Lost in the Funhouse

SEVEN ADDITIONAL. AUTHOR’S NOTES (1969)

1) The “Author’s Note” prefatory to the first American edition of this book has been called by some reviewers pretentious. It may seem so, inasmuch as the tapes there alluded to are not at this writing commercially available, may never be, and I judged it distracting to publish the tape-stories in reading-script format. Nevertheless the “Note” means in good faith exactly what it says, both as to the serial nature of the fourteen pieces and as to the ideal media of their presentation: the regnant idea is the unpretentious one of turning as many aspects of the fiction as possible — the structure, the narrative viewpoint, the means of presentation, in some instances the process of composition and/or recitation as well as of reading or listening — into dramatically relevant emblems of the theme.

2) The narrator of “Night-Sea Journey,” quoted from beginning to end by the authorial voice, is not, as many reviewers took him to be, a fish. If he were, their complaint that his eschatological and other speculations are trite would be entirely justified; given his actual nature, they are merely correct, and perhaps illumine certain speculations of Lord Raglan, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell.

3) The title “Autobiography” means “self-composition”: the antecedent of the first-person pronoun is not I, but the story, speaking of itself. I am its father; its mother is the recording machine.

4) Inasmuch as the nymph in her ultimate condition repeats the words of others in their own voices, the words of “Echo” on the tape or the page may be regarded validly as hers, Narcissus’s, Tiresias’s, mine, or any combination or series of the four of us’s. Inasmuch as the three mythical principals are all more or less immortal, and Tiresias moreover can see backward and forward in time, the events recounted may be already past, foreseen for the future, or in process of occurring as narrated.

5) The triply schizoid monologue entitled “Title” addresses itself simultaneously to three matters: the “Author’s” difficulties with his companion, his analogous difficulties with the story he’s in process of composing, and the not dissimilar straits in which, I think mistakenly, he imagines his culture and its literature to be. In the stereophonic performance version of the story, the two “sides” debate — in identical authorial voice, as it is after all a monologue interieur—across the twin channels of stereo tape, while the live author, like Mr. Interlocutor between Tambo and Bones in the old showboat-shows, supplies such self-interrupting and self-censoring passages as “Title” and “fill in the blank”—relinquishing his role to the auditor at the.

6) The six glossolalists of “Glossolalia” are, in order, Cassandra, Philomela, the fellow mentioned by Paul in the fourteenth verse of his first epistle to the Corinthians, the Queen of Sheba’s talking bird, an unidentified psalmist employing what happens to be the tongue of a historical glossolalist (Mme Alice LeBaron, who acquired some fame in 1879 from her exolalic inspirations in the “Martian” language), and the author. Among their common attributes are 1) that their audiences don’t understand what they’re talking about, and 2) that their several speeches are metrically identical, each corresponding to what in fact may be the only verbal sound-pattern identifiable by anyone who attended American public schools prior to the decision of the U. S. Supreme Court in the case of Murray v. Baltimore School Board in 1963. The insufferability of the fiction, once this correspondence is recognized, makes its double point: that language may be a compound code, and that the discovery of an enormous complexity beneath a simple surface may well be more dismaying than delightful. E.g.: the maze of termite-tunnels in your joist, the intricate cancer in her perfect breast, the psychopathology of everyday life, the Auschwitz in an anthill casually DDT’d by a child, the rage of atoms in a drop of ink — in short, anything examined curiously enough.

7) The deuteragonist of “Life-Story,” antecedent of the second-person pronoun, is you.