorted Greek gibberish. The title piece, Title and Petition were the only engaging and amusing stories here. Most of the collection indulges in Barths obsession with Victorian writing and Greek myth. Night-Sea Journey, Meneliad and Anonymiad are insufferable, despite the clever tricks and (rare) flashes of wit. (The middle
Lost in the Funhouse started off on a positive note and acquired my attention due its various meta-fictional tricks, for which Im a pretty soft target, but it was soon succumbed to those tricks only, which got a little out of hand for my personal taste . This is not a perfect series by any means and never meant to, especially with all those literary gymnastics, most of which ended in a nasty fall. Im fairly receptive to all these experimental and post modern writings but in most of the cases I
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