Lost in the Funhouse

By Paul Gray

LETTERS by John Barth; Putnam; 772 pages; $16.95

Author John Barth, 49, began his career in the guise of a realist with a somewhat spooky sense of humor. The Floating Opera (1956) and The End of the Road (1958) appeared as slim companion pieces; they pivoted on the same philosophical question, i.e., how to impose values on a neutral universe; and both dwelt on despair as a source of grim comedy. But they were also set in a recognizable version of Maryland's Eastern Shore and populated with conventional characters. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) changed course. An encyclopedic parody of 18th century English picaresque fiction, the novel was also a comic meditation on early colonial American history. From a few factual clues, Barth dreamed up a fancy as convoluted and funny as any in postwar American fiction.

Classed as a black humorist in the '50s, Barth was hailed as a fabulist in the '60s. He was actually becoming a school of one. Following hints in his own work and examples out of Beckett, Borges and Nabokov, he evolved assumptions that increasingly governed his fiction. Among them: the number of stories to tell is finite and dwindling; print has been rendered passe by film and electronics; realism is an irrational goal for the writer (What is real? Whose reality is it?); art rehashes art. Barth's response was to exalt artifice and make telling the subject of the tale. Giles Goat-Boy (1966) was less a novel than a treatise on the archetypes of heroism; some of the stories in Lost in the Funhouse (1968) suggested antiphonal readings between printed page and tape recorder, or struggled gamely just to get themselves started; the three novellas in Chimera (1972) portrayed classical myths swallowed by their own commentaries.

Barth's career is germane not only because it is one of the most interesting in contemporary letters but also because it literally dictated Letters. The subject of the book, some ten years in the writing, is the body of Barth's previous fiction. Letters is a vast hall of mirrors, endlessly reflecting earlier reflections. After two decades of preparation, Barth has finally lost himself in his own funhouse.

It is possible to respect and admire the tenacity that drove the author to this pass. It is possible to state that no student of fiction will be able to ignore the existence of Letters. But it is almost impossible to read the book. Pore over, dip into, muse about, trace patterns through, yes. Follow it willingly and comfortably from beginning to end, no.

What happened? The first clue appears on the title page, where the word LETTERS is built up from a welter of small letters that, when properly viewed, spell the following: "an old time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls & dreamers each of which imagines himself actual." Letters made up of letters, fiction made up of fictions, Chinese boxes diminishing to emptiness. Such diminution is what the novel is about. The 772 pages that follow thus constitute a stunningly obsessive exercise in inflatio ad absurdum.

This problem might have been papered over with a vivid, engrossing surface, but Barth seems to have taken pains to make his letter writers as unattractive and self-absorbed as possible. He is one of them, thus dryly joining the ranks of the fictitious who think themselves actual, and five of the others either figure in or are suggested by his earlier books. The seventh is Lady Amherst, a fiftyish British widow who has fetched up on the Eastern Shore as a visiting lecturer at a jerk water Maryland college. As the new girl in the book, she commands initial attention and then numbed disbelief. It is not just her Olympian long-windedness that is troubling, but the things she writes. She describes sex with her lover (another correspondent): " 'Appen I enjoy it (as, despite all and faute de mieux, I sometimes do), bully for me; 'appen I don't, it up wi' me knees and nightie anyroad, and to't till I'm proper ploughed and seeded." This language has nothing to do with Lady Amherst, a 20th century gentlewoman; it is present only because it echoes the 18th century patois of The Sot- Weed Factor.

The chief virtue of the old epistolary novel was suspense; the tense was present, and the letter writers did not know what would happen once they put down their quills. Barth strips the form of any forward thrust. His interest is not in progress or advancement but in recapitulation. The letters are governed by a "Deeper Pattern"; the letter writers slowly merge in the conviction that they are living the first part of their lives for a second time or, as one writes, that "biography like history may re-enact itself as farce." Stasis reigns, history is not Viconian cycles or Yeatsian gyres but the thumbscrew. On this subject, the correspondents begin to correspond: "The past is a holding tank from which time's wastes recirculate . . . History really is that bird you [Barth] mention somewhere, who flies in ever diminishing circles until it disappears up its own fundament."

It takes a major writer to commit a major blunder. What Barth publishes matters, in capital Letters, and this novel will fuel brush fires in academic journals and little quarterlies for years to come. Considerations will be reconsidered, opinions re-opined. At this moment though, Barth looks like a magician who has described too fully the trip wires up his sleeve or the spare tiger dozing fitfully in a box just offstage. As he talks on and on, piling analysis upon explanation, the audience slowly files out. If Joyce's Ulysses was the milestone of modernism, Barth's Letters may well be its tombstone.

--Paul Grey

Letter from the author of Letters:

I hope your review of my Letters novel will not emphasize the role in it of my earlier novels, since that is the aspect of the novel I am most inclined to de-emphasize. My books are allowed to know one another, as children of the same father, but they must lead their lives in dependently. It is a rule in our house that one may recycle characters from one's earlier stories, but only if one does not presume even for a sentence that even one reader has even heard of those stories and characters, much less that anyone has read and remembers the stories in detail.

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