Beyond Postmodern Fiction; David Foster Wallace’s Homage to and Rejection of John

Barth

John Barth – Lost in the Funhouse (Short Story)

“For whom is the Funhouse fun?”• Ambrose , the young protagonist, is a thinly-veiled representation of

a Barth himself• Ambrose and his family take a day trip to the Maryland coast along

with Magda, who is the object of Ambrose’s lust and sexual awakening.

• Ambrose fails to react to Magda’s advances, while his more simple-minded brother flirts easily with her

• They enter the Funhouse, in which Ambrose becomes lost after becoming engrossed in its workings.

• He spends the rest of his life in the Funhouse, reciting stories that unbeknownest to him are transcribed ,and are considered classics of western literature.

Lost in the Funhouse continued– Narrative is disrupted with commentary on literary tropes: “To say

that Ambrose’s and Peter’s mother was pretty is to accomplish nothing; the reader may acknowledge the proposition, but his imagination is not engaged.” (Barth, 1988, p75)

– The narrator continually questions the point of continuing the story: “There’s no point in going any farther; this isn’t getting anybody anywhere; they haven’t even come to the funhouse yet.” (Barth, p85). This mirrors Ambrose’s own reticence in completing the ‘act’ of seducing Magda.

– ‘To be’ is set in contrast to the observing and acting out of being that Ambrose/Barth participate in as authors, and questions fiction’s ability to represent reality.

– The protagonist-author ends up imprisoned in the ‘funhouse’ of language, doomed to ‘construct funhouses for others’ rather than experiencing the funhouse himself.

David Foster Wallace - Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way

• Title taken from George Berkeley’s poem ‘On Planting Learning and Arts in the Americas’

• A metafictional response to John Barth’s ‘Lost in the Funhouse’ and a statement of authorial intent.

• A married couple (Mark Nechtr and D.L), both aspiring writers, are invited to The Reunion of Everyone who Ever Appeared in a McDonalds Commercial in the fictional town of Collision, Illinois.

• They are joined by the childhood co-star of the female writer and travel to a local airport in Illinois.

• They are picked up from the airport by the charismatic advertising magnate J.D. Steelritter and his wayward son Dehaven.

• They discover a common acquaintance in Ambrose, a creative writing professor and the writer of the Funhouse story

• A washed up air-hostess called Magda joins them• They set off for the Reunion but never complete their journey

Characters in ‘Westward..’• Ambrose –An undisguised representation of the older Barth in ‘Westward..’.

We never meet him but he is constantly discussed.– Teacher of the two young writers in a Creative Writing program– Is collaborating with J.D. Steelritter to create a chain of ‘Funhouse’ discotechques.

• Mark Necthr – Represents Wallace himself and is the proposed ‘nectar’ to Barth’s ‘ambrosia’

• D.L – An aspriring actor and Mark’s wife. She is six months pregnant but not showing.

• Tom Sternberg – an aspiring advertisement actor.– Is deformed in a number of ways and is incredibly self-conscious.– We are told he inevitably grows old alone and angry, represents the ‘child’ of the self-

conscious text.

• Magda – the figure of lust and adolescent awakening in ‘Lost..’. In ‘Westward..’ she is a perma-tanned, chain-smoking divorcee. She is nevertheless kind and perceptive.

Manifesto 1: John Barth –The Literature of Exhaustion (1967)

– Distinguishes between ‘naive novels’ and works that are ‘imitations-of-novels’ (e.g. by Borges, Nabokov, himself) that ‘attempt not to represent life directly but a representation of life.’.

– “It may well be that the novel’s time as a major art form is up”

– “.. an artist may paradoxically turn the felt ultimacies of our time into material and means for his work.”

– Central Thesis: Realism is exhausted. The only path for fiction is to refute traditional narrative form and enter into a dialogue with itself.

Manifesto 2: David Foster Wallace – E Unibus Pluram; Television and US Fiction (1992)

• The early ‘rebel’ Postmodern writers troubled the concept of the authoritative voice, and incorporated ‘television images as valid objects of literary allusion’ (Wallace, 2011, p46)

• Television/advertising then adopted the techniques of the Postmodern writers, moving from an ‘authoritative ’ voice to an ‘irreverent’ , self-conscious one.

• Modern ‘Image-Fiction’ has taken the early Postmodern writers and modern television as its prime influences. It is “hilarious, upsetting, sophisticated, and extremely shallow.”(Wallace, 2011, p81)

• Wallace ends his article with a call for a new band of ‘anti-rebels’ who will write literature with ‘reverence and conviction’

Advertising, Irony and Post-Modernity in ‘Westward..’

• “And that, as they say, will be that. No one will ever leave the rose farm’s Reunion. The revelation of What They Want will be on them; and, in that revelation of Desire, they will possess. They will all Pay The Price – without persuasion. It’s J.D.’s swan song. No more need for J.D. Steelritter Advertising or its helmsman’s genius. Life, the truth, will be its own commercial. Advertising will have finally arrived at the death that’s been its object all along. And, in Death, it will of course become life. The last commercial. Popular culture, the U.S. of A.’s great lalated lullaby, the big remind-a-pad on the refrigerator of belief, will, forever unsponsored, tumble into carefully salted soil. The public, one great need, will not miss being reminded of what they believe. They’ll doubt what they fear, believe what they wish; and united, as Reunion, their wishes will make it so. Their wishes will, yes, come true. Fact will be fiction will be fact. Ambrose and his academic heirs will rule without rules. Meatfiction.” (Wallace 2010, p310)

Commentary

Interpretation of Wallace

• The destruction of sincerity, authorial intention, rules, will lead inevitably to a breakdown in the boundaries between art and advertising, just like the breakdown in relations between the author and reader in Lost in the Funhouse. In this sense the dominance of post-modern modes of irony and distancing from authorial intention leads to an ideological surrender in which art’s main use becomes to sell itself and other products.

A Marxist perspective of the Postmodern• “"What has happened is that

aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to aeroplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation" –(Jameson, 1991, p4)

Literary Inheritance and Influence

• The Anxiety of Influence (Bloom, 1973)– Writing as Oedipal struggle– The ephebe (young poet) attempts to swerve from the

Master Poet, and their influence (clinamen)– Each subsequent poem is a misprison, a misreading that

attempts to ‘put right’ where the previous poem (by the Master) failed

– Wallace deliberately sets himself up as the ephebe to Barth’s Master. ‘Westward’ is both a homage and ‘correction’ of Barth.

– Barth writes back to Wallace in ‘Coming Soon!!!’ (2001)

Influence and oedipal conflict between ‘Westward..’ and ‘Lost..’

• Nechtr and Ambrose– “Even when Mark doesn’t trust him, he listens to him, he’s consciously reacting against

the option of listening, and listens for not what to listen to.” (Wallace, 2010, 293)– Wants to write a story that will ‘tear your heart out’, as opposed to Ambrose’s dry, ironic

style.• D.L. and Ambrose

– D.L (possibly Death of Literature) is a self-professed Postmodernist. She has written a poem called ‘FIRMS DOCTORS TELEPHONE POLES’ that consists entirely of punctuation.

– She sees herself as the postmodern ‘child’ of Ambrose. She is rejected by Ambrose because of the ‘look mom no hands!’ quality of her writing.

– She cannot swerve from Ambrose and leaves the writing program, marking her as a ‘weak’ poet. We learn that she becomes J.D. Steelritter’s true heir.

• Dehaven and J.D Steelritter– J.D Steelritter forces his son to dress as the Mcdonalds clown, which he believes is an

‘honour’– Dehaven passively resists this. His response is to construct and drive a ‘pastiche’ car that

is made of salvaged parts and is brandless.

Images and Symbols in ‘Westward..’ 1. Deep Fried Roses

• “What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet;” – Shakespeare, 1600

• “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” – Gertrude Stein, 1913

• “Who’d voluntarily cook and eat a rose?.. Except after he’d washed down the thing down with a jolt and a grimace, he suddenly felt like he could go expel what he needed to expel.. He feels empty, better. And get’s cocky, as the empty will sometimes get.” (Wallace, 2010, p288)

• Gertrude Stein complained that a rose in the modern era is no longer just a rose, but had become symbolic of poetry and romanticism.

• In ‘Lost..’ the narrator often struggles to find the words for things, negating the signification of literature.

• In ‘Literature of Exhaustion’ we are told that literature should represent a ‘representation of life’ rather than life itself. We should not try to represent a rose as itself.

• So Wallace follows this and makes the rose a greasy fast food that gives a feeling of apathetic acceptance. The rose is commodified and stripped of meaning – ‘Meatfiction’.

2. The Arrow and the Target

• “As you stand shoulder first across thirty orthogonal meters between you and the red ring that encloses the gold chroma, and draw out your 12-strand string to the tip of your nose, the point of your arrow, at full draw, is somewhere between three and nine centimeters to the left of the true straight line to the bulls-eye, even though the arrow’s nock, fucked by the string, is on that line. The bow gets in the way, see. So logically it seems like if your sight and aim are really true, the arrow should always land just to the left of target-center, since it’s angled off in the wrong direction right from the beginning. But the straight-aimed and so off-angled target arrow will stab the center, right in the heart, every time.” (Wallace, 2010, 293-294)

• In Barth’s story, the journey can never end and hit its target.

• Nechtr’s obsession with archery is synonymous with his ambition to find and end. He wants to produce a story that throws off the shackles of post-modern irony and “stabs you in the heart.”

• Nechtr/Wallace accepts Barth’s ‘off-angled’ starting-point but believe that literature can still hit the target/heart. Thus the use of metafiction and irony is to be used to negate itself.

Endings and Beginnings

Barth“He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he’s not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator – though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.” (Barth, 1989, p97)

CommentaryThere is no escape from the hall-of-mirrors of the text ,and the writers collusion in it. The writer must accept and embrace this self-consciousness, rather than wishing ‘naive’ literature back.

The writers separation from ‘the lovers’ symbolises the separation of the writer’s ‘realism’ and the lover’s ‘reality’.

He assures us that we can listen beyond the ‘noise’ of the text’s

inner workings.

Endings and BeginningsWallace

“ Look. Listen. Use ears I'd be proud to call our own. Listen to the silence behind the engine's noise. Jesus, Sweets, listen. Hear it? It's a love song.

For whom?

You are loved.” (Wallace, 2010, 373)

Wallace emphasises the senses and the plural ‘our’ over the

isolated writer/reader.

To be loved is to be brought back into the story, and be neither the

isolated, worldly reader or stranded writer. We can all once

again share in a common narrative.

Further Reading

• John Barth’s original story – Lost in the Funhouse.• ..and his manifesto piece:

The Literature of Exhaustion with a later foreword added.

• Wallace’s E Unibus Pluram article.• Wallace’s short fiction in the New Yorker,

including excerpts from his final novel.• A critical overview of Wallace’s work from the

New York Review of Books.

Bibliography• Foster Wallace.D, Girl with Curious Hair, 2010, Abacus• Foster Wallace.D, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Abacus,

2011• Boswell, M, Understanding David Foster Wallace, 2003, University of

South Carolina Press• Jameson. F, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,

Verso, 1991• Barth.J , The Literature of Exhaustion, retrieved from

http://www.massey.ac.nz/massey/fms/Colleges/College%20of%20Humanities%20and%20Social%20Sciences/EMS/Readings/139.105/Additional/The%20Literature%20of%20Exhaustion%20-%20John%20Barth.pdf, on 24th April 2012

• Barth. J, Lost in the Funhouse, from Lost In The Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Voice, and Tape, Anchor, 1988

• Bloom. H, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Oxford University Press, 1997