Lost in the Funhouse (28 page)

No matter. It is finished, Apollo be praised; there remains but to seal and launch Calliope. Long since I’ve ceased to care whether this is found and read or lost in the belly of a whale. I have no doubt that by the time any translating eyes fall on it I’ll be dust, along with Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, Agamemnon … and Merope, if that was your name, if I haven’t invented you as myself. I could do well by you now, my sweet, to whom this and all its predecessors are a continuing, strange love letter. I wish you were here. The water’s fine; in the intervals of this composition I’ve taught myself to swim, and if some night your voice recalls me, by a new name, I’ll commit myself to it, paddling and resting, drifting like my amphorae, to attain you or to drown.

There, my tale’s afloat. I like to imagine it drifting age after age, while the generations fight, sing, love, expire. Now, perhaps, it bumps the very wharfpiles of Mycenae, where my fatal voyage began. Now it passes a hairsbreadth from the unknown man or woman to whose heart, of all hearts in the world, it
could speak fluentest, most balmly—but they’re too preoccupied to reach out to it, and it can’t reach out to them. It drifts away, past Heracles’s pillars, across Oceanus, nudged by great and little fishes, under strange constellations bobbing, bobbing. Towns and statues fall, gods come and go, new worlds and tongues swim into light, old perish. Then it too must perish, with all things deciphered and undeciphered: men and women, stars and sky.

Will anyone have learnt its name? Will everyone? No matter. Upon this noontime of his wasting day, between the night past and the long night to come, a noon beautiful enough to break the heart, on a lorn fair shore a nameless minstrel

Wrote it.

1) The “Author’s Note” prefatory to the first American edition of this book has been called by some reviewers pretentious. It may seem so, inasmuch as the tapes there alluded to are not at this writing commercially available, may never be, and I judged it distracting to publish the tape-stories in reading-script format. Nevertheless the “Note” means in good faith exactly what it says, both as to the serial nature of the fourteen pieces and as to the ideal media of their presentation: the regnant idea is the unpretentious one of turning as many aspects of the fiction as possible—the structure, the narrative viewpoint, the means of presentation, in some instances the process of composition and/or recitation as well as of reading or listening—into dramatically relevant emblems of the theme.

2) The narrator of “Night-Sea Journey,” quoted from beginning to end by the authorial voice, is not, as many reviewers took him to be, a fish. If he were, their complaint that his eschatological and other speculations are trite would be entirely justified; given his actual nature, they are merely correct, and perhaps illumine certain speculations of Lord Raglan, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell.

3) The title “Autobiography” means “self-composition”: the antecedent of the first-person pronoun is not I, but the story, speaking of itself. I am its father; its mother is the recording machine.

4) Inasmuch as the nymph in her ultimate condition repeats the words of others in their own voices, the words of “Echo” on the tape or the page may be regarded validly as hers, Narcissus’s, Tiresias’s, mine, or any combination or series of the four of us’s. Inasmuch as the three mythical principals are all more or less immortal, and Tiresias moreover can see backward and forward in time, the events recounted may be already past, foreseen for the future, or in process of occurring as narrated.

5) The triply schizoid monologue entitled “Title” addresses itself simultaneously to three matters: the “Author’s” difficulties with his companion, his analogous difficulties with the story he’s in process of composing, and the not dissimilar straits in which, I think mistakenly, he imagines his culture and its literature to be. In the stereophonic performance version of the story, the two “sides” debate—in identical authorial voice, as it is after all a
monologue interieur
—across the twin channels of stereo tape, while the live author, like Mr. Interlocutor between Tambo and Bones in the old showboat-shows, supplies such self-interrupting and self-censoring passages as “Title” and “fill in the blank”—relinquishing his role to the auditor at the.

6) The six glossolalists of “Glossolalia” are, in order, Cassandra, Philomela, the fellow mentioned by Paul in the fourteenth verse of his first epistle to the Corinthians, the Queen of Sheba’s talking bird, an unidentified psalmist employing what happens to be the tongue of a historical glossolalist (Mme Alice LeBaron, who acquired some fame in 1879 from her exolalic inspirations in the “Martian” language), and the author. Among their common attributes are 1) that their audiences don’t understand what they’re talking about, and 2) that their several speeches are metrically identical, each corresponding to what in fact may be the only verbal sound-pattern identifiable by anyone who attended American public schools prior to the decision of the U. S. Supreme Court in the case of
Murray
v.
Baltimore School Board
in 1963. The insufferability of the fiction, once this correspondence is recognized, makes its double point: that language may be a compound code, and that the discovery of an enormous complexity beneath a simple surface may well be more dismaying than delightful.
E.g.:
the maze of termite-tunnels in your joist, the intricate cancer in her perfect breast, the psychopathology of everyday life, the Auschwitz in an anthill casually DDT’d by a child, the rage of atoms in a drop of ink—in short,
anything
examined curiously enough.

7) The deuteragonist of “Life-Story,” antecedent of the second-person pronoun, is you.

John Barth was born on May 27, 1930, in Cambridge, Maryland. As a student at Johns Hopkins University he was fascinated by Oriental tale-cycles and medieval collections, a body of literature that would later influence his own writing. He received his B.A. from Johns Hopkins in 1951 and his M.A. in 1952. He has held professorships at Pennsylvania State University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and Boston University. He presently teaches in the English and Creative Writing programs at Johns Hopkins.

Barth’s first novel,
The Floating Opera
(1956), was nominated for the National Book Award.
The End of the Road
(1958) was also critically praised. In 1960,
The Sot-Weed Factor
—a comic historical novel—established Barth’s reputatation.
Giles Goat-Boy
(1966) was a huge critical and commercial success, after which he revised and republished his first three novels.
Lost in the Funhouse
, a book of interconnected stories, earned him a second nomination for the National Book Award. His other works are
Chimera
(1972), a collection of three novellas which won the National Book Award;
Letters
(1979), an epistolary novel;
Sabbatical: A Romance
(1982); and
The Friday Book
(1984), a collection of essays. His latest work is
The Tidewater Tales
(1987).