Donald Barthelme Long Fiction Analysis
For the reader new to Donald Barthelme, the most productive way to approach his works is in terms of what they are not: looking at what they avoid doing, what they refuse to do, and what they suggest is not worth doing. Nineteenth century literature, and indeed most popular (“best-selling”) literature of the twentieth century, is principally structured according to the two elements of plot and character. These Barthelme studiously avoids, especially in his earlier works, offering instead a collage of fragments whose coherence is usually only cumulative, rather than progressive. Some readers may find the early works emotionally cold as a result, given that their unity is to be found in the realm of the intellect rather than in that of feeling.
This style has resulted in the frequent classification of Barthelme as a postmodernist author, one of a generation of American writers who came to international prominence in the late 1960’s and 1970’s and who include Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, John Hawkes, William H. Gass, Ishmael Reed, and Kurt Vonnegut. This label indicates, among other things, that Barthelme’s most immediate predecessors are the modernist authors of the early years of the century, such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka. Yet critics have split regarding whether Barthelme is doing fundamentally the same things as the earlier modernist authors or whether his works represent a significant development of their method.
Barthelme clearly diverges from the modernists in that he seems to lack their belief in the power of art to change the world; his most characteristic stance is ironic, self-deprecating, and anarchistic. Since this ironic posture is productive more of silence than of talk, or at best produces parodic talk, it is not surprising that Barthelme began his career with shorter pieces rather than longer ones. Further, it does not seem coincidental that the novels Paradise and The King were produced in the last years of his life, by which point his short stories had become slightly less frenetic in pace.
Snow White
Barthelme’s longer works seem to divide naturally into two pairs. The earlier two are dense reworkings of (respectively) a fairy tale and a myth. The second pair are more leisurely, the one involving autobiographical elements, the other making a social point. Barthelme’s first longer work, Snow White, is reasonably easy to follow, largely by virtue of the clarity with which the author indicates to the reader at all points what it is that he is doing—or, rather, what he is avoiding, namely, the fairy tale evoked by the work’s title. Every reader knows the characters of this fairy tale; in fact, all of them have their equivalents in the characters of Barthelme’s version, along with several others unaccounted for in the original. In Barthelme’s 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 dwarfs 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 myth 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 spends time in a monastery in Nevada, goes to Spain,...
(This entire section contains 1634 words.)
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and joins the Thelemite order of monks. Ultimately he ends up near Snow White, but only as a Peeping Tom, armed with binoculars, in a bunker before her house. Barthelme’s version of the wicked queen is named Jane; she writes poison-pen letters and ultimately makes Snow White a poisoned drink. Paul drinks it instead, and he dies.
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 (1922), namely, that there are no more heroes today. This in fact is the crux of the personality problems both of Paul, who does not want to act like a prince though he is one, and 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 feels it necessary to undertake the writing of a lengthy (pornographic) poem that constitutes her attempt to “find herself.”
The Dead Father
The Dead Father, Barthelme’s second long work, may be seen in formal terms as the author’s overt homage to the fictions of the Anglo-American modernists, most notably Stein, Joyce, and Beckett. Certain of its sections appear to be direct appropriations of the formal innovations of Joyce’s Ulysses. The result is a complex overlayering of techniques that seems as much about literary history as about any more objective subject matter. The text presupposed by this novel is that of the Greek story of Oedipus, and of Sigmund Freud’s treatment of it. Freud’s version insists on the potentially lethal effects of an overbearing father and suggests that sons must symbolically kill their fathers to attain independence. Without an understanding of the association of father with threat, the plot of this novel can make little sense.
Nineteen men are pulling the Dead Father—who in fact is not really dead until the end, and perhaps not even then—across the countryside by a cable. The Father is huge, like Joyce’s Humphrey C. Earwicker from Finnegans Wake (1939), covering a great expanse of countryside. There are four children, named Thomas, Edmund, Emma, and Julie, who accompany the Father on his journey to his grave. Along the way his children cut off his leg and his testicles and demand his sword. This does not stop the Dead Father’s sexual desires; one of the objectionable aspects of the old man is clearly the fact that he has not ceased to function as a male. An encounter with a tribe known as the Wends, who explain that they have dispensed with fathers entirely, develops the background situation.
The plot is discernible only in flashes through the dense thicket of fragmentary conversations and monologues. The narration of the journey is constantly being interrupted by textual digressions. One of the most developed of these is a thirty-page “Manual for Sons” that the children find and that is reprinted in its entirety in the text. The complexity of this work is undeniable. It differs from Snow White in that the underlying mood does not seem to be that of alienation: The power of the Father is too great. Yet it may be that the use of so many modernist techniques splits the technical veneer of the book too deeply from the deeper emotional issues it raises.
Paradise
Barthelme’s third long work, Paradise, comes the closest of the four to being a traditional novel. It is set in a recognizable place and time (Philadelphia and New York in the last quarter of the twentieth century) and uses the author’s standard plot fragmentation to express the state of mind of itsprotagonist, an architect named Simon, who is going through a sort of midlife crisis. Simon has taken in three women, with whom he sleeps in turn; this arrangement solves none of his problems, which have to do with his previous marriage, his child by that marriage, his other affairs, and the drying up of his architectural inspiration. A number of chapters are set in the form of questions and answers, presumably between Simon and his analyst.
In this work, Barthelme draws on his knowledge of the Philadelphia architectural scene (especially the works of architect Louis Kahn) and seems to be expressing some of his own reactions to aging in the personality of the protagonist. This is certainly the easiest of the four novels for most readers to like.
The King
Barthelme’s final long work, The King, once again returns to a literary prototype, this time the Arthurian romances. Like the characters in Snow White, Barthelme’s Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and knights are twentieth century characters; unlike the earlier ones, they are particular public personages, identified with the king and queen of England during World War II. (At the same time, their language and exploits situate them in the Celtic legends, or at least the Renaissance retelling of these by Sir Thomas Malory.) Barthelme is exploiting his usual anachronistic confusion of times here, yet his purpose in this work seems not to be merely that of comedy. While readers can be distanced from the categories of “friends” and “enemies” that the characters use in their aspect as figures in Arthurian romance, it is more difficult to be this distanced from a conflict still as much a part of contemporary culture as World War II. Barthelme’s point seems to be that carnage is carnage and war is war, and that from the point of view of a future generation even twentieth century people’s moral certainty regarding this more recent conflict will seem as irrelevant and incomprehensible as that of Arthur and his knights.
Though Barthelme never abandons his concern with form over the course of his four novels, it seems clear that the second pair deals with issues that the average educated reader may find more accessible than those treated in the first two. Moving from the textual ironies of the first and second to the more measured plotting of the third and fourth, Barthelme’s novels show signs of a gradual emotional warming process for which many readers may be thankful.
