Trying to Read John Barth’s “Life-Story”:
“A Piece only an English Teacher Can Love”
I
wrote Scott’s observation on the board and watched as other students smiled in
agreement as they took their seats. I
knew at once that today’s discussion would be a lively one. In fact, it began spontaneously with
complaints about “Life-Story” ranging from the difficulty of the story’s
vocabulary; to the confusing shifts in point of view aggravated by the
lettering, rather than naming, the story’s characters; to the overlong
sentences and paragraphs. One student,
who obviously had not read the biographical introduction, wanted to know how
much education Barth had because he hardly used commas!
Next
we discussed Scott’s comment that this “piece” was not a story. In spite of its title, my students argued
that “Life-Story” was not even close to being a “story” because it lacked plot,
characters, action, excitement, dialogue, and an ending that “made sense.” I conceded that Barth’s “Life-Story” did not
conform to our traditional expectations of realistic fiction. At that point, Scott groaned, “spoken like a
true English teacher.” And he was
absolutely right. We then
“deconstructed” the rest of his critique:
“. . . only an English teacher can love.” The class quickly provided me with a list of
charges against the profession: English
teachers honor whatever is in a textbook, have a very high tolerance for the
“weird and symbolic,” and love to assign difficult pieces to that they can look
smart when they explain them. I
responded with “Yes, guilty as charged, but that how we stay employed.” No one laughed. More importantly, these charges and their
expectations complicated their attempts to read “Life-Story.”
However,
in spite of its complexity, I have continued to use “Life-Story” every semester
since this first insightful discussion in 1991, and generally my students have
responded to it like Scott and his classmates.
Some students are frustrated by Barth’s playfulness, while a few do
relax their expectations and enjoy the story’s “differentness.” At the beginning of each semester, I tell my
students that I view the course, ENG 124: American Writers,
like a smorgasbord; we will take bites of a wide variety of authors, genres,
and styles – some they will enjoy and return to for more, others they will not
try again. At times “Life-Story” has
been everyone’s least favorite dish – a broccoli-spinach-Brussels-sprout-asparagus
casserole, as one student phrased it.
I
had selected “Life-Story” for this course on American Writers for practical,
“teacherly” reasons: its seven pages in
our Norton Anthology of American
Literature: Shorter Fourth Edition is a manageable length; its
self-conscious and self-reflective themes concerning artistic production and
modern life exemplify postmodernistic characteristics; and its obviously
“different” style should prompt students to read in a more experienced-based,
rather then meaning-based, manner. But,
however practical my reasons, transforming them into classroom learning experiences
has not always been easy because of the students’ expectations and their
difficulty with reading “Life-Story.”
Recently
I have re-read “Life-Story” in a new context because of a doctoral seminar in
literature that examined modern and postmodern novels and theories. Most of the literature of in the general
education courses that I teach is “readerly text,” consumed for meaning, while
Barth’s “Life-Story” is “writerly text,” composed for its playful, interactive
experience. As a result, part of my
“teacherly” task has been to design learning activities that will facilitate
this transition from “readerly “reading to “writerly” reading. In addition, “Life-Story” illustrates how
Barth contends with, and at times satirizes, the dynamic tensions between
traditional realistic storytelling, “high-culture” modernist aesthetics, and
chaotic postmodern flux. Therefore,
considering “Life-Story” in light of realism, modernism, and postmodernism
provides general education students with a brief, but focused, summary of three
literary philosophies.
Instead of just saying “read Barth’s ‘Life-Story,’” and hoping
for the best, I prepare students for the “experience” of the story. To develop activities for “trying” to read
Barth’s “Life-Story,” I considered four perspectives. First, while I am familiar with Barth’s work,
I had never read all of Lost in the
Funhouse, from which “Life-Story” is an excerpt. By reading the entire series of Funhouse stories, I now have a better
understanding of why “Life-Story” was chosen to represent the entire book, and
I can do a follow-up discussion with students that will place the story in
context with the rest of the Funhouse
“experience” pieces. Second, I wanted to
consider what reviewers and scholars have said about Lost in the Funhouse and “Life-Story” in order to test my students’
critiques and to place the story in relationship to shifting critical points of
review. Next, I polled my students on
their “expectations of a story” and re-examined these and found some intriguing
parallels between my students’ expectations and the 28-years worth of critical
reviews of Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse. The similarities and differences I found in
the professional reviews and the student critiques also provided ideas for
“post-reading” writing and discussion activities. Fourth, I chose to closely re-read our text’s
version of “Life-Story,” preparing a glossary of words and terms that are
unfamiliar to most students, while at the same time considering the text in
light of student expectations and complaints.
And finally, after closely re-reading our text’s introductions on
modernism, postmodernism and Barth, I developed a plan of in-class reading
activities and out-of-class writing prompts that help students to enjoy, or at
least tolerate, the “experience” of the writerly text of Barth’s “Life-Story.”
Considering Lost in the Funhouse
While
some anthologies of American literature reprint the story “Lost in the
Funhouse” as a representative selection from the book Lost in the Funhouse (published in 1968), “Life-Story is, in many
aspects, a better microcosmic version of the book as a whole. Both the book and “Life-Story” overtly deal
with an authorial protagonist’s labyrinthine progression through a
self-conscious maze of artistic creation.
Both share the involuted structure of the cyclical Mobius loop that
begins the book, with the distinction that the book follows the conception, the
life, and the artistic development of the named hero Ambrose Mensch, while
“Life-Story” is confined to one day, the 36th birthday, of its
anonymous narrator. Within the context
of Lost in the Funhouse, a reader may
assume that the un-named writer in “Life-Story” is Ambrose Mensch on his 36th
birthday. However, for the reader unfamiliar with the book Lost in the Funhouse, the cyclical, self-referentiality
of “Life-Story” is still comprehensible.
In
John Barth: An Introduction, David
Morrell cites Barth’s claim that he wanted to “try something quite different”
after writing two long novels in nine years (80). The idea for the fourteen small pieces of
“fiction for print, tape, and live voice” (the book’s subtitle) came to Barth
in 1960 as he was working on The Sot Weed
Factor (Morrell 80). By using tape
recorded versions of these stories, Barth hopes to remove the actual
storyteller, allowing the listening to stop and play back the pieces. In his “Author’s Note” to the paperback
edition of Lost in the Funhouse,
Barth explains which pieces were composed expressly for print and which were
not. He concedes that “Life-Story,”
along with “Petition,” “Lost in the Funhouse,” and “Anonymiad” would “lose part
of their point in any except printed form” (Barth Lost in the Funhouse ix).
Clearly, the reader’s understanding of the
series Lost in the Funhouse is
augmented if the stories are heard as well as read silently. Consequently, having students begin their
“Life-Story” by reading it aloud should help them to see that this is no
“ordinary” college-level reading assignment.
From
reading Lost in the Funhouse, it is
clear to me that the metaphor of the funhouse established in the book’s title
can also provide a tool for a more relaxed and adventuresome reading of
“Life-Story.” Providing students with
background information about Barth’s intent for the entire book, based in part
on his well-known essay “The Literature of Exhaustion,” and also placing Lost in the Funhouse in the context of
the 1960s and McLuhan’s pronouncements concerning communication and the media
should enhance their reading experience of “Life-Story” (See Appendix A: “Bits about
Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse”).
Considering Critical Views of Lost in the Funhouse
In
order to examine Lost in the Funhouse
and “Life-Story” from a wide range of perspectives, I read fifty reviews and
scholarly articles which are included in the Works Cited at the end of this
essay. With it publication in 1968, Lost in
the Funhouse immediately generated a variety of criticism. While some reviewers praised its innovation
and “differentness,” other critics were skeptical of its self-consciousness. Two articles that appeared shortly after the
publication of Lost in the Funhouse
in 1968 reveal the complexity of discerning the book’s purpose. Douglas Robinson, in “Reader’s Power,
Writer’s Power: Barth, Bergonzi, Iser, and the Modern-Postmodern Debate,”
positions Barth as a postmodernist who tries to re-educate the popular audience
(309 and 320). In contrast, Edward Knapp
describes Funhouse as an “archetypal
passage through difficult ways” (446), and that these dark passages increase
the isolation of the characters and readers (447). While these two early scholarly articles show
just two possible evaluations of Funhouse,
the reviews of it in both the popular press and academic circles note even more
layers of interpretation for this unusual and challenging work.
The
negative reviews of Funhouse concentrate
on the book’s style and philosophical stance.
R. V. Cassils of the Washington Post condemned it as “gimmicky”
and “sophomoric” (16). Walter Schott of Life labeled it a “grinding bore” (8). Kirkus
claimed Funhouse was a series of
“failed excursions on philosophical themes (“Lost In” 836). “A
pretentious put-on” was Publisher’s
Weekly assessment (“Lost in the
Funhouse” 56). A reviewer for the Virginia Quarterly called it philosophically date
because of its reliance on the existentialism of the 1940s (“Notes on Current
Books: Fiction cxxviii). Lastly, Tony
Tanner in Partisan Review (1969)
regretted that Barth has fallen victim to the “sense of the arbitrariness of
invention” (293).
Generally,
the qualified reviews focus on comparing Funhouse
to Barth’s previous work. In 1968, Guy Davenport of the The New York Times Book Review calls it “thoroughly confusing,” but
“solidly readable stories” (63); Walter Harding of Library Journal feels the book was a “mixed bag” of Barth’s “best
and poorest” (3153); Granville Hicks for Saturday
Review asserts that some of the stories are “unproductive experiments,” but
Barth has a “first-rate imagination” (31-2); and William Hill for America suggests that while the
narratives are “compelling,” they are “frightfully allusive” (563-4). The reviewer for Time (1968) sums up Lost in
the Funhouse as “highly significant irrelevance” (100). Two reviewers in 1969 concentrate mostly on
the style: William Hjortsberg of Catholic
World believes that the radical
variations in technique will cause problems for most readers (188), and Stuart
Hood of The Listener concludes that
the “fictional funhouse has it difficulties” but there are “extraordinary
things to be found there” (385). Howard
Harper, in Contemporary Literature (1971),
offers that Funhouse is “less
ambitious” Giles, Goat-Boy, that the
book has a “world of profound human dimension” (210-11).
The
reviews which praise Funhouse emphasize
the roles of the reader and other authors.
Jack Richardson (1968) for New
Republic says that the book “profitably forces readers to reexamine
practiced notions of reading” (30).
Calling Barth a “genius,” John Murray of Best Sellers believes “the technical peculiarities of this volume
parody rather than merely illustrate McLuhan’s dicta . . .” (282).
Also, in 1968, Phoebe Adams of The
Atlantic Monthly praises the “amusing experiments” and compares Barth to
Rudyard Kipling (150); Pete Axthelm of Newsweek
likes Barth’s use of images from Homer and wordplay from Joyce (106-7); and
Alfred Appel, Jr. lauds Barth’s “involuted” stories, of which “Life-Story”
comes closest to this “dubious ideal” and states that Barth is “one of the most
successful of the second generation of postmodernists” (441-42). More compliments come from three reviewers in
1969: Barth is “inventive and brilliant,” writing “a fascinating and highly
entertaining work,” according to James Fenton of New Statesman; the voice of Funhouse
“makes this new volume a joy” (163-4) says Robert Garis of The Hudson Review; and Lee T. Lemon, in The Prairie Schooner, advises that while Funhouse is a “hodge-podge” that it does “cohere” its fragments
into “an extremely good book” (231-32).
Most of the critical
pieces written from 1970 to 1979 examine Barth’s style and his use of metaphor
and mythology. Gehard Joseph calls
Barth’s characters “floating signifiers” (8) in educational experiences
filtered though the distorted funhouse metaphor (5 and 41). Charles Harris, in his 1979 book Contemporary American Novelists of the
Absurd, argues that Barth and Vonnegut reveal absurdity through form, comic
exaggeration and story lines that show life as
resisting order (21-25). Sharon Davie
Decker calls Funhouse a series of separate fables that employ short metaphors
and artifice which foster “intimate involvement for the reader” (4), creating
“an endless series of stories-within-stories-within-stories” (129). Daniel Golden, comparing the shapes and strategies
of the fiction of Robert Penn Warren, Saul Bellow, and John Barth, argues that
while questioning and attacking common assumptions (6) and violating genres
(7), “Life-Story” is about the impossibility of writing fiction” (203). Bruce Lee Janoff defines the black humor in
Barth’s novels as laughing to not weep: “The element of comedy is utilized
primarily as a technical tool – as a means of combating the psychologically
pernicious effects of a despairing weltanschauung”
(5). The black humor, according to
Janoff, is revealed in Barth’s “discerning manipulation of language”
(105). All of these scholars offer
insightful lenses for reading “Life-Story,” but they all rely on the
comprehension of Barth’s language.
Clearly, the first obstacle to overcome when reading “Life-Story” is its
vocabulary if students are to understand its self-consciousness, its genre and
language violations, and its black humor.
Like
many reviewers attempting to categorize Barth in the 1970s, Robert Kiernan
calls Lost in the Funhouse a kunstlerroman, “recording the search of
an artist for a viable mode of fiction and shaping that search into a
significant and balanced action that is, indeed, emblematic of Barth’s themes”
(373). While Kiernan emphasizes the relationship
between the narrator and his story, Beverly Gray Bienstock concentrates her
critique on the role of the reader: The
book “turns from the role of the author to the role of the reader of fiction”
(71), as demonstrated by Barth’s famous direct address, or insult, of the
reader in Part 3 of "Life-Story.”
In The Literature of Exhaustion:
Borges, Nabokov, and Barth, John Q. Stark concludes that “Life-Story” is
“clearly literature of exhaustion” because of its involuted plot, “containing
Chinese boxes, arguing that life is a fiction” (140). To read the literature of exhaustion, Stark
acknowledges that “people should be concerned with the process not product”
(148). This emphasis on process should
be central to learning activities for “Life-Story,” even though most students
have come to value only the product aspect of reading literature.
Gerald
Gillespie’s “Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse:
Short Story Text in Its Cyclic Context,” provides complete, but brief,
summaries of all fourteen tales in the Funhouse
series. According to Gillespie,
“Life-Story” is the one-day cycle of the narrator’s birthday. The time markers, done with asterisks and
footnotes, help to position the readers in some sort of linear time cycle,
while they wander through the nonlinear “story-in-progress” that the narrator
is composing. William Krier, in 1976,
argues that Funhouse with its
postmodern sensibility of “life within a fiction” is “the storyteller’s
understanding that his existence depends on the cooperation of his
reader” which in turn “creates suicidal self-loathing” (106). Also in 1976, David Morrell asserts that
Barth’s work is not black humor or literature of the absurd, but fabulation in
the sense of Robert Scholes’ definition (99), and that its purpose is to
“dramatize alternatives to philosophical positions” (98).
The
year 1977 marks two very different explanations of Barth’s work. Victor Vitanza calls Barth a mathematician,
whose Mobius loop metaphor “suggests that a single story can generate a infinite number of stories all linked together around a
central structure” (85), like in Lost in
the Funhouse. On the other hand,
Evelyn Glaser-Wohrer, in her 1977 book that analyzes Barth’s weltanschauung, says that Funhouse is mainly about aesthetics
which place old themes, like love, in new technical devices (144), and the book
has “a minutely structured unity in the form of a kunstlerroman” of physical, intellectual, and artistic development
(145). Linda Westervelt’s 1978 article,
“Teller, Tale, Told: Relationships in John Barth’s Latest Fiction,” delineates
the triangular relationship between the author, the story, and the reader. According to Westervelt, by not using names
in “Life-Story,” Barth engages the reader in an elaborate sport (42), and “by
requiring his reader’s participation Barth refutes McLuhan’s contention that
reading is a ‘hot’ medium requiring little ‘completion’ by the audience” (49).
Much
of the criticism of the 1980s on Barth focuses on the role of the reader and
the debate about whether or not his work is modern or postmodern. Michael Hinden emphasizes the modernist
technique of “dazzle” which makes reading Funhouse
difficult. According to Jeff Rackham
“the initial difficulty most readers encounter with Lost in the Funhouse is the disorder of beginning without
referents, in media res” (165), and he suggests that readers synthesize the paradoxes
in the book (173). If students can
anticipate and tolerate the dazzle and paradoxes in “Life-Story,” it may be
possible for them to enjoy the experience of reading it and better understand
Barth’s purposes. In the same vein,
Carol Schloss and Khachig Tololyan believe that Funhouse “develops the insult as a form of motivation” (64) and its purpose is to “move readers away from
their traditionally flaccid reading postures” (65).
Lost in
the Funhouse generated varied thematic interpretations. Charles Harris in Passionate Virtuosity (1983) explicitly develops the writer/lover
analogy in his discussion of Funhouse
as the relationship between sex, language, and myth (7). In “Life-Story” the narrator is very much
concerned with his art, his sexuality, his life because “sex is the center of
al human activity” (Harris Passionate
Virtuosity 107). Steven M. Bell says
that Funhouse connects language, philosophy,
and the writing/reading binary (85).
Robert Hipkiss in The American
Absurd (1984) argues that Funhouse
presents a form of existentialism where “existence defies essence” (119).
According to Deborah Woolley, Funhouse
explores self-consciousness on tow planes, the existential
and the linguistic (468). She asserts
that the “Life-Sotyr” specifically critiques self-reflexivity, questions the
human implications of the boringness of the self-conscious, wonders about the
“impossibility of making something new,” and refuses to let the reader be
passive (474-75).
In 1987, Heide Ziegler
reconsiders the bildungsroman-kunstlerroman and contends that Lost in the Funhouse is a kuntslerroman of the self-reflective
artist, parodying Joyce’s Portrait of an
Artist (49-50). However, the artist
is “gradually consumed by art: Ambrose Mensch grows up not acquiring bildung
[education] for life, but becoming an artist” (55). Jan Gorak argues that Barth forces readers
“to see the world as no longer the creation of an artist god” and to “to see it
through the lenses of self-conscious rationalism” (159-160).
Two
articles in 1988, one by Katherine Kurk and another by Loretta Lampkin, argue
for labeling Barth as a “high modernist” because his narrative which have
“narrators, narratees, and ‘narrated’ characters continually exchange textual
identities” (Kurk 254). However, Carl
Malgren and Carolyn Norman Slaughter label Lost
in the Funhouse a postmodern work.
Malgren concludes that “Life-Story” is postmodern because its
metalingual commentary tells, not shows (19) a multiplicity of
selfhood. “In postmodernist fiction any
reconciliation between art and life is thoroughly problematized, as the full
implication of the funhouse motif makes clear” (Malgren 27). Slaughter argues that basically Funhouse “articulates the postmodern
ground-situation” because it has no system for interpreting
nor a language for expressing the used-upness of forms (90). Also according to Slaughter, Funhouse possesses “energy, wit, and irony”
(91), important characteristics of postmodernism.
The
lively debate over modernism and postmodernism in Barth’s works continues in
articles and published in the 1990s. Max
Schulz calls Barth “. . . not an errant realist quality of formalist
perversions so much as a radical preservationist looking for ways to conserve
old and new storytelling” (14-15).
Similarly, Richard Bradbury
defines Barth’s postmodernism as “fundamentally synthetic in its approach” of
displaying “disparate elements” in a “frequently satisfying mosaic” (60). Stan Fogel and Gordon Slethaug believe Barth
is the “best introduction to the experimentation and playfulness of
postmodernism” (11-12).
In
contrast, Lee Lemon counters that Barth reaches the common reader with his use
of love triangles, narrative hooks, human indecision, page-turning tricks,
themes of human predicament, and
dilemmas of aging” (“John Barth and the Common Reader” 42-48). But, Carol Olson argues that the narrator of
“Life-Story” is too self-absorbed, too fragmented, and too disturbed for the
common reader (56).
The
modern/postmodern debate is continued by Patricia Tobin in her 1992 book John Barth and the Anxiety of Continuance. In a pragmatic analysis, she comments that Lost in the Funhouse is a
These
28 years of criticism of Lost in the
Funhouse provide valuable points for developing strategies for reading
“Life-Story.” First, Barth clearly
intends to re-educate readers, placing them in a more active, participatory
role. The process of reading
“Life-Story” is important, if not more important than the product of the story. Second, the emphasis on experiential reading
can only be accomplished if the difficulty of the story’s style and structure
are overcome. Again, these scholars and
reviewers offer worthwhile approaches: 1) place Barth’s work in the context of
the oral tradition; 2) discuss the framework of the stories with stories; 3)
consider the metaphor of the Mobius loop and its implications to understanding
the story; 4) anticipate the effect of excess detail on the reading process; 5)
compare and contrast the imaginary effects of experimental techniques;
6)discuss the problems of unorthodox techniques affecting readability and
leading to confusion; and 7) question where and how a cohesive reading can
emerge from fragmentation. Third, this
story provides an opportunity to expand students’ understanding of literary
terms such as: fable, black humor, metafiction, bildungsroman, kunstlerroman, weltanschauung, mythology, and irony. Fourth, for the standpoint of philosophy and
literary history, “Life-Story” provides a chance to reconsider existentialism
and to critically compare Barth’s work to the works of Joyce, Homer, Kafka, and
Kipline. Fifth, Lost in the Funhouse and “Life-Story” are thematically rich as they
ponder the writer/artist’s creative dilemma, the role of love in human
existence, and the possibility of hope in the face of despair. Lastly, the modern/postmodern debate is alive
and well and lurking in “Life-Story,” making it a significant reading and
learning adventure.
To
better understand the reading expectations of general education students, I
asked thirty of them the following three questions: What do you expect when you read a
story? What kinds of stories do you like
to read? And What kinds of stories do
you dislike reading? Surprisingly, these
vague questions generated specific, precise responses. Three levels, or categories, of expectations
emerged: Most students listed plot, entertainment and sustaining interest as
their most desired elements, top level expectations. In the second level, student wanted strong
characters in interesting relationships and an effective ending with
closure. Lastly, student said they read
for conflict (with a problem to be solved), a climax, exciting details, and
knowledge (or insight). A few students
of the thirty polled also listed adventure, action, themes, dialogue, humor,
and reality as expectations. These
student most like to read “real life” stories, romances, and action/adventure,
but dislike science fiction (“it’s not real”), historical works, and stories without
closure. As one
student aptly phrased it: “I like stories that tempt your mind not your
patience.” Unfortunately, my
experience with Barth’s “Life-Story” is that it does tempt the patience of
students, challenging many of their expectations and causing them to resist the
experience of reading it. Thus, the
question becomes how to tempt them to take a bite of “Life-Story” in our
smorgasbord class of American writers?
Part
of their resistance to reading “Life-Story” comes from the students’ initial
difficulty with its vocabulary, which they consider pretentious, and its long
sentences, which they consider overloaded.
Because they have been conditioned to find out the who,
what, when, where, why, and how of a story, they are baffled by a story that
deliberately confuses these tradition questions and their answers. They want to sort out the story’s details,
but “Life-Story” resists sorting. Its
plot is not linear, except for the deceptive markers that Barth has included to
frame the story’s movement from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., Monday, June 20,
1966. Even the hyphen in the title
between “Life” and “Story” has been questioned by my students: Is it Barth’s
life and story? Or is it to be the life
story of all readers? Or, the lives and
stories of the story’s alphabetized characters? Their “inquiring minds want to know.”
I
have found that if I can keep students reading “somewhat intently” beyond the
fourth paragraph of “Life-Story” that it is possible to engage them with the
experience of reading the text, rather than trying to “figure it out.” One way to focus their reading is to ask them
to watch for the narrator’s expectations of a story. For all of its pretentious tone and stance in
paragraph #1 (no commas and the third person-outside-of-himself stance), the
story’s narrator begins to list his expectations of conservative realism,
ground-situation, and vehicle-situation, all of which are student expectations;
they just called by different names. Of
course, Barth’s story does not deliver any of these aspects, but they are named
to “tempt” the reader. Further reading will show that the story’s author
wants characters, “admirable” ones; plot, a linear one; conflict, of a motion
variety; and action, of a “bravura” nature – more student expectations. In paragraph #13 the author talks of tales of
adventure with values displayed in actions, characters, speeches and deeds
(Homeric mythology?). The monologue of
the imaginary mistress in paragraph #15 calls for themes of passion, “essential
to life,” but not at the expense of “fidelity” to middle-class life, the very
fabric of culture. In spite of the
author’s worry about the purpose of his literature, he is well aware that
reading is entertainment for most people, like the wife and daughter of
“Life-Story.”
In
addition to these expectations, in paragraph #20 the protagonist of
“Life-Story” questions whether a character should engage or annoy the reader,
but before the answer to the question is given, the famous “direct address” to
the reader begins: “You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it’s you
I’m addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction” (paragraph
#21). Here Barth assaults the readers’
expectations of entertainment and sustaining interest, as he asks why must he
always write to “engage” the audience?
From my past experience, I have found that students either love this
insult and enjoy its humor, or find it the most confusing portion of the story. If they are reading for experience of the
story, they enjoy it; however, if they are still reading for meaning, they are
confounded by being directly addressed.
The
end of the story is also problematic because some students have not separated
the story’s author from the story-within-the-story’s author. They worry that the author will commit
suicide, albeit fictionally, and that the ending is not a “closed, happy” one
that readers want and expect. As readers
they desire closure, but they don’t want the closure to be a death scene. The references to suicide often keep
contemporary students from seeing the humor and irony in the story because they
do not find suicide to be a humorous subject, nor do they understand the
existential question that underlies the author’s contemplation of suicide. Again, a key factor in reading the story on
an experiential level is to help students comprehend the puns and irony early
in the story before the references to suicide and death begin. Much of the success of reading the black humor
in “Life-Story” depends on vocabulary comprehension. While some of my students will admit to
occasionally checking words in the dictionary, “Life-Story” often presents too
many “big” words too soon. To contend
with the vocabulary/meaning problems, we use a quick reference glossary (See Appendix B: Vocabulary
Help for Barth’s “Life-Story”) arranged by page numbers corresponding to the
Norton anthology version of “Life-Story.”
By having students skim these words and meanings before reading the
story, some of the vocabulary problems are eliminated so that the experience of
reading is not hampered.
Helping Students Read and Write about
“Life-Story”
“Life-Story”
has valuable instructional potential in a general education class, but it also
has unique characteristics which make it difficult for students to read and
enjoy (or even tolerate). To deal with
the resistance between the story’s complex, self-conscious reflexivity and
students’ expectations of
“a story,” a plan for “teaching” this piece must involve several
levels or layers of activities. While
these general education students only have “Life-Story,” the twelfth story in
the fourteen-story Lost in the Funhouse,
it is worthwhile to introduce them to the Mobius strip/loop concept of the
first pieces in the series, the “FrameTale.”
By giving each student a strip of paper and asking them to write on one
side “Once upon a Time There” and on the other side “Was a Story that Began,”
and then twisting one end, taping the ends together, the students will have
created the physical representation of Barth’s central metaphor. With the instruction, “Keep this Mobius loop
in your mind as you read ‘Life-Story,’” students should be prepared for the
“differentness” of its reading experience.
Next, providing each student with a copy of the “Vocabulary Help for
Barth’s ‘Life-Story’” (Appendix
B) and pronouncing the words for them as they read the words silently
should give them some “relief” from Barth’s vocabulary overload.
Most
importantly to establish an “experience” atmosphere for reading “Life-Story,”
students, in groups of 4-5, begin reading the story aloud to each other. Having each student read one sentence works
effectively. If necessary they can refer
to the vocabulary sheet as they read. To
shift students away from a “what’s happening” mind set, they stop at the end of
each paragraph and write about “how are you experiencing the story” or “what
are your impressions or reactions to what you have read”? They may list questions they wish to ask of
their group members or the instructor.
No preliminary information is given on Barth – his life or career – or
on Lost in the Funhouse. The students have some background on
modernism and postmodernism because of earlier reading assignments and
discussions. By just “stepping into” an
oral reading of the story, we capture some of the “playfulness” that Barth
intended. Generally, in an hour and
fifteen minute (Tuesday, Thursday) class period, most groups finish reading and
“scribbling” their reactions to the story.
To
close the class featuring in-class, oral reading, I give each student the
handout “Bits about John Barth’s Lost in
the Funhouse (Appendix
A). I spend a few minutes discussing
the book as a whole and pointing out some key phrases in his two essays “The
Literature of Exhaustion” and “The Literature of Replenishment.” I also give them a handout on modernism and
postmodernism to supplement the introductions in the Norton anthology (See Appendix C).
With
these two handouts, and the their in-class reactions
to “Life-Story,” they write a journal entry responding to this prompt: Based on
your “experiential” reading of “Life-Story,” is it a “modern” story, a
“postmodern” story, or does it exhibit characteristics of both –ism’s? As always, support your answer with
definitions and examples from the story.
This prompt usually generates lively debates about themes, styles, and
their reading expectations. The
discussion provides a way to “get at” some of the story’s “meanings,” as well
as to compare and contrast realism, modernism, and postmodernism.
Another
potential reading, thinking, and writing activity is based on asking students
to read the first part of Barth’s “Stories of Our Lives,” published in The Atlantic Monthly in March of 1995
(See Appendix D). I then ask them to respond to this
prompt: What similarities and
differences do you see between the first few paragraphs of these two Barth
stories written 27 years apart? Does one
story’s opening appeal to you more?
Why? Do you think Barth has
changed as a writer? Have you changed as
a reader since reading “Life-Story”?
The
purposes of these various reading and writing activities are to encourage
students to read differently, both with and against their expectations, and to
become reflective about how they read. While
Barth’s “Life-Story” is challenging and complex, it does provide a worthwhile
experience for dramatizing the tensions between traditional realistic
storytelling, high-culture modernist aesthetics, and chaotic postmodern flux. The story is more much
than just “a piece only an English teacher can love.”