APF

Everything leads to nothing: future tense, past tense, present tense. Perfect. The final
question is, Can nothing be made meaningful?. . . .
The answer to the narrator’s question, which he asks as he is trying to write a story after realizing
“everything’s been said already over and over,” is actually “yes,” if we accept that indeed
“Everything leads to nothing.” A story doesn’t “lead” to anything beyond itself. To think
otherwise is to believe that a work of fiction has value only in the external meaning to which it
points us. The work itself—the work as embodied language—disappears, something that
metafiction does not allow to happen. Nothing can indeed be made meaningful if what fiction
does lead to—its own verbal texture, the formal structures language builds—is the “meaning.”
As Barth puts it in the later Chimera, “the key to the treasure is the treasure.”
Not all of the stories in Lost in the Funhouse are as purely metafictional as “Title” or
“Life-Story” but are more generally “experimental.” “Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction”
is a process-oriented story that narrates its own coming-into-being; it is most noteworthy for
appropriating the tape recorder as a literary stratagem, presenting itself as the transcription of an
audio recording. The story thus cleverly foregrounds the role of “voice” in fiction. “Glossolalia”
is also meant to be heard aloud—only in this way can the underlying rhythms of the Lord’s
Prayer that unite the six otherwise unrelated spoken fragments, including one literally spoken in
tongues, really be detected. Perhaps the most infamous experimental “story” in the book
(experimental in asking for the reader’s active participation and attempting to expand our
conception of what properly constitutes “writing”) is the first one, “Frame-Tale,” in which the
reader is instructed to take a pair of scissors to the page: “Cut on the dotted line. Twist end once
and fasten AB to ab, CD to cd.” The result is a Mobius strip forming an endless loop of “Once
upon a time there was a story that began.”
Barth would not return to the short story (at least in book form) until 1996’s On With the
Story. In the meantime, he had written several very long novels demonstrating that, however
much he calls into question many axiomatic storytelling conventions, Barth had by no means
abandoned storytelling. These books are stuffed full of story, although they also concern
themselves directly with the purpose and effects of stories, continuing in the metafictional mode
introduced by Lost in the Funhouse but in a more fully elaborated, structurally consistent way. If
Lost in the Funhouse is more purely experimental, the novels that follow it both further explore
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