The Platonic Cave Revisited: John Barth's Prison- House Of .
EUROPEAN ACADEMIC RESEARCHVol. III, Issue 6/ September 2015ISSN 2286-4822www.euacademic.orgImpact Factor: 3.4546 (UIF)DRJI Value: 5.9 (B )The Platonic Cave Revisited: John Barth's Prisonhouse of NarrativityDr. AMER RASOOL MAHDILecturerDepartment of English LanguageCollege of Education (Ibn Rushd), University of BaghdadIraqAbstract:This paper sets itself the task of approaching the shorterfictions of the postmodernist American writer John Barth. It isintended here to show how in Barth's hands the narrative funhousehas become a narrative prison-house by him meshing together thetypologies of fiction and labyrinth. By so doing Barth revisits thePlatonic cave to question and to further problematise the time-riddennotions of imitation, mimeses, and representation in his criti-fictionalwriting that self-consciously lays bare the props of realism's claims toreality and reality's claims to realism.The labyrinthine Barthian writing is shown here as making aheavy use of the scientific metaphor of entropy that, in Barth's canon,indicates the literary exhaustion. Through the onion-folds of myth andthe mirrors of his narrative funhouse Barth strives to replenish thetraces of meaning long lost in the frames of writing and reality. Thefictions to be studied or referred to here are selected texts from thewriter's chef-d’oeuvre Lost in the Funhouse.Key words: labyrinth, metafiction, entropy, literary exhaustion,narrativity.6035
Amer Rasool Mahdi- The Platonic Cave Revisited: John Barth's Prison-house ofNarrativityIntroduction: The Ontology of Labyrinth and FictionLabyrinth as a metaphor, a motif, and a typological design, ismore expressively telling of the problematic nature of themetafictional writing. First of all, both labyrinth andmetafiction have the same ontological dimension that reflectsthe mode and status of a troubled existence in the world and/orthe text. Hence they are mutually conceived as representing thetext-of-the-world formula. As an existential metaphor,labyrinth shifts the existentialist dasein (being there in theworld) into the textual dasein (being there in the text). Also,being either multi-coursal or circular in design, it proves to beanalogous to the de-teleological self-reflexive structure ofmetafictional narratives.John Barth is a creator of authorial/textual Grendelsthat disseminate signs of labyrinthine creatures. Thesecreatures are here to be metaphorically conceived as no lessthan variations of that “hybrid Child, the minotaur” asdescribed in Ovid‟s account of the Cretan labyrinth. So themyth goes that Daedalus is ordered to design a “labyrinthineenclosure” to house that hybrid creature. This he does, but forhis doom he gets lost and cannot find his way out (Faris 1988a,692). Being lost in a labyrinth of his own devising, Daedalus isidentified, literally and metaphorically, with its monster. Somuch the same holds true of the author-narrator-character whobecomes his own text, and is thus identified with his monstrousfiction. “[T]o reach the centre of language,” Peter Stoicheffargues, “would be similarly fatal, and paradoxical, for it holdsthe minotaur, „dual and ambiguous,‟ as Foucault terms both itand language” (1991). The myth of the Cretan labyrinthmatches up with one of the Borgesian parables. In the“Afterword” of The Maker (1960), Jorge Luis Borges (1989, 327)tells the story of a man who bends over the task of drawing theworld. Years later, and shortly before his death, this man findsout to his own surprise that the drawing is nothing but that ofEUROPEAN ACADEMIC RESEARCH - Vol. III, Issue 6 / September 20156036
Amer Rasool Mahdi- The Platonic Cave Revisited: John Barth's Prison-house ofNarrativityhis own face. This metafictional parable, according to Wendy B.Faris, implies a short-circuit of the two versions of thelabyrinth, the Daedalian and the Thesian (1988a, 692); i.e., thelabyrinth perceived from the viewpoint of the creator, and thelabyrinth perceived from the viewpoint of the victim entrappedwithin it. This implies erasing the margin separating the worldand the book/text, and the result is labyrinth envisaged as thetext of the world. Faris states that the sign of labyrinth “shiftsfrom designating the universe and picturing man‟s interior tothe domain of textuality, of writing and reading” (1988b, 10).Thus, the inversion of form into content, and vice versa, or theinversion of the Daedalian and Thesian interpretations of theworld each into the other, results in the spatial-textuallabyrinth where the self-reflexive art of metafiction operatesaesthetically.Thus designated, the ontology of labyrinth recalls thefunhouse-esque scriptorium where the absurd and comic effortsare exerted to fill in that hiatus/void at the heart oflanguage/narrative. It is tempting to say that the Minotaur, thefictional Grendel, occupies the centre of the world/textscriptorium. It creates its own horror vacui1 that motivates thewriterly Daedalus to inscribe his own textual labyrinth, and tobecome its own reader. This labyrinth is now inscribed, inBarth‟s Lost in the Funhouse (1969), withLove affairs, literary genres, third item in exemplary series,fourth―[where] everything blossoms and decays , from theprimitive and classical through the mannered and baroque tothe abstract, stylized, dehumanized, unintelligible, blank.(108; hereafter LF)The Platonic cave here is revisited by the metafictionist as atextual-labyrinth designer who records the pale traces of hisfiction‟s descending from reality as well as this fiction‟salienation from that very reality. The Platonic cave is thefictional space, “the stage-page” (Said 1982, 203), where thelabyrinthine, meta-representational, textual self represents itsEUROPEAN ACADEMIC RESEARCH - Vol. III, Issue 6 / September 20156037
Amer Rasool Mahdi- The Platonic Cave Revisited: John Barth's Prison-house ofNarrativityown textuality by “allowing the very notion of representation torepresent itself” (Said 1982, 201). This fictional space, beingclosed and eternally changing and changeable, represents theontological lacuna of the writerly/readerly scriptorium wherethe textual self flounders, and the discourse of which isrendered “a performance of theoretical prepositions in thepoetic „space‟ ” (Kamuf 1991, 144).Being self-reflexive fiction, registering the tensionsbetween some distorted and exhausted reality and the nostalgiafor that reality, the Barthian text of the world operates in thecircular ruins, in the interregnum between the old Thebes andthe newly found Thebes. It is championed by Tiresias-likeauthors-narrators-character-readers who are torn between twoworlds:Thebes is falling; unknown to the north-bound refugees, enroute to found a new city, their seer [Tiresias] will perish onthe instant the Argives take the old. He it is now, thrashingthrough the woods near Thespiae, who calls to his companionsand follows to exhaustion a mock response. (LF 102; italicsmine)The seer Tiresias here is the labyrinthine “eyeless,”“disengendered tale,” that “can[not] tell the teller from the told”(LF 102), and whose Oedipal who-am-I is ever answered with amock response. This mock response is echoed when “seer andseeker, prophet and lost, first met in the cave” (LF 102), “wheretruth and nontruth coexist as instances of textual repetition”(Derrida, quoted in Said 1982, 206) in the prison-house ofnarrativity.Finally, the labyrinthine typology in Barth‟s fictions is tobe approached here in terms of the metafictional entropy; i.e.,literature/text being conceived as a closed, self-reflexive systemin which “the labyrinth . represents an ingenious―almost tooingenious work of art, as well as a [textual] place where anexplorer may become lost” (Faris 1988a, 692). This is whereEUROPEAN ACADEMIC RESEARCH - Vol. III, Issue 6 / September 20156038
Amer Rasool Mahdi- The Platonic Cave Revisited: John Barth's Prison-house ofNarrativityBarth revisits the Platonic cave through the lenses of hisfunhouse.The Barthian Cave of NarrativityThere are analogies to be traced between the labyrinthinecomplexity, the chaotic excessive self-reflexivity, of metafictionon the one hand, and the scientific metaphor of entropy on theother hand. Brian Stonehill posits that “in its cosmic extension,entropy implies that the universe, for all its apparent chaos, infact conforms to a plot of steady decline” (1988, 153). Thisdecline, exhaustion, and irreversibility might be symbolised bythe “ouroboros: the ancient symbol of the snake biting its owntail” (Guerin et al. 2005, 187), or in the Barthian context, by thefictional chimera that cannibalises itself. Moreover, suchmetafictional geometrical designs as the Moebius strip of the“Frame-Tale” and the spiral in Barth‟s Chimera (1972) are to bebetter conceived as comprehensive attempts to re-plot theentropy in such a way so as to fully depict literary exhaustion.Still, at the same time, they seek out in this very exhaustion asign of replenishment through the nostalgic notion of order.This is harmonious with Alan Trachenberg‟s statement that “inthe midst of an entropic universe, man represents an „enclave‟of opposite tendency, a tendency for „organization to increase‟ ”(1979, 43). A more accurate definition of entropy might provehandy in this context:Entropy is the tendency described in Newton‟s Second Law ofthermodynamics, of any closed system to lose energy, to rundown. Another way of describing it is through probabilitytheory: the probable answers to a given set of questions in agiven world increase as the world grows older. (Trachenberg1979, 43)Transported from their scientific environ, these definitionscould be readily applied to Barth‟s literary entropy asaesthetically and critically circulated in his death-of-the-novelEUROPEAN ACADEMIC RESEARCH - Vol. III, Issue 6 / September 20156039
Amer Rasool Mahdi- The Platonic Cave Revisited: John Barth's Prison-house ofNarrativityfiction. In fact they could operate as a typological pattern ofBarth‟s so-called literature of exhaustion and literature ofreplenishment.2 In view of that, the Barthian fictional whole is,in a way or another, an attempt to dramatise entropic worlds.Still, this is to be found dexterously tested out in the narrativesof “Echo,” “Glossolalia,” and the titular story “Lost in theFunhouse.”In “Echo” Barth reworks the myth of Narcissus andEcho as an allegory of the narcissistic self-reflexive fiction as awhole, and as a dramatisation of the spatial metaphor ofentropy in particular. Likened to other closed systems,metafiction‟s narrative processes involve introversions andinvolutions. These could be translated into the entropic loopsthat turn output into input, which entails loss of energy andthus exhaustion beyond replenishment. In Ovid‟s TheMetamorphoses, the mythical donnée of Narcissus is alreadyreplete with the genesis of literary entropy that proliferateswithin the larger context of The Metamorphoses. Narcissus iscaptivated by his own reflection, imprisoned in a loop ofself-mirroring, when the nymph Echo tries to save him bygiving him fragments of his own speech. This goes in parallelwith the mythical labyrinthine narrative, where Theseus goesinto the labyrinth hoping that Ariadne‟s rope will lead him outof it. Still Ariadne is to be spellbound by the vipers of thelabyrinth, and she is bound to be lost herself. So is Echo herselfwho is imprisoned and “tied-tongued,” and “who had to waituntil she heard / Words said, and then follow them in her ownvoice” (1960, 59), as the Ovidian account has it.In Barth‟s story, when Narcissus―the assumed originalversion of self-conceit and self-creation―and Echo first meeteach other in the “Thespian cave” she only repeats the lastwords or syllables in a loop-like fashion:I can‟t go on.Go on.Is there anyone to hear here?Who are you?EUROPEAN ACADEMIC RESEARCH - Vol. III, Issue 6 / September 20156040
Amer Rasool Mahdi- The Platonic Cave Revisited: John Barth's Prison-house ofNarrativityYou.I?Aye.Then let me see me!See?A lass! Alas. (LF 101)This “coincidence of opposites” (LF 101), this disabled colloquy,deprived as it is of any possibility of healthy communication, ismediated by the exhausted sexless Tiresias.He, too, isimprisoned in the present moment in the confinements of hisself-knowledge. Thus he turns out to be the labyrinthinefictional Minotaur, “the disengendered tale,” and therefore theintertext. The roles of Narcissus, of Echo, and of Tiresiashimself in this hybrid intertext/tale are assigned by the veryagency/character of the Thespian Cave―suffice to know thatThespi is the originator of the actor‟s role―that also serves as amock reminder of the Platonic cave.The very roles of Narcissus and Echo are the dramatisedentropic version of the dual nature of the Minotaur-likeTiresias. As such, the three of them duplicate the Barthianformula of the teller-tale-told that keeps metamorphosing inthe Thespian cave that allows such undecidability of roles andcategories. This Thespian cave in the guise of the Tiresianintertext/tale is shown as being figuratively “capable ofemasculating the Platonic idea forming our views of meaningand representation, as well as the Hegelian triangle resolved insynthesis” (Said 1982, 204). The result is this characterlessintertext being conceived as a performer, a secrete operator ofthis funhouse of narcissism.EUROPEAN ACADEMIC RESEARCH - Vol. III, Issue 6 / September 20156041
Amer Rasool Mahdi- The Platonic Cave Revisited: John Barth's Prison-house ofNarrativityThis narcissistic textual self, this entropic ghost, wants “to ridhimself of others‟ histories—Oedipus‟s, Echo‟s—which distracthim fore and aft by reason of his entire knowledge” (LF 98).This he cannot do, and instead, he succumbs to repeating thesehistories as part of his protean character, and to re-“telling the[selfsame] story over as it were another‟s” (LF 98). Accountingfor the schizoid status of the text “Echo,” Terry J. Martin states:The story in fact gains a different focus and significancedepending on whom we conceive to be narrating: if the story isEcho‟s, it is about failed love; if Narcissus‟s, it is about thedanger of self love; if Tiresias‟s, it is about the burden of selfknowledge; if Barth‟s, it is about the paradoxical interplay ofall four points of view. (2001, 52)Not so far from Martin‟s approach, it is tempting to say thatthese viewpoints sound less “the storyteller‟s alternatives” (LF111) than they are the Thespian cave‟s alternatives of the text‟sotherness.EUROPEAN ACADEMIC RESEARCH - Vol. III, Issue 6 / September 20156042
Amer Rasool Mahdi- The Platonic Cave Revisited: John Barth's Prison-house ofNarrativityTiresias as seer is no longer the provider of answers than being,just like his doubles Narcissus and Echo, the “message” thatturns into its “medium.” This Tiresian failed-love/medium issomething both and neither. In other words, Tiresias is theunstable irony that is engendered in the narcissistic discourse,and that absorbs the opposites without these being resolved.This discourse is narcissistically self-reflexive, and is full ofothers‟ echoes as well, “The teller‟s immaterial, Tiresiasdeclares; the tale‟s same, and for all one knows the speaker maybe the only auditor” (LF 101 102). Here the teller and tale areonly present to their absence and to their being processed.Hence, the unproductive colloquy as allegorised inNarcissus-Echo‟s failed love represents the plight oflanguage/narrative as thematised in the self reflexive art. Thisdilemma is depicted in Barth‟s text in the followingmeta-textual explication:Narcissus would appear to be opposite from Echo: he perishesby denying all except himself; she persists by effacing herselfabsolutely. Yet they come to the same: it was never himselfNarcissus craved, but his reflection, the Echo of his fancy; hisdeath must be partial as his self-knowledge, the voice persists,persists. (LF 102 103)Therefore, in this dialectic of the opposites (absence-presence:sameness-difference), death of language/narrative will neverhave the upper hand, nor will self-knowledge, simply becausesuch dialectic is metaphysically sponsored and deferred by thegod of “ironic doubling[s],” or “the god of writing [who] mustalso be the god of death” (Derrida 1981, 93, 91). Again thisfather‟s narcissistic thesis (the Thespian cave‟s drama) is asecond-rate writing done―or imaginatively invented―byTiresias, and edited and re-edited by the entropic Echo‟s―orsimply echo‟s―mock responses. This Echo is finally conceived asbeing a Menippean reminder of the Platonic notion ofmisrepresentation, “Echo never, as popularly held, repeats all,like gossip or mirror. She edits, heightens, mutes, turns others‟EUROPEAN ACADEMIC RESEARCH - Vol. III, Issue 6 / September 20156043
Amer Rasool Mahdi- The Platonic Cave Revisited: John Barth's Prison-house ofNarrativitywords to her end” (LF, 100). So described, she turns out to bethe embodiment of the literature-of-exhaustion writer.The paradigm of Echo as an editor of others‟ words isprone to be compared to Barth‟s “Glossolalia,” literally meaning“speakers-in-tongues” (LF 115). Unlike Echo, the narrativevoice here does not turn the others‟ words to his end. On thecontrary, he mixes up with the others‟ tongues, to the extentthat he loses his idiosyncratic character and identity in thelabyrinthine heteroglossia of this narrative Babel Tower. HereBarth tries to create in a rather minimalist fashion thelinguistic labyrinth of non-representationality, as he re-enactsthe cosmic maze of the Babel Tower. This is done through hisappropriating a number of primordial narrative patterns andmythoi all depicting, in an apocalyptic tone and style, one topos:the paradoxical possibility as well as non-possibility oftale-telling and the blockage of the voice at the heart ofnarrativity. These mythoi are: Cassandra‟s abduction and herbeing unable to speak up her disgrace; Philomel‟s rape andhaving her tongue severed so as not to cast her adversary to theworld; Crispus‟s being horrified by the god of sun and his ravingbeing thus mis-deciphered, “my horror [is taken] for hymns, myblasphemies for raptures” (LF 114). This is to be followed by thequeen of Sheba‟s being overtaken by a new deity‟s agency, thebird hoopoe, that “mistranslates . [her] pain into cunningcounsel,” and to which she responds, “how I‟d hymn you, if histongue weren‟t beyond me―and yours” (LF 115). The result isthat all these variations of the voice-blockage are sub-codesimmersed in a kind of a holistic metaphysical discourse thatmanipulates this suspension or halt of meaning. This discourseis nothing other than the all-inclusive linguistic/narrativeminotaur/logos at the centre of the glossolalia of this text of theworld, that, through “constraint, and terror, generate[s] guilefulart” (LF 115). Once again the Daedalian inscriber deciphers hisciphers:EUROPEAN ACADEMIC RESEARCH - Vol. III, Issue 6 / September 20156044
Amer Rasool Mahdi- The Platonic Cave Revisited: John Barth's Prison-house ofNarrativityThe laureled clairvoyants tell our doom in riddles. Sewn in ourrobes are horrid tales, and the speakers-in-tongues enounceatrocious tidings. The senselessest babble, could we ken it,might disclose a dark message, or a prayer. (LF 115)Here both the cipherers, the riddle-making clairvoyants, and“we”, the decipherers, are but the same; they are theauthors-narrators-characters who, in the middle of narrativity,anticipate the end of this very narrativity.The title story “Lost in the Funhouse” is a full-fledgeddramatisation of the labyrinthine prison-house of narrativityand its entropic self-reflexivity. It tells the story of an authorwho is in the middle of writing a story tentatively titled “ „Lostin the Funhouse‟ ” about a thirteen-year old Ambrose, who getslost in the assumed funhouse. The line of the development ofAmbrose‟s story goes along that of the author‟s story aboutwriting Ambrose‟s story. Hence, there are two funhouses; theauthor‟s and Ambrose‟s, which are similar and different. Thisparadox is partly related to the dialectic holding between theworld of the story and the world of story-telling. Hence, theauthor and Ambrose and their story/stories sound more like aJanus-faced textual self, when the author materialises,Ambrose disappears, and vice versa. Intricately, one may haverecourse to the hypothesis-code that permeates the funhousenarrative: Ambrose, and in this case his narrative of himself, isnothing but “a name-coin someone else had lost or discarded[bearing the sign] AMBROSE” (LF 94). This name-coinmetaphor is tellingly expressive of the arbitrary and provisionalsign/structure intermediating between Ambrose the signifierand Ambrose the signified. This is, by extension, applied to thefunhouse narrative/mirrors as being a chain of signifierswithout a signified; i.e., without the real Ambrose, or the realversion of Ambrose‟s story. This Ambrose is witnessed earliersaying, “I and my sign are neither one nor quite two” (LF 34).So, no matter how long the dialectic holding between Ambrosethe author and Ambrose the character lasts, it inevitably leadsEUROPEAN ACADEMIC RESEARCH - Vol. III, Issue 6 / September 20156045
Amer Rasool Mahdi- The Platonic Cave Revisited: John Barth's Prison-house ofNarrativityto one synthesis: self-reflexivity. This is what Baudrillard termsas the “Abyssal vision” which he takes to beall the games of splitting the object in two and duplicating itin every detail. This reduction is taken to be a depth, indeed acritical metalanguage, and doubtless this was true of areflective configuration of the sign in a dialectics of the mirror.From now on this infinite refraction is nothing more thananother type of seriality in which the real is no longerreflected, but folds on itself to the point of exhaustion. (1998,497; italics mine)The above metaphor of the name-coin might be developed intoanother trope. This would be a silverless mirror3 on both sidesof which two replicas of Ambrose come into sight, reproving oneanother, “Not act: be” (LF 88). This silverless mirror isNarcissus‟s new thesis that could have for its antithesis thisinversion: Not be: act, and so forth. Given that Ambrose, theauthor and the character, is but one paradoxical entity, in theargument yet to come, the funhouse is to be approached as atextual labyrinth ciphered and deciphered by this textual entitybeside being itself this very entity. The following description ofthe plot is rendered as a personification of this entity: “[T]heplot doesn‟t rise by meaningful steps but winds upon itself,digresses, retreats, hesitates, sighs, collapses, expires” (LF 96).As such, the funhouse allegory turns out to be meta-allegoricalor “metafigural,” in that “it is an allegory of a figure . whichrelapses into the figure it constructs. [L]ike an aporia: itpersists in performing what it has shown to be impossible to do”(Owens 1984, 228). This impossible-to-do is, in this case, thefunhouse-eque conceit/text. Here, as in the text “Title,” thefunhouse narrative strives to narrate its unnarratability andreads its unreadability―that interrupts the progress oflife/literature―by becoming what it hesitates to be.It follows then that “Lost in the Funhouse” re-generatesanother replica of the narcissistic entropy by presenting thereader with the structural concerns and thematics of the toposEUROPEAN ACADEMIC RESEARCH - Vol. III, Issue 6 / September 20156046
Amer Rasool Mahdi- The Platonic Cave Revisited: John Barth's Prison-house ofNarrativityof narcissism in fiction. The funhouse “mirror-maze” isself-consciously worked out so that it duplicates the textuallocus/agency of the Thespian cave. This locus (stage-page) isnow rendered as repeating to exhaustion its own version ofself-reflexivity and distorted realities or simulacra. Just likethe Daedalian artificer, here the author-narrator-characterAmbrose is up to the task of writing himself in as well out ofthe funhouse-esque labyrinth. Typically, in the middle of themirror-maze, he is liable to be visited by the vision of “alonghaired monster that lived in some cranny of the funhouse”(LF 90). Hence the narrativised versions of Ambrose come toponder upon the funhouse‟s narcissistic thesis:You think you‟re yourself, but there are other persons in you.Ambrose gets hard when Ambrose doesn‟t want to, andobversely. Ambrose watches them disagree; Ambrose watcheshim watch. In the funhouse mirror-room you can‟t see yourselfgo on forever, because no matter how you stand, your headgets in the way. Even if you had a glass periscope, the imageof your eye would cover up the thing you really wanted to see.(LF 85)Just like Tiresias, he turns out to be the sum of all others‟histories which are the repetitive versions (reflections) ofhimself. These reflections are dispatched and fragmented allalong the cunning passages of this textual labyrinth, to theextent that he wonders, “Is there really such a person asAmbrose, or is he a figment of the author‟s imagination?” (LF88). Paradoxically enough, this assumed author is nothing butanother version of Ambrose who questions his ability of beingan author somewhere else in the text. In this context, thefunhouse-esque textual protean self is better approximated asan unexpressed subjectivity, [that on] refusing to submit itselfto the world of experience or to bind its theoretically limitlesspotential to mere definitive actuality tends . to be destructiveeither of self, or other or both: to be, that is, eithercannibalistic or narcissistic. (Kennedy 1974, 284)EUROPEAN ACADEMIC RESEARCH - Vol. III, Issue 6 / September 20156047
Amer Rasool Mahdi- The Platonic Cave Revisited: John Barth's Prison-house ofNarrativityThis “theoretically limitless potential” is once more theontological/textual interregnum in the deferral of whichAmbrose flounders between “The Funhouse” and “Lost in theFunhouse,” the two versions of his locus/narrative, while he isinvestigating how his existence/text might have its ownoutlet/content. The on-going provisional content―the narrativein hand―might very well be approached as a false archaeologyof some Ur-Texts that constitute in their entirety the holistictextual funhouse. This funhouse text, in the guise of theminotaur/voice, delivers its codes in the mode of “self-erasingnarratives” (McHale 1987, 108), or a palimpsest.4 In Barth‟sshorter fictions and in the funhouse narrative in particular thisis to be manifest in a variety of ways. The Barthian text hereerases itself through questioning the use of italics in fiction,and the realistic conventions so prevalent in the nineteenthcentury novel and realistic fiction such as exposition and therealistic illusion. It reminds the reader of other writers‟ use ofcertain motifs and settings in fiction, and it discusses the use ofthe point of view of the fiction in hand. These are all “nothing inthe way of a theme” (LF 77).The palimpsest is best realised in the text in a numberof permutations disseminated as a substitution for, and as asign of, its lack of a „real‟ theme or content. These permutationsaccount a great deal for the text‟s labyrinthine and entropicnature as well as meta-figural status. In this regard, Barth‟sdesignation of the labyrinth as a locus where suchpermutations are best tested out has an instantly recognisablebearing on his funhouse narrative:A labyrinth, after all, is a place in which, ideally, all thepossibilities of choice (of direction, in this case) are embodiedand―bearing special dispensation like Theseus‟s―must beexhausted before one reaches the heart. Where, mind, theMinotaur waits with two final possibilities: defeat and death,or victory and freedom. ([1968] 1984, 75)EUROPEAN ACADEMIC RESEARCH - Vol. III, Issue 6 / September 20156048
Amer Rasool Mahdi- The Platonic Cave Revisited: John Barth's Prison-house ofNarrativityThese choices are alternately embodied and disembodied allthroughout the funhouse narrative. The narrative voicereleases this self-erasing meta-commentary: “The climax of thestory must be its protagonist‟s discovery of a way to get throughthe funhouse. But he has found none, may have ceased tosearch” (LF 96). As a whole, the possibility of dénouement is notcompletely shunned, as the text is tantalisingly suggesting thispotential when the reader is told that Ambrose has finallymanaged to break through the funhouse‟s confinement ofmirrors. This potential is in accord with the traditionalnarrative linear trajectory of realistic fiction that mustconsistently have its ending (telos). In the postmodernist text,on the other hand, “we get the multiple ending, the falseending, the mock ending, or parody ending” (Lodge 1977, 226).Hence, the sense of closure in the funhouse narrative is hintedat only to be designified, for it proves to be a distorted trace in aceaseless series of other teloi/signifiers. These signifiers are,moreover, delineated in the form of other permutations, othertheoretical prepositions in the poetic space of the funhouse.Being haunted by his “dreadful self-knowledge,” Ambrose willnever stop “repeat[ing] deception.” He will never cease tosearch, to test out, and to be a generator of, Ur-texts and“fearful . alternatives” (LF 93), without him opting for any oneof them. Hence, Ambrose, the narrative voice enunciates,died telling stories to himself in the dark; years later, whenthat vast unsuspected area of the funhouse came to light, thefirst expedition found his skeleton in one of its labyrinthinecorridors and mistook it for part of the entertainment. (LF 95)This alternative/telos, no matter how much plausible it is, is tobe erased and displaced by a seemingly more plausible one:He died of starvation telling himself stories in the dark; butunbeknownst unbeknownst to him, an assistant operator ofthe funhouse, happening to overhear him, crouched justbehind the playboard partition and wrote down his everyword. (LF 95)EUROPEAN ACADEMIC RESEARCH - Vol. III, Issue 6 / September 20156
the mirrors of his narrative funhouse Barth strives to replenish the traces of meaning long lost in the frames of writing and reality. The fictions to be studied or referred to here are selected texts from the writer's chef-d’oeuvre Lost in the Funhouse. Key words: labyrinth, metafiction, entropy, literary exhaustion, narrativity.
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Dr. Sunita Bharatwal** Dr. Pawan Garga*** Abstract Customer satisfaction is derived from thè functionalities and values, a product or Service can provide. The current study aims to segregate thè dimensions of ordine Service quality and gather insights on its impact on web shopping. The trends of purchases have
Cave Creek Cave Area of Critical Environmental Concern Management Plan ii. CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION . in the mid-1950s; consequently, most water now flows past the cave (Figure 2), except during spring runoff when most of the water in Cave Creek goes under-ground in a series of small sinks upstream of the cave.
Chính Văn.- Còn đức Thế tôn thì tuệ giác cực kỳ trong sạch 8: hiện hành bất nhị 9, đạt đến vô tướng 10, đứng vào chỗ đứng của các đức Thế tôn 11, thể hiện tính bình đẳng của các Ngài, đến chỗ không còn chướng ngại 12, giáo pháp không thể khuynh đảo, tâm thức không bị cản trở, cái được
Cave Creek Lookout -- 1. The first view of Cave Creek resurgence is obtained from the top of the surrounding bluffs. A viewing platform and interpretive panel is required. This is the upper level entrance to the resurgence cave for the Bullock Creek waters. The viewing platform that collapsed was at the site referred to as Cave Creek Lookout 1.
