fragments (especially inThe Waste Land, 1922) structured, according to some commentators, by contrast with a mythical world that had been lost. Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is certainly structured on this principle.

In addition, it is usually asserted with respect to Barthelme that his works evoke the fragmentary nature of modern urban life or the alienation of consciousness that such nineteenth century thinkers as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels thought inevitable in industrial societies. This, too, was suggested by the modernists as a reason for the nature of their own works, most notably by Eliot. Yet, at the same time, Barthelme diverges from the modernists in that he seems to lack their belief in the power of art to change the world: His stance is ironic, self-deprecating, and anarchistic. The only reaction to the “disassociation of sensibility” of which Eliot spoke that is now possible, Barthelme seems to say, is the cackle of laughter. If there is a “message” in Barthelme’s fiction, it would surely have to be that the problems of the late twentieth century lie (in William Wordsworth’s phrase) too deep for tears and are, at any rate, beyond the capacities of the artist to affect them.

“A Shower of Gold”

First published: 1963 (collected in Come Back, Dr. Caligari, 1964)

Type of work: Short story

A young artist appears on a television quiz show and suffers a series of strange intrusions into his life.

“A Shower of Gold,” one of the works from Barthelme’s first collection of short stories, is a meditation on themes developed most fully by the existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, whose influence on American thought was especially strong in the 1950’s and 1960’s. The story has more of a plot than do many of Barthelme’s works, and it has a somewhat recognizable situation; its departures from reality are in the twists of situation and in the episodic interruptions by seemingly unconnected characters and plot developments.

The protagonist, a struggling New York artist named Peterson, is trying to get on a television program called Who Am I? The only qualification necessary is that he have strong opinions about some subject—a criticism on Barthelme’s part of the premium that contemporary society placed on novelty over depth, and on the emphasis on the individual implied by making the fact of belief so important. Peterson gets on the show by citing surprising factual data as his opinion, and he is praised by the woman running the program, Miss Arbor, to the extent that he mouths the platitudes of Sartrean philosophy.

Miss Arbor eagerly asks Peterson if he is alienated, absurd, and extraneous: all the depressing things that Sartre held to define humankind’s position in the universe. Nothing is so negative or weighty, Barthelme is saying, that it cannot be turned into glossy ad hype. Peterson resists Miss Arbor’s attempt to pigeonhole him but agrees to go on the show. While waiting to do so, he has run-ins with a number of people: his exploitative manager, who wants him to compromise his artistic integrity by sawing his artworks in half so that they will sell better; his barber, who continues the flow of prepackaged Sartre; the president (whose secret-service agents invade Peterson’s loft and attack him); the player of a “cat-piano” (made by pulling the tails of cats held fast in a frame); and three young women from California who preach a philosophy of “no problem” but exploit his kindness, as do all the others.

Despite these flickering, clearly absurd, and dreamlike happenings, Peterson continues to look for meaning in life. However, he sees the error of his ways when finally he does appear on the show and listens to the monologues of the other contestants. He then begins to free-associate, trailing off in the middle of a fairy-tale version of the tale of Zeus and Danae from which the story’s title is derived and which constitutes Barthelme’s simultaneous evocation of and brushing away of the myth of wholeness that will forever evade Peterson.

“The Indian Uprising”

First published: 1965 (collected in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, 1968)

Type of work: Short story

Comanche Indians are attacking a city that seems to be Paris; the situation has echoes of an insurrection in a developing nation.

“The Indian Uprising” is Barthelme’s vision of a world under siege, of civilization defined as perennially under attack from the forces of disorder that have entered into its very streets and define its mode of existence. The characters alternate an artistic café life with moments in which they torture and interrogate the Indians. The unnamed protagonist, referred to only in the first-person voice, asks a woman identified as Sylvia whether she thinks they are leading a good life. Her answer is in the negative, yet neither the protagonist nor the story suggests a means by which that life could be altered.

While the siege continues, the protagonist, whose descriptions of cafés and nightlife echo those of Ernest Hemingway writing of Paris, discusses the situation with a number of people, mixing battle reports with references to the nineteenth century French composer Gabriel Fauré, echoes of the so-called hyacinth girl in Eliot’s The Waste Land, and quotations from William Shakespeare. He stops to analyze the composition of one of the barricades (which results in a lengthy list of detritus); his conclusion is that he knows nothing. His main occupation, however, seems to be making a table.

One of his companions, a Miss R., echoes the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and discourses on the nature of words. A cavalry regiment plays music from a series of Italian composers in streets named for American military heroes (in the fashion of streets and squares in Normandy). At the end, the Indians may have completely penetrated the city, but it seems as if the protagonist is readying himself to enter prison (he is asked for his belt and shoelaces), and in any case it may not matter.

This mixture of places and times seems intended to focus attention on the only thing that ties them all together: the fact that for the inhabitants of this city, torture and battle have become normal and are integrated into daily existence. Life has become defined as the response to a threat and would have no meaning without it. On a general level, this can be read as a repetition of Sigmund Freud’s insistence that civilization is founded on repression. On a more specific level, it may be a portrait of a society that could not exist without its mobilization in war.

“At the End of the Mechanical Age”

First published: 1973 (collected in Amateurs, 1976)

Type of work: Short story

An unnamed narrator weds a woman he meets at the grocery store. God comes to their wedding, but the couple divorces before their child is born.

“At the End of the Mechanical Age” is Barthelme’s teasing meditation on the necessity and impossibility of conceptualizing human existence in the inhuman terms of “age” or “era.” His point of departure is certainly the suggestion, first developed in the 1960’s and 1970’s, that industrial society was evolving into a state that would be fundamentally different from that which had defined it for the previous two centuries—what some commentators have called postindustrial society. Barthelme pokes fun at this notion without fundamentally overturning it, by having the two main characters, the unnamed “I” and his eventual wife, “Mrs. Davis,” speak of “the end of the mechanical age” as if it were the same thing as talking about the end of the day, a precise thing with a particular nature and schedule.

They speculate on what will come after the mechanical age, as if an “age” were like a day or a season, but Barthelme’s feelings come through in their agreement that whatever it will be, the age to follow will not be pleasant. In response to the question of whether there is anything to be done about all this, Mrs. Davis replies that the only solution is to “huddle and cling.” Clearly, whatever will happen to humankind, it is not something that can be controlled, at least not by the average citizens that make up middle-class society.

The protagonist has met Mrs. Davis at the grocery store in front of the soap display; they hold hands before they speak, and when they do talk, it is for Mrs. Davis to express an opinion, as if on a television commercial, regarding one of the brands of soap. Later, they converse by singing songs of male and female savior figures named Ralph and Maude, who will redeem the world after the mechanical age has come to an end. Before it does, there is a flood, which echoes the end of the world that Noah survived; the two pass the time by drinking drinks of “scotch-and-floodwater” in their boat.

Even marriage as an institution is part of the mechanical age, which is why theirs must end. God, as much a character in all these developments as either of the human beings, comes to their wedding. The protagonist tries to get a clear view of the situation by asking God about the state of things, but he does little besides smile and disappear. Predictably, neither their marriage nor their child has had an effect on the alteration of ages, and at the end each leaves in search of his or her savior.

“The Educational Experience”

First published: 1973 (collected in Forty Stories, 1987)

Type of work: Short story

Students wander about a great fair, where the products of Western civilization are being offered in slipshod profusion.

“The Educational Experience” offers Barthelme’s view not only of what current education consists—random facts with no coherence—but perhaps also of the worth of the entire sum of humankind’s history: nothing. Barthelme’s theory of history is contained in a fractured quotation from Wittgenstein that is offered by the “group leader” toward the end of the story: “The world is everything that was formerly the case.” People are nothing but the bodies of their predecessors, which do not form into a coherent whole, as the chunks of citation and reference remain undigested. This past ranges from the Fisher King of the Holy Grail quest legends (whom T. S. Eliot claimed to have included in The Waste Land) to the television character Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.

Time has itself changed all those things from the past of which education consists. Another of the grail motifs that Eliot appropriated, the Chapel Perilous, has been turned into a bomb farm, and Antonio Vivaldi’s concerto The Four Seasons has become The Semesters. Education is clearly no fun. The students are not allowed to smoke, but the narrator reflects that this is undoubtedly “necessary to the preservation of our fundamental ideas.” Both the pretensions of the educators and the disinterest of the students are criticized: The students are told that they will be both more beautiful and more employable, but they are only in a hurry to get back on the bus that has brought them to this exposition. Those doing the educating are similarly in the dark: Several of the students are “off in a corner, playing with the animals,” and the professors are unsure whether to “tell them to stop, or urge them to continue.” As the narrator concedes, “perplexities of this kind are not infrequent, in our business.”

Neither the students nor the teachers believe what is being said, but both groups bravely play along as if they do. Both, it is clear, have lost touch with the real history of Western civilization, given that it has to be visited on a whirlwind tour. At the same time, however, this history has become both more trivial and more threatening, so that recovering it may not be as simple a thing as merely a change of method.

Snow White

First published: 1967

Type of work: Novel

A modern-day retelling of the German fairy tale of Snow White that ends badly.

Snow White is the first of Barthelme’s four novels and is one of his most lucid works of any length, largely by virtue of the clarity with which he indicates to the reader at all points what it is that he is doing—or rather, what he is avoiding. The work includes references to what is being avoided so that the reader is aware of the avoidance.

Every reader knows the characters of the standard version of the fairy tale: Snow White, the handsome prince of whom she dreams, the wicked stepmother, and the seven dwarves who live in the forest and with whom Snow White finds refuge. Indeed, all of these have their equivalents in the characters of Barthelme’s version, along with several others not in the fairy tale. In this version of the story, Snow White is twenty-two, lives with seven men with whom she regularly has unsatisfying sex in the shower, and seems to have confused herself with Rapunzel from another fairy story, as she continually sits at her window with her hair hanging out. Her dwarves have modern names such as Bill (the leader), Clem, Edward, and Dan, and they suffer from a series of ailments, of which the most important seems to be that Bill no longer wishes to be touched. During the day, the seven men work in a Chinese baby-food factory.

The closest thing this retelling of the tale has to a prince is a man named Paul, who does not seem to want to fulfill his role of prince. Avoiding Snow White, he puts in time in a monastery in Nevada, goes to Spain, and joins the Thelemite order of monks. Ultimately he does end up near Snow White but only as a Peeping Tom in a bunker before her house, armed with binoculars. The story’s version of the wicked queen is named Jane; she writes poison-pen letters and ultimately makes Snow White a poisoned drink, which Paul drinks instead. He dies. There is another character named Hogo (for which there is not a prototype in the fairy tale), who makes a play for Snow White. She rejects him, but he ends up taking on the role of chief dwarf, which Bill has vacated.

The underlying point of the contrast generated by these modernized versions of the fairy-tale characters is clearly that which was the point of Joyce’s version of Ulysses, namely, that there are no heroes today. This, in fact, forms the center of the personality problem both of Paul, who does not want to act like a prince although he is one, and of Snow White, who is unsure about the nature of her role as Snow White: She continues to long for a prince, but at the same time she feels it necessary to undertake the writing of a lengthy (pornographic) poem that constitutes her attempt to “find herself.”

Snow White is a somewhat more accessible work than many of Barthelme’s short stories, partly because its greater length dilutes the quotations and echoes of philosophers, and partly because the use of the well-known story as a prototype gives the reader a sense of a larger structure. This frame also clears some space for Barthelme to fill with his verbal jokes, most of which are directed at pointing out to the reader how language constructs that which people take to be reality. The book also abounds in the same kind of mindless repetition of stock phrases by characters that characterizes “A Shower of Gold” and which was partly explained by “The Educational Experience.”