BOOKS
NO EXIT
LOST IN THE FUN HOUSE. By John Barth. Doubleday. $4.95.
John Barth is what Robert Musil called a "possibilitarian,"
meaning someone blessed or afflicted with "a sense of possibility." "Any–
one possessing it does not say, for instance, here this or that has hap–
pened, will happen, must happen. He uses his imagination and says:
Here such and such might, should or ought to happen. And if he is told
that something
is
the way it is, then he thinks: Well, it could probably
be
just as easily some other way. . . . Such possibilitarians live, it is
said, within a finer web, a web of haze, imaginings, fantasy and the sub–
junctive mood
[The Man Without Qualities]."
Obviously without any
sense of possibility man would be mindlessly mired in necessity, and the
rejection of anyone fixed patterning of reality is an effort which Amer–
ican heroes and authors alike are constantly making. But it is possible for
the sense of possibility to get out of hand, and here Kierkegaard's
comments in
The Sickness Unto D.eath
are especially pertinent. "Now
if possibility outruns necessity, the self runs away from itself, so that it
has no necessity whereto it is bound to return - then this is the despair
of possibility." Barth has explored precisely this despair in some of
his previous novels but it now seems
to
have touched the author himself.
Again from Kierkegaard: "Possibility then appears to
the
self ever
greater and greater, more and more things become possible, because
nothing becomes actual. At last it is as if everything were possible - but
this is precisely when the abyss has swallowed up the self."
Lacking "the sense of actuality" some people, says Kierkegaard, go
"astray in possibility." In his latest book, brilliant as it is, I think that
Barth has gone astray in exactly this way.
Lost in the Fun House
suf–
ficiently indicates the impasse to which his sense of the arbitrariness of
invention, and the unlimited number of possible fictions, has brought
him. "What the hell, reality is a nice place to visit but you wouldn't
want to live there, and literature never did, very long.... Reality is a
