710 The American Century: Literature since 1945editors that suggest, among other things, that the author is “unhealthy, embittered,
desperately unpleasant, perhaps masturbative, perhaps alcoholic or insane, if not a
suicide.” Or then, again, that he is a mysterious unknown, or even a computer.
Besides creating multiple dubieties, making the book a series of masks, the letters
both liberate the author from the authority of authorship and advise the reader as to
how to read this fiction. Which is, as fiction: a series of signs that have no reference
to objects outside themselves, and whose value lies in their intrinsic relationship, the
play between them. “This author,” one editor complains, “has maintained ... that
language is the matter of his books”; “he turns his back on what is the case, rejects the
familiar for the amazing, embraces artifice and extravagance; washing his hands of
the search for Truth, he calls himself “doorman of the Muses’ Fancy-house.’ ”
“What is the case” is a sly allusion to a famous remark made by the philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The world is all that is the case.” The world, Wittgenstein
argues, is the sum of what we take to be true and believe that others take to be true.
We construct our world from the inside out; and the crucial weapon in those
configurations, those patternings of things, is the system of language we have at our
disposal. We cannot, in fact, get outside of the prisonhouse of our language; all we
can do, when we draw a picture of our world, is draw the bars. Inadvertently, one of
the fictive editors reveals the project that is at the heart of all Barth’s fiction, and all
other work that is sometimes called postmodern and sometimes metafiction.
Everything is only “in a sense” this or that it is named. The self is the sum of its rules,
its locutions; the world is the sum of our constructions of it; any apparent essence,
any “natural” being or feeling or presence, is really a social construct, a sign of
culture trying to wear the mask of nature (and “nature” is a cultural convention,
too). And the text refers to nothing but itself. The ultimate postmodern protagonist
is perhaps Echo in Lost in the Funhouse (1968), Barth’s first collection of stories,
who “becomes no more than her voice.” That, together with the self-referential
nature of his language and the self-reflexive character of his fiction, may make
Barth’s work sound abstract to the point of being ossified. It is not, on the whole,
because the voice is vital: his novels and stories are as packed with voices, energetic,
comically ebullient, often ironic, as Pynchon’s are with masks and figures. Not only
that, in his hands, the prisonhouse of language does become a funhouse: a place for
play and passionate virtuosity.
As for voices: these range from the tones of the narrator of Barth’s first novel, The
Floating Opera (1956), recalling his experiences on the day in 1937 when he debates
suicide, to the multiple voices of his fifth novel, Letters (1979). As its title implies,
Letters is an unusual development of epistolary fiction. In it, seven more or less
parallel narratives are revealed through correspondence written by seven characters
from Barth’s earlier fiction, including the author himself as just another imaginary
figure. The intricate story that emerges is a characteristic inquiry into enclosure and
liberation: the patterns into which all seven characters have previously been set, the
degree of freedom they may possibly discover and possess. Typical of Barth’s voices,
that of Jake Horner, in turn, is notable for its sometimes playful, sometimes angry
irony, its humorous elusiveness. Horner is a man so aware of the plural possibilitiesGGray_c05.indd 710ray_c 05 .indd 710 8 8/1/2011 7:31:40 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 40 PM