APF

Floating Opera and End of the Road, it instead became the first of Barth’s truly “experimental”
works, arguably the first recognizably “postmodern” novel by an American writer. (Barth would
later duly cite the importance of such predecessors as Borges and Beckett in pushing him in this
new direction.) A “self-conscious” novel, it doesn’t so much call attention to the process of its
own creation as make the reader aware of its status as an anachronistic work, a pastiche of an
18th-century novel in the mold of Fielding and Smollett. It is as if Barth is attempting to move
the novel as a form forward by taking it backward, reminding us of its roots. The 18th-century
English novel is indeed notable for a high degree of authorial self-consciousness (Tristram
Shandy being the most radical example), an additional sign that Barth is working toward a
complete break with the conventional realist novel and its transparent narrative in favor of a kind
of storytelling (Barth never abandons story) that is unafraid to acknowledge its inherent artifice.
Barth’s follow-up to The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy, similarly foregrounds its
artifice, but in this case it is not the artifice of storytelling that is most emphasized, although
there is some metafictional maneuvering in the story’s setup. Barth creates an artificial,
alternative reality, a fictional world depicted as a University Campus that marks the limit of the
characters’ awareness. In this world, it is possible for a boy to grow up with goats only to
discover he is a boy, then go on a heroic quest to free his world from an autocratic computer that
rules the Campus and to achieve spiritual enlightenment. The novel’s allegory—essentially a
restaging of the Cold War as a contest between “East Campus” and “West Campus”—is not
subtle, and much of the novel’s humor comes from the overstated parallels between conditions
on Campus and the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, juxtaposed with the
modes and conventions of the mythic quest as described by Joseph Campbell and others.
Barth has judged Giles Goat-Boy his least favorite among his novels “because the
overstatement is overdone—the novel itself is too long, the subject is inevitably dated, the setting
borders on the jejune.” Whether or not Barth had reservations at the time about his turn, in both
The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy, to this large-canvas, Rabelaisian satire (what at the
time was called “black humor”), his next book would nevertheless be very different,
conspicuously reduced in size. Lost in the Funhouse distills the essential elements in Barth’s
shift to more experimental work—heightened awareness of fiction as a literary form,
preoccupation with the process of writing, an interest in the source and structure of storytelling—
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