The sequence in [Lost in the Funhouse] leads us from the meditations of a sperm through the boyhood adventures of Ambrose to the mythical life history of an anonymous Homeric bard marooned on a desert island and forced to create a life-work out of his own life. From infancy through childhood, and then to the province of the mythical, Barth seems intent on writing large that wonderful sentence of Joyce's, "God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain." One thing is largely omitted, to be sure; that is the development of the individual sensibility. We leave Ambrose before he has become much more than a very embryonic artist; and what takes his place in the latter part of the book is simply the narrative process itself.
In playing the games of self-consciousness, Barth is in his own sportive element; he delights in sound-box, mirror, and echo effects, which turn every story into a wry questioning of its own processes. He raids an imaginary textbook on fiction for comments on the fiction that's being told, takes over the mind of a writer complaining about the process of writing, or enters into a story bewailing the mode of its own existence. His mythological fables are contaminated by an awareness that they are already mythological, but they are also cast, not just linguistically but motivationally, in the mode of the present. Most of Barth's mythological figures are in fact self-conscious writers, mocked by their own clichés and trapped by their own narrative reflexes. Character thus diminishes into the jokes and paradoxes of a quick-trick dialectic that's always pretty much the same, whatever the name attached to it. It's a spry and elegant kind of funny; but it's often very private too, and there's a lot of protesting—half dramatic, half quite personal as I hear it—against the narrow twists and turns of thought compressed by its own means of expression.
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