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houses, but what one notices about
Lost in the Fun House
is that it is not
a funhouse, but a series of depositions about building, or not building,
funhouses. It is as though he cannot find any finn foundation on which
his architectural abilities can take hold. A sort of plea seems to be con–
tained in the following suggestion:
"If
one regarded the absence of a
ground-situation, more accurately the protagonist's anguish at that ab–
sence and his vain endeavours to supply the defect, as itself a sort of
ground-situation, did his life story thereby take on a kind of meaning?"
But meaning itself is a dissolving notion in a verbal situation in which
the narrator thinks that "the word ... is now evidently nearing the end
of its road." One conclusion to all this nonprogressive muttering is that
fiction, having acknowledged its fictitiousness, must "establish some
other, acceptable relation between itself, its author, its reader." By being
exhaustive in making fiction display its own fictitiousness, Barth is
perhaps clearing the ground for this new and necessary relationship.
Meanwhile no stories get told, no funhouses get built on their ground
of no ground. The interest of this in some ways rather oppressive
book, is that it suggests that one of the most inventive and prolific of
all contemporary American writers has discovered that the freedom
provided by what Nabokov called "lexical playfields" may precipitate
new kinds of anxiety and incapacity.
Barth has always been fascinated by triangular relationships, and
they abound in this book - the Siamese twins, and the one girl they
share; Narcissus, Tiresias and Echo who seem to reflect the complicated
relations between "teller, tale, told"; and, most interestingly, Menelaus,
Proteus and Helen in "Menelaiad." Here Barth takes up the image of
Menelaus struggling with Proteus which, interestingly enough, Ralph
Ellison has used to describe the American artist's relation to American
reality. Added to this pair is Helen, "that faultless fonn," who figures
as a contrast to Proteus whose gift for metamorphosis and multiple
temporary fonns makes him the epitome of fluidity. Menelaus loses Helen
because he keeps asking why she loves him instead of being content
to accept the mystery of love in a wordless embrace. That loss, brought
on by a compulsion to understand and verbalize, is also a loss of sub–
stantial reality. From then on, Menelaus can never be sure what he
has hold of, if indeed he has hold of anything. His struggles to hold
Proteus extend to a more prolonged effort to catch hold of something
in his narrative. Menelaus is telling a story which includes within it
accounts of himself telling stories, and so on and so on. There are tales
within tales, and the narrator can never be sure what he has hold of, j\lst
as Menelaus cannot be sure whether when he is trying to hold Proteus
he is grappling with dreams. His lament
l
"When will
I
reach my goal
