PARODY AND SOCIAL SATIRE IN THE FICTION 0F .
DONALD BARTHELME

Dissertation for the Degree of Ph. D.
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
THOMAS L COSTELLO
1976

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ABSTRACT

PARODY AND SOCIAL SATIRE
IN THE FICTION OF DONALD BARTHELME

BY

Thomas L. Costello

Donald Barthelme is one of a group of American writers
during the 1960's whose fiction inspired new life in a form
which seemed, in the period following World War II, to be
dying. Many critics argue that the recent revival of the
novel is the result of daring and innovative formal experi-
mentation which released the novel from stale forms and con-
ventions, and which allowed writers to expand the range of
fictional options. I contend, however, that experimental
formal self-consciousness is a direct response to certain
characteristics of American culture during the 1960's, and
that the best writers of recent years are social satirists
whose work adheres closely to the social realities of the
times.

The dissertation begins with a review of the literary-
critical atmosphere of the post-World War II period in an
attempt to explain why so little hope was seen for the novel.
An examination of the criticism of Irving Howe, Herbert Gold,
Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, and others reveals a common
complaint: many novels published between 1945 and 1960 moved

too far from social reality. As Philip Roth said: there

Thomas L. Costello

was a "voluntary withdrawal of interest by writers of fiction
from some of the grander social and political phenomena of
our times." And one of the main reasons for this withdrawal
of interest was that writers found it difficult to understand
post-war society. It was an amorphous society for which the
traditional explanations no longer seemed adequate, and it
left many writers either confused, stupified, or both. They
tended, therefore, to ignore it, and to withdraw into private
and subjective worlds--with the result that the novel lost
its social moorings.

Beginning with the early sixties, however, a new social
fact began to emerge which helped to rekindle the writer's
interest in society: the fact was that society had become
self—conscious. The middle-class had learned the habit of
analysis--analysis of self, culture, ideas, the arts. Obscure
avant-garde theorists became part of the public domain, and
suddenly existential and Marxist ideas about alienation and
identity crisis were favorite topics Of journalism, popular
entertainment, and daily conversation. And with this emer-
gence of the self-conscious society came the emergence of
the formally self-conscious novel. It is my contention that
the resurgence of the novel in the sixties is directly re-
lated to the writers' return to and renewed interest in the
social realities of their time and culture.

Donald Barthelme's interest in society begins with lan-
guage, and his parodies of various rhetorics which corrupt

language and of rhetorics which give pseudo-explanations

Thomas L. Costello

result in novelistic introversion as well as satiric commen—
tary. Over the past fifteen years, Barthelme has continually
refined his ironic, satiric, and parodic methods, and this
refinement accompanies a gradual modification of attitude
toward the world, his craft, and himself.

In his earliest work, the short stories collected in

Come Back, 25. Caligari, Barthelme's irony is directed at

 

modish middle-class attitudes of angst and world-weariness.
While Caligari was funny, refreshing, and highly original

for its time, Barthelme's second book, the novella Snow White,

 

is a more complex and satisfying work because of its con-

sciousness of itself and of its own limitations. Snow White

 

employs an absolute and relentless irony which destroys Amer-
ican culture; but the book is also a self-parody which turns
back and destroys itself.

The stories in Barthelme's four collections since §EQE
White do not abandon irony but the effects created by these
works cannot be explained by irony alone. There is a peculiar

poignancy to many of these stories, and finally, in The Dead

 

Father, Barthelme moves even further away from the purely
satiric-parodic method. In this novel his cold and destruc-
tive methods are balanced by a kind of nostalgia, poetry, and
sadness.

Barthelme's implicit theme is that the world is no lon-
ger a serious literary subject: the world consists of dreck,
blague, impedimenta, sludge, game-playing. Barthelme does

not attempt any reconciliation with the world, nor is he

Thomas L. Costello

able to transform it into a better one. What he does, rather,
is to create perfect models of the world's imperfections.
Although his satires and parodies make for great comic revelry,
in his best stories there is an unstated sense of loss, of
caring, in conflict with irony--and this conflict results in

a curious tension and ambivalence.

Lionel Trilling feared in 1948 that one day the world
would be so unattractive that artists would no longer be able
to view it with ambivalence--something which, Trilling said,
could result in the novel's demise. In the years immediately
following World War II many writers were in fact so disenchan-
ted with the world that their novels lost touch with external
reality, and the critics announced the death of the form.
Their prognoSis was premature. Barthelme is as critical of
the world as artists of any period have been, but he can still
View it with ambivalence; and rather than turning away from
it and retreating into private consciousness or myth he turns
toward the world. In absorbing into his work the social

realities of the times, he breathed new life into the novel.

PARODY AND SOCIAL SATIRE

IN THE FICTION OF DONALD BARTHELME

By .55
eocp‘
Thomas L. Costello

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1976

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Herbert Greenberg and Gerald

Graff for providing numerous suggestions and valuable

criticism.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1 Come Back, 25. Caligari: A New Kind of
Fiction

 

Chapter 2 Snow White: The Irony of Infinite
Absolute Negativity

 

Chapter 3 The Later Stories: The Plight of
the Avant-Garde

Chapter 4 The Dead Father: Irony and Sentiment

 

Chapter 5 Conclusion
FOOTNOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

iii

27

59

90
141
160
169
178

INTRODUCTION

As we enter the last quarter of the twentieth century it
seems clear that the art of fiction has survived the death-of-
the-novel predictions which were initiated as long ago as the
1920's by Ortega y Gasset, and which during the years after
WOrld War II became something of a critical commonplace. Most
theorists now, in fact, argue a totally opposite View, which
is that although the age of the novel is clearly over, the
range of fictional options has increased enormously in the
last decade. Some critics blame the death-scare on our obses-
sive tendency to use organic metaphors of "birth," "growth,"
and "death." Philip Stevick observes that even late eight-
eenth century readers were told that the novel was dying, which
means that if it "has been dying for two centuries then there
is something wrong not with the novel but with the metaphor."1
Charles Newman argues persuasively that the real problem with
the novel is economic, that the genre is undermined by a hope-
lessly anachronistic technology: "...the cost of producing
and marketing what we make has simply exceeded the industry's
[profit margin, and this particular disease has been masked
long enough by theories of dying forms and metaphors of ter-
minal illness."2

Donald Barthelme, the subject of this study, is one of a

number of American writers whose work, during the 1960's,
1

2

exposed the shortsightedness of the novel's doomsayers. John
Barth, William Gass, Thomas Pynchon, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip
Roth, Saul Bellow, Stanley Elkin, John Hawkes, Robert Coover,
Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, and Barthelme--all of them
helped to contribute to the most astonishing release of crea-
tive energy since the twenties. But before commenting further
on fiction's revival, I want to review the literary-critical
atmosphere of the post-World War II period in an effort to
explain why so many serious critics saw so little hope for the
novel. For even if it is agreed that the novel seems to have
survived, the reasons it was, for a time, thought to be dying
are important: at issue is the very quality and character of
modern life. "If the novel is dead or dying, it is not alone
in its mortality," wrote Lionel Trilling in 1948. "The novel
is a kind of summary or paradigm of our cultural life, which
is perhaps why we speak sooner of its death than of the death
of any other form of thought."3 Thus, the question of whether
or not the novel can live becomes, more specifically, a ques-
tion of whether or not modern life is sufficiently "alive" to
permit a life for the novel.

The question of whether modern culture is "alive" is not,
however, new. Certainly that question was at the heart of the
whole modern movement in literature, and in certain works such

as The Waste Land it was thought that the question was answered

 

with almost too much finality. Why, then, should a problem
which actually nourished numerous novels suddenly, during the
period following the war, he considered a threat to the novel's

existence?

3

In 1959, Irving Howe pointed out the not-so-frequently
noticed fact "that long after the modern novelist had come to
suspect and even assault traditional values there was still
available to him...until about the second world war--a cluster
of stable assumptions as to the nature of society.... Beset
though they might be by moral uncertainties the modern novel-
ists could yet work through to a relative assurance in their
treatment of the social world."4 Likewise, Gerald Graff ar—
gues that "it is one of the strengths of modernist fiction
that it was able to incorporate within its structures much of
the bourgeois realism which it was undermining."5

Post-WOrld War II writers, however, confronted a hour-
geois society which had lost much of its distinctness and self-
definition; they confronted, as Howe said, "the despairing
contentment, the prosperous malaise...which by its nature is

vague and without shape."6

It was a society too soft and slug-
gish and amorphous to provide that dialectical setting against
which individual character is formed.

The response of novelists during the 1940's and 1950's
to this dilemma took several directions, consistent in one
important respect: as a group they moved away from social
realism to an unprecedented degree, effecting, as Graff says,
"that total subjectification and privitization of human exper-
ience" which many modernist theorists had called for, but
which most modern artists practiced while keeping one foot
moored in social reality.7 In other words, the more difficult

it became for writers to define individual character in rela-

tion to recognizable patterns in society, the greater was the

4
tendency for the novel to be taken over by a solipsistic con-
sciousness. This is no small departure for a form which was
contrived for the purpose of dealing with questions of society.
"The novel at its best," Herbert Gold writes, "is a large per-
spective on life in society," and even a stream-of—conscious
work like Ulysses, far from being "onanistic...is a lyric rev-

erie i2_the light 9£_the wide world of society."8

 

In retrospect we can see that this strategy of the post-
World War II writer to abandon social realism and to make the
novel a private affair had unsatisfactory results. Most of
the complaints lodged against many of the novels published
between 1945 and 1960 have a common focus, best clarified in
Robert Alter's remark that the fictional imagination, when it
is permitted to break all ties with social reality, tends to
"go slack."9 Thus, Alfred Kazin, writing in 1959, complains
that these novels give us "an imaginative universe limited to
the self and its detractors...in which society is merely a
backdrop to the aloneness of the hero."10 He is severe with
Mailer and Salinger, whose work is reduced to the "mystery of
personality" rather than "the drama of our social existence."ll
Philip Roth, in his famous "Writing American Fiction" essay of
1961, points to the "voluntary withdrawal of interest by the
writer of fiction from some of the grander social and political
phenomena of our times."12 He too laments Mailer's "self-
indulgence"13 and Salinger's "otherworldliness and mysticism."14
Bernard Malamud, Roth claims, "has not shown specific interest
...in the Jew we think of as characteristic of our times;

rather his people live in a timeless depression and a placeless

5

Lower East Side."15 And then there is Bellow's Henderson,
whose regeneration, Roth says, "takes place in a world wholly
imagined...hollow and unconvincing."16 Irving Howe observes
that a whole group of post-war novelists found themselves re-
sponding to immediate American experience by choosing distant
subjects and locales in order to enact the theme of personal
identity and freedom:

But the theme of personal identity, if it is to

take on fictional substance, needs some kind of

placement, a setting in the world of practical

affairs. And it is here that the "post-modern"

novelists run into serious troubles: the connection

between subject and setting cannot always be made,

and the "individual" of their novels, because he

lacks social significance and is sometimes a crea-

ture of literary or even ideological fiat, tends

to be not very individualized...the assertiveness

of idea and vanity of style which creep into such

books are the result, I think, of willing a subject

onto a novel rather than allowing it to grow out

of a sure sense of a particular moment and place.

This problem of "willing a subject onto a novel" is one
which numerous critics have observed. Confronted with a vague
and passive mass society, many writers resorted to the depic-
tion of the grotesque and abnormal to achieve dramatic effect.
John Aldridge points out that the war itself relieved many
novelists of the necessity to invent objects and situations to
satisfy their emotional and dramatic needs.18 Kazin argues
that the writing of the Beats expresses not anger so much as
the need for some "cause to be angry about."19 This criticism
especially fits Mailer, a writer almost all critics find gifted
but one who vastly oversimplifies history to suit his personal

needs. Mailer's crude schematization which sets the hipster

against the square, the existentialist against the plastics,

6
is remote from the actual society he seeks to understand, and
illustrates, as Graff says, "the difficulty a writer encoun-
ters when he attempts to make a wholly private typology take
the place of a plausible system of concepts."20 And Kazin
makes a similar indictment of the whole generation of 1940's
and 1950's writers, specifying a lack of "social intelligence"
on the part of novelists who have "strained" too hard:

What is it but the uncertainty of these writers

about their connection with that part of reality

which other novelists include in their work simply

because they were always aware of it--not because

they have strained to know it? What many writers

feel today is that reality is not much more than

what the say it is. This is a happy discovery

only or genius... the novel as a form will always

demand a common sense respect for life and interest

in society.

This lack of interest in society which Kazin and others
observed was largely a result of almost unprecedented confu-
sion on the social scene which, Philip Roth said,1eft writers
feeling "stupified."22 Gradually, however, in the late fifties
and early sixties, new social patterns began to emerge which
provided new possibilities for fiction. As early as 1948,
Lionel Trilling had predicted that "the novel of the next dec-
ades will deal in a very explicit way with ideas," and he cites
"an obvious social fact" to support his claim. The social
fact is that we live in a society where "everyone...even the
simplest person is involved with ideas."

Every person we meet in the course of our daily

life, no matter how unlettered he may be, is

groping toward a sense of life and his position

in it... The increase of conscious formulation,

the increase of a certain kind of consciousness

by formulation, makes a fact of modern life which
is never sufficiently estimated.23

7
Yet even Trilling could not have anticipated the extent
to which his prediction would be validated. During the fif-
ties and sixties a huge segment of the middle-class was be-
coming educated, and in colleges the departments of sociology,
psychology, and anthropology were flourishing. More than ever
before in history, the layman was being taught to analyze:
himself, his culture, ideas, the arts. Obscure avant-garde
theorists suddenly became part of the public domain, and what
many of the theorists were talking about were problems of
alienation, identity, the Death of God, and the Existential
Dilemma of living in a Pluralistic and Relativistic Universe.
Students walked around campus carrying paperback copies of

Pappenheim's The Alienation of Modern Man, Erich Fromm's The

 

 

Art of Loving, and anything by Camus. In short, a clear, hard
social fact finally emerged in the postmodern era: society
became self-conscious. In the fifties, people may have been
lonely, but in the sixties people discovered that they were
part of a social and cultural problem. To suggest that alien-
ation became modish is not, however, to argue its inauthen-
ticity. In addition to reading about identity and cultural
crisis, the American public of the sixties lived through sev-
eral actual calamities: three assassinations, and an immense-
ly unpopular war. Aided by mass media, the nation arrived at
a point where we were going through so many daily crises that
the term "crisis" itself became meaningless.

The tendency of middle-class culture to absorb ideas
which had previously been the domain of the avant-garde was

also an indication of the waning of the avant-garde impulse.

8
Some theorists began to speculate that in America an avant-
garde was no longer necessary, that an avant-garde is useful
only to the extent that its ideas are resisted by established
society. Far from resistance, the avant-garde of the sixties
encountered instead a public only too eager to adopt its ideas,
manners, and methods. Artists were expected to be "contro-
versial," to be eccentrically colorful; they were expected to
shock, making shock impossible, and while this state of affairs
may sound enviable to artists being persecuted in other coun-
tries, the American public's attitude actually amounted to the
severest form of condecension. In effect, this attitude means:
what difference can you make? what harm can you do? Such an
attitude had the effect of forcing artists to increasingly
radical means in their efforts to keep society off-balance so
as to prove that, yes, they do make a difference.

With the emergence of the self-conscious society came the
emergence of the self-conscious novel. The self-conscious
novel is neither a wholly new nor strictly American phenomenon,
but it certainly constituted the most important artistic ac-
tivity of the 1960's. It may be useful to distinguish between
to varieties of the self-conscious novel: those which take
self-conscious society as their subject-matter but which are
written and structured along conventional lines; and those
which treat that same subject-matter in a formally self-con-
scious way. This is not a hard and fast distinction, but it

is iJateresting that writers who are sometimes at antithetical
90-7-98 (for example, Earth and Bellow) in the debate between

tna‘ithional and innovative approaches nevertheless have similar

9

views, even similar definitions, of the plight of modern man.

Many of these writers--Thomas Pynchon, Stanley Elkin,
Joseph Heller, John Hawkes, Bruce Jay Friedman, John Barth,
and even Barthelme--have been called Black Humorists. Most
critics who have written about this group agree with Burton
Feldman that their novels "are inconceivable without the hoary
themes behind them of absurdity, alienation, nihilism and the
exhaustion of an age"-—all of the themes, that is, which now
sit packaged like items on a supermarket shelf. Max F. Schulz
observes that a pervasive tactic of Black Humorists is "to
parody the intellectual systems and constructs by which we or-
ganize...experience into bearable knowledge," not because all
such intellectual pursuit is pointless, but because the lan-
guage of such serious endeavor is itself available in the mar-
ket place.24 Even writers who are not usually identified as
either Black Humorist or experimentalist took to satirizing a
society which had become smugly self-satisfied with its new-
found knowledge. Gerald Graff argues that the central thrust
of Bellow's Herzog and Mr. Sammler'g Planet is an attack against

what Herzog calls "the delusion of total explanations."25

 

Ideas, explanation, intellectual systems--these became signi-
ficant facts of the social realities of the times, and the
best writers treated these facts with a variety of approaches.
The formally self-conscious experimental writers-~Barth,
Barthelme, Coover, Nabokov, Gass, Brautigan--have done much
to (Jpen new possibilities for fiction and, as with the self-
conscious tendencies in film, painting, and the theater, re-

fil€3<213ed, as Robert Alter says, "a heightened new stage of

10

modern culture's general commitment to knowing all that can
be known about its own components and dynamics."26 More spe-
cifically, Philip Stevick lists three forces which coincided
to produce the new movement in fiction: the fatigue of con-
ventional forms, the influence of several individual figures,
and the academic training of most of its practitioners.27
Charles Newman points out that ever since Joyce, fiction has
come increasingly to rely upon its own linguistic awareness
of itself to provide its momentum; he adds that at the very
moment we are beginning to understand this, "the impulse seems
to be waning, and the age of involution already past. Barthelme
is, after all, the most imitated writer in the country today."28

If it is true that the self-conscious novel is already on
the wane, then it has no doubt achieved its purpose, and con-
tinued experimentation in that direction would simply yield
diminishing returns. In fact, it is possible that the value
of the self-conscious movement was not so much in the works
of art it produced as in the questions it raised about the
relation between art and reality. It is clear that for some
writers the self-conscious approach was as much a strategy
for avoiding reality as for confronting it. Even before the
movement became popular in the sixties critic John Aldridge
was complaining in 1951 of writers like Truman Capote, John
Horne Burns, and Frederick Buechner who, lacking "a discover-
able subject-matter...must continually seek a substitute in
sheer technical display."29 And Robert Alter is no doubt cor-
rect in observing that much self-conscious fiction is guilty

of indiscriminate invention--inventiveness not held in check

11

by any commonly perceived reality.30 Some of John Barth's

stories in Lost ig_the Funhouse are about novelists writing

 

stories about novelists.... Tommaso Landolfi's acclaimed story
"Golgo's Wife" is about a woman who is a balloon but human in
every detail; she even has a baby. In "The Magic Poker,"
Robert Coover's narrator "invents" an island and discovers that
it is "real." The main problem of these stories and others

like them is that when everything is fictional there may be,

 

in Alter's words, "no longer any quixotic tension between what
is fiction and what is real."31

In recent years there has been considerable discussion
concerning ways the self-conscious novel is actually "about
itself" or "about language." Gerald Graff is right, I think,
in arguing that this sort of interpretation is founded in an
erroneous extension of the myth perpetuated by much modernist
and new critical theory concerning the autonomy and self—con-
tainment of the art object.32 One of the problems in some
post-World War II fiction is that in being too solipsistic
or too preoccupied with technique or invention, a novel may
fail precisely by achieving autonomy and pure self-reflexivity.
In other words, it may fail because it has no reference to any
recognizable reality. But an art-work can be self-reflexive
and still make a comment about external reality. The novel,
Trilling says, "is the form which provides the perfect cri-
ticism of ideas by attaching them to their appropriate actual-
ity. No less than in its infancy, and now perhaps with a
greater urgency and relevance, the novel passionately concerns

itself with reality."33 One reality of the 1960's was the

12
new self-conscious society, and the self-conscious novel is
as much about that society as it is about itself.

In general, the writers of the sixties, whether they
chose traditional or experimental techniques, opted in vary-
ing degrees for an unserious approach--unserious toward their
material and toward themselves as artists. They treated ev-
erything with a comedy so consistent that the effect was a
complete leveling of values. Society's most cherished notions
were shown to have no more substance or durability than the
latest fashion. The tremendous release of the comic spirit
in the sixties took place precisely because things seemed so
hopeless, and for certain writers the unserious approach had
extremely serious implications: for them, the world was no
longer a serious literary subject.

Over twenty-five years ago, Trilling expressed a tenta-
tive and fearful prediction which applies well to some of the
writers of the fifties and sixties.

Of all the practioners of literature, novelists

as a class have made the most aggressive assault

upon the world, the most personal demand upon it...

but great as the mental force has been, they have

been touched with something like stupidity, re-

sembling the holy stupidity which Pascal recom-

mends: its effects appear in their ability to

maintain ambivalence toward their society....

The novelist expresses this in his co-existent

love and hatred of the life he observes.... If

the novel cannot indeed survive without ambiva-

lence, does what the world presents us with any

longer permit ambivalence?3

The eighteenth and nineteenth century novelists achieved
the ambivalence Trilling discusses because, whatever personal

disagreements they may have had with their culture's values,

they nevertheless worked and struggled within the framework

13
of that culture's basic moral assumptions. Modernist wri-
ters, breaking with traditional bourgeois values, saw that
the world could be viewed from relative and multiple perspec-
tives, but still they used those traditional values as a
frame of reference, a point of divergence, so that even a
nihilistic work could be held in check and controlled by the
measure of the work's rejection. Then came some of the for-
ties and fifties writers whose rejection of and withdrawal
from their culture's past and present--which is to say their
total lack of ambivalence toward their culture--suggested
that Trilling's fears were being fulfilled. It was certainly
this bland crop of novels which helped to intensify the death-
of-the-novel scare. Finally, in the 1960's, the self-conscious
novelists arrived, and suddenly that art-form seemed alive
and healthier than it had been in decades. It is my conten-
tion that this resurgence of the novel had to do more than
anything with these writers' return to and renewed interest

in the social realities of their time and culture.

In this regard, the fictions of Donald Barthelme are a
strange case in point, because they constitute one of the
most radical responses to the cultural materials confronting
today's writers. One of his most persistent themes seems to
be the one which Trilling feared would vanquish the novel:
that the world no longer permits ambivalence. In Barthelme's
fictions the world is clearly contemptible; it is an insuf-
ficient literary subject, and given such a subject--his fic-

tion implies--an artist is forced (and is free) to concern

l4

himself with technique and with the stylizing of his own
personal attitude. His obligations to the world are none.

Barthelme is a writer well-known for his technical and
experimental innovation, but what is not so frequently no-
ticed is that his fiction, to use Trilling's phrase, "concerns
itself with reality," is steeped in the social realities of
the age. These social realities can be reduced here to a few
simple facts: society has lost its traditional centers of
authority, the family and the church. Society has lost a
sense of tradition, myth, and ceremony. Though these losses
are, as we shall see, grounds for celebration by many artists,
Barthelme views them as indicative of the triviality of con-
temporary life. With the past exerting no perceptible pull,
modern man lives in, wallows in, often glorifies, the con-
fusion, uncertainty and freedom of the present. Without the
power of tradition, the church, or even the family to give
substance and discipline to life, men try to make style the
highest priority, try desperately to believe that style is
substance and meaning. The development, refinement, and im-
itation of style is pursued with ferocity: style of speech,
of opinion, of manner, of dress. Social class distinctions
formerly based on economics or ethnic origin are replaced by
distinctions of style.

Barthelme's attitude toward these social realities is
typically one of severe ironic detachment, and the subject
of this study is the way he uses irony as a means of social
criticism as well as a tool for creating new fictional con-

structs. Critics such as Wayne Booth and D. C. Muecke have

15

recently written extensive studies the conclusions of which
confirm what most readers of modern and contemporary litera-
ture have sensed intuitively: that not only has irony be-
come the most pervasive of literary tactics, but that the
nature and degree of the irony employed is quite different
from that irony which artists of all ages have used. There
can be no denying, Booth says, "that in modern times more
authors have established themselves in our consciousness
through ironic voices than through metaphoric richness."35
For Booth, the main difference between the way writers of
the past and recent writers use irony is in the concept of
stability and instability. The stable irony of traditional
writers offers us "an unequivocal invitation to reconstruct,
and the reconstructions have not themselves been later un-
dermined."36 Thus, after the destructive irony of "A Modest
Proposal," we can reconstruct Swift's position and point of
view. In the unstable irony of much contemporary literature,
Booth says, "the truth asserted or implied is that no stable
reconstruction can be made out of the ruins revealed through
the irony."

The author--insofar as we can discover him, and he

is often very remote indeed--refuses to declare

himself, however subtly, for any stable proposition,

even the opposite of whatever proposition his irony

vigorously denies. The only sure affirmation is

that negation that begins all ironic play: "This

affirmation must be rejected," leaving the possibil-

ity, and in infinite ironies the clear implication,

that since the universe (or at least the universe

of discourse) is inherently absurd, all statements

are subject to ironic undermining. No statement

can really "mean what it says."3

Thus, although Barthelme's irony depicts man as impoverished

16
by the loss of the traditional centers of authority mentioned
above, one cannot conclude from his treatment that Barthelme
therefore "stands for" tradition, the family, or the church.
One cannot rely on the dictionary definition of irony and
conclude that his position is the exact opposite of the lit-
eral meaning of the words. Rather, his irony is absolute:
the immediate object of irony is undermined, and then its
opposite is undermined as well--and in much of his work the
very idea of undermining is undermined. Here is a typical

passage from Snow White:

 

"Ugh! I wish I were somewhere else! On the beach
at St. Tropez, for example, surrounded by brown
boys without a penny. Here everyone has a penny.
Here everyone worships the almight penny. Well at
least with pennies one knows what they add up to,
under the decimal system. No ambiguity there, at
least. 0 Jerusalem, Jerusalem! Thy daughters are
burning with torpor and a sense of immense wasted
potential, like one of these pipes you see in the
oil fields, burning off the natural gas that it
isn't economically rational to ship somewhere!"38

To argue that Barthelme's irony is directed at American waste,
wealth, and extravagance, the implication being that he advo-
cates a return to the primitive, is a serious misreading.
Clearly, Snow White's sentiment is also being treated iron-
ically; the switch from dollars to pennies undermines the
content of her statement. But what is being satirized in the

allusion to Eliot's The Waste Land? -Is the present being

 

satirized by showing the inappropriateness of the allusion
in this context? Partly, but that interpretation would sug-
gest that Barthelme "believes" in the tradition for which
Eliot stood, or at least that he longs for the past. The

parody of Eliot prevents such a reading. Then is Eliot

l7
himself the target of Barthelme's irony? Partly again, but
that interpretation implies the superiority of the present,
as well as the superiority of Barthelme's own "art" over
Eliot's. The excessiveness of the style is self-parodic.
Max Schulz, in his essay on Black Humor, notes that while the '
conventional use of parody is to invoke the weight of tradi-
tion, for the black humorist such assent to traditional in-
tellectual structurings has become impossible. "Hence, in
his act of representation of this or that value system, he
casts doubt on its objectivity and absoluteness, even as he
pays tribute to its ordered beauty."39 Thus, though Barthel-
me's irony is directed at the present and the past, at Eliot
as well as at himself, and while he cannot assent to Eliot's
intellectual structuring, he can admire it for aesthetic
reasons. The past is always lurking behind the lines of
Barthelme's fictions, and it is used typically in the way that
Schulz describes. The present may be empty and chaotic, and
while we may measure and compare the emptiness and chaos
against the ordered beauty of the past, we can neither return
to the past, nor can we view the intellectual structurings
of previous artists as absolutes.

Barthelme's art, then, particularly the early work, is a
purely ironic response to the social realities of our culture.
But the development of Barthelme's fiction over the past fif-
teen years can be best discussed in terms of the increasing
refinement and modification of his ironic, satiric, and par-
odic methods; and while this development is largely technical,

it naturally implies a gradual modification of attitude as

18
well, a modification of attitude toward the world, toward
his craft, and toward himself.

Generally, Barthelme's work reveals a gradual shift from
the purely negative and destructive toward the ambiguously
positive and creative. Whereas the early work simply destroys
everything with reckless abandon, much of the later work is
both more selective and more temperate. Whereas the early
work takes a playfully or maliciously ironic stance, the la-
ter work combines irony with a number of other approaches
which issue in delicate and elusive tones and meanings. geee
Beet,2t. Caligari is the work of a young writer who luxuri-

ates in his ironic freedom. Here is Barthelme i'enfant ter-

 

tieie, intruding into his stories at the last moment to kill
off a character or to twist the ending according to his pre-
conceived plan; compiling catalogs of supremely pointless
almanac information; exposing as clichés our culture's grav-
est concerns; turning the rhetoric about marriage, old age,
and race relations into comic poetic victories.

What makes Snow White a more complex and satisfying work
is its consciousness of itself, its consciousness of its own
limitations. Caligari destroys and leaves it at that; §eeg_
EEEEE destroys, but is also about destruction. Caligari des-

troys the world and is pleased with itself; Snow White des-

 

troys the world and at the same time destroys itself. The
main difference between the two books is the way style is
used. Caligari parodies various styles of speech and rhet-

orics in order to satirize the world; Snow White is written

 

in a self—parodiCIStyle whichrsatirizes itself as welltas the

19

world. The central idea in Snow White is retraction. Bar-

 

thelme's irony retracts--that is, destroys--everything. It
retracts the past and the present; it retracts traditional
and avant-garde approaches to art; it retracts the fairy tale
world and the world which replaced it. It retracts by redu-
cing everything bomere language, to style--and finally it re-
tracts retraction itself. Barthelme knows that style is not
enough to achieve the satiric destruction he has been pre-
tending to achieve. There is no substance to his satire.
He knows that he himself has nothing to offer but style.
Wayne Booth labels Barthelme's brand of irony as the "snotty
sublime"--"What fun we can have if we recognize that all val—
ues except our own superior ironic insight can be ridiculed"--
adding that such irony is often redeemed only by cleverness.
"Donald Barthelme, though he often rises above this object-
ion, to me often falls beneath it."40 Although there is no
question but that many of Barthelme's stories are merely
clever, his best work implies that his own ironic insight is
no more or less superior than any other value.

Barthelme's increasing awareness of the moral implica-
tons of irony can be seen clearly in "Kierkegaard Unfair to

Schlegel," a story he wrote several years after Snow White.

 

In this piece Barthelme uses Kierkegaard's The Concept gt

 

£523! to explore the moral questions raised by ironic de-
tachment and indirectly to explore his own literary practices.
The story is itself highly ironic, but serious to the extent
that he is measuring his work against the standards of a man

of Kierkegaard's stature.

20

Kierkegaard's basic criticism of irony rests upon this
assumption: that, yes, the world is imperfect; yes, all in-
telligent men wish the world were better than it is. But
the only moral way for a man to deal with this situation is
to attempt to reconcile his vision with actuality. Irony,
Kierkegaard says, is destructive. The ironist, rather than
attempting the vastly difficult task of reconciliation, takes
the easy way out. Irony is irresponsible, a means of achiev-
ing freedom by avoiding commitment. Irony destroys by de-
priving an object of its reality. "Now consider," says
Barthelme, quoting Kierkegaard,

an irony directed not against a given object but

against the whole of existence. An irony directed

against the whole of existence produces, according

to Kierkegaard, estrangement and poetry. The iron-

ist, serially successful in disposing of various

objects of his irony, becomes drunk with freedom.

He becomes lighter and lighter. Irony becomes an

infinite absolute negation. Quote irony no longer

directs itself against this or that particular

phenomenon, against a particular thing unquote.

Quote the whole of existence has become alien to

the ironic subject unquote page 276. For Kierke-

gaard, the actuality of irony is poetry.41
Kierkegaard detests this transformation. The world, however
imperfect, is preferable to the perfection of poetry. Poet-
ry, precisely because it is perfect, precisely because of the
distance between it and the world, is a victory over the
world which results in animosity toward the world. What is
wanted, Kierkegaard says, is not a victory over the world but
a reconciliation with the world; and the true reconciliation
is religion.

Barthelme's response to Kierkegaard is to turn irony upon

him. The style throughout the story is playful: the "quotes,"

21

the reference to page numbers in Kierkegaard's text, the
asides ("That's beautiful"). He refuses to discuss the ques-
tion of religion because of a "deep bias" against it. Fi-
nally, regarding Kierkegaard's condemnation of Schlegel's Ee-
cinde, Barthelme says that Kierkegaard has been "unfair to
Schlegel." He could, he says, cite reasons: Kierkegaard
fastened upon Lucinde'e prescriptive aspects and neglected
its "objecthood." But he says these reasons are not inter-
esting.

What is interesting is my making the statement

that I think Kierkegaard is unfair to Schlegel...

Because that is not what I think at all. We have

to do here with my own irony. Because of course

Kierkegaard was "fair" to Schlegel. In making

a statement to the contrary I am attempting...

to annihilate Kierkegaard in order to deal with

his disapproval.

Q. Of Schlegel?
A. Of me.42

Barthelme's irony throughout the story is the unstable
irony discussed by Booth, which is in fact the irony of infi-
nite absolute negation that Kierkegaard condemns. Thus, the

difficulties of interpreting the story are the sames ones we

encountered in the Snow White passage: when everything is

 

undermined, we are left with no stable ground to stand on;
the story does not allow us to "reconstruct" Barthelme's
point of view. But "Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel" does
treat the problem of ironic detachment within a form which
does justice to its complexity. It reveals the essential
dual and contradictory position of the ironist as one who is
both absolutely free and absolutely enslaved. And it shows

that there is a thin line indeed between the ironist's giddy

22

exhilaration, on one hand, and his despair and self-loathing,

on the other. At the story's conclusion the inquisitor,

aware that the ironist "has given away his gaiety, and now
has nothing," relates the touching incident involving Pasteur,
to which the ironist responds " (bitterly): Yes, that makes

up for everything, that you know that story.. ." Confronted

with genuine emotion, irony is a useless and unenviable free-

dom. Or, as Kierkegaard wrote:

"Irony is free, to be sure,
jfzree from all the cares of actuality, but free from its joys

as well, free from its blessings. For it has nothing higher

than itself, it may receive no blessing, for it is ever the

lesser that is blessed of a greater. This is the freedom,

for which irony longs."43

Essentially, then, Barthelme's irony functions just as

Kierkegaard explains. It is a negative, subjective freedom,

and it destroys by depriving the object of its reality. A

detailed explanation of how he transforms the imperfect

(dreck, trivia) into the perfect (poetry) will come later,

but hereI want to make one important point. All of the iron-

ies and counter-ironies, particularly in the early work, re-

duce to this central irony: Barthelme's art is simply a

@er version of what it condemns. On the one hand, his

irony criticizes and destroys a world whose exclusive pursuit

is style. On the other hand, in his own art nothing matters

but how purely these styles are captured. His irony destroys

a. world too devoted to triviality; yet his own art is but a

higher, more refined indulgence in the trivial. He mocks a

World obsessed with self; his own art, however, has but

23

one: character: the writer. Finally, nothing matters but
Barthe lme .

To say that Barthelme's art is a purer version of what
i1: condemns means two things. First, it means that his style
is more disciplined, complex, and consistent than that which
his art destroys. Second, it means that his art is also
purer in that it knows what it is not. His own pursuit after
style is at the same time an admission (and sometimes a la-
ment) that his work lacks substance. He is the central char-
acter in all of his work, but he constantly resorts to self-
mockery, which borders on self-contempt and self-hatred. In
other words, the element of self-irony is as pervasive as that
irony directed toward the world. Ultimately, these ironies

cancel each other, and in this sense Snow White is self—de-

 

structive. Thus, though irony may achieve, as Kierkegaard

said, a victory over the world, in Snow White this victory

 

is at best temporary, at the least phyrric.
Although Snow White may have nothing to offer but style,
style ie something. Style achieves that "objecthood" which

Kierkegaard neglected, and in Snow White style is used to

 

create a design, a new fictional reality, which reflects and
comments upon the real world. The style often takes the form
of parody, and what Max Schulz says about Black Humorist par-
ody is also true of Barthelme's: parody "does not figure in
its traditional form as device...for realizing answers....
Rather it offers one more way of formulating unanswerable

questions...of giving form and perspective to the diversity

24

of «experience, of controlling and arranging it with suffi-
cient artistry to embody a coherence that has internal logic
if Zlittle necessary relationship to the outer coincidence of
facts."44 The strength of Barthelme's fiction since m
EEEIEU however, is that it often achieves a more intricate
design and a more varied reflection of reality. As a work

of severe ironic detachment, Snow White'e purity and consis-

 

tency of purpose is dazzling. But this characteristic also
defines the book's limitation: there is an unrelenting same-
ness about it. Many of the stories in his four collections

since Snow White, as well as in The Dead Father, do not aban-

 

don irony, but the effects created by these works cannot be
explained by irony alone; the effects in fact are difficult
to explain. Sometimes a story will seem ironic but gradually,
often suddenly, the ironic voice will evaporate or will blend
with other voices, making interpretation difficult and re-
sponse guarded. Sometimes these effects are created by un-
usual combinations of words and images; sometimes by blend—
ing irony and sincerity; sometimes by Barthelme's attraction
toward a strong subject, as in "Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel."
Finally, in The Dead Father, Barthelme moves even further

away from the purely ironic-satiric mode. In this novel, as
in many of the later stories, his cold and destructive methods
are balanced by a kind of nostalgia, poetry, and sadness. .
Whereas any sentence of Snow White is representative of the
whole novel, the various scenes, voices, and images of tee

Dead Father create a whole larger than any of its parts.

25

If the result is not necessarily as satisfying as Snow White,

 

stiLll The Dead Father is a more ambitious novel.

Although, again, the instability of the irony precludes
any attempt at reconstruction, it is clear that Barthelme
has arrived at a point where he is able, at times, to view
the world with attitudes and feelings other than pure irony.
In the numerous stories discussed in Chapter 3 in which Bar-
thelme treats the relationship between the artist and society,
he offers us numerous perspectives from which to view the
current function of art and the increasingly popular notion
that the avant-garde is dead or useless. What is interesting
about these stories--and for that matter about Barthelme's
work as a whole--is that, while they resist meanings and
while they parody the idea that man can make any true state-
ments about the world, nevertheless they are rich with mean-
ing. For Barthelme, it is not that the world is meaningless,
but that it has meanings which exceed and defy our futile
and comic attempts at explanation. Barthelme's parodic atten-
tion to the nuances of language is largely an attempt to ex-
pose this fact, and to rescue words from the myriad forms of
phony certitude. Such an effort is hardly meaningless, and
it goes a long way toward absolving Barthelme's writing of
being purely negative. "Life itself can and should be en-
hanced by looking to our language," Wayne Booth said. "For
me, one good reading of one good passage is worth as much as
anything there is..."45 And his remark that the logical ex-

treme of infinite irony would be complete silence is

 

.t

it)

1“”

la

26

instructive: what is most important, he says, is that "nov-
eliests, dramatists, and poets inevitably draw back from com-
plete silence and in fact write works that embody their in-
tentions and therefore have 'meanings' of a kind--works of
resignation, of lament, of complaint, of dark laughter at the
chaos, of defiance, of pathos. And in doing so they usually
provide--sometimes it seems almost with a sense of shame--
some handle or other for interpreting their works at whatever
level of instability or negation they have elected."46
Barthelme's continuous refinement of his ironic method
constitutes his continuing refinement of attitude toward the
social realities of our times. He does not attempt the kind
of reconciliation with the world which Kierkegaard demanded,
but his attention to the moral uses of irony shows that he
still possesses that ambivalence toward the world which such

critics as Trilling and Booth found necessary for the novel's

survival.

Chapter 1

Come Back, Qt. Caliqari: A New Kind of Fiction

 

In this kind of world...absurd if you will,
possibilities nevertheless proliferate and
escalate all around us and there are opportunities
for beginning again.

How can you be alienated without first having
been connected?
"A Shower of Gold"

When Come Back, Qt. Caliqari was published in 1964 it was

 

greeted with mostly favorable reviews, with the notable ex-

ception of R. V. Cassill in The New York Times Book Review.

 

The specifics of Cassill's review are not so interesting as
the response it drew from journalist Seymour Krim:

To the Editors of The New York Times Book Review:
R. V. Cassill's review of Come Back, 2£° Cali ari
(April 12, 1964) gives barely the slightest whiff of
how fresh Donald Barthelme's work is, how much talk
it has stirred up, how it has fictionally goosed the
New Yorker and jimmied open the imaginations of other
more pedestrian writers.... Mr. Cassill...certainly
was not the prompt critical outrider that a talent
as unexpected and outrageously contemporary as Bar-
thelme's deserves...

 

 

 

Part of the reason for Krim's enthusiasm is that Barthelme's
talent was unexpected. For twenty years critics had been
waiting for that fresh impulse to come after the war, as it
did after the first war, and when it did not come the literati
began gradually to write fiction off as an exhausted art-form.
That this defense of Barthelme should come from Krim is par-

ticularly interesting, since Krim is a would-be novelist who

27

28

spent most of the 1960's practicing the New Journalism and
wristing essays arguing that "the only practical justification
for: 'fictionalizing' today is if it says something that can't
jgossibly be said journalistically."2 The assumption that lay
beneath the New Journalism movement was that fiction writers,
having grown bored with mere reality, had turned the novel
into a stuffy, self-serving medium. Whereas the great novel-
ists of the past had gone out into the streets and packed
their books with the people and events of the real world, re-
cent novelists had turned increasingly to the fanciful and
fabulistic in their desperate search for a "new" fiction.
Although this search resulted in a new fiction of sorts it
also resulted in an art-form with only a remote connection

to the real world and to man's daily concerns. The New
Journalists argued that they now did the job which the novel—
ists of the past used to perform, using the techniques of
conventional fiction upon the raw materials of real life to
inform and to entertain a public eager for information and
entertainment. So argued Tom Wolfe, for instance, in numer-
ous articles about the New Journalism.

Earl Shorris in a 1972 overview of Barthelme's work,
replied directly to Wolfe: "Donald Barthelme has accomplished
what the New Journalists are not competent to do. In a single
story he is able to include more of a taste of the times than
there is in the collected works of WOlfe, Breslin, Talese
and Co."3 Here, however, I am concerned not so much with

the debate itself as with the fact that Barthelme's work

29

should even be mentioned with reference to journalism. For
the: reference is not ill-considered: as was stated in the
Inrtroduction, much of the success of Barthelme's work resides
fix: his understanding of and interest in the social realities
of our culture, something which had been either ignored or
poorly understood by a whole generation of post-war writers.
More specifically, Come Back,2t, Caliqari is the work of an
acute social satirist.

But what was so strange about Barthelme's fictions in
the early sixties was this: on the one hand they seemed to
be about the real world we all experience; on the other hand,
they seemed to consist of the purely fanciful and invented.
While the New Journalists were beginning to use the tech-
niques of conventional literary realism upon the raw material
of everyday life, Barthelme went a step further: he used
the same material, but he broke completely with conventional
literary techniques.

The raw material of Come Backegt. Caligari is the mod-
ish attitudes prevalent among a huge segment of the American
middle-class in the early sixties. In general these atti-
tudes might be described as those of world-weariness and
pessimism, and the rhetoric was derived from existential
philosophy: alienation, boredom, ennui, absurdity. I ob-
served in the Introduction that one of the main differences
between the fifties and sixties was middle-class discovery
of alienation. This was a discovery which, as Gerald Graff

says, had its positive and negative aspects. It was a

3O

JJJaerating advance in the sense that one's problems could be
traced to actual deficiencies in the social process--thus
helping to ease one's personal guilt.

But the new self—consciousness about one's

alienation, "growing up absurd," and so forth,

could also take unattractive forms, forms which

invested alienation with an element of self-

dramatization or even self—congratulation. The

honest pathos of the genuine sufferer might give

way to the strident theatrics of the professional

victim. In the fifties, though sociological

writers might describe disaffiliated youths of

the period as the Lonely Crowd, the actual members

of this group had no awareness of figuring in a

significant social tendency, and certainly saw

no charm in the fact.... In the sixties bourgeois

alienation ceased being a mere predicament,

prosaically coped with as best one could, and

became a historically conscious style...4
Bartheme's treatment of this style creates a dual effect.
On the one hand, his stories evoke a strong sense of the
emptiness of modern life. We sense that "identity crisis"
was not only a much-abused term, but for many people an ac-
curate description of what they were experiencing. We see
that the cliched insistence on openness and honesty about
one's problems and feelings had its roots in a basic human
need. We sense that although "individuality" became a tire-
some word during the period, its use paralleled a desperate
effort to be different, to "do one's own thing."

Barthelme's stories capture these characteristics of
the period, but his parodies make for much revelry. He
catches the inherent irony in the way the rhetoric of alien-
ation was used: people loved this language, and they eme

ployed it cheerfully. They used it to communicate their own

31

illness--not in order to cure but to prolong it. In SEES
EEEE:E£° Caligari, Barthelme's absolute irony, his stylist's
fascination with the rhetoric of the disease, prevent us
from caring about the people who suffer from it. He is, as
Kierkegaard said, drunk with freedom. Almost every page is
full of exhuberance and nowhere moreso than in "A Shower of
Gold," one of Barthelme's most anthologized stories, which
makes a direct attack against the popularization and vulgar-
ization of ideas which had once belonged exclusively to the
avant-garde. The story is more of a theoretical than a li-
terary tour de force, for unlike his character who claims
not to know the language of existentialism, Barthelme knows
it only too well and shows it off far beyond the demands of
his central idea; He has done so, one thinks, for the sheer
pleasure of it. "Mr. Peterson, are you absurd?" asks Miss
Arbor, interviewing the young painter for the television
show called Wee éfl.£? "...do you encounter your existence
as gratuitous? Do you feel QEIEEQE? Is there nausea?...
People today, we feel, are hidden away inside themselves,
alienated, desperate, living in anguish, despair, and bad
faith. Why have we been thrown here, and abandoned?...Wte
éfl.£? approaches these problems in a root radical way."
When Peterson says he's not sure if he believes in absurdity,
a shocked Miss Arbor responds: "Oh, Mr. Peterson, don't
say that! You'll be... I "Punished?" Peterson suggests.
Sure enough, Peterson is punished for his "skepticism."

First, the President visits Peterson in his loft and smashes

32

his latest work with a ten-pound sledge--the idea being that
the President, as a "friend of the arts," believes in ab-
surdity himself. Then Peterson goes to the barber, a man
named Kitchen who is also a lay-analyst and has published

four books entitled The Decision te ES- They discuss the

 

President. "As far as his relationship with you personally,"
Kitchen says, "it's essentially a kind of I-thou relationship,
if you know what I mean." Kitchen quotes Nietzsche for a

bit, then concludes: You've got to "break out of the hell

of solipcism. How about a little more off the sides?"
"Everybody knows the language but me," Peterson says irri-
tably.

After he is punished by the cat-piano man and by the
girls from California (one of whom quotes Pascal: "The
natural misfortune of our miserable and feeble condition is
so wretched that when we consider it closely nothing can
console us"), Peterson calls Miss Arbor and begs to be re-
leased from his 'agreement. His request is of course denied,
and the story ends with Peterson's magnificient televised
rebellion against the bourgeoisie's easy co-optation of ab-
surdist values. First, he describes three truly absurd
things which happened Ushim yesterday. Then, while the emcee
and cameraman threaten and try in vain to shut him up, Peter-
son concludes with a semi-parodic invocation of the Renais-
sance ideal of man.

"In this kind of world," Peterson said, "absurd

if you will, possibilities nevertheless proliferate

and escalate all around us and there are oppor-
tunities for beginning again.... Don't be

33

reconclied. Turn off your television sets...
indulge in mindless optimism. Visit girls at
dusk.... My mother was a royal virgin...and my
father was a shower of gold. My childhood was
rich in experiences which developed my character.
As a young man I was noble in reason, infinite
in faculty, in form express and admirable, and
in apprehension... " Peterson went on and on
and although he was, in a sense, lying, in a
sense he was not.5

The last line of the story is true. Peterson is in a sense
lying and in a sense he is not. Existence may be absurd but
it is not only absurd. In another context, one of the dwarves

in Snow White says: "Normal life.... It is unbearable, this

 

consensus, this damned felicity." What is unbearable for
Peterson, and for Barthelme too, is the opposite consensus:
this damned despair, or at least this damned rhetoric of des-
pair. This is not to suggest that Barthelme "identifies"
with Peterson; there are moments in the story when Peterson's
"art" is as much a subject for parody as is middle-class ab-
surdity. But Peterson does come closer to being a norm, a
voice we can trust, than we usually get from Barthelme. At
the end of the story, Peterson has attained, as Gerald Graff
says, "the role of anti-existential hero"5--possibly the pro-
totype for the new heroes (or are they anti anti-heroes?)
created by Stanley Elkin, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow.
"Marie, Marie, Hold on Tight“ has no hero but it too is
anti-existential, with Barthelme again satirizing bourgeois
avant-garde pretensions.‘ The vehicle is again situational
and highly comic: three men demonstrating in front of a church
against the human condition, picketing with signs bearing slo-

gans: "Man Dies!" "The Body is Disgust!" "Cogito Ergo

34

Nothing!" "Abandon Love!" The details of what happened at
the demonstration are being told to Marie (who painted the
signs) by one of the pickets, whose observations and manner
continually betray his naive and philistine nature. This
irony is part of a larger one, which is that there is no con-
nection whatever between the pickets' absurdist rhetoric and
the actual events of the story.

The narrator begins on a sort of self-congratulatory
note, feeling rather proud that they had braved a rainstorm
during their demonstration. Bystanders in the vicinity of
the church showed much interest, he said, and one man even
shouted encouragement: "gtetfe.tte.gey!" But others made
taunting remarks--"Cogito Ergo your ass!" To those who called
them communists, the pickets disseminated mimeographed leaf-
lets which cited their distinguished army records, announced
that they were law-abiding Americans who support the consti-
tution and pay taxes. In short, they are honest, hard-work-
ing bourgeoisie whose only gripe is existential.

"We are simply opposed to the ruthless way in which

the human condition has been imposed on organisms

which have done nothing to deserve it and are unable

to escape it. Wey_eeee it have to be £223.!EX?"

The leaflet goes on to dIEcuss, In EImple language,

the various unfortunate aspects of the human con-

dition, including death, unseemly and degrading

bodily functions, limitations on human understanding,
and the chimera of love.7

 

At one point a high official emerges from the church and asks
the men if they have ever heard of Kierkegaard. "'This demon-
stration displays a Kierkegaardian spirit which I understand,‘

he said, and then requested that we transfer our operations

35

to some other place."

Finally, the demonstrators are approached by a group of
youths wearing hood jackets, T—shirts, tight pants. The nar—
rator's explanation of their background is perfect caseworker
textbookese: "They were obviously delinquents from bad en-
vironments and broken homes where they had received no love."
The simple explanation is that these youths have literally
"abandoned love" as the sign's slogan demands. The youths
call the demonstrators "flits," and ask questions such as
"What ie this shit?" "What do you mean you don't believe in
God?" Unable to speak their street talk, Henry Mackie answers
in the only language he knows: belief is not the issue, he
says; it is rather "a question of man helpless in the grip of
a definition of himself that he had not drawn, that could not
be altered by human action, and that was in fundamental con-
flict with every notion of what should obtain." A fight
erupts during which Henry Mackie is repeatedly kicked in the
head. But the next evening, the narrator concludes, Mackie
delivered his scheduled lecture entitled "What is to be Done?"
at Playmor Lanes. He delivered it "with good diction and
enunciation and in a strong voice. He was very eloquent.

And eloquence, as Henry Mackie says, is really all any of us
can hope for."

Barthelme's technique is to turn all of this absurdist
rhetoric back on itself. The narrator carries signs declaring
the futility of life and he claims that eloquence is all we

can hope for, but it is clear throughout that he loves life,

36

and that he is trying to impress Marie. "(Marie, you would
have been proud of us)", "(it probably didn't register on
your TV screen, Marie, but I was there, I saw it--it was
beautiful." "The rain had stopped and the flowers smelled
marvelously fine..." The picketers profess an understanding
of Kierkegaard, but when a man tries to pull their signs
down they express surprise because the man was "very well-
dressed." Such naiveté’is consonant with their belief that
Henry Mackie is eloquent when in fact he is a victim of the
most banal absurdist rhetoric.

"A Shower of Gold" and "Marie, Marie, Hold on Tight"
are the two stories in this collection which deal most di-
rectly with the comedy of bourgeois flirtation with avant-
garde ideas, but several of the other stories play with var-
iations on the theme of identity crisis, the attempt to find
meaning in life, and the comically desperate attempt to make
oneself and one's life "interesting." Central to these and
to most of the stories in the book is the problem of boredom.

In "Me and Miss Mandible" the main idea is the large
gap between what life promises and what it gives--a universal
theme but also one with some uniquely American implications.
Here Barthelme uses a technique which he will use many times
in his fiction--that of altering some aspect of our world,
thus allowing us to see the whole from a new perspective.
Through some "misconception" which he has never understood
a thirty-five year old man suddenly finds himself enrolled

111 a sixth grade class, the class consisting of thirty-five

37

eleven year ohhsand Miss Mandible, the teacher. The form

of the story, the man's journal beginning on the first day

of school and ending four months later when he is dismissed,
is functional in a semi-parodic way: we can watch him "grow."
At first he is more curious than anything--curious as to what
sort of error caused him to be there, curious about his al-
ternating allegiance between Miss Mandible, who is sexually
attracted to him, and Sue Anne Brownly, "between eleven and
eleven and a half (she refuses to tell her exact age,)" who

is infatuated with him.

We learn that he has had a ruined marriage; his career
as an insurance adjustor ended when he obtained (justifiably,
he believed) a $165,000 settlement for an injured woman; there
had been an interlude in the army. "Small wonder," he writes,
"that re-education seemed my only hope."

Removed from the "unexamined life" of desperate, money-
making Americans, the narrator-pupil begins "to understand
how I went wrong, how we all went wrong." He peeks one day
into Miss Mandible's teacher's manual and reads:

Many pupils enjoy working fractions when they,

understand what they are doing. They have con-

fidence in their ability to take the right steps

and to obtain correct answers. However, to give

the subject full social significance, it is neces-

sary that many realistic situations requiring the

processes be found. Many interesting and life-

like problems involving the use of fractions should
be solved...

They have confidence ie their ability te take the right steps

 

 

.§Q§_te obtain the correct answers." But what happens, the

Story asks--at least by implication--when you take the right

38

steps, obtain the correct answers, and you are fired from
your job and your wife deserts you? "Who points out that
arrangements sometimes slip, that errors are made, that signs
are missed?" No one does. Elementary school teaches that
authority equals life and that signs are promises. Thus, in
his first life the narrator believed the company motto, "Here
to Help in Time of Need." By acting in accordance with this
sign, he was fired. Because he had obtained a wife with wife-
signs--"beauty, charm, softness, cookery"--he thought he had
found love. The great "discovery" of the narrator's reschool-
ing is that "signs are signs, and that some of them are lies."
As a theoretical insight this one might not sound like much,
but the narrator is not presented as a small-minded man.
Barthelme's partly parodic point is that most human beings
fail or suffer setbacks and disillusionments in their lives
precisely because this discovery is so difficult to come by.

The teacher's manual said: "Many interesting and life-

 

like problems involving the use et fractions should 9e solved."

 

 

But the narrator realizes that "everything that is either in-
teresting or life-like in the classroom" stems from interper-
sonal relations--which means sex. In a famous chapter of
John Barth's EBE.§E§.2£.EEE.322§I Jacob Horner enters the
classroom on the first day of school and makes the discovery
that "girls study grammar and boys engineering all at the
behest of Absolute Genital." He continues:
Who would not delight in telling some extra-

galactic tourist, "On our planet, sir, males
and females copulate. Moreover, they enjoy

39

copulating. But for various reasons they cannot

do this whenever, wherever and with whomever

they choose. Hence all this running around that

you observe. Hence the world."9
Jacob teaches at Wicomico State Teacher's College, but Bar-
thelme's point is that the sex factor is no less pervasive
in the sixth grade, where the "atmosphere is charged with
abortive sexuality." The students are not taught, do not
understand, and cannot handle their sexuality. This is not
to say that the story is a plea that students should be taught
to handle their sexuality. Barthelme is simply satirizing
an educational rhetoric which pretends to explain student
behavior while omitting the most important factor. One boy

draws a dirty picture in the cloak room which sets the room

buzzing with excitement. Other boys read Road and Track as

 

a defense against "being driven frantic." Sue Anne Brownly
reads yezie-gy Secrets, "studying their history as a guide
to what she may expect when she is suddenly freed from this
drab, flat classroom." The narrator shuffles through seven-
teen of Sue Anne's magazines, "noting the broad editorial
perspectives"--and here Barthelme compiles a catalog which is
so true it hardly achieves the level of parody.

"Debbie's Kids Are Crying"

"Eddie Asks Debbie: Will you...?"

"The Nightmares Liz Has About Eddie!"

"The Things Debbie Can Tell About Eddie"

"The Private Life of Eddie and Liz"

"Debbie Gets Her Man Back?"

"A New Life for Liz"

40

"Love Is A Tricky Affair"

"Eddie's Taylor-Made Love Nest"

"Isn't It Time to Stop Kicking Debbie Around?"

"Debbie's Dilemma"10
Finally Sue Anne catches the narrator with Miss Mandible in
the cloakroom and she runs off weeping, "certain now which
of us was Debbie, which Eddie, which Liz." She had mis-read
the signs.

The questions of what and how things went wrong, all of
the mysteries that perplexed us as adults, do have their or-
igin in school, and Barthelme, through the narrator, is "one
by one numbering them, exposing their roots." On another
level the story is a parodic expos! of the naivete’ of the
public school rhetoric that "confidence" and the knowledge
of what is "right" and "proper" will lead to self-knowledge,
social and professional success, and, all in all, an "inter-
esting" life.

"Florence Green is 81" is also about identity crisis,
and it deals more specifically with the desperate attempt to

be interesting and interested. "i want te ge’te some other

 

country." "i_want te ge somewhere where everything ie_dif-

 

ferent," Florence Green announces at dinner-~a request we
will hear echoed in Snow White's desire to hear some words
that "are not the words I always hear." Baskerville is there,
at the dinner party, courting old Florence Green, because he
needs her contribution to help defray printing costs of gte

EEEEEEi gt Tension Reduction, of which he is editor.

 

41

In order to win her favor he must above all be interesting,
more interesting, if possible, than the rest of the guests.
The story is written is a furiously self-conscious stream-
of-consciousness style, which is a parody of the stream-of-
consciousness style ("I am free-associating, brilliantly,
brilliantly"). Parallels are set-up: Baskerville must keep
Florence Green interested; he must also keep the reader in-

terested. He quotes from his journal: "One source gt con-

 

cern ie_the classic encounter between patient and psychoan-

 

alyst ie the patient'e fear gt boring the doctor."

 

 

For fear of being boring, Baskerville uses three basic
strategies: he adopts an ingratiating tone; he disseminates
paragraphs of trivial, *almanac type information ("Lentils
vegetate in the depths of the fourth principal river of the
world, the Ob, in Siberia, 3200 miles."); and he delivers
remarks:.

"It is closing time in the garden of the West

Cyril Connolly." This remark pleased her, it was

a pleasing remark, on the strength of this remark

Baskerville was invited again, and on the second

occasion he made a second remark, which was

"Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship

faded Gertrude Stein."11
Baskerville is a satire of several well-known social types:
the dinner guest who tries too hard; the would-be writer with
no talent; the would-be analyst with deep psychological prob-
lems. In a more general sense, Barthelme is satirizing all
men, since most men are not interesting and do not find life

sufficiently interesting. Thus, the story as a whole iden-

tifies and satirizes what has become one of modern man's

42

chief values: interestingness. The implication is that he
has nothing else.

"Hiding Man" also strikes an attitude toward popular
interest in identity, alienation, and alleviation of boredom.
The hiding man is I. A. L. Burligame. He hides behind his
initials, behind masks, in dark movie theaters. What is he
hiding from? The story is never explicit, but we can deduce
that Burligame is in fact hiding from nothing, or merely from
himself, and that his whole life is an elaborate game, designed
to satisfy his need for the mystery and drama which ordinary
life fails to provide.

The games he plays are built around the conventions of
horror films, of which Burligame is a devotee and addict. All
of his frames of«re&erencetare horror films, all of life is
looked at through the translucent frame of some horror film
image. "Is not this real life, risk and danger, as in Vbodoo

Woman, as in Creature from the Black Lagoon?" His most con-

 

sistent habit of thought is that nothing is as it seems; ev-

erything is potentially "menacing as in Dragstrip Riot, as in

 

Terror from the Year 5000." Thus, when he walks into a movie

 

theater expecting to find the place empty and sees instead a
heavy Negro, well-dressed, in dark glasses, the situation is
ripe for Burligame's imagination. At once he decides that if
the Negro is hostile, he will flee through the door marked
EXIT. But for Burligame a simple EXIT is not a simple EXIT;
there is no bulb behind the sign, no certainty that it leads

anywhere. The boy he had seen with a kite in the lobby

43

suggests for him frightening possibilities. "What was the
kite for?"

The Negro is someone like himself--also a hiding man,
and the rest of the story is a kind of ritualistic enactment
of the horror film genre, in which each man attempts to dis-
cover who the other man really is, what he is hiding from,
while at the same time each tries to conceal his true iden-
tity. The irony throughout is that the only "true" identity
either of them has is that gleaned from horror films.

The story is rich in its parody of all sorts of special-
ized languages: film, sociology, psychology, religion, phil-

osophy--since the two movie buffs are educated and can borrow

 

from all the disciplines in order to give weight and complex-
ity to their games. In response to the Negro's "apparently"
simple observation that "It's better when the place is full,"
Burligame considers a number of possible responses, then says:
"People don't always tell the truth." He considers the pos-
sibility that the Negro is "simply what he pretends to be:
a well-dressed Negro in dark glasses," but Burligame dismisses
this since "All life is rooted in contradiction." Each man
agrees openly that "I could be anybody," and Burligame re-
sponds: "Thus, we are problematic for each other." Burli-
game notices that the Negro is "too knowledgeable in the
sociology of concealment," and that perhaps he lies to sug-
gest the "mutability of time."

Finally, each man reveals what he claims is his true

identity, his true story. The Negro says his real name is

44

Adrian Hipkiss and that among other thingshe mailed a letter
in 1944 in which "I didn't say what I meant." His whole life
has been one mask after another. Now, his "identity is gone,
blown away, who am I, who knows?" His story, Burligame knows,
is patently contrived. Then it is Burligame's turn. He hides
from the priests, particularly from a Father Blau, who wanted
Burligame to go out for basketball ("I was the tallest boy in
the eighthgrade at Our Lady of Sorrows"). When he refused,
Father Blau got his revenge in the confessional, insisted on
knowing everything, including impure thoughts, self-abuse,

and compulsive over-consumption of Baby Ruths, Mars Bars, and
Butterfingers. Burligame was "in fine totally alienated."

The story's concluding twist follows along the lines of the

horror film conventions, as Hipkiss "strips away his skin,"

 

claims he has been sent to get Burligame, who is of course
prepared for such a crisis with a deadly device borrowed from
his favorite genre.

Relying heavily upon the trivia of the pop arts and upon
the rhetoric of sociology, "Hiding Man" is a satiric comment
on boredom and on the attempt to create artificial mystery
and drama by avoiding real life, real drama and mystery. In
another sense, though, the game played by Burligame is sim-
ilar to that played by Barthelme, who turns life into elab-
orate games and intricate designs.

Barthelme is at his best when he creates recognizable
social types, as he does in "Margins." This story satirizes

bourgeois interest in race relations, specifically the liberal

45

white's curiosity and beliefs about "Negroes." Edward, the
white man, is certainly a "fool," as he himself admits and

as Carl, the black man, agrees. But in 1964, when this story
was written, many white people held lazy assumptions about
blacks, particularly the condescending assumption that blacks
want to be like whites. Barthelme simply exaggerates things
a bit. Edward's interest in the implications of handwriting
and "margins" makes him even more of a buffoon, while Carl

is made out to be a super-funky literary black, a master of
put-ons. He stands on the street corner, waiting for hand—
outs, wearing a sign of sandwich boards proclaiming that all
of the clichés of black history have happened to him person-

ally.

 

 

Which I Did Not Do. While i Wee‘ie_ Jail My
Brother Was K1lled & My Mother Ran Away+When

I Was Little. In Jail I Began Preachieg & I
Preach to People —Wherever I Can Bearing Witness
of Eschatological Love. I —Have Filled Out Papers
for Jobs But Nobody Will Give Me e Job Because

I Have Been h1Ja1l & The Whole Scene is Very
Dreary, Pep31 Cola. I Need Your Offerings

te Get Food. Patent Appl1ed_ For & Deliver Us
From Evil.I2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"It's not true, is it?" Edward asks seriously. And Carl's
response is a comically incongruous use of literary jargon:
"It's true...with a kind of geteefy inner truth which shines
forth as the objective correlative of what actually did hap—
pen, back home."

True or not, Edward does not really care about the sub-
stance of Carl's sign; he is concerned with how it is written,

the width of the margins, the pointed "m" and "n." His

46

questions are those on all white minds: "Are you a drug ad-
dict?" "Are you a Muslim?" "Where do you steal your books
from, mostly?" When he is unable to obtain a superior feel-
ing over Carl, Edward gets critical, self-defensive. He tells
Carl: "People like people who look neat...you look kind of
crummy, if you don't mind me saying 50.... Do you think I'm

a pretty color?" Edward begins to grow "despondant" over the
fact that Carl is "well-spoken"--a fact which Carl attributes
to his reading. Barthelme's choice of John Hawkes--an exper-
imentalist worlds from black concerns-~for Carl's reading ma-
terial is fine satire.

Edward's irritation increases because more than anything
he wants to teach the black man something. "Get a haircut,
Carl.... Get a new suit...you could be upwardly mobile, you
know, if you just put your back into it." To Carl's state-
ment that it is "cold here on 14th street," Edward comically
declares that Carl's coldness "arises from your marginal sta-
tus as a despised person in our society." Unable to teach
him anything but still wanting to be helpful, Edward agrees
to hold Carl's sandwich boards while Carl goes into a store
"to take a leak." "'Boy, these things are kind of heavy,
aren't they?‘ 'They cut you a bit.’ said Carl with a mal-
icious smile." Then the final paragraph: "When Carl returned
the two men slapped each other sharply in the face with the
back of the hand, that beautiful part of the hand where the
knucklesgrow." This ending is surprising, almost shocking,

even on later readings. Barthelme allows the characters to

47

come to blows, not because that would probably happen in the
world of literary realism, but because pasting each other is
on their minds. Carl has only contempt for Edward; Edward‘
fears Carl, does not understand him, and hates the fact that
he cannot make him submissive. Almost the entire story is
pure dialog except for the last paragraph, where Barthelme

is saying, in effect: this is how these two, and in a larger
sense, the black and white races, really feel about each
other.

"Margins" is a playful piece which allows Barthelme to
deflate numerous cliched assumptions and to exploit his fond-
ness for bookish dialogue--in an unlikely character. He uses
this same approach in "The Joker's Greatest Triumph," the
first of a number of stories which dip into American folk-
lore for subject-matter. His intention in these related
pieces is similar: to show how the world has changed in the
time since the heroes of pop culture roamed the earth. Read-
ing these stories is like checking in on these legendary
heroes after a long absence, to see how they are doing. Na-
turally, they are not doing too well. They have been smitten
with identity crises, with "problems"--qua1ities deadly to
the heroic life. Their concerns are at once too pedestrian
and too sophisticated. In "The Joker's Greatest Triumph,"
Batman and Robin seem unaware that things have changed but
several changes are noticeable at once: first, they have be-
come boozers. Fredric goes over to Bruce Wayne's house, just

as he used to, every Tuesday night: most of their talk is

48

about what they are drinking.

"Tell me, Bruce, what is it you're drinking
there?" Fredric asked.

"I'm sorry Fredric it's tomato juice. Can I
get you a glass?"

"Does it have anything in it or is it just
plain tomato juice?"

"It's tomato juice with a little vodka."

"Yes, I wouldn't mind a glass," Fredric said.
"Not too heavy on the vodka please."l3

Moments later Bruce returns from the kitchen and announces
that he must "have left the vodka in the Batmobile," which,
we later discover, is equipped with "a little bar, with ice,
glasses, water, soda, quinine, lemons, etc..."--though Bruce
does not drink "while I'm working." After Batman has been
knocked unconscious by the Joker, Fredric's first words are,
"Don't you think we ought to give him a little brandy or
something?" A button is pressed and out comes "a bottle of
B & B and the appropriate number of glasses."

The second change has to do with their comic pedestrian
dialogue. Fredric asks Commissioner Gordon the best way to
get to the airport.

"Well, if I were you I'd go out 34th street
until you hit War Memorial, then take a right on
Memorial Drive until it connects with Gotham Park-
way! After you're on the Parkway it's clear sail-
ing!" he indicated.

"Wait a minute!" Batman said. "Wouldn't it
be quicker to get on the Dugan Expressway where it
comes in there at llth street and then take the
North Loop out to the Richardson Freeway? Don't
you think that would save time?"

"Well, I come to work that way!" the Commis-
sioner said. "But they're putting in another
two lanes on the North Loop, so that you have to
detour down Strand, then cut over to 99th to get
back on the Expressway! Takes you about two miles
out of your way!" he said.14

The third change is the one discussed in the previous

49

stories: Batman, Robin and Fredric have become complex bour-
geois. Robin is studying and having trouble with his French
at Andover; Batman hums "a tune which Fredric recognizes as
the "Warsaw Concerto," and later he hums the flip-side "Cor-
nish Rhapsody." Having beenunmasked by the Joker, Batman
later worries about his "identity."

"Yes Batman," Robin said seriously, "I think

he learned your real identity!"

"Great Scott!" Batman said. "If he reveals it

to the whole world it means the end of m career as

a crime fighter! Well, it's a problem." 5
Finally, like everyone else in the post-Freudian world, the
boys are articulate about motivation and behavior. "What
makes the Joker tick I wonder?" Fredric asks. "I mean what
are his real motivations?" And then follows Bruce's parodic
catalog of The Joker's contradictory nature--a paraphrase of
"what Mark Schorer said about Sinclair Lewis."

What makes the story effective is that alongside all of
these changes Barthelme has left just enough of the old iden-
tities intact. He has preserved the exclamatory style, add-
ing scores of exclamation marks to heighten the parody. He
has preserved the use of idioms used literally:

"Batman! I thought that clue I sent you would
leave you completely at sea!"

"No, Joker! I'm afraid this leaves your plans
up in the air!"

——"But not for long Batman! I'm going to bring
you down to earth!"l6

 

And on the walls of Bruce's study hang many trophies of "past
exploits" to remind us of the Batman and Robin of old.
Batman and Robin are presented as being oblivious to

their new consciousness but Barthelme often uses the opposite

50

approach: although his characters are placed in the present,

the past looms over everything--sometimes as a source of pain,
but usually of cheap nostalgia, a continual memory of "better

days." A more thorough examination of just how Barthelme

uses the past will be reserved for a discussion of Snow White,

 

but the past also figures strongly in several stories in this
collection--all of which are either directly or indirectly
about marriage.

Barthelme's treatment of marriage may be considered under
the larger umbrella of his treatment of American institutions.
The question posed is: how are certain institutions holding
up in the modern world? Relying heavily on the past for
structural and thematic parallels, Barthelme will, in later
books, put to test the church, the law, the arts, popular
myths, education, language, the self, and marriage. In gale
igari, he is most obsessed with marriage.

His treatment of married life cannot be separated from
his treatment of the other problems I have been discussing--
identity, alienation, boredom--since these problems are in a
large part responsible for the disintegration of marriages.
In "To London and Rome" Barthelme creates two characters who,
except for their names and their money, have no identity
whatever. Peter and Alison are mere puppets, shells of hu-
man beings, without a trace of inner life. Their external
life consists only of buying things and going places--acti-
vities designed to ward off boredom. "Peter Alison said,

what do you want to do now? Oh I don't know I said. Well we

51

can't simply sit around the apartment Alison said so we went
to the races at Aqueduct where I bought a race horse..."
Peter also buys a sewing machine, a purple Rolls Royce, a
$1,600 garden hose, a house for the horse, a jockey, a gar-
dener, a mistress (for $5,500), a $1.5 million hospital (when
the horse gets sick), and a Viscount Jet to fly to London and
Rome. These items are paid for with checks on the First City
Bank, the Capital National Bank, the State Bank and Trust,
the Municipal National Bank, the Central National Bank, and
the Manufacturers Trust Bank.
Where have you been? Alison said, I've been

waiting lunch for hours. I bought a new suit I

said, how do you like it? Very nice Alison said,

but hurry I've got to go shopping after lunch.

Shopping! I said, I'll go with you!17

Other than the comic catalog of purchases and banks the

story is interesting chiefly for its device of marginal no-

tations. We recall that in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,

 

a poem rich in levels of symbolism, Coleridge used this de-
vice to help explain some of the poetic complexities, and to
provide bridges between stanzas; thus, in that poem it is a
highly functional literary technique. In "To London and Rome"
the device is parodically redundant but still functional in

a satiric way. The story's style is so simple and straight-
forward, so lacking in depth, and structured on such a single
plane that explanation is unnecessary. Therefore, the only
function of the marginal notations is to provide bridges be-
tween purchases, when nothing is happening. "THERE WAS A

BRIEF PAUSE,""THERE WAS A LONG PAUSE,""THERE WAS A TREMENDOUS

52

PAUSE, A PROLONGED SILENCE." The pauses and silences are
more significant than the "action," since Peter and Alison's
whole marriage is an attempt to avoid them.

"To London and Rome" is one of numerous stories in which
Barthelme uses ironically a literary device from another per-
iod or work and is able to make a comment on his own impover-
ished material. But working with impoverished material has
its risks, and if his technique is not strong enough the re-
sults are often less successful. "Will You Tell Me" is writ-
ten in a style similar to that of "To London and Rome" but
the numerous characters are uninteresting and Barthelme fails
to do anything sufficiently interesting with them. The char-
acters grow up, get married, have affairs. There is a lot
of smiling. They go to Madrid and Denmark and to the Virgin
Islands. There is some complex bourgeois talk: "Do you want
to talk about phenomenalogical reduction now? or do you want
a muffin?" There is a suicide.

"The Piano Player" succumbs to some of the same weaknesses
but on the whole it is more successful. The couple is married
and bored but the wife at least has the virtue of honesty.
She cannot remember the names of her children who, she says,
are ugly. We know they are ugly because the first sentence
describes in detail one of the ugliest children ever seen.
But Brian, the husband, refuses to admit it: "Nonsense...
they're wonderful children. WOnderful and beautiful. Other
people's children are ugly, not our children." His wife is

bored, tired and overworked. She wears shoulderpads and has

53

been caulking the medicine chest. Brian tries to cheer her

up: "Get up, dearly beloved. Stand up and sing. Sing BEE?
sifgl." But she will not sing. Instead, she delivers a ti-
rade. She wants out of this life. She wants a Triumph and

she wants to go to Wellfleet to talk to Edmund Wilson ("Bunny").
"I thought you were going to be somebody," she shrieks at her
husband. "I thought you were going to be distinguished, like
Bunny."

The story ends with one of those surprise-shock-endings
characteristic of several stories in this book. Brian is
murdered by his wife's piano. Conceptually, the ending works
because Barthelme prepared for it. Brian's wife is a much
stronger person than he is. She has more energy, more nerve,
she is less deceived, and she has a talent: she plays the
piano. Brian, on the other hand, is a loser. He has no char-
acter, he has bad taste (he built a steel house which is rust-
ing), and he is jealous of her piano. Her piano is a threat
to him. He is, in short, so weak, so insubstantial, that he
can be destroyed by what the piano represents: his wife's
talent, his competition, his enemy. As in "Margins," the
ending is a display of Barthelme's authority over his material,
a performance in which at least part of the message is that
fiction can break through the constraints of conventional
literary realism.

There is the same message in another story about marriage--
"For I'm the Boy Whose Only Joy is Loving You"--a bitter but

effective piece whose bright happy title (song lyric borrowed

54

from "better days") makes the story even darker. The single
scene is simple and rich with possibilities: three men in

a car returning from the airport where one of them has just
put his former wife on a plane. The three men are ostensibly
friends, but each of them is inwardly seething with malicious-
ness because his life is so empty. Bloomsbury had apparently
asked Huber and Whittle to accompany him on the send-off in
order to preclude privacy and weeping, but on the return trip
he grows more and more irritable at the fact that his friends
"are not what he wishes them to be," though he is aware that
he is possibly "not what they wished him to be." His friends,
meanwhile, grow increasingly irritable because Bloomsbury re-

fuses to tell them "everything" concerning his divorce; they

 

want the "emotion--give us the feeling." And here Barthelme

 

compiles one of his parodic catalogs, this one an itemized
parody of the friends' vulgar curiosity, but also a parody
of the substance of married life.

It would be interesting I think as well as instructive
Whittle said casually, to know for instance at what
point the situation of living together became unten-
able, whether she wept when you told her, whether you
wept when she told you...if there were mental cruelties,
cruelties of what order and on whose part, whether she
had a lover or did not have a lover, whether you did
or did not, whether you kept the television or she
kept the television...what food remains in the pantry
at this time...was it a fun divorce or not a fun
divorce...whether you asked her for a "date" after

the granting of the decree or did not ask...whether
the date if there was such a date was a fun thing

or not a fun thing--in short we'd like to get the

feel of the event he said.18

When Bloomsbury refuses to satisfy their curiosity they re-

mind him that they "are no doubt all you have left in the

55

world," a proposition Bloomsbury finds "disagreeable." And
then the story's shock ending: the "friends of the family"
beat Bloomsbury in the face, "first with the brandy bottles,
then with the tire iron, until at length the hidden feeling
emerged, in the form of salt from his eyes and black blood
from his ears, and from his mouth, all sorts of words."

The story never offers any specific reason why the mar-
riage failed--not that one is ever needed-~but its omission
here is purposeful: these men are characterized as so vacant
that not even friendship, let alone marriage, is possible.
Emotionally, they are dead.

Emotion! Whittle exclaimed, when was the last

time we ever had any? The war I expect Hubert

replied, all those chaps going West. I'll give

you a hundred dollars Whittle said, for the feeling.19
This is a parody of emotional deadness, of course, and Bar-
thelme suggests, in the "Pelly" passages, that the only time
most men feel any intensity of emotion today is during brief
sexual affairs--the point being that affairs are easy com-
pared to marriage and friendship. In his love affair, Blooms-
bury is, like most men, merely trying to recapture some emo-
tion, what in another context he calls those "Golden days...
in the sunshine of our happy youth."

It is not necessary or even satisfactory to read the
violent ending as a literal murder. As in "Margins," "The
Piano Player," and even, to an extent, in "Hiding Man," the
ending is a literary murder—-another brash, authorial intru-

sion in which Barthelme is saying, in effect: since Blooms-

bury would not give them any emotional satisfaction, they

56

heat it out of him. They needed emotion.

”The Big Broadcast of 1938" almost seems a companion
piece to "For I'm the Boy Whose Only Joy is Loving You." Here
is Bloomsbury, alive and well; he has "acquired in exchange
for an old house that had been theirs, his and hers, a radio
or more properly radio station." He plays "TheStar Spangled
Banner" hundreds of times a day, a piece he likes "immoder-
ately, because of its finality." He selects a word from the
English language, such as "nevertheless," and repeats it in
a monotonous voice for as much as a quarter of an hour. And
he broadcasts announcements "addressed not to the mass of men
but of course to her," his former wife. From his announce-
ments to her one gets the impression, for awhile, that he
desperately wants her back, but in the end, when she returns
and offers herself to him, he rejects her. "Martha...old
skin, why can't you let the old days die."

The only other stories in this first book are "Up Aloft
in the Air" and "The Vienese Opera Ball." The first is a
boring story about boring people who try desperately to make
life interesting by dancing on airport runways and by hopping
from one to another of Ohio's four major cities, looking for
fun. The other story creates a cocktail party atmosphere:
"Carola was thrilled by all of the interesting conversation,"
but the parody of interesting conversation is dull, as are
the mounds of almanac type information. In these two stories
one already sees a problem which Barthelme would try to over-

come in the next decade: having succeeded in wrenching

57

fiction out of its predictable molds, he must resist becom-
ing predictable himself.

On the whole, however, Barthelme's fiction improves after
Caligari. While one of the strengths of this book is Bar-
thelme's sure sense of irony, it also exhibits an authorial
arrogance and swagger which is not held in check by the sort
of self-irony that subtly controls his best work. This arro-
gance is particularly evident in those stories where Barthelme
simply steps in and twists an ending to meet the demands of
his preconceived design. The trick is a somewhat crude as-
sertion of his authority, a display of dictatorial control
which elevates himself as the work's only hero, and of his
own attitude as the only significance. In his best work he
will remain just as much the dictator, but in a more subtle
and complex way: he will become a vulnerable dictator, a
man who continues to wreak havoc all around him, but whose
attitude includes the knowledge that he has nothing to put
in its place. The writer of Caligari is far more pleased
with himself than the writer Barthelme will become. The
writer of the later work knows that his freedom is a mixed
blessing.

A parallel change that will take place after Caligari
is a severe refinement of style. Caligari provides us with
a good but inconsistent taste of that style. Almost every
story contains passages of highly stylized parodies of var-
ious rhetorics and jargons, but they are just that--passages--

they stand out, or seem inserted, within a story which is

58

otherwise told in a straightforward, often colorless prose.
Thus, "A Shower of Gold," while it offersan impressive dis-
play of absurdist rhetoric, nevertheless uses the story it-
self as a kind of envelope for that rhetoric--as if the story
has something else to offer in addition. Beginning with

Snow White, Barthelme develops an organic style in which ev-

 

ery word is stylistically functional. It is in that work and
in his succeeding books that one of Barthelme's central themes

emerges: style is all he has to offer.

Chapter 2

Snow White:

 

The Irony of Infinite Absolute Negativity

Whereas once we were simple bourgeois who knew
what to do, now we are complex bourgeois who are
at a loss. We do not like this complexity. We
circle it wearily, prodding it from time to time
with a shopkeeper's forefinger: What is it?

Is it, perhaps, bad for business?

 

Snow White

 

The above lines, spoken by the collective "dwarves" in

Snow White, constitute a miniature summary and satire of the

 

self-conscious society which is one of Barthelme's primary
subjects in this most self-conscious of novels. The lines
take us at once from the world of Grimm to the world of Bar-
thelme, from a time when there were "giants on the earth"

to a time when "the seven of them only add up to about two
£g§l_mgn." For self-consciousness is the central fact of
the unheroic life, and Barthelme's method of exploiting this
fact is simply to retain the form of the original fairy-tale
while substituting this alien content.

Snow White does not have a plot in any realistic sense

 

but there is a story of sorts, a vehicle which serves as a
framework for Barthelme's satiric commentary. The Snow White
we remember now lives with her seven suitors "in a mocksome
travesty of approved behavior," and far from the innocent,

untroubled girl Grimm created, today's Snow White is the

59

60

personified spirit of Alienation herself. She has thus be-
come a "problem" for her seven men, as well as for Paul, the
would-be prince. These characters' various attempts to an-
alyze Snow White, themselves, and life itself provide the
story's basic movement and the novel's satiric thrust.

Above all, Snow White is worried about her "role" in
life, and about finding "meaningful" goals. Whereas former-
ly she had been happy reading the mail and writing letters,

now she reads Liberation, writes existential poems, and de-

 

livers enigmatic statements: "Let a hundred flowers bloom."
Whereas she used to wear "tight-fitting, how-the-west-was-
won trousers" now she has taken to wearing "heavy blue bulky
shapeless People's VOlunteer trousers." The new Snow White
fears mirrors, apples, poisoned combs and is under the care
of a psychiatrist, who tells her that she is "uninteresting"--
that harshest of critiques. There are reasons for her con-
dition, of course, and some of them are to be found in the
list of subjects she took in college.

She studied Medern Woman, Her Privileges and Responsi-
bilities: the nature and nurture of women and what
they stand for, in evolution and in history, includ-
ing householding, upbringing, peacekeeping, healing
and devotion, and how these contribute to the re-
humanizing of today's world. Then she studied
Classical Guitar I, utilizing the methods and tech-
niques of Sor,TaErega, Segovia, etc. Then she
studied English Romantic Poets II: Shelley, Byron,
Keats. Then she studied Theoretical Foundations

of Psychology: mind, consciousness, unconscious
mind, personality, the self, interpersonal rela-
tions, psychosexual norms, social games, groups,
adjustment, conflict, authority, individuation...1

 

 

 

 

 

 

The style here, the random accumulation.of subjects, is fine

satiric comment on the eclecticism of the contemporary

61

university, and explains the habit of analysis and the growth
of self-consciousness which best characterizes modern man.

At one point her suitors discuss "The Psychology of Snow

 

White"--

What does she hope for? "Some day my prince will

come." By this she means that she lives her own

being as incomplete, pending the arrival of some-

one who will "complete" her. That is, she lives

her own being as "not-with"...the "not-with" is

experienced as stronger, more real, at this par-

ticular instant in time, than the "being with."

This incompleteness is an ache capable of subduing

all other data presented by consciousness.2
Such language, if read with an ironic turn of mind, would
seem almost parodic even in the context of a psychology text.
voiced by a layman, however, we see it instantly for the jar-
gon it is, a jargon which complicates rather than clarifies,
and which the characters use for its own sake rather than
because they have any genuine interest in or understanding
of the problem.

Much of Snow White's identity-crisis stems from her dis-
enchantment with the role of "horsewife." Even while her
suitors elevate her for her feminine qualities, they treat
her as a second-class citizen; hence, the legitimate com-
plaints and cliches of the feminist movement. Barthelme
compiles a mock-bibliography on the subject.

THE HORSEWIFE IN HISTORY

FAMOUS HORSEWIVES

THE HORSEWIFE: A SPIRITUAL PORTRAIT

THE HORSEWIFE: A CRITICAL STUDY

FIRST MOP, 4000 BC

62

VIEWS OF ST. AUGUSTINE

OXFORD COMPANION TO THE AMERICAN HORSEWIFE

ACCEPT ROLE, PSYCHOLOGIST URGES

THE PLASTIC BAG3
While on the one hand Snow White takes a more than casual
interest in the liberation of women, on the other hand she
has been conditioned to take a more than casual interest in
and concern for cleaning. Thus, through rhetorically she
resists the role which the Psychologist Urges, she neverthe-
less pays elaborate and painstaking attention to her chores,
"paying particular attention to the gas orifices," using a
bit of ammonia "to help cut the grease," and "using steel
wool on the tough spots."

Snow White's main problem, however, is that she can find
no heroes in the world, and regarding this problem too her
behavior is characterized as contradictory: on one hand
there is her liberated rhetoric; on the other, she resorts
to the seductive ploy of hanging her hair out the window.
She refuses Hogo's feverish love because he does not have
"the purple blood of exalted station" which Paul does--though
she admits that Paul is "pure frog." And she has not given
up the most romantic of notions--that a prince is somewhere
off in the wings.

"Which rince?" Snow White wondered brushing her

teeth. Which prince will come? Will it be Prince

Audrey? Prince Igor? Prince Alphonso? Prince

Malcolm? Prince Donalbain? Prince Fernando?

Prince Siegfried? Prince Phillip? Prince Albert?

Prince Paul? Prince...4

Most of the book's parody of various rhetorics is found

63

in the suitors' efforts to analyze Snow White and their gen-
eral predicament. Barthelme has made certain that the seven
men are virtually indistinguishable from one another. They
are all "talk," as it were, and their talk is all the same,
consisting of the jargon of the specialized disciplines,
cliches, and the "sludge" of qualifications. Only Bill, the
leader who no longer leads, is different, and that is only
because he represents an even more extreme state of hyper-
consciousness and self-doubt. At the outset, Bill is "tired"
of Snow White and cannot bear to be touched by anyone. His
comrades, the collective narrators, analyze his condition.

We speculate that he doesn't want to be involved

in human situations any more. A withdrawal. With-

drawal is one of the four modes of dealing with

anxiety. We speculate that his reluctance to be

touched springs from that. Dan does not go along

with the anxiety theory. Dan does not believe in

anxiety. Dan speculates that Bill's reluctance

to be touched is a physical manifestation of a

metaphysical condition that is not anxiety. But

he is the only one who supports that. The rest

of us support anxiety.5
The language highlights the felt disparity between analytic
language and reality. What do their words mean? What are
they talking about? The word "speculate" is repeated five
times in this short chapter, in addition to phrases like
"Dan does not believe," "She must have noticed," "We are
sure," "We are certain." The concluding line undercuts all
of this speculation and pretense of certainty. "But to what
does she attribute the 'not-liking' itself? We don't know."
They don't know. The language of explanation has explained

nothing.

64

All of Barthelme's parodies of the way these men talk
suggest that analytic language is too often a means of avoid-
ing reality, of circumventing problems, rather than getting
to the heart of them. Bill's friends blame their problems
on the failure of leadership-~always an easy out. They com-
plain about "all that potential being pissed away"; why isn't
Bill out "realizing his potential," why isn't he out "maxi-
mizing his possibilities." Bill describes his own former
desire for greatness in a hilarious monologue whose very
triteness reveals why greatness will forever elude him.

"Yes," Bill said, "I wanted to be great, once. But
the moon for that was not in my sky, then. I had
hoped to make a powerful statement. But there was
no wind, no weeping. I had hoped to make a power-
ful statement coupled with a moving plea. But
there was no weeping, except perhaps, concealed
weeping.... I had hoped to make a significant
contribution.... I had hoped to bring about a
heightened awareness.... I wanted to provide a
definitive account.... I wanted to achieve a
breakthrough.... I wanted to effect a ra roch-
ment, I wanted to reconcile irreconciliabIe
forces..."5

 

Later, rather than responding directly to Snow White's hair
invitation, Bill, as well as the others, analyze the "mul-
tiple meanings" of this "complex and difficult question."

In order to improve their sexual habits with Snow White the
men buy a new shower curtain, and when this maneuver fails

to produce results they call in a professor of esthetics to
help them determine the quality of the curtain. The whole
chapter is a satire on Americans' habit of seeking out author-
ities and specialists to solve their problems, as well as a

commentary on the near-fact that there exist specialists for

65

for virtually everything--"shower curtain critics recruited
from the curtaining journals, if there are such journals,
and I do not doubt it." Paul, the prince-figure, is dis-
couraged from stick-dancing by a stick-dancing critic.

All problems are "papered over" by evasive language and
pseudo-logic, or by indulgence in the trivial. When Snow
White complains: "Oh I wish there were some words in the
world that were not the words I always hear!" the men get
rid of a rude visitor, who had suggested "fish slime." "But
the problem remained." When Edward delivers a sermon on the
mistreatment of the American horsewife, Dan argues that
"rightly understood, the problem of Snow White has to do at

its center with nothing else but red towels. Seen in this

 

way it becomes a non-problem." Clem resents being treated
like a "rube" but prefers to think instead about fried cal-
imaretti. Paul believes he has a "right" to effect a liason
with some beauty, but "this duck-with-blue-cheese sandwich
that I am eating is mighty absorbing, too." The men want,
above all, to preserve equanimity, or at least what little
remains since Snow White has become a problem. To this end,
they usually avoid saying anything with even a hint of con-
troversy. The novel is a catalog of safe, pointless obser-
vations.

"It was a brisk day, more brisk than some of the
others we've had."7

"It had been extremely tasty, that trout."8

"I smoked an Old Gold cigarette, the same one I‘
had been smoking before. There was still some

66
of it left because I had put it down without
finishing it."9

"Then Bill said something: 'Torch in the face.‘
Other people said other things."10

"'After I read the book, I'--'Don't say that

Edward,’ Kevin said. 'Don't say anything you'll

regret later.'"11

Paul, the prince-figure, is no more decisive or capable
of action than the common suitors, despite the blueness of
his blood, and despite his assertion that "I am princely."
He is afflicted with a debilitating self-consciousness; he
poses before a fence, hoping to be discovered so that he will
not have to go to a monastery. The hair hanging from Snow
White's window merely makes him nervous; he sets up an elab-
orate sensing mechanism in the yard outside her window and
becomes "a voyeur." Only loathsome Hogo and malicious Jane
are free of self-consciousness and identity-crisis (though
even Hogo can quote Stendahl). The "dwarves," unable to
satisfy Snow White, call Hogo in for advice. The world is
"full of cunts," he tells them. "The loss of any particular
one is not to be taken seriously...bear in mind multiplicity
and forget about uniqueness." Jane, deserted by Hogo and
"alone with my malice at last," writes a letter "irritating
in the extreme" and seeks new forms of malice. But even hers
is a "cultivated malice, not the pale natural malice we knew
when the world was young."

Nine-tenths of the novel consists of what Snow White
calls non-events, but the book ends with a series of decisive

events. The seven suitors, in order to restore all that lost

67

equanimity, take Bill to trial, where he is found guilty of
"vatricide" and failure. He is hanged, and Hogo takes his
place. Jane prepares a poisoned vodka gibson for Snow White
which Paul intercepts at the last moment: he dies in an un-
heroic, convulsive "death agony." Snow White undergoes a

"revirginization" and "apotheosis."

The collective abstract characters represent that ex-
treme condition of a society which, in Eliot's phrase, "knows
too much and is assured of too little." What the characters
"know" is the language of literature, sociology, psychology
and advertising--which is to say that they know the language
of writers who have tried to explain the world and human be-
havior. This knowledge accounts for the self-consciously
literary style of the novel--a style whose incongruity is
heightened by being contained within a fairy-tale form, and
it informs one of Barthelme's central intentions, which is
to satirize society by parodying the language of the "explain-
ers." The trouble with the various technical jargons is, as
Gerald Graff observes, "the way they can delude one into sup-
posing that all of the mysteries of human nature are at once
explained by the simple act of affixing labels on them."12
When these jargons are removed from their intellectual con-
text and voiced by the man-on-the-street, as they so often
are today, the disparity between analytic language and reality
becomes all the more pronounced. Since the layman's grasp
of the concepts behind the jargon is shaky, he tends to use

it with a highly tentative authority, and in order to capture

68

this characteristic Barthelme adopts in Snow White what might

 

be called the style of continual qualification: most expla-
nations are followed by a series of words or phrases such as
"probably," "to a certain extent," "if you follow me," "as is
likely," etc. At one point in the book Bill echoes a thought
which describes Barthelme's own posture: "Now I limit my-
self to listening to what people say, and thinking what pamby
it is, what they say. My nourishment is refined by the on-
going circus of the mind in action."

Snow White is thus written is a self-parodic style wherein

 

increased complication in vocabulary leads to increased con-
fusion and self-estrangement, and all explanations are can-
celled by endless qualifications. What Bill calls "pamby"

is what Barthelme calls grggk. This grggk is the entire sub-

stance of‘Snow White, and it is discussed in one of the nov-

 

el's key chapters.

"You know, Klipschorn was right I think when he spoke
of the 'blanketing' effect of ordinary language, re-
ferring, as I recall, to the part that sort of, you
know, 'fills in' between the other parts. That part,
the 'filling' you might say, of which the expression
'you might say' is a good example, is to me the most
interesting part, and of course it might also be
called the 'stuffing' I suppose, and there is proba-
bly also, in addition, some other word that would do
as well, to describe it, or maybe a number of them.
But the quality this 'stuffing' has, that the other
parts of verbality do not have, is two parted, per-
haps: (1) an 'endless' quality and (2) a 'sludge'
quality. Of course that is possibly two qualities
but I prefer to think of them as different aspects
of a single quality, if you can think of it that
way. The 'endless'aspect of 'stuffing' is that it
goes on and on, in many different forms, and in fact
our exchanges are in large measure composed of it,
in larger measure even, perhaps, than they are come
posed of that which is not 'stuffing.' The 'sludge'

69

quality is the heaviness that this 'stuff' has..."13

 

Dan's speech is both an explanation of the dreck of language
and it is a parodic example of it. The sludge or stuffing
of qualification which he describes occurs in abundance on
every page of the book. It constitutes the characters' main
verbal habit and it suggests that they do not quite under-
stand what they are talking about; the concepts which they
are attempting to verbalize are over their heads. But Dan
himself in this speech is over his head intellectually, and
he must resort to the very stuffing which he is trying to
explain: "I suppose," "perhaps," "probably also," "or maybe,"
"possibly," etc. The chapter goes on to discuss the rela-
tionship between trash and language; it postulates that at
some point in the future trash will reach 100 percent, at
which point "the question turns from a question of disposing
of this trash to a question of appreciating its qualities..."

The parodic assumption of Snow White, and the reason

 

for its severely attenuated picture of humanity, is that the
world, including language, is already 100 percent trash.
Barthelme has taken the "most interesting part" and made it
the whole. "It's that we want to be on the leading edge of
the trash phenomenon, the everted sphere of the future, and
that's why we pay particular attention, too, to those as-
pects of language that may be seen as a model of the trash

phenomenon." Snow White assumes that "those aspects" of

 

language have become the only aspects, and that it is neces-

sary, therefore, to "appreciate" their qualities. Of course,

70

appreciating the qualities of trash, whether language or ma-
terial, has become something of a convention of 20th century
art, beginning with the so-called Ash Can painters at the
turn of the century, on up through the junk sculptors of to-
day. In literature Ionesco, Eliot, Beckett, Raymond Queneau,
Nathalie Sarraute and other writers had great sport with
inane cocktail party type dialogue. Stephen Spender spoke
for the "pylon poets" and wrote about "the concrete that
trails black wires." But many writers tended either to ro-
manticize the ugly, or to assume that somewhere there is
something that is not ugly. The idea was that all of life--
the beautiful as well as the ugly, high life as well as low
life--was a proper subject for art; a subject did not have
to be inherently "poetic" to warrant literary treatment.

With Barthelme (and with other postmodernists) the choice
between the poetic and the unpoetic is gone. Now there is
only the question of either total immersion into the unpoetic
or a retreat into the privacy of one's own poetic world. To
follow the latter course would mean a voluntary withdrawal
from the social life of the times, the same sort of withdrawal
which we observed of numerous 1940's and 1950's writers. To
follow the former course means immersing oneself as deeply
as possible into the dreck of contemporary society whilg_£gt
taining an ability EQ.§EE.QEE.9£.EE° This is a difficult
and complex process which requires some explanation.

We recall that Seymour Krim and Earl Shorris praised

Barthelme for his contemporaneity and for his ability to

71

catch a taste of the times. Catching a taste of the times,
in the best sense of that phrase, is not simply a matter of
writing about the latest happening, which is what most jour-
nalists new and old do, and what many novelists do too in
their fervent striving after contemporaneity. Reading through
Updike's Couples may stir up nostalgic memories of the era
of the Bay of Pigs and Kennedy's assassination but what we
are left with is contemporary history, not a contemporary
vision. Mailer's recent books, relying on the stuff of cur-
rent events, are often interesting, but much of the interest
resides in the events themselves, simply because they are

happening to us today. Even The Naked and the Dead achieves

 

much of its power from the sheer power of the war itself.

Barthelme achieves his contemporaneity not simply from
the power of current events but from a strong sense of the
past--which is the way the best artists of all times have
achieved it. Reading through Barthelme's fictions is in a
sense like touring the ruins of contemporary America, but
they are not presented as ruins, per se: we know they are
ruins only because Barthelme, through various formal and
stylistic devices, makes the more stable past a felt thing.
Barthelme's constant subject is confusion, and his fictions
do not describe this confusion; rather it grows out of a sense
of some unstated loss.

He immerses himself in the dreck of the present, but he
retains an ability to see out of it by using the past as a

mirror against which the present is measured and structured.

72

The historical aspect of Barthelme's writing cannot be em—
phasized enough. All of his beSt stories rely heavily on
tradition in one way or another, either through direct liter-
ary allusion, or stylistic allusion, or structural and the—
matic parallels. That he uses the past as the basis for par—
ody and satire does not lessen the seriousness of this use.
Leslie Fiedler points out that American writers' use of the
literary past has always been essentially comic and burlesque.
"Mock-epic is of course their form and satire their mode; but
the device they make most use of is the travesty—allusion:
the simultaneous evocation and parody of great verses out of
the past."14 Even a writer as solemn about the need for tra-
dition as Eliot was usually whimsical in his poetic treat-
ment of the past, Fiedler says. The reader coming across

the Goldsmith allusion in The Waste Land "finally is unsure

 

what is being mocked: Goldsmith, our relationship to him,
us, or the poet himself?"15 The term travesty-allusion ac-
curately describes one of Barthelme's persistent habits, too.

In Snow White, for instance, there is this allusion to Henry

 

James: "The recipes came from our father. 'Try to be a man
about whom nothing is known,’ our father said." Gerald Graff
argues that what Barthelme is doing here is inverting "the
assumptions about character, psychology and the authority of
the artist.... In place of James' earnest dedication to his
craft, Barthelme assumes an irreverent stance."16 This is true,
but the excessiveness of the style, the later juxtaposition

of canned goods with human moral choice, suggests parody of

73

the irreverent stance too. As Fiedler said of Eliot, it is
difficult to tell what is being mocked. The main point,
though, is that the present is modified and given historical
context, and the importance which the present assumes merely
by virtue of its being the present is diminished.

This is just a single instance of what the whole of

Snow White attempts to do. It is a commonplace that Ameri-

 

cans live with less sense of history than any other culture,
and for that reason they tend to inflate the importance,

value, and uniqueness of the present. Snow White deflates

 

the present and suggests that human beings without a sense

of history and tradition are shadows of human beings. Every-
thing in the novel serves as a reminder of what man no long-
er is, and the fairy-tale form is not to be taken lightly.
Although the world which Grimm described never really existed
it nevertheless contained imaginative validity for its time,
a time not when men were free of the follies and vices which
are a part of being human but when men were surer of who they
were and what they were doing because the past, in the form
of history, family, the church, was still alive to help guide

them. The past for today's world, and in Snow White, is sim-

 

ply a source of cheap nostalgia, or what D. S. Carne-Ross
calls the supermarket past, wherein we purchase trinkets,
momentoes, antiques. These "things," wrenched from the past,
become meaningless, become more of the garbage of our age.17

Snow White is saturated with the things, fashions, fads, gim—

 

micks, and notions of our age--amplifiers, motorcycles, baby

74

food, drugs--and Barthelme's technique is to trivialize all
of this "impedimenta" by reducing it to mere language, to
cliches. Without these things contemporary man has nothing.
He is left alone with himself, his identity crises, his a1-
ienation, his "problems."

One way to describe the way the past functions in Snow
Whit§_is this: the characters are drowned in the confusion
and impedimenta of the present because the past, except in
the form of cheap nostalgia, is not alive for them; it exerts
no pressure, no pull; it has been forgotten. But Barthelme
has not forgotten it. He sees the confusion of the present
from a historical perspective. In the Introduction, it was
observed that one difference between modernism and postmod-
erism is that writers of the former period were able to in-
corporate within their artistic structures the very middle-
class values which they were undermining; by the same token,
they were able to incorporate within their structures certain
humanistic values if only to show that such values had been
lost. Their work, in other words, could be built upon a dia-
lectic between the solid past and the fluid, changing present.
But postmodern writers confront a present from which the old
values have already been thoroughly eroded. They confront a
present, in other words, for which the past itself has been

fluid and changing; there is no difference between past and

 

present. And dialectic is lost. Given this state of affairs
the retention of any sense of the past at all requires a

special exertion of the imagination. It is this exertion

75

which Barthelme is willing and able to make, and it is this
exertion which may provide a criterion for distinguishing
that postmodern literature which transcends the confusion
of its cultural setting from that which does nofl more than
preflect it.

D. S. Carne-Ross, in an eloquent essay on the teaching
of literature, wrote:

Why is literature still "needed?" Because...

literature and the other arts are the purest wit-

ness to what has been lost. They reveal as nothing

else can something that once was presence and now

is absence. And could through no forseeable future

be present again. They bear witness to earth at a

time when there is nothing but world, and to man

when the talk runs only of Homo 1970.... But for

them, we would not even know that we are living

without what men have always had. They alone

remember and remind us; everything else encourages

us to forget and to be content. The arts teach us

to be discontent with this "world we live in"....

They remind us that we have no Gods, no sanctities

of place, no valid ceremonies to mark the seasons

of the year and the stations of our lives, and

scarcely any more the innocent realm of natural

creatures and forms.18
Carne-Ross is most assuredly not suggesting that the arts ask
us to return to the way things were--just as Fiedler, in "The
Unbroken Tradition," says of Eliot and Pound that they had no
desire to go back to the traditions which they espoused. El-
iot knows, Fiedler says, "that Americans must begin by recog—
nizing their exclusion from the organic cultural community
once the common heritage of all Europe."19 Likewise Snow
White shows no longing for the world of Grimm's Snow White.
It is simply, in Carne-Ross's words, a witness to what has
been lost. What has been lost is, from Barthelme's postmod-

ern perspective, even greater than what had been lost for

Eliot and Pound. They world in which they lived may have

76

lost touch with the old values, but at least whose values
were remembered. Barthelme lives in a world which has lost
even that memory. Snow White's poem parodically suggests
that bearing witness to this loss may be literature's only
theme and function today: "'The theme is loss, we take it.’
'What,’ she said, 'else?'"

Snow White is a witness to what is lost and its theme
is a parodic presentation of that loss. Its form might be
described as a palinode, that form of retraction mentioned
in the novel. "Perhaps it is wrong to have a favorite among
the forms," Paul reflects, "but retraction has a special al-
lure for me. I would retract everything if I could so that
the whole written world would be..." The method by which

Snow White retracts may best be understood by reference to

 

the Kierkegaard story, in which Barthelme examines the moral
implications of destructive irony. Barthelme's ironic use

of the fairy-tale in effect destroys it. Grimm's story, how-
ever "true" it may once have been, is no longer alive to to-
day's world, and Barthelme's irony, by "depriving it of its
reality," kills it off once and for all. Along the way, his
irony also retracts, by means of the travesty-allusion, wri-
ters like Eliot, Henry James and Malcolm Lowry. Then there
is his ironic treatment of contemporary rhetoric. Figura-

tively speaking Snow White retracts "the whole written world,

 

and, by association, the worlds which those words described.
It will be recalled that Kierkegaard worried about what irony

had to put in the place of what it had destroyed, and here we

77

arrive at the heart of the problem. Because he cannot offer
an alternative world, Barthelme is ironic even toward the
idea of retraction, which is to say that he retracts re—'
traction. In this sense the novel is critical of itself and V
is ultimately self-destructive.

The arts reveal, as Carne-Ross said, "something that was

once presence and is now absence."20 Snow White is a brutal,

 

relentless illustration of that principle. All of the values
which were a living presence for the world of which Grimm

wrote are shown, in Barthelme's Snow White, to be absolutely

 

absent; it "reminds us" of what has been lost. It reminds
us of what has been lost, not by sentimental longing for the
past, but by exposing the fact that we live with nothing to-
day: "100% trash." This is Barthelme's donée, that the world
is 100% trash, and the novel therefore asks to be evaluated
in terms of its trashiness--the extent to which it adheres to,
and yet resists becoming, trash. But Barthelme treats this
practice with as much irony as he treats everything else.
Anti-art, too, has become a convention, a convention even re-
spected by the middle-class: the characters in Snow White,
for instance, regard Paul's latest painting, "a dirty great
banality in white, off-white, and poor-white":

"Interesting," we said. "It's poor," Snow White

said. "Poor, poor." "Yes," Paul said, "one of

my poorer things I think." "Not so poor as yes-

terday's, poorer on the other hand than some,"

she said. "Yes," Paul said, "it has some of the

qualities of poorness." "Especially poor in the

lower left-hand corner," she said. "Yes," Paul

said, "I would go so far as to hurl it into the
marketplace." "They getting poorer," she said.

78

"Poorer and poorer," Paul said with satisfaction,
"descending to unexplored depths of poorness
where no human intelligence has ever been."
"Sublimely poor," she murmured.21
Barthelme is himself attempting to "descend to unexplored
depths of poorness where no human intelligence has ever been,"

but Snow White is also a parody, a retraction, of this prac-

 

tice. "Is there too much blague in the narration? ( ) Not
enough blague? ( L" In an age when the avant-garde impulse
is as exhausted as conservatism and tradition, the techniques
and materials of anti-art no longer constitute a significant
rebellion.

This point is important to remember in trying to under-
stand Barthelme's aesthetics. It is a mistake simply to ca-

tegorize Snow White as a New Novel or an anti-novel, as some

 

critics have done, without the qualifying observation that
his book is also a parody of the New and the "anti." §22!.
White takes itself no more seriously as anti-art than it takes
itself as art. For example, the most important characteris-
tic of the New Novel aesthetic, as described by Robbe-Grillet
and others, is its rejection of "depth." "New fiction,"
Philip Stevick writes, "presents its textures as devoid as
possible of aesthetic and philosophical depth.... There is

no clearer break than this between modernist (and late Vic-
torian) fiction and new fiction--the implicit intention to

let the surface be the meaning, let the possibility of a
symbolistic level of reference be consistently undercut..."22

wylie Sypher writes that "Like the recent scientist, the

contemporary novelist or painter detects that the ordinary,

79

the commonplace, the superficial, the quotidian is the very
mystery inaccessable to reason and explanation and method....
If the significance is on the surface, the need for depth
and explanation has gone..."23 This general characteristic
of contemporary art has resulted in a critical aesthetic,
such as Susan Sontag's, which denounces the interpretation
of works of art on the grounds that "to interpret is to im-
poverish, to deplete the world-—in order to set up a shadow
world of meanings."24 Gerald Graff is correct in observing
that suddenly it appears that the term "meaning" itself,
like "truth" and "reality," can no longer be written unless
apologized for by inverted commas.25

There is no question that Snow White is void of the

 

aesthetic and philosophic depth which characterized modern art,
that it resists the sort of meaning-mongering which modern
art lent itself to, and that, as Stevick says of new fiction
generally, it "tends to mock, subvert, and preempt any tra-
ditional attempts at critical interpretation of itself."26

But to suggest that Snow White is in any sense a program for

 

new fiction aesthetics, or that it even suggests a belief in
anti-depth and anti-meaning is to miss the fact that the
novel is as much a parody of these "new" aesthetics as it is
of modernist aesthetics. We are told explicitly to avoid
"reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in
those white spaces)." But the style here undercuts the
thrust of the assertion, is a parody of the assertion. Like-

wise, on the following page:

80

"What is that apelike hand I see reaching into
my mailbox?" "That's nothing. Think nothing
of it. It's nothing. It's just one of my
familiars mother. Don't think about it. It's
just an ape that's all. Just an ordinary ape.
Don't give it another thought. That's all
there is to it." "I think you dismiss these
things too easily Jane. I'm sure it means
more than that. It's unusual. It means

something." "No mother. It doesn't mean more
than that. Than I have said it means." "I'm
sure it means more than that Jane." "No

mother it does not mean more than that. Don't

go reading into things mother. Leave things

alone. It means what it means. Content your-

self with that mother." "I'm certain it means

more than that." "No mother.“27
To argue that Jane's position places Barthelme in Sontag's
"against interpretation" camp would be just as foolish as
arguing that the mother's insistence on meaning places Bar—
thelme in the "for interpretation" camp. The style parodies
both positions, just as the questionnaire parodies conven-
tional and avant-garde approaches at once: "Are the seven
men, in your view, adequately characterized as individuals?"
"Has the work, for your, a metaphysical dimension?" Snow
White's hair is a parody of conventional symbolism--"here is
the hair, with its multiple meanings"--but the book also
parodies the avant-garde, sophisticated notion that symbol-
izing is d3 trop. There are several bold-faced passages in
the novel which obviously mock the solemnity and heaviness of
modernist art and criticism.

THE SECOND GENERATION OF ENGLISH ROMANTIC POETS

INHERITED THE PROBLEMS OF THE FIRST, BUT COMPLI-

CATED BY THE EVILS OF INDUSTRIALISM AND POLITICAL

REPRESSION. ULTIMATELY THEY FOUND AN ANSWER NOT

IN SOCIETY BUT IN VARIOUS FORMS OF INDEPENDENCE

FROM SOCIETY:

HEROISM

ART
SPIRITUAL TRANSCENDENCE 2 8

81

These passage are balanced, however, by passages which mock
avant-garde pointlessness and triviality.

EBONY
EQUANIMITY
ASTONISHMENT
TRIUMPH
VAT
DAX
BLAGUE29

Virtually everything about the aesthetics of Snow White

 

can be regarded as, on the one hand, a conscious break with
conventional theories about art and, on the other hand, a
parody of the methods used by the avantégarde. Consider,
for instance, the now-popular rhetoric concerning the inau-
thenticity of narration--summarized here by Lionel Trilling.

A chief part of the inauthenticity of narration

would seem to be its assumption that life is sus-

ceptible of comprehension and thus of management.

It is the nature of narration to explain: it can—

not help telling how things are and even why they

are that way. "In the beginning..." But a be-

ginning implies an end, with something in the

middle to connect them. The beginning is not merely

the first of a series; it is the event that orig-

inates those that follow. And the end is not

merely the ultimate event, the cessation of hap-

pening; it is a significance or at least the

promise, dark or bright, of a significance.30
Snow White is neither a story nor an anti-story so much as
it is a parody of both. It follows the pattern of the orig-
inal fairy-tale in a highly parodic way, with all of the
characters trying and failing to fulfill their heroic des-
tinies. There is a "beginning," which is a parody of begin-
nings, with its mock description and mock exposition. There
is a "middle," with its pseudo-complications leading up to

the mock trial, and there is a questionnaire in the center.

82

There is an "end" in which Bill is hanged and Snow White is
revirginated.

But what prevents this parody of conventional story from
becoming an authentic anti-story is that it exceeds the anti-
story. Not only is there no real beginning, middle, and end,
but almost any page of the book can be re-positioned without
consequence. The point of view changes randomly in mid-para-
vgraph. The material switches from one subject to another at
the author's whim. The pages are cluttered with bits and
pieces of monumental irrelevance. If narration assumes, as
Trilling says, that life is susceptible of comprehension,

then Snow White parodies that assumption, yet also parodies

 

the assumption that life is not susceptible of comprehension.
Trilling says that endings imply "significance," and it
is this quality which most separates the structure of con-
ventional fiction from that of new fiction. The conventional
story arrives at a kind of plateau of understanding toward
which the rest of the story has worked. The tradition of
epiphany fiction, Philip Stevick writes, "values the private
and the domestic over the public and the external...it demon-
strates a belief that intuitive self-knowledge can cut through
accumulations of social ritual and self-deception, a belief
so firm that it permits the intuitive act to serve as a dra—

matic end point and structural principle...."31 Snow White

 

departs completely from the epiphanic form, and its pseudo-
complications and pseudo-climax suggest a parody of that form.

But the excessiveness of Barthelme's random, inconclusive

83

structures suggests that he is also parodying the ideas of
anti-significance and anti-epiphany. For example, the chap-
ter concerning recycling the trash of civilization treats a
theoretically serious subject, especially since it describes
the materials of Barthelme's own art. His style does deflate
the significance of this idea: "It's that we want to be on
the leading edge of the trash phenomenon, the everted sphere
of the future..." He deflates the significance of this idea
because, as mentioned earlier, the materials of anti-art have
become conventional. And yet, closer scrutiny tells us that
Barthelme does not take even his own deflation seriously.

The concluding line of the chapter, in its sublime inconse-
quentiality, is a parody even of the anti-significant style:
"Would you like a cold Coke from the Coke machine now, before
you go?"

Barthelme's most distinctive stylistic and comic tech-
nique, related to his use of continual qualification, is to
deflate anti-epiphanic syntax by exceeding it. Take a sen-
tence like, "We are going to go whole hog on this program,
to a certain extent." If he had just written "We are going
to go whole hog on this program" and stopped there, the line's
very triteness would deflate and belie the sincerity and per-
suasiveness of the statement. We would recognize the style
as parody, and recognize a disparity between the words and
the intention. The line would be clearly anti-climatic. But
to add the phrase, "to a certain extent" deflates the anti-

climax itself. The excessiveness of the style shows that the

84

anti-quality of the syntax is itself being parodied--shows
that parody is being parodied.

The height of his ambition was to tumble the

odd chambermaid now and then, whereas I have

loftier ambitions, only I don't know what

they are, exactly.32

If the graves fall open in mid-passage and

swathed forms fall out, it will be his fault,

probably.33

Paul savored the sweetness of human communication,
through the window.34

Barthelme's refusal to treat avant-garde aesthetics of
insignificance and anti-meaning with any more seriousness
than he treats modernist aesthetics of Significance and Mean-
ing can be illustrated with one final example--his use of
simile. Stevick says that the "as if" clause, as a syntactic
strategy, does not exist in new fiction because it implies
that "the empirical reality being described is rather bizarre,
sufficiently unfamiliar so that some conjectural cause must
be supplied to account whimsically for its being so bizarre.
The writer of new fiction does not know why empirical reality
is as bizarre as it is."35 Barthelme's similes, though in
one sense they parody the Eliotic, literary, high-seriousness
of evenings "spread out against the sky like a patient ether-
ized upon a table," in another sense parody the rejection of
the "as if" attitude which Stevick describes. Snow White's
imagination stirs "like the long-sleeping stock certificate
suddenly alive in its green safety-deposit box because of
renewed investor interest..." Or: a direct travesty allusion

to Eliot: "0 Jerusalem, Jerusalem! Thy daughters are burning

85

with torpor and a sense of immense wasted potential, like
one of those pipes you see in the oil fields, burning off
the natural gas that it isn't economically rational to ship
somewhere!" Barthelme's similes parody the idea that em-
pirical reality is unknowable; they are so ridiculous that
the become a parody of the idea that serious similes are no

longer possible.

Snow White's refusal to become a platform for avant-

 

garde aesthetics is part of Barthelme's larger refusal to be-
come a spokesman for New Sensibility. Earlier I discussed

his own satire of the bourgeois rhetoric of explanation. But
the revolt against explanation and meaning also became some-
what of a pop movement during the mid-1960's. This sensibility
elevated feeling over thought, the visionary over the rational,
energy over form. It was a sensibility of radical liberation
and Ecstasy, and it manifested itself in such phenomena as
Happenings, rock music, drugs, the Living Theater, in the mu-
sic and writings of John Cage, and in such writers as Ken
Kesey, Richard Farifia, Herman Hesse, and Norman Mailer. This
sensibility even developed a critical following, with Susan
Sontag, Richard Poirier, and Richard Gilman as some of the key
spokesmen.

Barthelme satirizes this sensibility, partly because it
was "new," partly because it was recognizable, but primarily
because it constitutes the dreck of contemporary society as
much as does the bourgeois rhetoric of alienation and despair.

It is a sensibility which sees itself as different, exciting,

86

and important. It sees itself as avant-garde with a duty
to shock; it takes a pose of artistic defiance, its assump-
tion being that there still exists an enemy "out there" ca-
pable of being shocked. Sontag describes "the exemplary
modern artist" as a "broker in madness," a "free lance ex-
plorer of spiritual dangers."36 Such a characterization of
the modern artist is, as Gerald Graff observes, totally out
of touch with the reality of modern America.

Bold transgressions of conventions and standards

lose their meaning in a situation in which con-

ventions and standards are routinely disregarded

to the point where no one is sure whether they

exist at all. In an age obsessed on every level

with breakthrough experimentation, and the almost

daily invention of new environments and new iden-

tities, the conception of art as a risky form of

spiritual improvisation earns little distinction.37

The techniques, then, which the avant-garde used to mock

bourgeois society Barthelme assimilates in Snow White, but

 

he turns those techniques not only upon bourgeois society
but upon the avant-garde itself, as well as upon himself.

He knows what too many self-styled avant-garde types do not
know, which is that his own "transgressions" of conventions
and standards take place within a social context which anti-
cipates, even rewards them. At the least, no one cares.

So Snow White destroys--retracts--the avant-garde as it

 

destroys everything else: the past and the present, the
fairy-tale and today's world. And finally, because it par-

odies retraction, it retracts retraction too. Snow White has

 

nothing to offer but style.

But style is what earns Snow White its distinction.

 

87

Style is what Barthelme uses to create a new actuality. The
sludge of continual qualification, the stale rhetorics, the
safe observations, the anti-climatic assertions, the pre—
tentious foreigh phrases, the worn-out symbolism and predic-
table plot structures of conventional fiction--Barthelme's
style puts all of this dreCk to work alongside some of the
elegant language of such writers as Henry James, T. S. Eliot,
the romantic prose of a long-forgotten past, and even the
pompously serious critical remarks of an age for which liter-
ature was the highest form of truth. What he makes out of
these diverse elements is something new, an intricate, fragile,
almost-beautiful design.

But Barthelme would not have been able to make this de-
sign were it not for his understanding of the social realities
of our times, and if one is going to praise the novel, it is
a mistake to praise it only for its craftsmanship and inven-
tiveness. Stevick, for instance, in writing about Borges,
Barthelme, Coover and others, says that it is possible to read
these writers "with a constant delight in the craft displayed,
with a constant sense of recognition, a feeling that the fic-
tion is, in some oddly tangential way, powerfully pertinent
to one's inner life, yet never once saying, yes, that is the
way things look and feel...that is the way we live now."38
In these writers, Stevick says, "there is a progressive lack
of interest not only in institutions, but in the very 'solid-
ity of specification' that the novel seems to need to survive."39

If Stevick were only saying that in these writers we witness

88

a departure from the mimetic and realistic impulse he would
be right, thoughiflua observation would hardly be worth making.
But what he is trying to say is that the "craft" of these
fictions is unrelated to "the way we live now." Such a state-
ment is simply untrue. How is sheer craft pertinent to one's
inner life? Stevick attempts to account for this problem
with the vague phrase "in some tangential way." In fact,
however, the "way" these writers' fictions achieve pertinence
is that their craftsmanship, their inventiveness, grows out
of a sure sense of and interest in the institutions and spe-
cific elements of society. Craftsmanship, if it is to have
an effect on our inner life, does not take place in a vacuum.
Stevick's basic error is in assuming that the more inventive,
the more fabulistic the work, the more removed it is from
social reality. A. N. Kaul, in his essay on Cooper, Melville,
Hawthorne, and Twain, claims that these writers "were all in
their different ways preoccupied with certain aspects of
social life as it was shaping itself in the America of their
times."40 Kaul admits that in comparison with the social
solidity observable in the novels of Dickens and Balzac,
Hawthorne's and Melville's approach to society would indeed
seem "attenuated and tangential." But,he argues, "the sort
of social realism which we associate with European fiction
constitutes one way of approaching reality but there is no
reason to assume it is the only way."41
The way a writer approaches reality depends upon the

nature of that reality. The realities of the 1960's in

89

America were a self-conscious middle-class society eager to
adopt the manners and methods of the avant-garde and, at the
same time, a self-conscious avant-garde deluding itself into
believing that it still served a useful purpose. The self-
conscious techniques, craftsmanship and inventiveness of
Snow White are a direct response to and a commentary upon

these social realities.

Chapter 3
The Later Stories:

The Plight of the Avant-Garde

In the summer of the show, grave robbers appeared
in the show. Famous graves were robbed, before
your eyes. Winding sheets were unwound and things
best forgotten were remembered. Sad themes were
played by the band, bereft of its mind by the
death of tradition. In the soft evening of the
show, a troupe of agoutis performed tax evasion
atop tall, swaying yellow poles. Before your
eyes.
"The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace"

Whereas Snow White's irony was primarily negative and

 

destructive--a clearing of the ground--Barthelme's work since
then has combined irony with a number of other elements, the
primary effect of which is not so much the destruction of the
world as the creation of new fictional realitie31.

Snow White is a book about language. It is not, as some

1

have said, exclusively about language, for, as noted earlier,

 

one's attitude toward the way language is used and abused is
itself an attitude toward life, toward culture. But Barthel-

me's fiction since Snow White puts language to more varied

 

and complex uses, and although irony and satire are usually
there, these are not always the dominant characteristics.

The dominant characteristic of his recent work is precisely
its elusiveness. Irony and satire often describe its effects,
but so do any number of qualities: the fantastic, sincere,

sad, journalistic, whimsical, moralistic, nostalgic. The

90

91

elusiveness resides in the tone. In Snow White'§_purity of

 

purpose, the satiric tone never falters; in the later work,
the subtle and varied tones resulting from strange combin-
ations of elements function to create fictional constructs
which allow us to view reality from different, multiple, often
bizarre perspectives. Sometimes this view is itself satiric
but often it is a view entertained only for the sake of its
strangeness or newness.

This development in Barthelme's work has taken place at
the same time that he has moved a step closer to the exper-
iential. This fact partially accounts for the peculiar
poignancy of much of the later work. There is a melancholy,
a humaneness, a sadness in many of these stories. One feels
Barthelme's presence and personal voice more immediately, the
effect of which is that the cool ironic surface often betrays
feelings of regret and moodiness. Morris Dickstein went so

far as to call City Life an "impassioned" book, and he argues

 

that Barthelme "needs a great subject, an immediate subject,
to draw him at least half-way out of his irony and aesthetic

detachment."1 Actually, Barthelme's fiction since Snow White

 

is still ironic by more than half, and "impassioned" is too
strong a term to describe Barthelme's treatment of any sub-
ject. But Dickstein is correct in observing that a great or
immediate subject affects Barthelme's treatment. It affects
it in that he allows a greater degree of actual experience to
penetrate his smooth literary surfaces. Because many of his

recent stories seem closer to experience, the irony sometimes

92

results in genuine pain--an effect never created by the

purely literary irony of Snow White, and of the stories in

 

Caligari.

The difference between Barthelme's previous work and
some of the stories discussed in this chapter is precisely
that in these later stories he treats a number of subjects
which touch him personally. The subject is itself important,
is treated with a certain respect, and it therefore provides
greater resistance to irony. Often the ironist himself be-
comes emotionally vulnerable, something which adds a new
dimension to many of these stories.

The reason "Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel" is such a
strong story is that Kierkegaard is a strong subject.
Barthelme tries to treat him ironically, but Kierkegaard
cannot be destroyed--and we recall that at the conclusion
of that piece the narrator-ironist is defeated: he has
lost his gaiety, his cool ironic detachment, and "now he
has nothing." The beauty of the story resides in the ten-
sion between the ironist and his object, and in the fact
that the ironist respects his adversary. The story is a
good example of what Barthelme can do when he is emotionally
and intellectually engaged by a subject other than his own
style. His own style is, of course, still a crucial part
of the subject of that story, but it is a subject which
must struggle to survive.

Barthelme often treats such major topics and ideas as

the disintegration of American culture, alienation, and the

93

death of the past. But, as we have seen, bent on pure
destruction, in the early work Barthelme treats these con-

cepts as clichés. In Snow White's purity of purpose, every-

 

thing is reduced to clich€Si_ and it is this quality which
gives that novel its distinctive effect. Yet the slightly
tainted purpose of many of his recent stories creates more
subtle effects. Often, the tone is so delicate that one

is uncertain whether it is ironic or not, or whether it is
both simultaneously. Moods and emotional effects are estab-
lished not through characters so much as through unusual

and provocative combinations of images, as in the passage
quoted as this chapter's epigraph. Against plausible back-
grounds, implausible, comic, surreal actions occur. Our

response is guarded, tentative. Unlike Snow White, which

 

we can sense at once is satiric from the outset, many of
the later stories do not reveal their intent until the end;
we must put together all of the pieces of the puzzle and
examine the whole picture. Even then, the finished picture
often seems, in an intriguing way, clear yet out-of-focus.
What is clear is that the elusive methods of these later
stories are indicative of Barthelme's growing concern for
and command of his craft. He is still the social satirist

he was in Caligari and Snow White, but he has combined the

 

satirist's instinct to destroy with the artist's need to
create.
Most of these later stories have a common subject—~one

with which Barthelme has been preoccupied in recent years.

94

Generally speaking, the subject is the relation between the
artist and society, or if not the artist, then the Exception-
al Man: the saint, the genius, the hero, anybody who might
represent the avant-garde. In these stories Barthelme cre-
ates intricate fictional constructs which reflect, satirize,
contradict, lament, and in general allow us to View from
various angles the predicament of art and the avant-garde
in a culture which has apparently robbed these creative
forces of their traditional functions.

It is often argued today that the avant-garde in America
is confronted with a public whose easy assimilation of, ap-
petite for, and/or invulnerability to The New has made it
impossible for the artist to perform his traditional func-
tions. It has become impossible for art to fulfill its
entertainment function, simply because the public's demand
for new forms of sensory and intellectual disorientation
has exceeded art's ability to create them. On the moral
side, it has become impossible for art to instruct, simply
because the contemporary public is morally indifferent and
incapable of moral indignation. In an age when society no
longer believes in itself, avant-gardism is simply a pos-
ture; it no longer has a radical function to perform.

In his article "The Age of the Avant-Garde"2 Kramer
contends that contrary to the romantic notions engendered
by popular history, the avant-garde belongs ineluctably to
the world of the middle-class, and is barely conceivable

apart from it. Specifically, Kramer argues that the

95

avant-garde owes its very existence to the bourgeoisie's
loyalty to its own liberalism,

to its commitment to the principle of freedom and
dissent, to its refusal to tyrannize or terrorize
its own opposition. However distasteful it may
have found the expression of that dissent, however
alarmed it became in the face of the cultural
forces arrayed against it, however panic-stricken
it occasionally was in responding to them, bourgeois
society remained more or less loyal to its liberal-
ism. And to that liberalism, which the avant-garde
so often mocked and despised, the avant-garde owed
its very existence. Only where bourgeois liber-
alism was itself destroyed-~not infrequently

with a little help from the avant-garde--did the
avant-garde suffer a brutal and enforced demise.

4

Poggioli, in The Theory of the Avant-Garde, tries to show

 

 

that the contemporary relation between the artist and soci-
ety is unique in the history of culture. He argues that
although great flowerings of art and bold innovative experi-
mentation have occurred within authoritarian societies,
their artists enjoyed a privileged condition which has
ceased to exist since the cultural revolution of romanti-
cism. This privileged condition is the absence of any

doubt on the artist's part of his public and his mission.

By definition, art produced under such conditions is not
avant-garde. Poggioli says that if one offers up the
Russian literature of the 19th century as an example of
avant-gardism flourishing under authoritarian rule, his
answer is that, first, that literature was the least roman-
tic of the century and therefore the least avant-garde; and
second, that the authoritarianism of Tsarism was ”only rela-

tive" compared to the absolute authoritarianism which fol-

lowed it in the 20th century and which erased all traces of

96

an avant-garde movement in Russia. "The avant-garde can
exist only in the type of society that is liberal-democratic
from a political point of View," he says.5 And although
Poggioli does not agree with those who claim that avant-
gardism is dead or dying today, he admits that there may be
periods when artists feel that their efforts are futile--
when society's belief in itself and its own values has so
deteriorated that it hardly presents the artist with any-
thing substantial to be alienated from. This is the situa-
tion which Kramer believes now exists. The bourgeoisie to-
day, he says, dispossessed of all its traditions, dispos-
sed of even the idea of tradition, "lies supine and demoral-
ized, awaiting the next scheduled rape of its sensibilities
with that mixture of dread and curiosity and bemused resig-
nation befitting an organism no longer in control of its
own habitat."6

The middle-class today, however, is not simply a pas-
sive body. In many respects it is itself actively anti-
bourgeois. It is fascinated with and involved in the sort
of experimental counter-cultural tendencies it once despised
and feared. It adopts "opposition" tastes, manners, dress
and ideas with ease and in wholesale dimensions. And it
creates its own art: photography, film-making, ceramics,
and pottery have become as central to middle-class life as
home-making and money-making. In such a society the term
avant-garde ceases to denote a critical perspective so much

as a characterization of a whole searching society.

97

Avant-gardism, in other words, becomes simply a styl_. It
is partly this state of affairs which has turned so many
artists to parody. Irony, for many, becomes the only pos-
sible attitude. This attitude, as we observed in "Kierkegaard
Unfair to Schlegel," creates both a liberating and paralyzing
situation.

Artists have always felt intensely their relationship
with the past, and this characteristic still separates the
avant-garde from society at large. But depending on the
individual temperaments and on the age in which they live,
some artists see the past as a source of value and strength,
something to preserve, while others see it as an oppressive
weight, something to destroy and escape from. In either
case artists, until recently, were able to measure the pres-
ent and to measure radical change itself against a back-
ground of relatively stable values, institutions, and tra-
ditions. Until recently artists were able, in other words,
to see radical disruption and disorientation dialectically.
What happens, however, when the values and traditions of a
long-ago past have been so thoroughly eroded that they are
no longer remembered? Postmodernism is the condition in
which the distinction between past and present has dissolved,
and it is precisely this state of affairs which has so
helped to trivialize the function of the avant-garde.

But the avant—garde over the past 50 years or so has
been instrumental in creating the very climate and predica-

ment in which it now finds itself. For was it not the

98

avant-garde which helped to divest the bourgeoisie of the
very traditions which are now so depleted? Not simply by
revolt and schism but by continual revision of the past.
Hilton Kramer's analysis is instructive. Like society as
a whole, the avant—garde, he says, has always been divided
into radical and conservative factions. At one extreme,
there is the intransigent radicalism which theoretically at
least cancels all debts to the past. This is the faction
(Dada, for instance) which receives the greater share of
publicity and the more immediate response. Indeed, it is
the révoltés who, for the pOpular mind, constitute the
entire avant-garde. But in fact the avant-garde has always
had a more moderate faction which champions harmony and
tradition, and it is actually this group, Kramer argues
(Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, Picasso), which provided us with the
most solid and enduring achievements of the modern era.

Ironically, however, this impulse to act as the crea-
tive conscience of tradition resulted ultimately in the
destruction of tradition. The intent of the moderate, re-
visionist faction was to rescue tradition from its "official"
bourgeois guardians who were determined to resist reconsider-
ation and revaluation at any cost. But as Kramer says,

That this effort to place tradition under the

pressure of a constant revaluation had an un-

expected effect, that it resulted, in the end,

in the virtual dissolution of any really viable

concept of tradition, is, of course, at the heart

of the situation in which we find ourselves today.

Without the bulwark of a fixed tradition, the

avant-garde finds itself deprived of its historic
antagonist. Much to its own embarrassment, it

99

finds that it has itself become tradition. With
its victory over the authority of the past com—
plete, its own raison d'etre has disappeared and
it has in fact ceased to exist except as an
imaginary enterprise engaged in combat against
imaginary adversaries.

 

The genesis of this unexpected effect may be found in
T. S. Eliot's classic statement on the relation between the
present and the past, and the relation between the contem-
porary writer and the past. Eliot argued, on the one hand,
for that historical sense which involves a perception "not
only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence." Yet
his admission that when a new work of art is created some-
thing "happens simultaneously to all the work of art which
preceded it" had implications from which he himself later
recoiled. For what "happens" is that the past is not simply
modified by the introduction of the new; the past is finally
modified to a point where it becomes unrecognizable. The
avant-garde, in its attempt to wrest tradition from the of-
ficial custodians of bourgeois culture--for whom tradition
was fixed and static--created a fluid and actually subjec—
Eiyg tradition. Eliot's tradition, Kramer says, "is a
little like Tolstoy's God: it is the name of his desire...
his general theory of culture...in practice, could only be
a highly solipistic conception of tradition."8

The social fact which Barthelme and other postmodern-
ists confront, then, is a society whose sense of past has
been so diluted that it exerts no influence. There is only

the present. Now the division in the avant-garde ranks

100

mentioned above still exists today; that is, the révoltés
vs. the revisionists. For the revoltés this social fact
of the dilution of the past is grounds for celebration.
This "healthy-minded" strain of postmodernism is found in
writers like Ken Kesey, Herman Hesse, Richard Farifia, John
Cage, in a great deal of contemporary poetry, and in such
thinkers as Herbert Marcuse, Norman 0. Brown, Leslie
Feidler, Charles Reich, and Susan Sontag. They see the
present as a vital and dynamic era, well-suited to their
quest for radical liberation, expansion of consciousness,
the release of primal energies, the greening of America.
To describe these writers as healthy—minded and optimistic
is not to say that they are without conflict; as a matter
of fact, they still see themselves in conflict with certain
traditions and institutions which they believe are not yet

dead and buried. In Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest the conflict is

 

between the healthy, liberated spirit of McMurphy and the
unhealthy, repressive spirit of Big Nurse. Mailer is more
complex but his conception of the conflict is similar: the

past, for him, as he wrote in Advertisements for Myself, is

 

a burden which prevents man from encountering new experiences

openly. Why Are We In Viet Nam is structured upon such a

 

conception: man, in order to achieve sexual and psychic
health, must free himself from the oppressive influences
of the past, which "strangle our potentiality for responding
to new possibilities which might be exciting to our indi—

vidual growth."9

101

The more moderate and traditional strain of post-
modernism--Barthelme, Barth, Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, Borges,
Nabokov--tends to be far more pessimistic and often nihil-
istic. The present for these writers is grounds not for
celebration but for cynicism. Many of them use the tech-
niques of self-parody and structural involution in order to
create a solipsistic world where human consciousness cannot
transcend its own confusion. And in Barthelme's fictions,
the loss of distinction between past and present is not only
an underlying assumption; many of his stories are directly
about this loss. That is, they are about a society which
has been so dispossessed of its past that its thoughts and
actions occur in a kind of vacuum without reference to any
of the values and traditions by which society was Once de-
fined. Lacking such definition, this new society has ob-
tained a freedom which is meaningless since it encounters
no resistance either from within or from without. It is,
in other words, a trivial freedom, identical to the trivial
freedom which the artist himself has today: freedom to in—
vent, to experiment, to play, to rage or whatever he wishes.

"The Genius" (Sadness) is one of the best examples of
Barthelme's efforts to fashion a story out of these atti-
tudes and ideas. The story is about both the mystery of
genius and the status of avant-garde thought in a society
where such thought has become institutionally funded. The
story is satiric, but not just satiric; rather, the twenty-

eight sections present a comic picture of a man who does

102

not quite know what to do or to make of himself: a man who
enjoys his immense p0pularity but despairs over his recog-
nition that society's easy accomodation of his "genius" is
at least as debilitating as the old philistine resistance
ever was.

He has urged that America be divided into four
smaller countries. America, he says, is too big.
"America does not look where it puts its foot,"

he says. This comment, which, coming from anyone
else, would have engendered widespread indignation,
is greeted with amused chuckles. The Chamber of
Commerce sends him four cases of Teacher's Highland
Cream.

The government awards the genius "a few new medals--
medals he has not previously been awarded." The genius re-
ceives flattering letters from the University of Minnesota,
asking for his papers, for which a new wing of the library
will be built. When he fails to win the Nobel Prize, the
National Foundation, "to console him...gives him a new
house." His more meaningless and harmless suggestions are
met with excessive and unwarranted enthusiasm:

The genius proposes a world inventory of
genius, in order to harness and coordinate the
efforts of genius everywhere to create a better
life for all men.
Letters are sent out...
The response is staggering!
Telegrams pour in...
Geniuses of every stripe offer their cooperation.
The Times prints an editorial praising the idea...
Three thousand geniuses in one room!
The genius falls into ill humor. He refuses to
speak to anyone for eight days.

 

The only resistance he encounters is from students who

are capable of offering up only the clichés of Marxism.

103

The students tell the genius that the concept

"genius" is not, currently, a popular one.

Group effort, they say, is more socially pro-

ductive than the isolated efforts of any one

man, however gifted. Genius, by its very

nature, sets itself over against the needs of

the many. In answering its own imperatives,

genius tends, even embraces, totalitarian

forms of social organization. Tyranny of the

gifted over the group, while bringing some

advances in the short run, inevitably produces

a set of conditions which--
In response, the genius merely "smokes thoughtfully." He
signs autographs for little boys with a smile. In answer
to a question he admits that America is "most hospitable
to genius," but he knows his function is ornamental. Thus
he suffers from "moments of self-doubt." He falls into
hysteria and ill-humor. He is paranoid. "He is a drunk."

The triviality with which Barthelme saturates the
story comes directly from the America which we all recog-
nize. It includes the "problem" of acquiring a new driver's
license, the fear of flying in a "flimsy" aircraft, the
magazine advertisements: "Why don't you become a profes-
sional Interior Decorator"; the green Sears Roebuck Tool—
box in which the genius carries his most important papers.
In one sense this passage is a comic admission that even
the genius has trivial thoughts. In a larger sense, how-
ever, the trivia provides the whole cultural context in
which the genius finds himself. Lacking a significant cul-
tural adversary, the genius has no significant function or
identity. His genius is either wasted on such practical

and humiliating projects as the "sewer system of cities,"

or even worse, it is turned inward: he wastes energy

104

attempting to define the sources of his genius. He philo-
phizes about his "work"; he fantasizes. One of the best
touches in the story occurs when, after reading Theodore

Dreiser's The Genius, the genius "gets up and looks at him-

 

self in the mirror." In a society which does not take him
seriously, or which takes him seriously for the wrong rea-
sons, he no longer knows how to take himself: "Am I really
a --" "What does it mega to be a --" "Can one refuse to be
a __n

It would be a mistake, however, to read "The Genius"
as Barthelme's diagnosis or criticism of the function of
the avant-garde in contemporary American society. The story
offers ways of looking at the situation. Each section de-
scribes one of the genius' experiences, ideas, or problems,
but Barthelme does not destroy him the way he destroys the

characters in Snow White; rather, Barthelme uses him in a

 

playfully satiric way to create a comic story which reflects
and illuminates a complicated cultural phenomenon.

A few years prior to "The Genius" Barthelme wrote a
story called "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning" (Unspeak-

able Practices, Unnatural Acts). Its form and style is

 

 

almost identical to that of "The Genius." Its subject is

also similar: the problem of the public man's relation to
himself and to the public. On the whole, "Robert Kennedy"
is a better story because Barthelme is more engaged by the
real life enigmatic figure of Robert Kennedy. What fasci-

nates Barthelme are Kennedy's fervent efforts to find

105

something which he can adhere to, believe in, act on.
Kennedy's lack of a sense of self accounts for the extra-
ordinary contradictions in his character: his spoiled rich
boy's inflated sense of self-confidence, next to his touching
and unexpected vulnerability; his extreme sensitivity (and
insensitivity) toward both the tragic and the trivial; his
role of leadership, and his child-like naiveté and curiosity
about everything. Barthelme is fascinated with Kennedy's
intensity, with his air of pent-up, volatile energy, parti-
cularly because Kennedy is so uncertain about how to put
that energy to use.

Kennedy represents an extreme instance of the predica-
ment and condition of the public man--a man whose private
self has been buried by a purely public self. He is defined
by the mood of the crowds, the need to create impressions,
the response of subordinates. The public views him as a
complex and mysterious person: "a lot of people who think
they know him well don't really know him at all." But
Barthelme, though his treatment is partly sympathetic, views
him as a man who simply does not know himself; Kennedy has
no "self" to know: "He is neither abrupt with nor exces—
sively kind to associates. Or he both abrupt and kind."
"His reactions are impossible to catalog.“

All of Kennedy's thoughts, remarks, and speeches are
philistine, and much of the story consists of Barthelme's
satiric presentation of those who surround him: the "philo-

sophical" and sentimental response of the secretaries; the

106

bartender who tells Kennedy to return to the "guest" side

of the bar; the P.R. man's air of self-importance in trying
to "set up a sitting" for Kennedy with the artist; the crowd
at the art gallery which dissolves in laughter at a Kennedy
witticism, and who "repeat the remark to one another,
laughing"; the administrative assistant recalling with awe
the time Kennedy walked in and disposed of a "really crucial"
matter "with a quick phone call. A quick phone call!"

The rest of the story depicts many of Kennedy's famil—
iar traits: he reads while maintaining "a rapid drumming
of his fingertips on the desktop." He walks "with that
familiar slight dip of the shoulders." He dresses neatly
"in a manner which does not call attention to itself." He
is compassionate and considerate, sending tulips to bed-
ridden employees, and worrying about unhappy children; he
also strikes fear in his staff. Most of Kennedy's thoughts
are trivial--"Which of you has the shirts?"--until, in the
next-to-last section, Barthelme ironically allows Kennedy
this existential rumination:

"For Poulet, it is not enough to speak of

seizing the moment. It is rather a question of,

and I quote, 'recognizing in the instant which

lives and dies, which surges out of nothingness

and which ends in dream, an intensity and depth

of significance which ordinarily attaches only

to the whole of existence.‘

"What Poulet is describing is neither an

ethic nor a prescription but rather what he has

discovered in the work of Marivaux. Poulet has

taken up the Marivaudian canon and squeezed it

with both hands to discover the essence of what

may be called the Marivaudian being, what Poulet
in fact calls the Marivaudian being.

 

107

"The Marivaudian being is, according to Poulet,
a pastless futureless man, born anew at every in-
stant. The instants are points which organize
themselves into a line, but what is important is
the instant, not the line. The Marivaudian being
has in a sense no history. Nothing follows from
what has gone before. He is constantly surprised.
He cannot predict his own reaction to events. He
is constantly being overtaken by events. A con-
dition of breathlessness and dazzlement surrounds
him. In consequence he exists in a certain fresh-
ness which seems, if I may say so, very desirable.
This freshness Poulet, quoting Marivaux, describes
very well."13

 

What Barthelme is doing here is allowing Kennedy to
describe himself (or, more accurately, his lack of self).
The style makes clear that for Barthelme the idea expressed
is nonsense. The comic repetition of the phrase "Marivaudian
being" drains it of meaning, as does the fact that the quo-
tation is so far removed from its source: Kennedy quoting
Poulet quoting Marivaux. For Barthelme, there is no
Marivaudian "being."

Despite the irony, Barthelme's treatment is not nega-
tive. He allows Kennedy's compassion, vulnerability, and
loneliness to penetrate the flat presentation, and the re-
sult is an intriguing portrait. When the story was first

published in the New American Review in April, 1968, the

 

NAR editors commented that the story "reverses the much noted
trend from fiction to journalism by raising the materials of
reportage to a more subtle level of imagination."14 This

is an interesting comment, more interesting, in fact, if

one uses it to describe a dominant characteristic of

Barthelme's work rather than the technique of this one story.

108

William Gass, in his review of Unspeakable Practices, 92:

 

natural Acts, dismissed the Kennedy story for descending to

 

the level of journalism, and he praised such stories as "The
Indian Uprising" and "The Balloon" for the way Barthelme

15 But Gass

transformed the materials of dreck into poetry.
was too quick in his judgment. The Kennedy story also trans-
forms dreck into poetry, and Gass overlooked the important
function of the materials of reportage in all of Barthelme's
work. One of the main strengths of his work is the way it

is rooted in the social realities of the age. Barthelme is
an acute observer, with an eye for the small detail which
best represents the general pattern. He is more than a re-

porter, of course, but he is a reporter. The dusk jacket

on Guilty Pleasures states that it is Barthelme's "first

 

book of non-fiction," but in fact the pieces in that book
are neither more nor less "fictional" than Barthelme's work
has ever been. Like "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning,"

some of the pieces in Guilty Pleasures seem, in a super—

 

ficial way, more closely to resemble journalism.

As NAR observes, Barthelme raises the materials of re-
portage to a more subtle level of the imagination. No
strictly journalistic treatment would have had Kennedy
quoting Poulet. And the final section of the story, in which
the author steps in and "saves" Kennedy from drowning, takes
us far from the world of journalistic truth deep into an
imaginative terrain where reality and fantasy are blurred,

where meaning is always obscure. Yet the event is described

109

with the precision of good reporting. "I throw a line, the
coils leaping out over the water. He has missed it. No, it
appears he has it. His right arm (sword arm) grasps the
line.... I am on the bank, the r0pe around my waist braced
against a rock." Why the narrator envisions saving Kennedy
is not clear; perhaps Barthelme is speculating on how

Kennedy would respond. If so, Kennedy's simple, "Thank you"
seems just the right response: correct, slightly embarrassed,
in control.

"Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning" is a strong story
because Barthelme is engaged by a subject which he treats
with a careful blend of realistic description and fanciful
invention. Kennedy is not destroyed by Barthelme's irony;
rather he is preserved in a tight portrait which captures
the reasons why Kennedy was loved and hated, why he was
strong and weak, and why he still incites both admiration
and contempt. The story was published only three months
before Kennedy's death, and there have since been thousands
of words written about him attempting to capture what
Barthelme's story achieves in a few pages.

Because of something that has happened to the world,
because of innumerable changes which have taken place in
the world, men, myths, ideas, and forms which once had a
clear meaning and function are today confused, useless, hope-
lessly anachronistic. That assumption underlies the pre-
ceding stories and much of Barthelme's fiction of the past

ten years. In "The Phantom of the Opera's Friend"

110

(City Life) Barthelme pays a visit to this former hero to

 

see how he is faring (just as he had paid a previous visit
to Batman and Robin). But whereas Batman and Robin seemed
unaware of the changes that had taken place, The Phantom of
the Opera is overwhelmed with a world which is too much for
him; he has been the Phantom of the Opera for forty years.
In the beginning he had been smitten with the violent emo-
tions of jealousy and revenge, but these are replaced today
by a deep, all-pervading melancholy. He has grown indeci-
sive, uncertain "whether to risk life aboveground or to re-
main forever in hiding, in the cellars of the Opera." All
of his remarks smack of alienation and self-consciousness:
"Our behavior is mocked by the behavior of dogs." "All men
that are ruined are ruined on the side of their natural pro-
pensities." "One hundred million cells in the brain! All
intent on being the phantom of the Opera."

The most inventive strategy of the story is Barthelme's
creation of the Phantom's "friend." The Phantom's remem-
brance of the rich past, his inability to live in the pres-
ent, is in sharp contrast with his friend's easy comfort
with the paraphanalia of modern life. He tries to tell the
phantom that "normal existence is still possible for him...
a home, even marriage and children are not out of the ques-
tion." When the Phantom falls into one of his deep despairs,
the friend grows irritated: "Why must I have him for a
friend. I wanted a friend with whom one could be seen

abroad. With whom one could exchange weekends on our

111

:respective estates." Finally, though the phantom considers
:for a moment attempting normal life, he cannot bring himself
'to»do so. Like Snow White, Batman and Robin, and King Kong
("The Party"), the phantom is too fragile a creature to sur-
xrive in a world cut off from myth, the past, and the values
which supported heroism.

How would a saint fare in such a world, assuming there
Inere saints around and that one of them paid an extended
‘visit to a representative American city, population 100,000,
(circa 1970? That is the question Barthelme poses in "The
'Temptation of St. Anthony" (Sadness).

Yes, the saint was underrated quite a bit,

then, mostly by people who didn't like things

that were ineffable. I think that's quite under-

standable--that kind of thing can be extremely

irritating, to some peOple. After all, every-

thing is hard enough without having to deal

with something that is not tangible and clear.

The higher orders of abstraction are just a

nuisance, to some pe0ple....And some were

actually angry at the idea of sainthood--not

at the saint himself, whom everyone likes,

more or less, except for a few, but about

the idea he represented, especially since it

was not in a book or somewhgre, but actually

present, in the community.1
As even this passage reveals, the story is narrated by a
man whom the media and the world of advertising would con-
sider perfectly normal, a man who conceives of himself as
a bit more liberal and tolerant than his neighbors. As
a whole, the community's response to the saint consists of
slight irritation and prurient curiosity. They wish he

would "go out and get a job." Some people said the saint

"thought he was better than other people." One man tries

112

to lure the saint into a business deal, promising "to throw
the account your way." Everyone wonders excessively about
the saint's sex life. Considering the astonishing fact of
saintliness and the idea of the ineffable, their response is
wholly trivial. Cut off from any of the values which in the
past nourished the idea of saintliness, they are incapable
of an appropriate response. Like the Phantom, the Saint is
too fragile to survive in such a world, and at the end he
moves out to the desert.

A brief but exquisite story which treats the same sub-

ject is "On Angels" (City_Life). Its blunt beginning says

 

volumes about "what has happened" to the world: Not if
God were dead, but "The death of God left the angels in a
strange position." It is one thing to use the Godless .
universe as a backdrop as writers have been doing since
Nietzsche, but it is quite another thing to refer to God's
death casually in a sentence where it is not even the most
important element. The most important element here is the
"strange position" the angels now find themselves in. That
this anti-climatic, even trivial, academic problem should
be the main subject of inquiry makes even more dramatic the
casualness with which God's death has been accepted.

So Barthelme, in a professorial manner perfectly suited
for the occasion, proceeds to examine the angels' former
function, which was rooted in their clear sense of identity,
and their current search for a new function and a new iden-

tity now that God is gone. He comically quotes learned,

113

scholarly works, such as Gustav Davidson's "useful Diction—

ary of Angels" and Joseph Lyon's The Psychology of Angels.

 

However, what these scholars had to say about angels "no
longer obtains." What obtains now is that in their new,
confused condition, angels resemble men, and of course
Barthelme's story is not about angels at all; it is about
man, about man's brilliant, foolish, comic, and continual
efforts to define and to justify his own existence. And
while the tone is satiric, the intent is not negative or
destructive; rather the story is an imaginative exercise,
in which Barthelme makes a little game out of one of man's
endless and most ambitious enterprises.

While "On Angels" is a strictly intellectual piece, a
number of stories treats the subjects of loss and confusion,
of the relation between the artist and society, with satire
as well as with nostalgia and sentiment. "At the Tolstoy

Museum" (City Life) is an interesting blend of the satiric

 

and the serious, and, with a variety of devices, the story
strikes at least three attitudes: it satirizes a greedy
public which bastardizes art and lionizes literary giants;
it satirizes Tolstoy's assumption of "moral authority" (and
by implication the modernists' grand conception of the value
and function of art); and it suggests envy for what he (and
the modernists) were able to achieve.

As the title suggests, Tolstoy has become a museum-
piece, a capitalistic commodity to feed the art—hungry,

emotion-hungry masses. Size and quantity are everything:

 

114

"The holdings of the Tolstoy museum consist principally of
some thirty thousand pictures of Count Leo Tolstoy." The
museum itself is immense, consisting of "many stones" and
three levels of "increasing size." In the basement are
“huge crates" of new Tolstoy pictures. Inside the museum
are "tiny pictures of Turgenev, Nebrasov, and Fet...along-
side extremely large pictures of Count Leo Tolstoy." There
are "741 Sunday visitors" who regard "the 640,086 pages
(Jubilee Edition) of the author's published work.“ Barthelme
has used ten photographs and engravings to illustrate the
story, and these too satirize size. One picture is almost
a full-page photo of Tolstoy's head, made to look all the
larger because below this picture is a tiny picture of a
full-sized boy. Another picture is entitled "Tolstoy's
Coat," in which the coat is ten times larger than the peo-
ple observing it. In the museum's plaza is a picture of
Tolstoy's "monumental head."

The public's response to Tolstoy's "moral authority"
consists of various forms of bourgeois self-indulgence. The
visitors complain that the pictures are "placed too high on
the wall." They eat sandwiches and listen to lectures "by
eloquent speakers, who were probably right." They know
selected details from Tolstoy's biography:

Tolstoy means "fat" in Russian. His grandfather

sent his linen to Holland to be washed. His

mother did not know any bad words. As a youth

he shaved off his eyebrows, hoping they would

grow back bushier. He first contracted gonor-

rhea in 1847. He was once bitten on the face
by a bear. He became a vegetarian in 1885.

 

115

To make himself interesting, he occasionally
bowed backward.

But most of all the visitors weep. "Even the bare title

of a Tolstoy work, with its burden of love, can induce
weeping." People stand before various articles, weeping.
Guards carry buckets of clean, white handkerchiefs, because,
"more than any other museum, the Tolstoy museum induces
weeping." And yet, at the story's end, the narrator is
still not satisfied. All of this quantity--of building,

of man, of weeping--and he is not satisfied. He is still
waiting for "something vivifying" to happen to him.

On the one hand, then, "At the Tolstoy Museum" satir-
izes the sentimental, indulgent public. On the other hand,
and equally important, Barthelme's story makes a satiric'
comment on the profound difference between his own and
Tolstoy's art--which is a difference not simply of quality
but of intention. Tolstoy used the novel to achieve those
very intense emotional effects which Barthelme's irony
prohibits. Tolstoy's art could induce the same weeping
which Barthelme satirizes and which he refuses to indulge.
There is a touch of envy and nostalgia in the story, but
the satire is hardly negative; though Barthelme may not be
able to do what Tolstoy did, his story stands as a reminder
of an idea which emerges again and again in his work: that
there are, as he says in "Daumier," "always openings, if
you can find them, there is always something to do."

This spirit is struck again in "The Flight of Pigeons

116

from the Palace“ (Sadness). The ostensible assumption of
the story is that there is nothing art can do today to
satisfy or to shock the satiated‘ public. In effect, the
story says there is nothing in the past, present, or future
of the world, no human effort, no natural phenomenon, no
concept or miracle that can satisfy the public's appetite
for long. In a satiric effort to support this notion,
Barthelme creates a "show" which includes an abandoned pal-
lazzo requiring years of refurbishing; an "amazing numbered
man," a "Sulking Lady."

The lineup for opening night included"
A startlingly handsome man

A Grand Cham

A tulip craze

The Prime Rate

Edgar Allen Poe

A colored light18

Despite these and numerous other acts, "there was faint
applause," and the story concludes:

It is difficult to keep the public interested.

The Public demands new wonders piled on new
wonders.

Often we don't know where our next marvel is
coming from.

The supply of strange ideas is not endless.

The development of new wonders is not like the
production of canned goods. Some things appear to
be wonders in the beginning, but when you become
familiar with them, are not wonderful at all.
Sometimes a seventy-five foot highly paid cacode-
mon will raise only the tiniest frisson. Some
of us have even thought of folding the show--
closing it down. ’That thought has been gliding
through the hallways and rehearsal rooms of the
show. The new volcano we have jfst placed under
contract seems very promising... 9

A few years ago Robert Coover wrote a story called

"The Hat Act," in which a magician's increasingly

117

astonishing "hat act" is greeted by applause, then by in-
ordinately high expectations, then--after such expectations
are satisfied—-hissing and booing. Both Barthelme and
Coover are trying to provide conceptual equivalents to the
"marvels" which the public demands, and Barthelme's use of
engravings in "The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace" is
partly a parody of the attempt to satisfy this demand. The
artist today knows that the public would be bored by a real
volcano or by a real anything. In this sense the story, as
in "At the Tolstoy Museum," is a parody of what today's
artists will no longer even try to do.

But though "The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace" may
not keep the public interested for long, the real irony of
the story is, again, that Barthelme does in fact create a
kind of marvel--and the marvel is not simply in the parody:

In the summer of the show, grave robbers appeared

in the show. Famous graves were robbed, before

your eyes. Winding sheets were unwound and things

best forgotten were remembered. Sad themes were

played by the band, bereft of its mind by the death

of tradition. In the soft evening of the show, a

troupe of agoutis performed tax evation 350p tall,

sway1ng yellow poles. Before your eyes.
The reason these lines are moving is difficult to define,
but the effects do not result purely from irony or parody.
It is the elusive tone which gives us pause: is the show
comic or fantastic? Or, if fantastic, comically so? Our
response is tentative, but the writing, the unusual combina-
tions of words and images, is powerfully suggestive. Like-

wise, some of the engravings are unquestionably humorous,

but there is something sad about the Sulking Lady, who shows

 

“1.;

 

118

us only her back. "That was the way she felt.... She had
felt that way since she was four years old." The engraving
called "My Father Concerned about his Liver" is both funny
and sad. As was said earlier, it is often impossible to
know, for sure, in these later stories what is irony and
what is not. The line "It is difficult to keep the public
interested," as well as the whole concluding section, is
ironic, given the extraordinary "show" put on in the public's
behalf. But the conclusion is also a poignant statement of
fact: it is difficult to keep the public interested; the
supply of strange ideas is no; endless. Barthelme's achieve-
ment is that in "The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace" he
was able to hold our interest, temporarily at least, with

one more strange idea.

"The Balloon" (Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts)

 

 

is a similar kind of achievement. Its subject is again the
relation between the artist and society, and in particular
the triangular relationship of the artist, his public, and
the 92135 d'ait. In addition, the story tests the relevance
of an established literary convention-—that of the work of
art as love-gift.

The narrator-artist has created an immense balloon,
forty-five blocks long, six crosstown blocks wide; the pur-
pose of his narration is to describe the effects of the bal-
loon on various members of the public and on his mistress.
The artist is extremely sensitive about their various re-

sponses, and his tone--flatand professorial--seems at first

119

comically inappropriate to the immensity of his creation.
Barthelme's point is that for the public the balloon is just
another marvel, and his description of their collective at-
titude toward it is fine social satire.

There were reactions. Some people found the
balloon "interesting." As a response this seemed
inadequate to the immensity of the balloon, the
suddenness of its appearance over the city; on the
other hand, in the absence of hysteria or other
societally-induced anxiety, it must be judged a
calm, "mature" one. There was a certain amount
of initial argumentation about the "meaning" of
the balloon; this subsided, because we have
learned not to insist on meanings, and they are
rarely even looked for now, except in cases in-
volving the simplest safest phenomena.

This is playfully malicious irony. The simple sentence
"There were reactions" perfectly catches the spirit of the
whole piece: not "There were strong reactions," not even
"Everybody reacted." Likewise, the second sentence: "Some
people found the balloon 'interesting.'" That is all. The
response is, of course, too calm, too "mature." And the
lack of concern for "meaning" is not the sort of philosophi-
cal or aesthetic corrective for which many artists stand
today; rather, this is a fear of meaning. It is easier to
trivialize the balloon, to hang "green and blue paper lan-
terns" from the underside, or to leave it to children.

The public's trivialization of the balloon is basically
what the rest of the story is about. The official bureau-
cratic attitude is predictably one of tolerance. City of-
ficials would have preferred, naturally, if the balloon had

a more practical function--if, say, the words "18% more ef-

fective" were written somewhere on its surface, but they

120

still adhere to remnants of the old liberalism, enough so
that they will not publically demand the balloon's destruc-
tion or removal. The citizens themselves simply become
accustomed to the balloon's presence, and they use it in a
vulgar way. Some men see it as an "imposture," something

in the way. Others see it as a kind of reward; still others
use it as the basis for their fantasies. Everyone uses it
for social reasons, in the same way that peOple read and
discuss best sellers or meet at the theater. "People began,
in a curious way, to locate themselves in relation to aspects
of the balloon: I'll meet you at that place where it dips
down..." And the scholars respond as scholars are expected
to respond: "Critical opinion was divided."

As for the artist himself, he too acts out a role which
is a parody of the artist's role. He "cannot reveal" the
point at which the balloon began. He objects to the notion
that his balloon is simply a "situation," i.e., simply a
formula, much in the way Eliot objected to the notion that

The Waste Land spoke for the despair of a generation. The

 

artist seems not to mind that children enjoy his creation,
but he cautions: "...the purpose of the balloon was not

to amuse children." He could have satisfied city officials
by offering some slogan-meaning for the balloon, but "I

could not bear to do so." It is not until the very end,
however, that we are given an explanation for the artist's
typically touchy attitude toward his work, and here the story

achieves its best, its most consciously literary moment.

121

I met you under the balloon, on the occasion

of your return from Norway; you asked if it was

mine; I said it was. The balloon, I said, is a

spontaneous autobiographical disclosure, having

to do with the unease I felt at your absence,

and with sexual deprivation, but now that your

visit to Bergen has been terminated, it is no

longer necessary or appropriate. Removal of

the balloon was easy; trailer trucks carried

away the depleted fabric, which is now being

stored in West Virginia, awaiting some other

time of unhappiness, sometime, perhaps, when

we are angry with one another.2
The balloon, then, turns out to be a love-gift, and the story
itself a parody of the artist-lover's "all-for-you" plaint.
The way in which Barthelme has updated this literary conven—
tion underlines what was said earlier about the marginal role
to which art today has been relegated. The artist/lover has,
in the first place, given her this gift, not because of some
high and noble emotion like romantic love, but because of
his "unease" and his "sexual deprivation." And she herself
is not ineffably flattered as her Elizabethan counterpart
would have been. She simply "asked if it was mine." She
has, undoubtedly, received numerous other love-gifts; she
is tired of them. The balloon, for her, is just another
marvel. Yet the story must not be oversimplified; it would
be wrong to suggest that "The Balloon" can be reduced to
a statement or criticism about the marginal role of art.
Rather the story simply accepts this state of affairs, builds
upon it, and uses it to create new possibilities for fiction.

The contemporary artist cannot, like Tolstoy, presume

"moral authority” and induce widespread weeping; he cannot

create a "show" with erupting volcanos, as did the artist

lll

122

in "The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace"; nor can he create
enormous balloons. The public, being imperturbable, has a
capacity to accomodate anything, and today's art, Barthelme
implies, must reflect this fact. Nevertheless, there are
artists, or would-be artists, who still seem unaware of this
situation, who still view their relationship with the public
in terms which, for Barthelme, have no connection with the
realities of the age. A number of his stories are built upon
this idea.

In "The Angry Young Man" (Guilty Pleasures) he sets out

 

to capture and to expose whatever pretensions to anger a
writer today may claim. Anger, we learn, has become so
totally assimilated and institutionalized that the expres-
sion "an'gry young man" has achieved the humiliating respect-
ability of inclusion in the Random House Dictionary of the
English Language:

1. (often cap.) one of a group of British writers

since the late 1950's whose works reflect strong

dissatisfaction with, frustration by, and rebellion
against tradition and society.

2. any author writing in this manner. 3. any

frustrated, rebellious person.

The angry young man is then defined by his clothing:
"Brown corduroy pants, a black turtleneck sweater, work
shoes, coonskin cap, glass of porter in his right hand. Or,
dark blue suit, black shoes, white shirt, maroon tie--this
worn when receiving the Order of the British Empire or other

honors." The angry young man is also defined by the predict-

ability of his revolutionary ideals--at which point Barthelme

123

simply includes a hefty chunk of Fidel Castro's revolutionary
jargon. Finally, the angry young man can be defined accord-
ing to the "characteristics of the Angry Young Book":

The angry young book should be a good true book of
a familiar and reliable pattern. It should concern
itself with human emotions of standard issue plus
at least one (1) nonstandard emotion for seasoning
and piquancy. It should extend to a good number
of pages and said pages should hold a full body

of printing both recto and verso, the lines so
arranged as to come out even at the right-hand
margin, save at the termination of paragraphs

and the like. It should have a good true spine

to which the pages are attached by sewing and a
strong glue, and no page should fly out of the
whole save by prior arrangement, as when the
author is especially angry. The same should
reflect strong dissatisfaction with, frustration
by, and rebellion against tradition and society.
The book should, ideally, burn the hands--a
third-degree burn.

In a world where angry artists have become as institu-
tionalized as bankers, they will of course hold an Annual
Meeting, at which "voices are raised in anger." At such
a meeting it is likely that self-conscious, theoretical ques-
tions about the nature of anger will be raised, such as:

"(1) Is fresh ever-renewed anger possible? (2) How long
(expressed in decades) can anger be maintained without mod-

ulating into, say, pique? (3) Was it originally pique, made

 

to seem anger by skilled dramaturgy?"

Barthelme's story mocks whatever claims to seriousness,
meaning, and significance the angry artist has for the world
of today. During the mid and late 1950's, when the group
of British authors for whom the label was contrived were

writing, society still provided some token resistance to

124

artistic outrage. But now, confronting a public bereft of
any felt social or historical context, the angry young man
is free to vent all the anger he can muster. This freedom
is something of a curse, part of the very dilemma the avant-
garde finds itself in today. And the story succeeds in de-
lineating one of the main differences between the fifties
and the sixties. The fifties was still a period of a pre-
self-consciousness. Authentic anger still seemed possible.
The question Barthelme half-jokingly asks, "Is there any
point in being an angry gig man?," says as much about the
growth of self-consciousness and the aging of a society as
it does about the growth and old-age of an artist.

"A Film" (Sadness) satirizes the current excesses and
high seriousness surrounding that genre. The director il-
lustrates a host of artistic pretensions, and the story ex-
poses him for what he is--a self-indulgent bourgeois con-
cerned primarily with his own image and career. "Things
have never been better," he begins, "except that the child,
one of the stars of our film, has just been stolen by van-
dals, and this will slow down the progress of the film some-
what, if not bring it to a halt." But the director is a
clever man! He decides that this incident should be made
part of the story line. The film is entitled "Flying to
America," and its theme is nothing less than The American
Experience. "Self-improvement is a large theme in Flying
to America. Nowhere is self-realization more a possibility

than in America."

125

The narrator-director hires Ezra to help him direct the
film. Ezra is virtually a card-carrying member of the avant-
garde:

"And is it not the case," Ezra said, when we

first met, "that I have been associated with the

production of nineteen major motion pictures of

such savage originality, scalding verité, and honey-

warm sexual indecency that the very theaters chained

their doors rather than permit exhibition of these

Ezagzdmotion pictures on their ammonia-scentgg gum-

prem1ses. And 13 it not the case...
For the most part the director is pleased with Ezra, and
with the various "sequences" of the film. He is particularly
pleased with the sequence on the moon rocks, which were "the
greatest thing we had ever seen in our entire lives!" But
he is also saddened by what his film will not contain. "I
wanted to film everything," he says, "but there are things
we are not getting. The wild ass is in danger in Ethopia--
we've got nothing on that. We've got nothing on intellectual
elitism funded out of public money, an important subject."
Though he laments these and other omissions, the director
concludes in a burst of self-satisfaction when he realizes
that the vandals will be caught. "Truth! That is another
thing they said our film wouldn't contain. I had simply
forgotten about it, in contemplating the series of triumphs
that is my private life."

The film which this director has put together seems
like something which has literally been "put together."

The various sequences, though unrelated to each other, are

supposed to be related to the film's central theme of the

American experience. Of course we have seen numerous movies

126

edited according to this cut and paste method, and Barthelme
is more or less parodying this technique. But the construc-
tion of the story is itself of the cut and paste variety.
"A Film," as it appears in Sadness, is actually the product
of pieces of previously "whole" stories. Barthelme wrote

a story called "A Film" for the New Yorker several years ago;

 

it was less than half the length of the current story; while
none of it has been omitted, it has been broken up and
spliced together with inserts from a story called "Flying to
America," which was also published separately in the Neg
Yorker; the section on the moon rocks was previously unpub-
lished. Thus, the final version of "A Film" is itself a
patch and paste job, and an example of how Barthelme's art
takes the shape of what it mocks. Barthelme had parodied
this approach in a much earlier story called "See the Moon"

(Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts), which also pokes

 

fun at using the materials of dreck. The narrator of the
story points to the wall of his room on which are pinned
such souvenirs as a red hat, a book of ant farm instructions,

a traffic ticket. He says:

It's my hope that these...souvenirs...will
someday merge, blur--cohere is the word, maybe--
into something meaningful. A grand word, meaning-
ful. What do I look for? A work of art, I'll
not accept anything less. Yes I know it's shat-
teringly ingenuous but I wanted to be a painter.
They get away with murder in my view....They can
pick up a Baby Ruth wrapper on the street, glue
it to the canvas (in the ri ht place, of course,
there's that), and lo! peopIe crowd about and
cry, "A real Baby Ruth wrapper, by God, what
could be realer than that!" 6

127

Several reviewers of Barthelme's work have cited this
passage to support their contention that it is a statement
of his own creative technique. But the passage really sug-
gests the way in which Barthelme manages to use, and yet to
outdistance, the dreck of much contemporary art--as discussed

in Snow White.

 

Hilton Kramer said of previous avant-garde movements
that the réyglté strain achieved a more immediate response
and popularity than the moderate strain, and the same is
true today. The writers of celebration and liberation have
had an astonishing influence on much of the cultural and
artistic activity in this country since the mid-sixties.

But perhaps the more moderate and traditional faction will
turn out to have the most enduring influence after all, and
thereby establish that critical and historical perspective
which the more popular strain is not providing. This need
becomes increasingly important as traditional values recede
further and further from memory. Barthelme most assuredly
does not "stand for" or affirm any particular tradition as
Eliot did; but he does possess what Eliot called the histori-
cal sense, and he uses it to expose the mere presentness of
contemporary American society.

One of the central facts of this mere presentness is
an obsession with self. Postmodern man's almost exclusive
interest in and indulgence of the self, his reduction of
everything to the self has, ironically, helped to trivialize

the self. In the self's inability to attach itself to any

 

I I'll
411'

128

tradition, institution, or myth, it loses stature. We are
a society whose largest purpose is self-fulfillment. In
attempting to thrust the self into a position of absolute
importance we have diminished its importance. The révolté
strain of postmodernism would undoubtedly disagree with such
a diagnosis, since celebration of self and self-liberation
are its persistent themes. The title of Richard Poirier's
book, The Performing Self, not to mention its content, is
indicative of this group's general position. Poirier, for
instance, confesses to a highly qualified admiration for
the writing of Jorge Luis Borges:

...Borges is for my taste too little concerned

with the glory of the human presence within the

wastes of time, with human agencies of invention,

and he is too exclusively amused by the careers

of competing systems, the failed potencies of

techniques and structures. We remember the point

of his texts, especially since it is so often the

same point, but he gives us few people to remem-

ber or care about. Our greatest invention so

far remains ourselves, what we call human beings,

and enough inventing of that phenomenon still

goes on to make the destiny of persons altogether

more compelling in literature than the destiny of

systems or of literary modes.27
For writers like Barthelme, Borges, and a number of other
postmodernists in possession of a historical sense, Poirier's
"glory of the human presence," and the compelling "destiny
of persons" strikes of naive anachronism. Poirier attri-
butes his criticism of Borges to "taste," but read closely

we see that it amounts to a fundamental disagreement with

Borges' vision of man and the world.

Though he does not say so, what Poirier is finally

objecting to is the dehumanization of art which Ortega y

129

Gasset long ago cited as the central tendancy of the avant-
garde art of his time. As dehumanization increases so does
concern for the mechanical, the scientific. Barthelme's

"The Glass Mountain" (City Life), for instance, is a story

 

written in 100 numbered sentences. To object, as some re-
viewers have, to the mechanical quality of the story is not
simply to quarrel with its technique; it is to quarrel with
its subject-matter as well, since what Barthelme is doing is
showing how the literary convention of the quest, once so
fertile and dynamic, must be severely attenuated for adap-
tation to today's world. The convention was developed over
the centuries as a vehicle for exploring and defining man's
courageous striving after beauty and truth. But in an age
when beauty, truth and courage have long since been forgotten
in favor of self-fulfillment, the convention of the quest
survives as a form without any adequate content. Barthelme's
parodic use of the convention thus places contemporary soci-
ety within a perspective, and his mechanical emphasis on
technique parallels this society's elevation of the technical
over the substantial. But the story offers a judgment of
technique. Poggioli claims that what triumphs in avant-garde
art is not so much technique but "technicism"-—in which tech-
nique invades spiritual realms where technique has no raison
e'etie. Technicism is a revolt against "the reduction of
nonmaterial values to the brute categories of the mechanical

"28

and the technical. As in Barthelme's other stories, of

course, the element of self-parody in "The Glass Mountain"

130

cancels out any suggestion that the story is a statement of
belief.

Barthelme's main approach is to combine the invasion of
the scientific and mechanical into all areas of modern life

with man's habits of self-obsession. In "Game" (Unspeakable

 

Practices, Unnatural Acts), the two characters are the prod-

 

 

uct of a country which reduces humanity to military/mechan-
ical dimensions. These two characters have only a flicker
of human spirit left. Stationed in an underground missle
installation "in Utah, Montana, or Idaho," the two men have
been there 133 days, "owing to an oversight," with no know-
ledge of how long they have to stay. "I suspect the only
way they can persuade sun-loving creatures into their pale
green sweating reinforced concrete walls is to say that the
system is twelve hours on, twelve hours off," the narrator
reflects. But his natural desires have so eroded that now
he longs only to get his hands on Shotwell's ball and jacks,
and to keep from being shot. Barthelme's style captures
perfectly the rigid, mechanical quality of his mind:

Each of us wears a .45 and each of us is sup-
posed to shoot the other if the other is behaving
strangely. How strangely is strangely? I do not
know. In addition to the .45 I have a .38 which
Shotwell does not know about concealed in my
attache case, and Shotwell has a 125 calibre
Beretta which I do not know about strapped to
his right calf. Sometimes instead of watching
the console I pointedly watch Shotwell's .45,
but this is simply a ruse, simply a maneuver,
in reality I am watching his hand when it
dangles in the vicinity of his right calf.
Similarly Shotwell pretends to watch my .45
but he is really watching my hand resting idly
atop my attaché case, my hand resting idly atop

131

my attache case.29

In "Report" (Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts),

 

technique has achieved awesome triumphs. The narrator, whose
group is against the war, visits the engineers in Cleveland.
"I was supposed to persuade them not to do what they are go-
ing to do." At the meeting he observes hundreds of bone
fractures. He speaks with the Chief Engineer, who tells him
of a "few new marvels" they have invented, such as computer-
controlled wish evaporation, which is "going to be crucial in
meeting the rising expectations of the world's peoples..."

"I intuit your hatred and jealousy of our things,"

he said. "The ineffectual always hate our thing'

and speak of it as anti-human, which is not at all

a meaningful way to speak of our thing. Nothing

mechanical is alien to me," he said...
The engineer concludes by insisting that although they could
employ all of their sophisticated technology, their moral
sense, which is on punched cards, is the most technically

advanced moral sense the world has ever known.

In "Paraguay" (Citnyife), Barthelme creates a country

 

where the technical controls every aspect of human and nat-
ural life. The government of Paraguay controls its inhab-
itants' activity by controlling the temperature. ”For in-
stance, males move twice as fast at 60 degrees as they do
at 35 degrees." Sexual intercourse occurs only between 66
and 69 degrees. Silence is sold in paper sacks. Creative
misunderstanding is crucial. Everyone has the same finger-
prints. Certain "technical refinements" have been made in

Paraguay's sexual life, "intended to complicate and enrich"

132

this activity. Finally, Paraguay has solved the "problem
of art."

New artists have been obtained. ,These do not object
to, and indeed argue enthusiastically for, the ra-
tionalization process. Production is up. Quality
control devices have been installed at those points
where the interests of artists and audience intersect.
Shipping and distribution have been improved out of
all recognition.... The rationalized art is dis-
patched from central art dumps to regional art dumps,
and from there into the lifestreams of cities. Each
citizen is given as much art as his system can tol-
erate. Marketing considerations have not been allowed
to dictate product mix; rather, each artist is en-
couraged to maintain, in his software, highly per-
sonal, even idiosyncratic, standards (the so-called
"hand of the artist" concept). Rationalization
produces simpler circuits and, therefore, a saving
in hardware. Each artist's product is translated
into a statement in symbolic logic. The statement

is translated back into the design of a simpler
circuit. Foamed by a number of techniques, the art
is then run through heavy steel rollers. Flip-flop
switches control its further development. Sheet

art is generally dried in smoke and is dark brown

in color. Bulk art is air-dried and changes color
in particular historical epochs.§

One of the common elements in these three stories--
"Game," "Report," and "Paraguay"--is the absence of any
sense of past; where technique flourishes, the past vanishes.
Earlier I suggested that Barthelme's main subject is confu-
sion, that he allows confusion to grow out of some unstated
sense of loss. Technique creates this loss, and accounts
for Barthelme's dominant image of modern man, who, having
lost all touch with the past, tradition, religion, the fam—
ily, becomes obsessed with "self," his petty "problems,"
his self-fulfillment. The result is the therapeutic society.

One of Barthelme's most direct attempts to characterize

this society is the story "Daumier" (Sadness). The point to

133

be made about the self, Daumier says, "is that it is insa-
tiable." And so the story is about Daumier's elaborate at-
tempts to construct a surrogate self, one designed for sa-
tiability, one who "knows his limits," "doesn't overstep,"

in whom desire "has been reduced to a minimum." So he con-
structs such a surrogate--based on a character out of Dumas--
whose life is so full, so exciting, that he hardly desires
anything. Later, of course, Daumier must construct a second
surrogate; one is not enough.

The problem of the insatiability of the self is not
strictly a modern problem. In a more stable age, however,
the self's desires could be curbed externally, by certain
traditions, institutions, rigid social mores and the like.
The timeless theme of the individual vs. society takes its
one from these circumstances. Today, however, with virtu-
ally all external restrictions gone, the self is free to
indulge itself to its heart's content--but its heart is
never content. The dilemma of the self today is the infi-
nite possibilities confronting it. The self can taste any—
thing it desires, and still it will not be satisfied for
long. Barthelme's catalog of the materials which Daumier
consults is hilarious.

My plan for self-transplants was not formulated

without the benefit of some amount of research.

I turned over the literature, which is immense,

the following volumes sticking in the mind as

having been particularly valuable: The Self: An

Introduction by Meyers, Self-Abuse By_SamEElsT—

The Armed Self by Crawlie, Burt's The Concept of

Self, Self-Congratulations by McFee, FingaretteTs
Self-Deception, Self-Defense for Women and Young

 

 

 

 

 

 

134

Girls by Birch, Winterman' 3 Self- -Doubt, Self—
Loathing in Vermin by Skinner, LeBatt's Selfish-
ness, Gordon's Self- -Love, TheM any-Colored Self
by Winsor and Newton, Paramananda s Self-Mastery,
The Misplaced Self by Richards, Nastiness by
Bertini, The Self Prepares by Teller, Flaxman' s
The Self as Pretext, Hickel' s Self— —Propelled Ve-
h1cles, _Sorensen's Self Slaughter, Self and So-
ciety in Minnghought by DeBary, The Sordid Self
by Clute, and Techniqges of Self-Validation by
Wright. These works underscored what I already
knew, that the self is a dirty great villain, an
interrupter of sleep, a deviler of awakeness, an
intersubjective atrocity, a mouth, a maw.32

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The postmodern self's insatiable thirst for novelty--
particularly in art and sex--is, we have seen, one10f Bar-
thelme's common subjects. With this search for novelty,
man disowns the old, the past, and yet makes unreasonable
demands on the new. "I must have the new, though there be
none left in the world," Daumier quotes La Fontaine. The
line describes exactly the dilemma of the postmodern self,
particularly in America. 131“Perpetuafl (Sadness), a story
about a girl who divorces her husband, Perpetua meets Andre:

Americans were very strange, Andre said. They did

not have a stable pattern of family life, as the

French did. This was attributable to the greater

liberty--perhaps license was not too strong a term--

permitted to American women by their husbands and
lovers. American women did not know where their

own best interests lay, Andre said. The intoxica-

tion of modern life, which was in part a result of

the falling away of former standards of conduct...33
In "Perpetua," however, the subject is treated a bit glibly.
In "Daumier," Barthelme writes a passage which is poignant
in its chillingly accurate description of the postmodern

temper.

Your attachments are measured. Not that you are
indifferent by nature--you want nothing so much as

135

a deep-going, fundamental involvement--but this does

not seem to happen. Your attachments are measured;

each seems to last exactly two years. Why is that?

On the last lap of a particular liason, you feel that

it is time Eg.gg, as if you were a guest at a dinner

party and the host's offer of another brandy had a

peculiar falseness to it. Full of good will, you

attempt to pretend that you do not feel this way,

you attempt to keep the level of cheerfulness and

hope approximately where it has always been, to keep

alive a sense of "future." But no one is fooled.

Optimistic plans are made, but within each plan is

another plan, allowing for the possible absence of

one of the planners. You eye the bed, the record-

player, the pictures, already making lists of who

will take what. What does this say about you--that

you move from person to person, a tourist of the

emotions? Is this the meaning of failure?34
"Tourist of the emotions"--in love, in art, in friendship--
this is one of the chief characteristics of modern man. Yet
the irony with which Barthelme customarily treats this dis—
mal characteristic is curiously softened here, as it is in
the story's conclusion: "The self cannot be escaped, but
it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted. There
are always openings if you can find them, there is always
something to do." This spirit of careful optimism is typical
of Barthelme's unwillingness to be drawn into easy formulas
of despair and endgames. We observed this quality as early
as "A Shower of Gold" (Caligari), in which Peterson concludes
in a defiant revolt against the clichés of alienation. In
"At the Tolstoy Museum," "Flight of Pigeons from the Palace,"
and "The Balloon," Barthelme takes as his subject the Dilemma
of Art today and then proceeds to turn that subject back upon
itself by making something new and different--similar to the
way Borges did in "Pierre Menard" and other stories. In "A

City of Churches" (Sadness), Klee concludes: "I am sorry

136

about the lost aircraft, but not overmuch. The war is tem-
porary. But drawings and chocolate go on forever."

This same spirit is displayed in "The Party," another
story from Sadness, whose compressed blend of realistic de-
scription and fanciful invention is typical of Barthelme's
best work. The opening line, "I went to a party and corrected
a pronounciation," establishes the sense of slight dissonance
and illogic--the sense that something is not quite right--
which is sustained throughout the story. The setting is a
dreary cocktail party, dreary, that is, but for one factor:
the presence of King Kong, who had entered through a window
in an effort "to make himself interesting."

Yes, it was King Kong back in action, and all of

the guests uttered loud exclamations of fatigue

and disgust, examining the situation in the light

of their own needs and emotions, hOping that the

ape was real or paper-mache according to their

own temperaments, or wondering whether other

excitements were possible out in the crisp, white

night.35
Barthelme's technique of bringing King Kong into the story
is itself an acknowledgement that We, the readers, are
as weary of reading about cocktail parties as we are of at-
tending them. The technique is disarming; it takes us off
our guard. We expect an unrealistic tale, a clever diver-
sion, perhaps. But the story turns out to have a painful
realism for which we are totally unprepared.

The party is a kind of retreat, an attempt on the part
of a group of civilized, academic types to escape from the

savage world outside and from whatever personal problems

they try to leave at home. The party is a place where

137

hopefully one will meet new people, because "When one has
spoken a lot one has already used up all of the ideas one
has. You must change the people you are speaking to so that
you may appear, to yourself, to be alive." The party is a
place where you may test "the effect on the members of the
audience of your ruffled blouse, your long, magenta skirt."

The party is a place where taste is of the highest im—
portance; hence, "I corrected a pronounciation..." "I praised
a Bonnard." To show excitement over the mere presence of
Kong would be...provincial--particu1arly since Kong himself
has become so civilized and camp (he is now "an adjunct pro-
fessor of art history at Rutgers, co-author of a text on
tomb sculpture"). Word games are played; Kafka is discussed;
khaki-colored punch is served. The escapist quality of the
whole party is reflected in the television commercial play-
ing in the background: "A number of young people, standing
in a meadow, singing, holding hands. Can the life of the
time be caught in an advertisement? Is that how it is, really,
in the meadows of the world?"

Despite all of these effort to escape reality, reality
intrudes. From outside on the street are heard the inter-
mittent and increasingly frenzied sounds of "drums, whistles,
howls, rattles, alphorns. Is it some kind of revolution in
taste?" Inside, a child swallows twenty aspirin: "Is six
too young for a suicide attempt?" And: "The people here
don't look new; they look like emerald mine owners, in fact,

or proprietors of some other sector of the economy that

138

something bad has just happened to." The hostess tells the
guests that, shortly, the party "would improve," but the
narrator wants only to go home. His l'date" still possesses
that "zest" which he lost long ago: he is no longer even sure
he likes her; he has even lost the zest to leave her. The
story concludes:
Dear Francesca, tell me, is this a successful

party, in your View? Is this the best we can do?

I know that you have always wanted to meet Kong;

now that you have met him and he has said whatever

he has said to you (I saw you smiling), can we go

home? I mean you to your home, me to my home, all

these others to their own homes, cells, cages? I

am feeling a little ragged. What made us think

that we could escape things like bankruptcy, alco-

holism, being disappointed, having children? Say

"No," refuse me once and for all, let me try some-

thing else. Of course we did everything right

insofar as we were able to imagine what "right"

was. Is it really important to know that this

movie is fine, and that one terrible, and to talk

intelligently about the difference? Wonderful

elegance! No good at all!36
Once again, because of the references to "Kong," it is tempt-
ing to read this provocative paragraph as playful. But if
Barthelme had wanted only to be playful he could certainly
have written it in a more parodic style. 'The style here is
frank, not only allowing a serious reading, but demanding
it. And while it may seem a gloomy conclusion, the fact
that Barthelme allows the narrator to arrive at an under-
standing of his situation, and to question the priorities
of his friends' values, is quite optimistic. In any case,
the tone and attitude here show how far Barthelme can some—

times move from the purely parodic approach of Snow White.

 

"The Sandman" (Sadness), too, allows some genuine

139

sadness to filter through the irony and once again displays
an optimistic spirit. The story, which again treats middle-
class obsession with self and with postmodern man's habits

of analysis, takes the form of a letter written by an unnamed
man to his girlfriend's psychiatrist. And while a good deal
of the humor is in the fact that the letter-writer, though
naive, "knows the language," as Peterson had said, he is
treated sympathetically and most of the irony is directed at
the analyst. The story implies that the analyst's diagnosis
of Susan is at best arbitrary ("or...or...or...or..."), at
worst motivated by the doctor's own professional and psych-
ological needs and fears. Throughout most of the story the
man attempts to refute the doctor's diagnosis of Susan: Su-
san had been thinking of giving up analysis in order to buy

a piano; the doctor thinks this would be a mistake, an escape.
The lover-narrator quotes from (and footnotes) learned ar-
ticles in an effort to dispute the doctor's diagnosis of
Susan's voyeurism, her depression, her love of failure, her

chasmus hystericus. All of this is amusing, but the end of

 

the letter is touching:

Let me tell you a story.

One night we were at her place, about three a.m.,
and this man called, another lover, quite well-known
musician who is very good, very fast--a good man.

He asked Susan, "Is he there?" meaning me, and she
said "Yes," and he said, "What are you doing?" and
she said "What do you think?" and he said "When will
you be finished?" and she said, "Never." Are you,
Doctor, in a position to appreciate the beauty of
this reply, in this context?

What I am saying is that Susan is wonderful. As
is. There are not so many things around to which that
word can be accurately applied. Therefore I must view

140

your efforts to improve her with, let us say, a
certain amount of ambivalence. If this makes me a
negative factor in the analysis, so be it. I will
be a negative factor until the cows come home, and
cheerfully. I gan't help it, Doctor, I am voting
for the piano.3

There is a curious emotional release here, issuing from the
character's naive and poignant expression of resistance to
the clichés of analysis. When we contrast this character

with those in Snow White, who surrender to clichés at every

 

turn, we can see why there is a human element here, and in
many of Barthelme's recent stories, which survives irony.
Irony is still Barthelme's main strategy but his recent
work puts irony to more positive uses than did his early
writing. In addition, he has learned that irony is some-
times more effective, and results in more intricate fic-
tional constructs, when it is combined with other approaches.
Perhaps, too, Barthelme has learned that pure irony is ef-
fective only in very short pieces; one of the problems with

Snow White is its unrelenting sameness. And this may explain

 

why, in The Dead Father, Barthelme moves even further away

 

from the purely ironic mode of the early work.

Chapter 4

The Dead Father:

 

Irony and Sentiment

You must become your father, but a paler, weaker
version of him. The enormities go with the job,
but close study will allow you to perform the job
less well than it has previously been done, thus
moving toward a golden age of decency, quiet, and
calmed fevers.

'The Dead Father

 

The Dead Father, Barthelme's last book to date and his

 

first novel since Snow White, is an ambitious elaboration

 

upon the ideas and techniques of his later stories. It is
at once more traditional and experimental than anything he
has previously written: its form, that of the quest, is once
again borrowed from another literary epoch, but whereas in

Snow White and stories like "The Glass Mountain" Barthelme's

 

intent was purely satiric, in The Dead Father he achieves a

 

 

wide and subtle range of effects. Alongside the satire there
are passages of beautiful and evocative poetry, moments of
stern moral judgment, and scenes of genuine sentiment and
sadness.

The novel is ambitious both in its choice of subject and
in its treatment. It is, first of all, heavily symbolic. The
Dead Father of the title symbolizes virtually everything of
value which once inhabited the world: he is God; he is the

"Holy Father“; he stands for Tradition, the Past, Order.

141

142

Perhaps he even stands for the Novel. But above all he stands
simply for fatherhood. He is everything which we remember
nostalgically and everything which we would find a substitute
for; at the same time, he represents everything which modern
man seeks to escape from, everything we have succeeded in
annihilating.

In Totem and Taboo, Freud described the totem feast as

 

the killing and eating of the father by a band of brothers--
a criminal act which marks the beginnings of social organ-
ization, moral restriction, and religion:

...we need only assume that the group of brothers
banded together were dominated by the same contra-
dictory feelings toward the father which we can
demonstrate as the content of ambivalence of the
father complex in all our children and in neurotics.
They hated the father who stood so powerfully in
the way of their sexual demands and their desire
for power, but they also loved and admired him.1

...psychoanalytic investigation of the individual
teaches with especial emphasis that god is in
every case modelled after the father and that our
personal relation to god is dependent upon our
relation to our physical father, fluctuating and
changing with him, and that god t bottom is
nothing but an exalted father...

A process like the removal of the primal father by
the band of brothers must have left ineradicable
traces in the history of mankind...3

Barthelme's story is both an elaboration and an updating of

this and other primal myths. In The Dead Father, a band of

 

brothers drags the father, by means of a steel cable, to a
mysterious place to kill him, thus re-enacting the ancient
ritual. But in this story there is one crucial difference
at the outset, a difference which is Barthelme's donée: the

father is already a dead father, in a sense. The mission of

143

the band of brothers is to drag the carcass to its burial
ground, there to dispose of it once and for all.

The Dead Father is dead in the same sense in which Snow
White, Batman and Robin, and the Phantom of the Opera are
dead. The values which brought these figures into the world
and which nurtured belief in them (and allowed them to believe
in themselves) have so thoroughly eroded or disappeared that
these heroes exist today merely as remnants of their former
selves. But the Father is (was) a far more powerful figure
than were those fragile fairy-tale creatures. In history
and in the imagination he has assumed universal stature and
God-like proportions. He does not die easily and is not
killed easily. We want to be rid of him but we also want to
hold on to what is left of him; he is "like a bubble we do not
want to burst." Likewise, although his stature is severely
diminished, he still tries to believe in himself, he "still
has hope." He is, as the Prologue announces, "Dead, but still
with us, still with us, but dead."

The novel is structured around dual oppositions: the
traditional views of the Dead Father are opposed by the ex-
perimental views of his son Thomas and those of the other
young people; and the traditional elements of the novel are
opposed and undermined by a variety of anti-novel devices.

The Prologue, employing a language both grand and trivial,
establishes the main idea: the Dead Father lies half-buried,
resembling an immense fallen soldier carved out.of stone. He

is dead. But he is remembered. "No one can remember when

144

he was not here in our city positioned like a sleeper in a
troubled sleep." And in memory he has not only assumed awe-
some proportions, he has achieved a kind of life-—in the
sense that he still controls "what Thomas is thinking, what
Thomas always thought, what Thomas will ever think, with
exceptions." The heroic descriptions of the Dead Father es-
tablish the power he has retained on the imagination, but
they are balanced by a flip, banal style which undercuts the
former style and creates a disproportion: thus, "The brow
is noble, good Christ what else?" The jawline is "Imposing,
rugged, all that." Above all, the Prologue establishes the
metaphoric mode of the whole story. The Dead Father is the
stuff of "legend" and "sagas." The citizens "sit with tears
in our eyes wanting the Dead Father to be dead..." But they
also have the "good sense" not to attempt obliterating the
memory of him--something which would only increase their
feelings of guilt.

The novel proper begins conventionally: "Eleven o'clock
in the morning." There is a pause in the action, in the
"grand expedition," as the Dead Father calls it, in his dig-
nity and naiveté. The talk of the characters indicates the
changing roles, the transition from old to new. In former
times, young people--those between the ages of sixteen and
sixty-five--were required to wear bell-tipped, multi-colored
caps in order to advertise their youngness, foolishness, and
general subservience to the elders. The Dead Father invokes

"the law" in his support of this tradition, which has only

145

lately been cast aside by Thomas and the other young people.
And he also invokes his "Ukases"--a term used frequently in
the novel to mean orders or commandments. But to the young
people both the law and the Dead Father's Ukases--things
which in former times had the stature of absolutes--are
merely outworn "notions." In opposition to the Dead Father's
invocation of the law, Thomas invokes "love." The law, he
says, did not "make you loved." "Loved!" the Dead Father
replies. "Not a matter of love. A matter of Organization."
The Dead Father views the law, his Ukases, as a means of pre-
serving social organization, as well as a means of preserving
his own authority. Thomas invokes the subjectivity of love
as an equalizer, as a means of leveling social distinctions.
Thus, the group "disposed themselves around the cloth" in
this fashion:
Julie
Emmms D.F.
Frawns

so that the Dead Father is placed on the same level not only
with Thomas and Julie, but with the prawns. Gone are the
days when fathers occupied the head-of-the-table.

Nevertheless, the Dead Father is contented, momentarily,
apparently reconciled to this relatively minor encroachment
of the new upon the old. But he has not reconciled himself
to relativity itself--and this characteristic is one of the
main differences between the Dead Father and the others:

Soon we will be there, said the Dead Father.
Fourteen or fifteen days, I reckon, Thomas

146

said. Is there any doubt? There is always

doubt. When we are there, and when I wrap

myself in its warm yellowness, then I will

be young again, said the Dead Father. I shall

once again be wiry.4
The Dead Father's capacity for hope and belief is something
Thomas hates and envies. Whenever the Dead Father expresses
hope, Thomas almost instinctively reacts sexually with either
Julie or Emma, because sex is all he has to fall back on.
"Why do I feel so bad? he asked, looking around him in every
direction, as if in search for an answer.... I could use a
suck of the breast." Thomas' deliberate sexual exhibitions
always incite the Dead Father's rage, for if the Dead Father
has not reconciled himself to hopelessness, neither has he
reconciled himself to being a sexually excluded "old fart."
Insulted, he "slips his cable" and storms off into the grove
of music and musicians, there to find a kind of sexual re-
lease in violence.

Technically, the first chapter imitates the techniques
of the conventional story: setting, characters, dialogue,
initiation of conflict. There is a beginning, a sense of
movement, even an anti-climax. Particularly by the end of
the chapter, however, it is clear that the traditional ele-
ments of fiction are being undermined by something new and
untraditional. In response to the Dead Father's violence in
the grove of music, Julie says: "Impressive...had they not
been pure cardboard." What is interesting about that remark

is that it comes from within the story. Barthelme's descrip-

tion of the Dead Father's battle with the musicians is

147

presented like a magic act or a puppet show. The musicians
are only replicas of musicians, and this fact alone undermines
the scene from the standpoint of conventional realism. But
we do not expect another character to be privy to this kind
of information or insight. Later in the novel, when the

Dead Father storms off into the woods to slay the animals,
realism is again undermined; we are told that his weapon is
brought to him "by a metaphorically present gillie."

The rest of the novel describes the efforts of Thomas,
Julie, Emma, and the "band of brothers" to drag the Dead
Father to his final resting place. For Thomas, Julie, and
Emma this effort implies a number of things: ridding them-
selves of something nagging at their conscience; ridding
themselves of the reminder of old age and death. For Thomas,
particularly, it means that he will now become the Father
and assume the power which he has always wanted, though of
course he is incapable of assuming this role. The feelings
of Thomas, Julie, and Emma are ambivalent, however. They
cannot rid themselves of their admiration for the Dead Father,
and they still find themselves defending and protecting him
from others. During the course of the journey the Dead Fa-
ther gradually surrenders to Thomas the trappings of author-
ity--buckle, sword, passport, keys--but even at the end he
possesses a reserve of inner strength and natural authority
which demands respect. As Julie had said earlier: "I have
the greatest possible respect for him and what he represents."

Thomas, by contrast, is a weak person; he represents the

148

weakness of the New--and authority symbols cannot help him.
That Thomas is vaguely aware of this fact accounts for his
dizziness, his sensation of sliding, and his depressions.

The Dead Father represents everything that is dead or
dying: a grandeur, a largness, a capacity for high love and
immense hate, for rage and evil and hope. In his dying,
therefore, tragic potential also dies. Barthelme's descrip-
tion of his immense carcass is also a description of a shrunk-
en world whose atmosphere is too thin to keep alive one who
would breathe life so deeply. The difference between the
Dead Father and Thomas is in one sense the difference between
content and form, or between substance and style.

My criticism was that you never understood the

larger picture, said the Dead Father. Young

men never understand the larger picture.

I don't suggest I understand it now. I

do understand the frame. The limits.

Of course the frame is easier to understand.
Older people tend to overlook the frame, even

when they are looking right at it, said Thomas.

They don't like to think about it.5
The fact that the Dead Father probably never understood the
larger picture himself is beside the point. What is important
is that the larger picture is what he sought to understand
and to believe in: the larger picture is life's possibilities:
the frame, its limitations. Thomas is correct in saying that
older people do not see the frame, but he is merely correct.
This form-content idea is repeated in Chapter 18, when Thomas
takes away the Dead Father's passport:

You are killing me.
We? Not we. Not in any sense we. Processes

are killing you, not we. Inexorable processes.
Inexorable inapplicable in my case, said the

149

Dead Father. Hopefully.

"Hopefully" cannot be used in that way,
grammatically, said Thomas.

You are safe, dear old man, you are safe,
temporarily, in the mansuetude of our care,

Julie said.

The what?

The mansuetude that is to say mild gentle-
ness of our care.

I am surrounded by creepy murderous pedants!

the Dead Father shouted. Unbearable!6

In his mere correctness, Thomas reduces the issue from
the substantial to the formal, from the grand to the trivial.
The Dead Father is being murdered by pedants. Later, the
argument between the Dead Father and Thomas regarding the
Last Will and Testament underscores this difference between
the two. It is not the Dead Father who wants to put his
house in order; Thomas, again, is the one preoccupied with
this "prudent step." He wants "to have everything tidy," he
worries that the Dead Father may leave his affairs "in rotten
mishmashy, cluttersome, disarray..." The Dead Father is still
impassioned about life, not about order after his death. "Tidy...
what a way of putting it," he tells Thomas. And, in rage:
"Prudent is shit!" Dylan Thomas would have approved of the
Dead Father's rage against the dying of the night.

Although, when the Dead Father finally dies Thomas will,
in a literal sense, become the Father, in a larger sense he
will always stay the son because modern culture no longer be-
lieves in or feels the things for which the Father stood. In
place of the Dead Father's absolute belief, his "I will not

be reconciled" attitude, and his hope for immortality, Thomas

is a "relativist," a "student of decay," whose only absolute

150

is his conviction that everything is temporary. "I cannot
abandon what I know," he tells Julie. "One doesn't find an
absolute everyday." Both the Dead Father and Thomas are con-
tinually preoccupied with sex, but whereas for Thomas sex is
as mechanical as breathing, the Dead Father is a genuinely
lustful, dirty old man. Come to bed with me, he tells Emma,
"and I will whisper secrets in your ear. Powerful secrets."
But Emma's interest is in "buying the furniture, picking out
the towels. The stainless steel." That the Golden Fleece
turns out to be nothing more than Julie's private parts, of
which the Dead Father is permitted only a touch, "outside the
skirt," is an irony directed not at him but at Julie and
Thomas; by trickery, they got him to submit to this journey.
"I wasn't really fooled, said the Dead Father. Not for a
moment. I knew all along..." But though in a sense he was
cruelly fooled, he still has enough character at the end to
express admiration for Julie's sexuality: "It is lovely, said
the Dead Father. I am covered with admiration."

In place of the Dead Father's passion and rage, Thomas
suffers from ennui--he "falls to the ground in a swoon." He
stutters when he talks about himself. It is clear that his
preoccupation with external forms is a means of offsetting
the formlessness of his beliefs, feelings, and sense of pur-
pose. In the beginning of Chapter 13, Barthelme describes
Thomas' condition in a paragraph quite unlike anything he
has ever written before.

The mountain. The cathedral. The stone steps.
Music. Looking down. The windows, apertures.

151

Rows of seated people. The alters, lights, sing-
ing. Egg-shaped apertures like seats opening onto
the void. The drop. The clouds. Slipping in the
seat. Thomas slipping in the seat. Toward the
void. Brace foot against the edge. Lean back
hooking shoulder around opening. Out strolling
on the grounds. Flowers blue with a border of
white. The Dead Father strolling. Julie stroll-
ing. Others strolling. Edmund strolling. The
music, a Kyrie. The edge. The fall. Stone steps.
Mandrills staring. Photographers and cooks.
Thomas sitting in the sloping seat. Slipping
toward the edge. Braces foot against the outer
wall, which trembles. Hooks shoulder around

inner wall and grasps with left hand. Out stroll-
ing. Julie speaking to the Dead Father. The

Dead Father smiling. People sitting on stone
benches. Processional. Under a canopy. Golden
censures swinging left right left right. Tall

old man in golden mitre. Acolytes. Rings with
amethysts. The edge. Looking over the edge.
Sheer walls. Clouds. Thomas slipping in the
seat. Braces foot against outer wall. A quilt
or blanket slipping toward the edge. Shoulder
hooked around inner wall. The wall trembling.

The alcove shaped like an egg. Quilt slipping
toward the edge. Singing...

For Barthelme, this passage is unusually sensuale-the colors,
the music, the censers, the dream sensation of continually
slipping--and, like a good poem, its meanings are both sug-
gestive and symbolic. The cathedral, built high on the moun-
tain and close to heaven, still contains the traditional re-
ligious trappings, but like the Dead Father it too is dying.
The church, once a source of strength and a bastion against
the void, is for Thomas only a reminder of what he does not
believe. Rather than having a calming or steadying effect
upon him, as it does upon the Dead Father, the church only
makes Thomas more uneasy, more uncertain of his footing. It
is therefore consistent with his character and the age he

represents that, in order to ward off these feelings, Thomas

152

turns and puts his arms around Julie. Sex provides the only
(momentary) relief from nothingness and total aloneness.

In its largest sense, the novel is saying that the Dead
Father will be replaced by nothing. Fatherhood is dead. If
the Father is one who is big and strong, courageous, protec-
tive of and responsible for his children, an all-knowing,
arbitrary ruler, then Fatherhood is dead. It is not a ques-
tion of whether the Dead Father succeeded in his role; what
matters is that he tried to fill it, knowing that success was
impossible. "I never wanted it, it was thrust upon me," the
Dead Father says of fatherhOOd. He would have preferred "re-
maining in my study comparing editions of Klinger." Likewise,
in his final hours, he movingly admits that there were holes
in the absolute wisdom he often professed to have:

There were things I never knew what made the

pavement gray and what made the giant monuments

move back and forth on the far horizen ceaselessly

night and day on the far horizen and what made

the leaves fibrillate on the trees and what

comity meant and what made the heart stop and

how unicorns got trapped in tapestries, these

things I never learned.8
Though he may not have wanted to be a Father, and although
the role itself contains a good deal of the sham, neverthe-
less the Dead Father tried to fulfill the role. It was en-
trusted to him by culture and he did it. "Did I do it well?"
he asks Julie. "Marvelously." But society today no more
believes in Fatherhood than it believes in God. So the Fa-
ther is dead, and the sons, like Thomas, do not know what

role to play. "What will you do with yourselves when it is

all over?" the Dead Father asks Thomas and Julie as the

153

expedition approaches its destination.

Julie looked at Thomas.

What will we do with ourselves when it is
all over?

Thomas shook his head.

I'd rather not answer that question if you
don't mind.

Why not?

I haven't an answer.

I know that, the Dead Father said.9

Alongside this thematic conflict between old and new
values, the formal elements of the novel engage in a similar
contest between traditional and experimental. Unlike the

conventional sections of The Dead Father, in which a story

 

is told, in which there is progress, and in which the char-
acters develop, there are four extended conversations between
Julie and Emma which tell no story and go nowhere. For ex-
ample:

Whose little girl are you?

I get by, I get by.

Time to go.

Hoping this will reach you at a favorable moment.

Bad things can happen to peOple.

Is that a threat?

Dragged him all this distance without any

rottytoottoot.

Is that a threat?

Take it any way you like it.

Other fish to fry.

We guarantee every effort will be made.10
There is no reference to their words outside the language it-
self. Julie and Emma have no subject because they have no
history, no sense of past. They express opinions ("That's
your opinion") but in fact they have no opinions; hence, the
numerous contradictions and statements such as, "I didn't
really mean that really." They have no opinions because they

have no sense of self. It makes no difference which one of

154

them is speaking because they talk identically and because
they are not eVen listening to one another. Their closest

literary precedents are the Thames Daughters of The Waste

 

Lang, who can "conneCt nothing with nothing." But next to
Julie and Emma the Thames Daughters, in their honesty, pos-
sess a certain moral stature. The absolute meaninglessness
of Julie and Emma's talk provides a strong ironic contrast

to the meaning and plight of the Dead Father and to the tra-
dition of the quest. What the girls represent is what is
killing him. Though the girls' dialogue is perhaps given too
much space, Barthelme's ear for exquisite banality and the
context of these passages prevents them from becoming merely
sludge. They serve as an effective counterpart in the novel's
overall design.

"A Manual for Sons" is the other main digression in a
novel which is in a large sense about digressions ("What has
this to do with fatherhood? asked the Dead Father. I talk
about what I want to talk about, said Julie, this is a digres-
sion"). The Manual is given to Thomas and Julie by a stranger
and after they have read it they drop it into the fire. It
is a funny piece, probably a takeoff on Lord Chesterfield's
cynical Letters 39 my S93, and it is filled with passages of
wonderful jokes, generalizations, "truths," and advice. Much
of it is only playful; but as in the rest of the novel, moments
of exquisite sadness and poignancy, which catch the reader
off-guard, somehOw surface amid the games and flights of fan-

cy. Thus, though we are told that fathers are mad, that they

155

are teachers of the true and not-true, and that they sleep
with hired women because they fear women who are free, we
are also told that "some fathers never sleep at all, but are
endlessly awake, staring at their futures, which are behind
them." Most fathers, the Manual says, can control their de-
sire to sleep with their beautiful daughters, "But the im-
portant thing about daughter-fathers is that, as fathers,
they don't count...to themselves." They tend, therefore, to
take a milder attitude toward their daughters than they take
toward their sons. The key idea in fatherhood is "responsi-
bility," and it is due to this enormous burden that fathers
are ambitious, frustrated, and bitter. At this point, Bar—
thelme gropes to describe a typical son's dominant emotion
toward his father in the most touching sentence in the Man-
ual.

He is mad about being small when you were big,

but no, that's not it, he is mad about being

helpless when you were powerful, but no, not

that either, he is mad about being contingent

when you were necessary, not quite it, he is

insane because when he loved you, you didn't

not1ce.

The Manual gives additional advice on how to find a lost
father ("Do you really want to find this father?"), and on
how to rescue a father from danger--and feel, "for a moment,
that you are the father and he is not." The Manual warns
that upon the death of father you must deal with a memory
often more potent than his living presence. Patricide is a

bad idea too because such an act would simply prove that the

father's every accusation against you was correct. "It is

156

all right to feel this hot emotion but not to act upon it."
Your true task, as a son, the Manual concludes,

is to reproduce every one of the enormities touched
upon in this manual but in attenuated form. You
must become your father, but a paler, weaker ver-
sion of him. The enormities go with the job, but
close study will allow you to perform the job less
well than it has previously been done, thus mov-
ing toward a golden age of decency, quiet, and
calmed fevers. Your contribution will not be

a small one, but "small" is one of the concepts
you should shoot for.... Fatherhood can be, if
not conquered, at least "turned down7_in_ this
generation--by the combined’Efforts of all of us
together. 1‘

 

 

 

 

 

The conclusion of the Manual is not ironic advice so much as
it is a satiric comment on a situation which already exists.
Today's fathers are in fact "paler, weaker" versions of their
grandfathers--just as Thomas is a paler, weaker version of
the Dead Father. Thomas' comment that it would "depend on
the experience of the individual making the judgment" as to
whether or not the Manual was harsh or not harsh enough is
something the Dead Father would never have said. "I hate
relativists," Julie replies, and we are meant to share her
contempt. The Dead Father, both the one in the novel and the
idea he represents, was stronger, more interesting, more symr
pathetic than the sons who replaced them. In his madness,
his ambitiousness, in his delivery of truths and not-truths,
in his terrible voice, even in his inability to show love,
there was something heroic and tragic. He tried to fill an
impossible role. There is nothing heroic or tragic about

the "attenuated" version of the Dead Father who has taken

his place. The Thomas who swoons, stutters, and who believes

157

only in temporaneity and relativity is a pathetic figure who
reflects only too clearly what we have become and, by contrast
with the Dead Father, what we have lost. The notion of ac-
tually conquering fatherhood is fancifully described by Bar-
thelme in the section of the novel about the Wends.

We Wends are the father of ourselves...that which

all men have wished to be from the very beginning,

we are.... wends have no wives, they have only

mothers. Each Wend impregnates his own mother and

thus fathers himself. We are all married to our

mothers, in proper legal fashion.13

Modern man has not "conquered" fatherhood, but The Dead Fa:

 

Ehg£_works on the assumption that fatherhood is being "turned
down," gradually, as we free ourselves from its demands and
responsibilities. There is something to be said for this
freedoms-just as there is something to be said for being lib-
erated from the constraints of Tradition, the Church, God,
the Novel, any authority or convention. But one must be
strong enough and self-disciplined enough to know how to use
such freedom. For most of us, it means confusion, and the
loss of a fundamental sense of self and purpose.

In his review of The Dead Father in The Atlantic, Rich-

 

 

ard Todd wrote: "Sentiment earns a larger place for itself
in this novel than in anything Barthelme has written be-
fore.... We are sorry to see the Dead Father go, when the
bulldozers appear. He reminds us of whatever it is that we
imagine to have existed in a more coherent world."14 Todd
might have added that this "sentiment" is achieved despite
the fact that the Dead Father is hardly a realistic character,

and despite the fact that the idea represented by the Dead

158

Father is as much an object of irony as of sympathy and nos-
talgia. It is in Barthelme's ambivalence, in the blending
of contradictory attitudes, that the novel achieves the elu-
sive tone which characterizes much of his later work. We
laugh at the Dead Father; we feel sorry for him; sometimes
we are uncertain how to respond.

One might think that The Dead Father's subtlety of tone

 

and intricate design might make it Barthelme's best achieve-
ment, but in fact the novel is a falling off. The problem
with it is in the prose itself: except for many isolated
passages, the writing lacks the wit and freshness which sus-

tained Snow White's far less ambitious design. This weak-

 

ness is partly the result of Barthelme's inability to tell

a conventional story. Snow White's very lack of narrative

 

is its strength: the form of that novel allowed Barthelme
to indulge in a new subject every paragraph. To an extent

Barthelme tries to do the same thing in The Dead Father,

 

except that the narrative form forces him to describe the
ongoing action. Barthelme's prose is unsuited for this pur-
pose, with the result that much of the description is flat.
Then, too, Snow White seemed to speak more directly to the

pressures and realities of its time. The Dead Father ad-

 

dresses itself to a broad modern phenomenon, but Snow White

 

was a more immediate response to 1960's America. There is

a strain to The Dead Father--the allegory, the heavy symbol-

 

ism, the careful design--which suggests an effort to make the

subject important, whereas the intentional frivolousness of

159

Snow White announces the triviality of his subject. Thus,

 

where Snow White moves along purely on the momentum of its

 

own style, The Dead Father carries along with it some content

 

which literally makes it a weightier work--one which requires
the kind of "interpretation" and "reading between the lines"

which Snow White satirized.

 

But it was obviously Barthelme's intention to do some-
thing different, to attempt a novel which achieves a wider
range of effects than that achieved by his earlier work.

And if The Dead Father does not seem as satisfying as his

 

earlier work it would have been even less satisfying had he
-decided to sit still with success, with a formula which is
now widely imitated. Barthelme's instincts probably tell
him what imitators never know, which is that the style he

used ten years ago is not quite right for today's realtites.

Chapter 5

Conclusion

Over fifty years ago Ortega observed of modern art that
it expresses a real loathing of living forms and beings and
a disgust with history, society, and the state. Artists of
all periods have had difficulty reconciling their visions
with reality, but it seems that in the modern era this dif-
ficulty reached unprecendented proportions. The disappear-
ance of God forced man to create his own system of values;
the discrepancy between the way the world is and the way it
ought to he became increasingly intolerable, and reconcil-
iation became almost impossible. We recall that for Kier-
kegaard religion was the true reconciliation with actuality
but for most modern artists this solution has long since
evaporated.

The notion that art transforms the imperfect into the
perfect is a critical commonplace, but its applicability to
Barthelme lies in the degree of the world's imperfection.
His implicit is that the world is no longer a serious literary
subject: the world consists of blague, dreck, impedimenta,
garbage, game-playing. Barthelme does not attempt any re-
conciliation with the world; nor is he able to transform it
into a better one, a "new actuality." What he does, rather,
is to create perfect models of the world's imperfections--

or, more accurately, models more purely imperfect. The

 

160

161

irony which destroys the world and which results in estrange-
ment does not reconstruct the world; instead, the irony creates
a purer version of what it has destroyed. This purer version
is the "poetry" which Kierkegaard lamented; it is the work's
"objecthood."

Barthelme's irony makes for much revelry. At the same
time, it often results in animosity, and in his best work
feelings of sadness, regret, even sympathy, filter through
the show of ironic superiority. There is an unstated sense
of loss, of caring, in conflict with his irony--and this con-
flict results in a curious tension and ambivalence.

Irony--its function, its moral implications--is the
central issue in Barthelme's fictions. How right and useful
is destructive irony? How much pleasure does an artist get
from a freedom which leads to such animosity? "Kierkegaard
Unfair to Schlegel" is a statement of what art can no longer
do today--and in a less direct way all of Barthelme's work
can be considered a presentation of this thesis. But even
Kierkegaard admits that there may be periods when an artist
may have no choice but to be ironic. And Bonamy Dobree notes
that during the great comic periods in history "we find that
values are changing with alarming speed. The times are those
of rapid social readjustment and general instability, when
policy is insecure, religion doubted and being revised, and
morality in a state of chaos."1 Likewise, G. D. Kermidjian
observes of parody that it becomes a "major mode of expres-

sion for a civilization in a state of transition and flux."2

162

It is necessary, then, to see both the sixties' writers in
general and Barthelme in particular within a broad historical
context.

Barthelme's brand of irony and game-playing is similar
to the comic attitude found in all literary periods. Louis
Kronenberger notes that comedy, in its philosophical sense,
as "an attitude toward life, rather than as a mere technical
aspect of the theater," is the same comic spirit which an-
imates such diverse writers as Aristophanes and Jane Austin.3
Comedy, he writes, is much more reasonably associated with
pessimism than with optimism; it is concerned with human im-
perfection, with people's failure to measure up either to
the world's or to their own conception of excellence. "At
its most severe, comedy is not just skeptical but cynical...
comedy at its greatest is criticism."4

Some theorists argue that the difference between the
comedy of the sixties and that of previous eras rests in the
inability of recent satirists to suggest any moral alternative
to what is criticized--which is exactly the problem formu-
lated by Kierkegaard. Some commentators find in this dis-
tinction the difference between parody and satire, with the
implication that the parodist is a mere mimic with no posi-
tion of his own, whereas the satirist only destroys in order
to save. Denis Donogue derides parody as the "readiest form
of disengagement," and calls it the ”genre of hoax."5 Burton
Feldman writes: "As its reliance on parody shows, Black Hu-

mor does not unmask the illness hidden under our bland

163

surface; it merely mimics the violence in front of the scene."6
He argues that Black Humor "foments no revolution" because it
"springs from affluence, not deprivation."7

There is surely some truth to these remarks about parody
but the condemnatory tone neglects the question of whether
alternatives are possible. Regarding Feldman's point about
affluence, we might note with Henri Bergson that in all ages
the comic "comes into being just when society and the indi-
vidual, freed from the worry of self-preservation, begin to
regard themselves as works of art."8 What better words
could describe the intellectual pretensions of middle-class
America during the 1960's? With half of Ireland starving,
Swift had an unshakable moral position for the basis of his
satire, whereas the American writer of the sixties confronted
a society which was feeding itself to death while at the
same time talking about the "problems" of identity crisis,
Apocalypse, and the Void.

Nevertheless, though the parodist or Black Humorist may
"foment no revolution," this is not to say that he has no
moral position, "only to suggest," as Max Shulz says, "that
this position is implicit."9 The morally explicit and pre-
scriptive satires of previous eras did not improve the world
noticeably, and contemporary writers have abandoned such
modes. But as Kermidjian points out, parody has an "ethical
implication" in its mission "as a necessary corrective of
excesses and abuses,"10 and too many critics fail to take

this implication seriously enough, arguing instead that

164

parody and black humor are mere "play." There is no question
but that the play element is central to Barthelme, but it is
play with serious implications, and it is play which may even
be useful in an extra-literary sense. The social atmosphere
of the times is polluted with so much jargon and the schlock
of mass media that the comic and destructive irony of a wri-
ter like Barthelme may serve as a powerful anti-pollutant.
The distinction, therefore, which some theorists make
between parody and satire, though it may have some technical
validity, does not seem substantially important if we allow
that satire's moral position may be implicit as well as ex-
plicit, and particularly if one accepts the broad implica-
tions of parody discussed by Kermidjian-~that it reveals not
only the "flaws, mistakes, conceits, idiocies and absurdities
of individual authors and philosophical systems, but "in its
widest application the mode of being of entire societies and
cultures."11 So defined, parody is satiric in intent, and
Barthelme's irony is satiric in just such a way. Even if
one insists on the narrower definition of parody--as an im—
itation of art rather than life--Barthelme's parodies must
be seen as satires by virtue of the fact that the American
middle-class of the sixties had come to see itself in terms
of textbook and avant-garde rhetoric--regarding itself, as
Bergson said, as "works of art." Though Barthelme's art may
begin as a parody of various bookish jargons, it ends up
satirizing a society which has adopted that very language in

everyday discourse. This phenomenon accounts for Barthelme's

165

self-conscious and pseudo-literary style.

There is, however, one other distinction between the
satires of previous periods and contemporary satire, which
has to do with the ironist's attitude toward himself. The
ruthless ironist despises himself for the way he is just as
much as he despises the world for the way it is. So that
in addition to animosity the failure at reconciliation pro-
duces guilt and, as mentioned before, regret and sadness.
Kronenberger claims that "there is always a strain of melan-
choly" at the heart of the highest and most cynical comedies.12
The irony of a Barthelme story may not always evoke melancholy,
exactly, but there is, particularly in the later stories, of—
ten an emotional residue. The conclusion of the Kierkegaard
story suggests that when an ironist is confronted with gen—
uine emotion his irony is useless--and at such moments an
ironist "has nothing." Yet, when one is confronted with a
world which has lost touch with its emotions, a world in
which there is little genuine anything, then the very ab-
sence of such moments is itself a cause of irony.

The ironist is primarily concerned with his own attitude
toward the world rather than with the world itself; it might
even seem of a radical ironist like Barthelme that his atti-
tude toward the world has replaced the world as his subject-
matter. But in a very real sense this is a contradiction in
terms, since that subject-matter is itself an attitude toward
the world, is taken as a response to the world. To read any

of Barthelme's stories is to recognize at once that here are

166

the social realities of the 1960's and 1970's, and that the
stories are shaped by these realities. Unlike some of the
writers of the forties and fifties who either out of disgust
or incomprehensibility abandoned the social realities of
their times and withdrew into private, solipsistic worlds,
Barthelme is a very public writer, as are the other Black
Humorists. The whole character of comedy is, as Kronenberger
says, "social rather than individual,"13 and, as the Intro-
duction explained, certain social patterns began to emerge
around 1960 to give some clarity to what had been merely con-
fusing for the two preceding decades. Though Barthelme uses

every conceivable device in order to have his way with his

 

subject-matter, when he has finished we still recognize the
world and usually recognize it all the better. Sometimes he
fails by having his way too easily, but when he succeeds it
is due to the tension created by a complex personal attitude
imposed upon a world which, however devastated, resists suf-
ficiently and remains recognizable through the devastation.
In the Introduction it was also suggested that the single
character of Barthelme's fictions is Barthelme himself. I
further contended that Barthelme's art is simply a purer ver-
sion of what it condemns. The character of Donald Barthelme
is a pure and composite picture of postmodern man. He is,
first of all, thoroughly a creature of the city, as attracted
by city life as he is repulsed by it: the city is the only
place that matters; the city is the modern world. And not

just any city. Barthelme is thoroughly New York City. Its

167

addresses and landmarks provide the setting for almost all
of his stories. More important, his sensibility is that of

New York City--the sensibility best captured by the New York-

 

SE! where almost all of his stories originally appeared.
Above all, this sensibility can be defined by its meticu-
lously appropriate sense of style: witty, refined, wry,
clever, sophisticated, self-conscious, fashion-conscious,
cool, modest, playful, etc. The Barthelme character is also
self-indulgent, a player of games, a lover of trivia; he is
detached and uncommitted, he has a campy nostalgia, he is
very literary.

But although these characteristics help to define him,
Barthelme's sensibility has more breadth and depth than does

the New Yorker, at the same time that his style is far more

 

stylized than that magazine. The New Yorker style pokes

 

gentle fun at and diminishes its content; the Barthelme style

implies total absence of content. The New Yorker is pleasant-

 

ly satiric; Barthelme is devastating and malicious. The New
Yorker manner is often self-effacing and mildly self-depre-
cating; Barthelme's manner turns at times to self-hatred and

self-contempt. The New Yorker is politically liberal; Bar-

 

thelme is radical. Like the New Yorker, Barthelme is attracted

 

by the fashions, fads, and impedimenta of everyday life, but
his attraction is strongly undercut by repulsion and by a far
deeper understanding of history. These distinctions are im-
portant, because too many reviewers of his work have suggested

that there is little difference between Barthelme and the

168

magazine in which his work usually appears.

The composite Banthelme character is an extremely pure
and consistent version of postmodern man--the man his fictions
consistently annihilate. Above all, this man is, as has been
observed, concerned with style. Barthelme's primary artistic
achievement is that he has managed to find a style so distinc-
tive that it requires but a few sentences from any story to
identify them as his. In another sense it could be argued
that he has no style of his own, that his style consists of
all the various styles of our culture. It so, his achievement
lies in the purity with which he is able to capture them.
Lionel Trilling, we will recall, worried in 1948 that the
novel might die for lack of a subject, as artists grew in-
creasingly impatient with the ways of the world. Barthelme
is assuredly one of the most impatient and relentless writers
of our time, but the world is still his subject, and his style
grows right out of it. Few writers in any period develop a
voice as original as his, and while it is still too early
to determine how durable his work will be, there is no ques-
tion but that Barthelme is one of the most imitated and in-

fluential of American writers today.

FOOTNOTES

Introduction

1. Philip Stevick, "Scheherazade Runs Out of Plots,
Goes on Talking; the King, Puzzled, Listens: an Essay on New
Fiction," TriQuarterly 26 (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1973), pp. 339-340.

 

2. Charles Newman, "The Uses and Abuses of Death: a
Little Rumble Through the Remnants of Literary Culture,"
TriQuarterly 26, p. 7.

 

3. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York:
Doubleday, 1948), p. 257.

 

4. Irving Howe, "Mass Society and Post-Modern Fiction,"
The American Novel since WOrld War ii, ed. Marcus Klein
(New York: Fawcett Premier, 1969). p. 49.

 

 

5. Gerald Graff, "Babbitt at the Abyss: the Social
Context of Postmodern American Fiction," TriQuarterly 33
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1975), p. 306.

 

6. American Novel Since Wbrld War ii, p. 134.

 

7. "Babbitt at the Abyss," p. 307.

8. Herbert Gold, "The Mystery of Personality in the
Novel," The American Novel Since World War ii, pp. 109-110.

 

9. Robert Alter, "The Self-Conscious Moment: Reflections
on the Aftermath of Modernism," TriQuarterly 33, p. 214.

 

10. Alfred Kazin, "The Alone Generation: a Comment on
the Fiction of the Fifties," The American Novel Since World
War ii, p. 115.

 

11. Ibid., p. 121.

12. Philip Roth, "Writing American Fiction," The Sense
2: the Sixties, ed. Edward Quinn and Paul J. Dolan (New York:
Free Press, 1968), pp. 450-451.

 

 

13. _I_b_i_g_., p. 450.
14. 5933., p. 453.
15. i_b_i_d., p. 454.
169

170

16. Ibid., p. 461.

17. American Novel Since WOrld War ii, pp. 137-138.

 

18. John Aldridge, "The Search for Values," The Amer-
ican Novel Since WOrld War ii, p. 49.

 

 

19. American Novel Since WOrld War ii, p. 118.

 

20. "Babbitt at the Abyss," p. 315.

21. American Novel Since WOrld War ii, p. 122-123.

 

22. Sense 9: the Sixties, p. 448.

 

23. The Liberal Imagination, p. 264.

 

24. Max F. Schulz, Black Humor Fiction si the Sixties:
s Pluralistic Definition sf Man and his World (Athens, Ohio:
Ohio UniVersity Press, 1973), p. 8.

 

 

 

 

25. "Babbitt at the Abyss," p. 327.

26. "The Self-Conscious Moment," p. 210.

27. "Scheherazade Runs Out of Plots," pp. 352-354.
28. "The Uses and Abuses of Death," p. 38.

29. American Novel Since world War ii, p. 56.

 

30. "The Self-Conscious Moment," p. 213.
31. Ibid., p. 214.
32. "Babbitt at the Abyss," p. 323.

33. The Liberal Imagination, p. 267.

 

34. Ibid., PP. 269-270.

35. Wayne C. Booth, s_Rhetoric sf Irony (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 178.

36. Ibid., p. 233.
37. Ibid., pp. 240-241.

38. Donald Barthelme, Snow White (New York: Bantam, 1968),
p. 102.

39. Black Humor Fiction si the Sixties, p. 12.

 

 

171

40. Rhetoric 9i Irony, p. 211.

41. 'Donald Barthelme, City Life (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1969), pp. 88-89.

 

42. Ibid., pp. 90—91.

43. Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, with Con-
stant Reference to Socrates (London: Coll1ns, 1966), p. 296.

 

 

 

44. Black Humor FictiOn sf the Sixties, p. 9.

 

 

45. Rhetoric s: Irony, p. xii.
46. Ibid., p. 245.

Chapter 1

l. Seymour Krim, Shake is for the World, Smartass (New
York: Delta Books, 1970), p. 311.

 

2. Ibid., p. 349.

3. Earl Shorris, "Donald Barthelme's Illustrated Wordy-
Gurdy," Atlantic, January, 1973, p. 93.

4. Gerald Graff, "Babbitt at the Abyss," TriQuarterl
33 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1975), p. 317.

5. Donald Barthelme, Come Back, Dr. Caligari (Garden
City: Doubleday/Anchor, 1965), p. 137-138.

 

6. “Babbitt at the Abyss," p. 326.

7. Come Back, 25. Caligari. p. 87-88.

 

8. Ibid., p. 74.

9. John Barth, The End 2: the Road (New York: Bantam,
1958), P. 93.

10. Come Back, 93. Caligari, pp. 78-79.

 

11. 12193! p. 6.

12. isig,, p. 108.
13. 1219:! p. 113.
14. 1219-! p. 116.

15. Ibid., p. 119.

172

16. Ibid., p. 118.
17. Ibid., p. 125.
18. Ibid., p. 43.

19. Ibid., pp. 45-46.

Chapter 2

1. Donald Barthelme, Snow White (New York: Bantam, 1968),
p. 25.

 

2. IQ1§., p. 70.
3. IQid., p. 61.
4. 2219'! p. 77.
5. 1219., p. 4.
6. Igid., p. 52.
7. IQiQ., p. 154.
8. IQid., p. 41.
9. 2219-! p. 35.
10. IQid.
11. Ibid.

 

12. Gerald Graff, "Babbitt at the Abyss: the Social Con-
text of Postmodern American Fiction," TriQuarterly 33 (Evan-
ston: Northwestern University Press, 1975), p. 327.

 

13. Snow White, p. 96.

 

14. Leslie Fiedler, "The Unbroker Tradition," Theories
g£_American Literature, ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Malcolm
A. Griffith (New York: MacMillan, 1972), p. 362.

 

15. Ibid., p. 363.

16. Gerald Graff, "The Myth of the Postmodernist Break-
through," TriQuarterly 26 (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1973), PP. 400-401.

 

17. D. S. Carne-Ross, "Scenario for a New Year," Arion,
vol. 8, 1970, p. 227.

173

18. Ibid.

 

19. Theories 9£_American Literature, p. 363.

 

20. "Scenario for a New Year," p. 227.

21. Snow White, pp. 48-49.

 

22. Philip Stevick, "Scheherazade Runs Out of Plots,
Goes on Talking: the King, Puzzled, Listens: an Essay on
New Fiction," TriQuarterly 26 (Evanston: Northwestern Uni-
versity Press, 1973), pp. 358-359.

 

23. Wylie Sypher, Literature and Technology: The Alien
Vision (New York: Random House, 19681, P. 240.

 

 

24. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), p. 32.

 

25. "Babbitt at the Abyss," p. 387.
26. "Scheherazade Runs Out of Plots," p. 338.

27. Snow White, p. 107.

 

28. Ibid., p. 24.
29. Ibid., p. 95.

30. Lionel Trilling, Singerity and Authenticity (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 135—136.

 

 

31. "Scheherazade Runs Out of Plots," p. 345.

32. Snow White, p. 27.

 

33. Ibid., p. 179.
34. Ibid., p. 149.
35. "Scheherazade Runs Out of Plots," p. 344.

36. Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 19757, p. 45.

 

37. "Babbitt at the Abyss," p. 416.

38. "Scheherazade Runs Out of Plots," p. 361.

39. Ibid.

40. A. N. Kaul, "Cultural and Literary Background: the
Type of American Experience," Theories of American Literature,

ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Malcolm A._Griffith (New York:
Macmillan, 1962), p. 60.

 

174

41. Ibid., p. 62.

Chapter 3

1. Morris Dickstein, "Fiction Hot and K001: Dilemmas
of the Experimental Writer," TriQuarterly 33 (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1975), p. 269.

 

2. Hilton Kramer, "The Age of the Avant Garde,"
Commentary, October, 1972.

 

3. Ibid., p. 42.

 

 

4. Renato Poggioli, The Theorygf the Avant Garde
(New York: Harper and Row, 1968). ‘

5. Ibid., p. 106.
6. "Age of the Avant Garde," p. 44.
7. Ibid., p. 41.
8. Ibid., p. 43.

9. Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (New York:
Berkeley Madallion, 1959), p. 319.

10. Donald Barthelme, Sadness (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1972), p. 26.

11. Ibid., p. 33-34.
12. Ibid., p. 29.

13. Donald Barthelme, Ungpeakable Practices, Unnatural
Acts (New York: Bantam, 1969), pp. 43-44.

14. Preface to New American Review, no. 3, New York,
1968.

15. William Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (New
York: Knopf, 1970), p. 102.

16. Sadness, p. 149.

17. Donald Barthelme, City Life (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1970), p. 43.

 

18. Sadness, p. 134.

19. Ibid., p. 137.

20.
21.
22.

23.

rar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), pp.

24.
25.
26.

27.

175

Ibid., p. 132.

Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, p. 16.

 

Ibid., p. 21.

Donald Barthelme, Guilty Pleasures (New York: Far-
39-40.

 

 

Ibid., pp. 41-42.

Sadness, 74.

p.

Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, p. 106.

 

Richard Poirier, The Performing Self (New York:

 

Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 44.

28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.

37.

Chapter

1.

trans. by A. A.

2.
3.

4.
rar,

5.

4

Straus and

Theory of the Avant Garde, p. 138.

 

Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, p. 106.

 

Ibid., p. 50.

City Life, pp. 22-23.

 

Sadness, 166—167.

PP-
p. 44-45.

p. 177.

Ibid.,

Ibido 1 PP- 57-58 .

Ibid., p. 62.

Ibid., pp. 93-94.

Sigmund Freud, The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud,

 

 

Ibid., pp. 919-920.

Ibid., p. 925.

Donald Barthelme, The Dead Father (New York: Far-

Giroux, 1975), pp. 8-9.

 

Ibid., p. 32.

Brill (New York: Modern Library, 1938), p. 916.

176

6. Ibid., p. 158.

7. Ibid., pp. 84-85.

8. Ibid., p. 172.

9. Ibid., p. 168.
10. Ibid., p. 23.

11. Ibid., p. 143.
12. Ibid., p. 145.
13. Ibid., p. 73.

14. Richard Todd, "Daddy You're Perfectly Swell,"
Atlantic, December, 1975, p. 114.

Chapter 5.

1. Bonomy Dobree, "Restoration Comedy: Drama and Values,"
Comedy: Plays, Theory, Criticism, ed. Marvin Felheim (New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), pp. 202-203.

 

 

 

 

2. G. D. Kermidjian, "The Aesthetics of Parody,"
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Winter, 1969, p. 242.

 

3. Louis Kronenberger, "Some Prefatory Words on Comedy,"
Comedy: Plays, Theory, Criticism, p. 194.

 

 

 

 

4. Ibid., p. 195.

5. ’Denis Donogue, New York Review of Books, August 24,
1967, p. 12.

 

6. Burton Feldman, "Anatomy of Black Humor, " The Amer-
ican Novel Since World War II, ed. Marcus Klein (New York:
Fawcett Premier, 1969), p. 226.

 

7. Ibid.

8. Henri Bergson, "Laughter," Comedy: Plays, Theory,
Criticism, p. 217.

 

 

 

9. Max F. Schulz, Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties:
a Pluralistic Definition of Man and his World (Athens, Ohio:
Ohio Univers1ty Press, 1973), p. 8.

 

 

 

 

10. Ibid., p. 13.

177

11. "Aesthetics of Parody," p. 234.

12. Comedy: Plays, Theory, Criticism, p. 195.

 

 

13. Ibid., p. 196.

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