294
TONY TANNER
drag." So said Barth in an interview. What seems to have happened by
the time of
Lost in the Fun House
is that he can no longer get hold of
any "reality" at all; everything he touches turns into fictions and yet
more fictions. There is no reason for his words to follow in anyone
direction; as a matter of fact there is no reason why he should go on
writing at all except that there seems to be an underlying feeling that
identity is coextensive and coterminus with articulation. The "I" is
only ascertainable as that which speaks: self is voice, but voice speaking
unnecessary and arbitrary and untrue words. The torment of this book is
that of a man who cannot really find any sanction for writing either in
world or self, yet feels that it is his one distinguishing ability, the one
activity which gives him any sense of self. In "Autobiography," intended
for tape recording, voice turns on voice in a void. "Now that I reflect
I'm not enjoying this life: my link with the world .... Are you there?
.... I hope I'm a fiction without real hope. Where there's a voice there's
a speaker.... I must compose myself.... I'll mutter to the end, one
word after another, string the rascals out, mad or not, heard or not, my
last words will
be
my last words." Words floating free in this way
never encounter any necessity so they can drift on in self-canceling and
self-undermining recessions as long as the voice lasts.
If
this is what
"identity" is, it is surely in a precarious state.
This corrosive doubt about identity and its relation to language
reveals itself in Barth's preoccupation with the relationship between
self and name. Ambrose, who figures in a number of the stories, knows
well "that I and my sign are neither one nor quite two," and I think
this sense of the ambiguous relation between "I and my sign" is the
focal point of a larger dubiety about the relationship between all names
and bodies, between words and world. One rather grotesque story
called "Petition" takes up the old Mark Twain "joke" about incom–
patible Siamese twins and gives it a philosophical twist. The petitioning
brother is an intelligent almost mandarin figure who is seeking "dis–
junction" from the coarse brutish appetitive brother to whose back he
is stuck. "He's incoherent but vocal; I'm articulate but mute." The
incoherent brother is like life itself, constantly shrugging off the at–
tempts of language to circumscribe it within particular definitions.
Lan–
guage, in the form of the articulate brother, would be happy to pursue
its inclination to ponder its elegant patternings in pure detachment
from the soiling con tacts of reality. But they are brothers, divided yet
related - neither one nor two. Like Ambrose who cannot work out the
relationship between his self and his sign, so Barth seems to have reached
a point where he cannot stop troubling himself with his uncertainty
