Lost in the Funhouse was the title
of a very important short story collection
by the very progressive and avant-garde writer
John Barth.
It was a really, really brilliant collection
as I remember it.
I remember one story, which I think was called...
"Night Swimmers."
And it had got the narrator and all of his companions
are swimming in this dark ocean.
And, one by one, they are perhaps sinking
and going underwater
until there's fewer and fewer of them left.
And it just ends up
with the narrator continuing his swim
beneath dark skies, through this dark sea.
And that's where the story ends.
And it's never explained.
And it was only about a month or two later
when thinking about the story I suddenly thought...
"They're sperm!"
It suddenly occurred to me
that that was the meaning of the story.
It's a wonderful idea.
And it was a wonderful collection.
However
it had a cautious rebuttal
from the huge John Barth fan David Foster Wallace.
In one of his stories
he had a character ask the question
"But for whom is the funhouse fun?"
Which underlines a lot of the problems
of avant-garde and progressive writing.
Because the idea of writing material
that can only be understood
by a tiny, tiny group of academics
is obviously all but futile.
That's elitist and exclusionary.
You're ruling out a huge amount of your audience
by doing that.
And, yes, you're making the funhouse
very, very definitely not fun if you do that.
There are some very wonderful ways
of writing progressive avant-garde material
that will still be immensely entertaining.
There's a catalogue of the pitfalls
awaiting an avant-garde progressive writer.
You could do a lot worse
than reading the novel Mulligan Stew
by Gilbert Sorrentino
one of my very favourite American writers.
In Mulligan Stew, what you've got is a brilliant
hilarious, progressive avant-garde novel
about somebody attempting to write
a completely useless, failed
collapsing avant-garde novel.
There are wonderful touches in it.
All of the characters of the novel
will get together in between scenes
and discuss how the novel is going
and they're not very happy about it.
One of them is saying "Well
you know, before I was in this book
he pinched me from a footnote in Ulysses.
Alright, it was only a footnote
but it was Ulysses.
And now I'm in this rubbish book.
What I think would teach him a lesson
is if all of us characters just quit.
We walk out.
We'll see where he gets his next chapter from
then maybe."
I think the next chapter in question
was the writer's attempt at a pornographic chapter.
This was one of the funniest pornographies
that you will ever read.
It was based on the style of Victorian pornographies
with their very overblown language.
You've got this sexual situation
where it keeps describing the colour of the underwear
worn by the female participants
and how this underwear is being ripped off.
And in fact, the writing gets so overwrought
that some of the underwear
is being ripped off more than once
and it seems to be changing colour.
And at the end of the chapter
the characters are standing in a room
that is completely half full
of discarded stockings and lingerie
in a variety of different colours.
And in the section after that
the disgruntled characters of the novel are saying...
"Well, actually, I might stay around
for a bit longer
if he does any more chapters like that
because actually the language was wonderful."
And you've even got the characters
starting to lie to themselves
about their reasons for being in this novel.
It's wonderful.
Gilbert Sorrentino is an amazing writer.
You might also wanna look at another book of his
called Aberration of Starlight
which is not funny so much as incredibly moving.
It's telling the story of a woman and her young son
at a boarding house
and there is a travelling salesman
at the boarding house
who might be a good romantic match
for the young single mother.
Who might be a good father
for her lonely son.
And you've got the three or four characters
in this novel.
Each chapter contains
three or four different parts.
One is a letter that the character has written
but not posted.
Another one
is a fantasy that the character has had.
And there are a couple of other things
and in each chapter
Sorrentino goes through these various things
according to that character.
And you start to get an idea
of how all of these people are misunderstanding each other.
And in fact the title, Aberration of Starlight
is an astronomical term.
It is the difference between where a star really is
and where we perceive it as being.
A marvellous book.
Obviously, there are many, many wonderful avant-garde writers:
Angela Carter
with her berserk baroque fantasies
that are like nothing else in science fiction or fantasy
or anything else for that matter.
Things like the...
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
which is one of her early books.
It's a completely fluid landscape
of changing things and changing genders
and changing personalities.
It's wonderful.
There's also the American writer Robert Coover
who has done some extraordinary things
with avant-garde ideas.
One of my favourite books by him
and I'm going to completely forget the title of this thing
I think it was something like
"Plus The Full Supporting Feature."
The essential structure of the book...
In the introduction
it explains about this little neighbourhood cinema
that is being closed down.
And the heart-broken manager
who is probably near to the edge
in terms of his psychological reaction
to all this
locks himself into the projection booth
of the cinema
and he takes his favourite films
and he runs three or four of them
through the projector at once
so that the films
are actually physically melting into each other.
That is the introduction.
The rest of the book
it takes various parts
from a multiple feature cinema viewing.
Like, you've got your short cartoon.
You've got your main feature.
You've got your movie serial.
And he moves through all of these things.
The lead story, the main feature, if you like
is called You Must Remember This.
And it is a showing of Casablanca
that has suddenly got melted into a pornographic film.
So...
in the film's climax
you've got the meeting
between Humphrey Bogart's character
Rick Blaine
and Ingrid Bergman's character
where they heroically decide to forego their affair
to forego their love for each other.
In Coover's story
they're not so keen upon that.
They suddenly become really attracted to each other.
And start having pornographic sex on the desk.
Meanwhile, all the other characters
in the film
are waiting downstairs in the casino.
Because something has happened.
Because the story is not working out
they way it was meant to.
And amidst all this desire upstairs
the lights are getting darker and darker.
It's a wonderful story.
And, yeah, these are just a few examples
of wonderful avant-garde writers
that can actually tell a story that is enjoyable
that is fun, that is hilarious
that is sexy, that is dramatic.
And they tell these stories so much better
because they have dared to use an unproven technique
an experimental technique.
One of my favourite discoveries
and many other people
had discovered him long before I had
was the writer David Foster Wallace.
His most famous book is called Infinite Jest.
And it's a huge book.
A thing that he seems to like to do
is to take a basic institution
in this case it's a sports college
that is training tennis players.
But he makes that institution stand for the whole world
in some way.
And then he examines all of the different threads
in people's lives.
But being David Foster Wallace
he had a very perverse sense of humour
in the way that he related with his readers.
And I noticed on the first page
there are lots of little footnote numbers.
When he's brought up a point about one of the characters
or something about the situation
there will be, you know, one, two, three.
So you have to look to the back of the book
where all of the footnotes are there in order
and you read the footnotes.
If you miss this out
which most people will be inclined to do
you'll miss an awful lot of the narrative of the book.
You've really got to read the footnotes.
So, I was doing this
until around about page 400 and something.
I came to a character using a very unusual turn of phrase.
I can't remember what it was at the moment.
But it had got "footnote 176."
So, I went to the back of the book
looked up footnote 176
and what it said by that footnote was...
"I haven't got a clue."
Now, that is... That is actually quite funny.
I realised at that point
that David Foster Wallace was actually trying to annoy me.
And at that point, I could...
I was in on the joke at that point
and I really enjoyed it.
It's that...
he was employing what I was referring to earlier
as "literary difficulty."
He was making the novel a bit of a challenge
in fact, quite a lot of a challenge
for the average reader.
Because that forces the reader to engage with the novel
in a different way.
So, yes, all of David Foster Wallace's work is...
fascinating
and suitably inquiring
and a progressive writer will find much of value there.
All of these things
are examples of avant-garde writing
which does all of the things that any book is expected to do
which does all of these amazing progressive things
with literature
and which, more importantly
is actually enormous fun for the reader
taking us back to John Barth's Funhouse
and the importance of a funhouse actually being fun.