Enemies of the Text: Part II—Art/Essentialism/Experiential This-ness. John Barth`s Funhouse/Alain Robbe-Grillet`s Voyeur(istic) Bauhaus

Abstract

John Gardner laments in On Moral Fiction that postmodern fiction subverts the “true and only purpose purpose of art— to seriously attempt to improve life.” John Barth, in particular, gets lost amid his selfconscious Funhouse “wiring,” roman nouvelle fabulist-theorist, Alain Robbe-Grillet, among others, promotes anarchy that “is not properly art at all,” Donald Barthelme values only “values mislaid.” All fuse fictive experience with (f)actual, alienating reader from writer, meaning from moment, fabulism from chthonic fine frenzy-cum-High Jamesean “sacred rage,” inter(p)laying contextualities upon one another only to deconstruct the “reality” of each. Essentialist fictive truth and veracity, morality, and privileged signifiers, are negated, reinvented epistemologically as fragments. An ossified, epical “absolute past” morphs into Bakhtin carnival “openendedness” as this newest “genre-in-the-making” constantly reinvigorates itself.