Barth and Nabokov: Come to the Funhouse, Lolita

Self-consciousness in literature is bad enough, but self-consciously self-conscious self-consciousness is intolerable, especially when carried to the nth degree--like a box with a picture of a man holding a box with a picture of etc.--and combined with narcissitic aimlessness and a razzle-dazzle contortionist style.

This is John Barth's new book, Lost in the Funhouse, which is a collection of stories for "print, tape, live voice." The Funhouse of the title is the metaphysical maze of reality, perception, and creation. The book is an extraordinary inside-outside-inside exploration of the process of composition, like a photograph of a man taking a photograph. Whitehead said that literature is that which embodies what it indicates. When that which is embodied is the act of embodiment, there is bound to be a bang, probably the reader slamming shut the book.

Lost in the Funhouse consists of facile, stylistic games. There is no doubt that Barth has an excellent command of the language, but his skill is misdirected, or, more accurately, not directed at all. The stories "Title," "Life-Story," and, in different ways, "Anonymiad," "Lost in the Funhouse," and "Autobiography" are stories about men writing stories. Indeed, in "Life-Story" the man in the story is writing a story about a man writing a story and so on. The novelty of the idea is quickly exhausted; Borges could have summarized it in a single line.

There are some good things about the book, including some very clever word-play, like the story which ends, "My last words will be my last words," and two of the pieces are good in themselves--"Night-Sea Journey," and the title piece "Lost in the Funhouse."

"Night-Sea Journey" is a monologue of a spermatazoa on its way to the ovum. It is amusing, and, unlike the other stories, is about love, however abstractly that compact may be presented. There is, though, a basic flaw in the piece: In fantastic literature, the author is allowed to make any conditions he likes, but once these are established, the action must be within their limits. The reader will allow Barth to allow a spermatazoa to meditate, but he cannot allow that spermatazoa to record theories about his purpose (correct in every detail)--which theories no spermatazoa could ever have conceived.

The best of the lot is "Lost in the Funhouse," which, although it has maddening disgressions, is at least concerned with a "real" character, a pubescent boy named Ambrose. Ambrose goes to a seaside amusement park with his family, and there he gets lost in the funhouse. We are not sure if he really gets lost in the funhouse because we are made constantly aware of the author's hand pushing his characters around. Does Ambrose get lost, or does Barth make him get lost, or does Barth speculate about making him get lost? It is impossible to tell, which may be what the author is driving at.

Barth's main fault in this book is that he is not concerned with human beings--that is, the human beings he creates--but rather with his own intrusive role as author. Mabye this is not wrong, but there can be no interest in the substance of the stories, because there is no substance, only style. For my money, that is not enough, and I find it annoying. It is easy, dear reader, to play games with the reader, usually addressed "dear reader" (or by Barth "dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard"), and extend these games until neither the dear reader nor the dear writer has any idea where he is.

Finally, there is the problem of these pieces being for media other than print. I heard Barth recording "Title" in Buffalo, and it is better on tape; but if he publishes it in print, he must be judged on its printed merit.

****

Within a month of Lost in the Funhouse's appearance came Nakobov's Congeries, a collection of stories, poems, fragments of novels, and critical essays.

Vladimir Nabakov, like Joseph Conrad, is a foreigner who has become one of the most important stylists in English; but, unlike Barth, he deals with human beings, not metaphysics. The charm, for instance, of the novel Pnin (included in its entirety in Nabokov's Congeires) comes not so much from the telling of the story as from the character of Pnin, a hapless professor of Russian in a small American college. There may be no real separation between style and content, but Nabokov uses his style to create a believable man, charming and pathetic. Having just fallen down a flight of stairs and flat on his back. Pnin remarks, "It is like the splendid story of Tolstoy--you must read it one day, Victor--about Ivan Ilyich Golovin who fell and got in consequence kidney of the cancer."

Nabokov's prose is elegant and lucid, easy to read, and amusing. He is one of the few writers who can make a reader laugh out loud, even with "serious criticism" like his delightful essay "On a Book Entitled Lolita." In that essay he says, "After all we are not children, .not illiterate juvenile delinquents..."And that is one of the best reasons for liking Nabokov--he treats the reader as a sensitive, literate person. He sets out to tell amusing and moving stories, and this he does. He says, "For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss..."

Occasionally Nabokov plays games, as in the acrostic in "The Vane Sisters," but basically he eludes explication and literary criticism. He is a magician who gets us to watch the rabbit, not the false bottom of his hat. His style illuminates, it does not blind. In his autobiography, Speak, Memory, part of which is included in the present volume, he writes:

Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.

And Nakobov is best when his characters bear the same watermark as himself. Some of his "made-up" characters are good, but they cannot compare to the boy in "First Love," the aging lover in "Spring in Fialta," Pnin, or Humbert Humbert of Lolita, all of whom clearly resemble the author. Lolita, that beautiful and hilarious love story, is still his greatest novel.

Nakogov's Congeries is not a "Complete Nakobov," but it does offer from that tomb-like quality of the Collected Works of Dead Dull Author. There is not much point in printing selections from novels, and the poems are better forgotten. For the reader who knows Nakobov, Congeries is redundant; for the reader who does not, the many paperback editions of Nabokov are a better introduction.

But the important thing is that Nakobov is a very great writer. John Barth may be washed up, or at least he has exhausted this particular vein, but Nakobov is now at the height of his powers. One reviewer, in The New York Times, said that his best work is still to come. I have the same feeling, but if he never writes another word, Lolita will be enough