Donald Barthelme

Maurice Couturier, Régis Durand

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000639186
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire moderne

In the early 1980s Donald Barthelme was widely recognized in the United States as one of the major figures in contemporary postmodernism, a key and central experimental writer. In this study, originally published in 1982, two leading critics present Donald Barthelme's work in its most radical and innovative aspects. Their essay combines textual analysis, critical theory and cultural awareness and aims at investigating the impact of Barthelme's fictions on the reader and at defining the type of reading experience and pleasure such fictions can produce. Included in the aspects of Donald Barthelme's work discussed here are his use of language, his sense of comedy, his parody, his vision of the modern self as fragmented and displaced, and his relation to psychoanalysis and other forms of art.

---

1

---

DONALD BARTHELME
IN THE
LABORATORY OF DISCOURSE

Ever since the first stirrings of modern fiction, the language of novels has been an object of fascination. Up until the beginning of the twentieth century, it was generally taken for granted, however, that verbal tricksters like Tristram in Tristram Shandy, or even the Marcel of Proust’s The Remembrance of Things Past, belonged, despite their amazing virtuosity, to our own ‘universe of discourse’ – a phrase that Donald Barthelme has playfully lifted from French structuralist jargon and put firmly before us in his novel Snow White (SW, p. 44). The modern novel can indeed be considered as a laboratory of discourse;² what basically distinguishes it from older romance is the fact that the telling is as important as, and often transcends, the story told – as it does in Joyce’s Ulysses. The narrator is not now the anonymous scribe who commits to paper a well-known tale; he is an active, clever puppeteer who hides in the wings and often appears on stage to play a part of his own. Ricardou’s famous aphorism about the French New Novel being essentially ‘not the writing of a story but the story of a writing’ could be applied, more or less adequately as the case may be, to most of the great novels and fictions written since Cervantes. In twentieth-century fiction we have seen a massive intensification of this emphasis, above all in the great experimental works like Finnegans Wake. And today our writers are taking it even further.

Thus what is clearly new in post-modernist fiction – this would naturally include the French New Novelists like Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon and Philippe Sollers – is that the novel’s language is no longer used to simulate a plausible discourse, however elaborate or witty, but blatandy subverts the communication code. In Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy (1957), for example, the jealous husband is not really telling his own version of a ‘story’ but randomly shooting a series of sequences with his own portable camera (his eyes), and playing them in haphazard order inside his private studio (his imagination). The text does not read as a transcribed discourse; it is rather a hotchpotch of recorded perceptions and images developing according to their own laws. The short and fragmented fictions of Donald Barthelme clearly belong to this same category. Even when they seem to borrow various forms of established discourses, as they constantly do, they exist only by reference and cannot be read as coherent. In the story ‘The Explanation’, in City Life (1970), for example, the following exchange gives an extraordinary twist to the sequence of questions and answers from which the narrative is made:

Q:Are you bored with the question-and-answer form?

A:I am bored with it but I realize that it permits many valuable omissions: what kind of day it is, what I’m wearing, what I’m thinking. (CL, p. 80)

Here and elsewhere, Barthelme is making fun of the modern tendency to bracket our discourse, to build up a meta-discourse in which the theory itself seems to take precedence over the personal involvement of the speaker. He is also stressing his own chosen omissions and dissent from realism. But he is also doing a great deal more: he is composing a fiction which is so saturated with motley fragments of recognizable discourses that it eventually becomes non-discursive. Such a fiction seems to confirm Roland Barthes’s theory that first-person narrative may turn out to be the most impersonal or non-discursive form that a writer can compose. As this dialogue testifies, once our ordinary speech is transcribed, and so divorced from the body that produced it, it begins to float in a vacuum.

One of Barthelme’s most disquieting fictions in this form is another story in the same collection, ‘Brain Damage’, where we are confronted with a series of fragments written in the apparent first person about ‘the new electric awareness’. What becomes clear, though, is that the statements cannot firmly be ascribed to the same speaker or narrator:

In the first garbage dump I found a book describing a rich new life of achievement, prosperity, and happiness. (CL, p. 133)

We thought about the blue flowers. (CL, p. 134)

A dream: I am looking at a ship, an ocean-going vessel the size of the Michelangelo. (CL, p. 137)

I worked for newspapers. (CL, p. 138)

The absence of cross-references in these fragments makes it impossible to decide whether or not it is the same ‘speaker’ who is uttering all these ‘I’s and ‘we’s. These fragments could be the rational utterances made on various occasions by a sane person, or a collage of statements made by a group of speakers, or the irrational utterances made at some particular time by a madman. The last interpretation seems the most logical, since the fiction is apparently about madness. But there is another that is probably more appealing: Barthelme is not attempting to simulate a plausible discourse, however crazy, but trying to confuse the reader’s mind and make him feel what it is like to be suffering, in that new electric awareness, from ‘brain damage’.

Certainly, as we read through Barthelme’s stories, novels and visual collages, we have the uncanny feeling that someone is showing us around a lunatic asylum to test our sanity, introducing us to megalomaniac inmates who take themselves to be figures like Paul Klee, General Kellerman or the President of the United States. Each individual character we come across may brazenly assert his ego without a shadow of doubt as to his real identity; but identities in words readily dissolve, as they do with the notional ‘Robert Kennedy’ in ‘Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning’, in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968). The sane visitor, whom the reader presumably considers himself to be, does not feel like arguing with these people for fear of precipitating a storm in their tormented brains, or may indeed feel afraid of being contaminated if he gets too involved in their arcane worlds. He is in much the position as K. in Kafka’s The Castle, who was not at first aware of having landed in another ‘universe of discourse’, and vainly tried to argue with the people around him, while not realizing that they did not rely on the same presuppositions and representations as he did. Barthelme’s reader is similarly unable to enjoy the privileges he has taken for granted in reading fiction: Olympian aloofness, a patronizing condescension toward the characters and narrators. He is utterly seduced by an absolute freedom of speech apparently shared by all the would-be narrators and characters, and by the constant flouting of the linguistic code. At the same time, however, he tends to lose countenance when he realizes that something has been wrenched from him by underhand means he neither masters nor even understands. As the philosopher Jean Baudrillard keeps repeating in a recent book, there is always a price to be paid for seduction – acquiescence and surrender.³

So the casual – as well as the serious – reader of Barthelme spontaneously senses that he is not considered a qualified or trustworthy interlocutor of either the multifaceted narrators of these works or the secretive author who creates them. He has the disturbing impression that this inaccessible individual is writing for his own perverse or guilty pleasures and is not taking his audience into account. The ominiscient author of more conventional fiction, on the other hand, is always very much aware of his audience and the referential compacts he makes with it – as Barthelme keeps reminding us in his allusions to the fictions of previous realism. Thus, as he puts it in ‘Engineer-Private Paul Klee Misplaces an Aircraft between Milbertshofen and Cambrai, March 1916’, in Sadness (1972): ‘with omniscience and omnipresence, hand-in-hand as it were, goes omnipotence… We yearn to be known, acknowledged, admired even’ (S, p. 66). The godlike narrator whom Sartre ridiculed was no more than a conventional disguise in which the timorous author wrapped his devouring pride. Certainly this narrative strategy allowed a high level of exchange between author and reader. With Barthelme, no such communication is established: each narrator (one wonders if the word means anything any more) is imprisoned in his private ‘universe of discourse’ and does not seem to acknowledge, however obliquely, the actual or future presence of an audience.

The reader’s embarrassment is even worse, of course, when the fiction he reads includes pictures. In ‘At the Tolstoy Museum’ (CL) or ‘The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace’ (S), for instance, we find a narrative or descriptive text, plus drawings or photographs, plus block-letter captions which often have little to do with the pictures. The collage technique, which Barthelme practised with considerable success until Sadness, was not, of course, new, but perhaps it had never been exploited so efficiently in short fictions where the reader spontaneously looks for a sustained discourse or a linear narrative. A surrealist painting based on the same technique is puzzling too, but we tend not to worry about the sanity of the artist. Where language is concerned, however, we feel that no one can tamper with it like this and claim to be in their right mind, because we usually consider that a good mastery of language is the best proof anyone can give of their sanity. This technique – which includes not only the mixing of text and pictures but also the listing of questions (‘Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel’, ‘Concerning the Bodyguard’) or of unrelated statements (‘The Explanation’, The Dead Father), or the evocation of miscellaneous topics (‘What to do Next’) – makes it impossible for the reader to decide what the story is about, simply because no single speaker can be identified. All these devices stagger our imagination, baffle our intelligence, and eventually induce us to evolve our private interpretation, no matter how extravagant it may be, to escape the tension and embarrassment.

In Pale Fire (1962), Vladimir Nabokov had inaugurated this brain-testing form of fiction on a large scale: he created two different discourses, that of Shade, the poet, and that of Kinbote, the commentator, and two or even three diverging narratives – the biography of Shade, the history of the King of Zembla, the history of the poem. The question that still perplexes the critics can be stated in terms borrowed from Humpty-Dumpty: ‘Which is to be master?’ Which, of Shade or Kinbote, can satisfy the reader that he is the prime or the sole narrator of this puzzling book? We take too easily for granted that people speak or write mostly to give a coherent view of themselves, to show that they enjoy a satisfactory understanding of, or power over, the world they live in. Of course, the Nabokov aficionado is aware that the problem of motivations is irrelevant, that it is raised by the reader when he is puzzled with a book and can make no sense of it. What Nabokov and Barthelme are probably both inviting us to do is to change our outlook altogether, to take possession of their texts boldly and without inhibitions – in other words, to read them creatively.

It was Joyce, of course, who first took the tremendous risk of overriding the principle of narrative coherence dramatically. But, whereas the delirious language of Finnegans Wake could conceivably be located as the senseless logorrhoea of a demented scholar, the disrupted and often abstract language of Barthelme’s fictions seems to have no such referential anchorings, however questionable they may be. When these short fictions appeared in periodicals, they looked strange, of course, but not half as baffling as they are now in their respective collections. We usually consider that there are limits to the number and variety of discourses a given speaker or writer can imitate or invent, to the variety of subjects he can tackle, to the wealth of objects he can create. In this case, we definitely feel that these limits have been transgressed, and we find it difficult to conceive of the insane or talented word-handler who has shattered them. Many critics have taken Barthelme to task for his incapacity to write long fictions. It is true that both his novels – Snow White (1967) and The Dead Father (1976) – look very much like collections of short fictions, except for the fact that the same characters turn up in the various sequences. But this may be his individual achievement too: he has proved capable of creating (and not simply pastiching or simulating) countless discourses which do not seem to reflect the workings of an individual mind or unconscious but rather a great variety of both. Each fiction seems to be an objet trouvé, the senseless utterance of an anonymous (and improbable) speaker (GD, p. 71), like ‘Question Party’, which Barthelme says he lifted from Godey’s Lady’s Book (the popular monthly published in Philadelphia between 1830 and 1898).

This obsessional search, on the part of the reader, for an identifiable and stable discourse is somewhat morbid, of course; but, ever since Henry James, Percy Lubbock and E. M. Forster, critics who have worked on fiction have been unable to avoid being caught in it. Apparently it is difficult to accept Borges’ theory that literary works are the product and outgrowth of other books written before them. A defiant novelist like Nabokov, for instance, could not consent to the idea that each individual writer’s contribution to the ‘Library of Babel’ was only slight. In our Western world, where every human being is considered to be a valuable entity endowed with both freedom and the capacity to create, individual achievements have always drawn respect and admiration, as the prestige of the Prometheus myth testifies. The contribution of Marxist criticism, on the other hand, has no doubt been to show that a literary work is as much the product of a language, a literary tradition and a national history as the personal accomplishment of the individual writer – though, at times, this type of criticism overshoots the mark and tends to underplay the personal achievement of the artist.

Barthelme’s approach to the problem of literary discourse is neither that of the Marxists nor that of Borges. His Snow White may express his view on the subject when she says: ‘Oh I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear!’ (SW, p. 6). He seems at times to be dreaming of developing a new language as he writes, of doing without the well-worn language of his cultural community. This new language would be something like the ultimate non-discourse that Joyce sought to create in Finnegans Wake. Although Barthelme is probably aware that this dream can never be fulfilled, during the last twenty years he has worked hard to stretch the capacities of the English language. And he has succeeded, to a certain extent, in evolving an idiom all his own.

*

This idiom is characterized in the first place by its high degree of impersonality. The number and peculiarity of the passive sentences, for instance, are quite amazing in his fictions – as we see, for example, in the following passage from ‘Brain Damage’: ‘At the restaurant, sadness was expressed. Black napkins were draped over black arms. Black table-cloths were distributed. Several nearby streets w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General editors’ preface
• Preface and acknowledgements
• A note on the texts
• 1 Donald Barthelme in the laboratory of discourse
• 2 Barthelme’s art of displacement
• 3 Barthelme and the eclipse of the subject
• 4 Barthelme’s codes of transaction
• 5 Barthelme in the art gallery
• 6 Barthelme and the Escherian perception
• Notes
• Bibliography