Word: barthes
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...reader, the most antiquated piece of equipment in a mixed-media production, gets only the book. Barth says he originally planned to insert audio tapes in a number of hollowed-out pages, but dropped the idea as too gimmicky. There was no mention of providing each reader with a visible but silent author. Thanks mainly to Barth's enormous vitality and virtuosity, however, most of the pieces do quite well in print. Basically, Barth is firmly fixed in the Gutenberg galaxy...
Taken together, as Barth urges they should be, these fictions interreact to produce a series of constantly changing and enticingly illusive forms. Like the sea god Proteus, who avoided foretelling the future by changing his form every time he was pinned down, Barth keeps his artistic assets as liquid as possible...
Another bit of Barth cunning is to turn daily life into mythology while turning mythology into domestic comedy. Ambrose His Mark, Water-Message and the title story, Lost in the Funhouse, contain elements of autobiography, though the characters and events have an Olympian quality. Menelaiad and Anonymiad, bawdy colloquializations of the Aeneid, are reminiscent of Barth's historical burlesque The Sot-Weed Factor...
...What Barth is really up to can perhaps best be seen-or rather heard-in Glossolalia. He uses the mystical notion of speaking in tongues as a pointed metaphor in his guerrilla war against static literary forms. More a soothsayer's scripture than prose fiction, the piece mimics the ancient ritual that attempts to divine the truth with spontaneous word patterns and nonsense syllables. Concludes Barth: "The sense-lessest babble, could we ken it, might disclose a dark message, or prayer...
Illusive Meaning. In his own mischievous and amiable way, Barth is seeking what has been called "the coincidence of apposites," those meanings that are beyond the ability of value-burdened words to express fully. Sometimes an illusive meaning can be momentarily grasped with an oxymoron-the joining of two mutually contradictory words. Barth's "printed voice" belongs in this category, along with Capote's "nonfiction novel" and Detroit's "hardtop convertible." Clearly-or un-clearly-Lost in the Funhouse is a work of highly significant irrelevance...