39 pages • 1 hour read
John BarthLost in the Funhouse
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1968A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“Menelaiad”-“Anonymiad”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story Summary: “Menelaiad”
Here, Barth reimagines Greek mythology, retelling–in baroque lyrical imagery–the Odyssey’s different accounts of Menelaus’s quest to win back his wife, Helen, from her lover, Paris. From the first sentence we’re told: “Menelaus here, more or less” (127). The story is framed around Telemachus’s visits, with sister Peisistratus, to Menelaiad, who recounts his experience stranded in Egypt on the beach at Pharos, on the way home after the Trojan War, and after killing Paris. Menelaus demands to know why Helen caused such trouble. Her answer is love. Helen suggests: “Your wife was never in Troy. Out of love for you, I left you when you left, but before Paris could up-end me, Hermes whisked me on Father’s orders to Egyptian Proteus and made a Helen out of clouds to take my place” (158).
So many players from Greek mythology appear here, one needs solid knowledge of Greek mythology to know Proteus, Eidothea, and the lesser-knowns of the cast. Throughout, Barth deploys complex dialogue tags, inserting quotation mark inside quotation mark, as many as seven times, to represent shifting voices. This creates ambiguity, at times leaving a reader unsure who’s speaking and furthering Barth’s concept of exploring just who is telling the story.
Separated into fourteen parts, the sections count up to seven, then back down to one, the roman numerals matching the rising and falling action of the story’s intellectual exercise as well as the progress of the evening with Telemachus and Peisistratus, poking fun at traditional narrative modes. At times, the narrator interjects–not explaining what narrative technique is often used at this point–but as though the characters are speaking back to the writer, or narrator, and the narrator includes his reply. “ “ ‘Got you!’ ” I cry to myself, imagining Telemachus enthralled by the doctored wine” (128). Note the quotation marks and Barth calling attention to the story’s artifice.
As “Menelaiad” progresses, viewpoints shift one to the next, like a pinwheel, or a narrator running along a Mobius strip. The question is raised whether “Proteus changed from a leafy tree not into air but into Menelaus on the beach at Pharos, thence into Menelaus holding the Old Man of the Sea” (146). Menelaiad, meanwhile, recounts being in the Trojan Horse, and sacking Troy: “I made straight for Helen’s apartment” (146). As the story continues, so do Bath’s syntactic games. At one point, the word “why” is surrounded by brackets, and housed by five rows of quotation marks. Voice and agency are granted to different mythological characters, all with unique viewpoints. The story concludes ambiguously; Menelaus still wants answers, suggesting the story carries on through infinity.
Story Summary: “Anonymiad”
This story imagines the minstrel from the Odyssey lost on an island, telling his tragicomical account of why Agamemnon leaves the minstrel behind to watch Clytemnestra, when Agamemnon fights the Trojan War. “Anonymiad” ends after Barth’s–or the narrator’s–wordplayand intellectual riddles (which amount to a man looking at a man writing a story) present the minstrel on a beach, wondering if a scroll that washes ashore was written by him, or in response to scrolls he’s sent out into the sea over the ages. The final words of the story are: “upon this noontime of his wasting day, between the night past and the long night to come, a noon beautiful enough to break the heart, on a lorn fair shore a nameless minstrel [paragraph ends sans punctuation] Wrote it” (194). This closing suggests the minstrel still lives, punctuating Lost In The Funhouse with a play on the immortal storyteller’s voice that alludes to the collection’s opening story.
“Anonymiad” opens in the form of a poem, one that we’re told is written on Helen’s pelt, and in no time the minstrel interrupts this verse to comment on his life. We’re told the story begins in the middle. The minstrel–fed up with the “Merope’s love, Helen’s whoring, Menelaus’ noise” (166)–recounts how he’s come to learn his craft. Older minstrels say he needs world experience. Just past the story’s halfway point, we learn Aegisthus lures the minstrel to leave Merope, his lover, or wife–their relationship’s never clarified–to join Aegisthus’s sea journey to an island populated by nymphs. A nine-part story, during which at one point the minstrel explains his epic nine-part vision, Barth plays with subheads: one section is labeled 1 ½, and the text points out that Section 3 is missing. In the story, the minstrel describes a nine-part epic he wishes to compose.
After Aegisthus convinces the minstrel to join the sea journey, Aegisthus cautions the minstrel, foreshadowing the story’s end: “‘Unless you think I’m inventing all this to trick you,’ […] ‘Wouldn’t you look silly jumping out to grab an old wine merchant […] while I sail back to Mycenae!” (183). Once he’s left behind on the island, the minstrel says he’s left on a rock, alluding to Prometheus. The minstrel rhapsodizes about the scroll he finds, believes it shows someone else is out there. It leaves us to ask if the minstrel’s quest for love with Merope, or anyone, is imagined, or the work of Barth–or the narrator’s–trickery.
“Menelaiad”-“Anonymiad” Analysis
Here, all Barth’s tricks and themes are at play. Both stories reimagine legends of Greek mythology, giving fresh voice to ancient characters. Barth wants to reimagine the symbols of realist literature and to do so, he seeks to disrupt the very core of Western Literature itself. These stories poke fun at the hero’s quest for love, while at the same time finding it not without beauty. Barth still wants us to believe in the power and immorality of a love story, and thus ourselves. The language is at times incredible, steeped in the romantic imagery Barth claims is exhausted.
Similarly to how Zeus deceives and assumes human form or other God’s identities to procreate with humans, the narrator in “Menelaiad” tells us the Helen who sleeps with Paris was an imposter, and that the real Helen remained true to her husband. Barth just has to plant the seed of doubt in the reader’s mind to allow him to allude to this idea as the story progresses, setting it off in his self-reflexive world. Barth wants to reimagine some of these most recognizable legends and disrupt our process of reading, so that Barth may reshape the experience. Here, Helen suggests she killed her lover, Deiphobus.
“Anonymiad” can be read as a metaphor for Barth’s metafictional postmodern mission. Characters comment on the narrative, which characterizes them; Barth conflates author, narrator, and character; merges the mythic with the personal; and satirizes and recounts tragedy.
As Aegisthus dares the minstrel to journey, so Barth wants to dare the reader. We don’t learn when the story’s being told, or why, until almost the halfway point; this happens numerous times in the collection. Barth knows we crave information and wants us to search for symbols while he subverts reader expectations. In the final story, Barth brings his concepts in the book full circle, leaving us with a narrator who is partly known, partly anonymous and steeped in an eternal investigation–which is itself a journey–unsure if the stories he writes reach anyone, and uncertain if the stories he tells are his own. He’s unsure whose voice tells them, but certain they contain an essential message and so must be told.
