Done with Mirrors: Restoring the Authority Lost in John Barth's Funhouse

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2001 by Marjorie Worthington

he could demonstrate by syllogism that the story of his life was a work of fact: though assaults upon the boundary between life and art, reality and dream, were undeniably a staple of his own and his century' s literature as they'd been of Shakespeare's and Cer vantes's, yet it was a fact that in the corpus of fiction as far as he knew no fictional character had become convinced as he had that he was a character in a work of fiction. This being the case and he having in fact become thus convinced it followed that his conviction was false. (125-26)

And that is ostensibly what the narrator of "Life Story" attempts to do. After spending two-thirds of his lifetime writing novels, "it was perhaps inevitable that one afternoon the possibility would occur to the writer of these lines that his own life might be a fiction, in which he was the leading or an accessory character" (113). He decides to write a story about a character who believes he is a character in someone's fiction, which would of course be a story about himself. This character suddenly and self-consciously recognizes his creator's, his author's, existence, and "Life Story" starts out to be about the writing of that story. However, in the process of writing the story, the narrator recognizes that he cannot be a fictional character because

Whereas critics like Patricia Waugh argue that it is this metafictional self- consciousness that helps to blur the line between art and reality, and to "explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text" (2), it is this very self-consciousness that assures the narrator of "Life Story" that he is indeed real, that his life is factual. In the case of "Life Story," narrative self-consciousness does not lead to the recognition of the fictionality of life; instead, the narrator's awareness of himself as a self-conscious being allows him to conclude that he is not, after all, a character in someone else's fiction. However, while the narrator's self-consciousness serves to reestablish his personhood or reality by convincing him that he could not possibly be fictional, that same self-consciousness stands in the way of his successfully completing the story he set out to write. Once he recognizes that he is not a fictional character in someone else's fiction, it suddenly becomes impossi ble for him to write the story about a character who is.

"Life Story" is indicative of many of the stories in Lost in the Funhouse in that, perhaps in response to "The Literature of Exhaustion," it acts as an attempt to demonstrate the "used-upness" of modern literary traditions. In this series, seemingly pointless and meandering stories chronicle the ostensible inability of contemporary narrative forms to tell a proper or interesting story or to provide any manner of or route to "truth."

For example, the story titled "Echo" depicts the character of Narcissus looking into the pool and desiring immediate and direct access to the image he sees there, not knowing that that image is of himself--and not even of himself undistorted, but an image of himself inaccurately reflected by the pool. Narcissus tries but cannot truly find, see, or know himself without the interference of a screen of reflection. Heide Ziegler calls attention to "the double meaning of the word 'self-reflection'" as Narcissus moons over the reflection of himself that he sees in the pool, and becomes lost thereby in self-reflection--in reflecting on that self--until the gods pity him and turn him into the eponymous flower (91).