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

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.