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CAROLYN NORMAN SLAUGHTER Who Gets Lost in the Funhouse -IY story, any section of story, will do. This one: There's no point in going farther; this isn't getting anybody anywhere; they haven't even come to the funhouse yet. Ambrose is off the track, in some new or old part of the place that's not supposed to be used; he strayed into it by some onein -a-million chance, like the time the roller-coaster car left the tracks in the nineteen-teens against all the laws of physics and sailed over the boardwalk in the dark. And they can't locate him because they don't know where to look. Even the designer and operator have forgotten this other part, that winds around on itself like a whelk shell. That winds around the right part like the snakes on Mercury's caduceus. . . .' Now the trick is to get hold of it, hold on. Try it. Identify the character (s), thevoice(s), theplot(s), theme(s)—identify fact, fiction, implications , significance if any, truth if. The story moves under your hand, changes. It's Proteus you're onto. Ambrose in the funhouse? No, he's lying on the sand with that physically whelming presence he thinks is Magda, pretending to watch that impostor Peter show off his diving, muscles—form. The timing's wrong. The funhouse is later. The narrator, then, anticipating his story? Oh yes, and mirroring it, both ofthem wandering roundly off the track. The narrator's plan and his character's plot wandering off into the wrong time, out ofplace, astray. The characters' characters (author's Arizona Quarterly Volume 44 Number 4, Winter 1989 Copyright © 1989 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 004-1610 Lost in the Funhouse narrator's, character's) blur into each other; there's no focus; space is as imploded as time. The voice (author's, narrator's, character's) attenuates to one multidistinguishable whine. Point of view? Who's to see? When I understood that Proteus somewhere on the beach became Menelaus holding the Old Man of the Sea, Menelaus ceased. Then I understood further how Proteus thus also was as such no more, being as possibly Menelaus's attempt to hold him, the tale ofthat vain attempt, the voice that tells it. (167) Climactic confrontation. Turning point. Turning, turning, turning point. The rest is a story of diminishing returns. Ajax is dead, Agamemnon, all my friends, but I can't die, worse luck; Menelaus's carcass is long wormed, yet his voice yarns on through everything, to itself. Not my voice, I am this voice, no more, the rest has changed, rechanged, gone. The voice too, even that changes, becomes hoarser, loses its magnetism , grows scratchy, incoherent, blank. (167) The last word? Hold-on. One more interpretation. In my discussion of John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse I shall treat his "series" of stories as a novel: because a unity, a wholeness, is intended, according to the 'Author's Note," because a single work is achieved, as I hope to demonstrate, and because, as Barth remarked in a "conversation " referring to "book-length fiction" written today, "it's got to be called something or other."2 Besides, the form this novel takes (selected stories) is not new to the genre. The moderns broke up whatever unity the form had previously assumed: Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio), Williams (In the American Grain), and Faulkner (Go Down, Moses), for example, used collected stories in a technique of fracture, collage, collation , conflation. I shall call Barth's work a novel, but not to place it in the tradition of the moderns. If its form was predicted, legitimized, in the first half of the century, its themes and its attitudes toward them were not. Postmoderns lost something of the moderns' sense of shame, of shock, of loss, grief. The moderns' reactionary reaction to revolutions and world wars, to radical disorientation, first devolved to a milder, less passionate, because existentialist or nihilistic, dis-ease. The emphasis turned from events themselves to interpretations of them. We 82Carolyn Norman Slaughter seemed to have passed another crisis. The fever abated a bit, spirit revived. This turning point...

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