Abstract
Without defining another subgenre of the novel, this study calls the centripetal/centrifugal, open-ended forms of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, James Joyce's Ulysses, and John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, encyclopaedic narrative, a form which blends Greco-Roman narrative for the eye with Judeo-Christian narrative for the ear. By drawing upon the symbols, images, and typologies found in the Bible's and Kabbalah's archetypal father-son motif, each artist blurs the narrative boundaries between irrational man's timeless quest to know self, other, and another; and rational man's timebound quest for knowledge. Spanning the abyss between voice and print, each writer-protagonist and his reader get doublecrossed with each other, with life's embeddedness, and with a protean, ambiguous sign system. The result is a tragi-comic, yet mysterious and serious, handing over of narrative traditions, father to son. The writer-reader team reverses life's irreversibles by traveling via neqativa, learning in the process that unselfish love triumphs over all things. Due to each artist's transformational, twoness-threeness rhythm, each re-reading generates from within itself, more possibilities for new narrative, a form equivalent to Hebraic Midrash. Yet, despite surface pyrotechnics, by letter and by number each work's profusion of metaphors in motifs spiraling out from a nexus of energy radiation adds to the mystery surrounding each form's warmly human and loving family relationships. Form and human relationships cooperate to produce a satisfying reading experience.
Lampkin, Frances Loretta Murrell (1985). Metaphor, motif, and the moment : form and human relationships in Laurence Stern's Tristram Shandy, James Joyce's Ulysses, and John Barth's Lost in the funhouse. Texas A&M University. Texas A&M University. Libraries. Available electronically from
https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /DISSERTATIONS -596455.