[In the following essay, Couturier and Durand analyze the different forms of transaction and discourse in Barthelme's short fiction.]

Barthelme's fiction—rather like Beckett's—does point in the direction of a theoretical reconstruction of the self; this is a comic enterprise, however, and is undercut by one of Barthelme's favourite strategies of displacement and defence, his constant irony. His irony is, as we have seen, a generator of fiction, but when applied to the psychological and historical world it becomes part of the complicated game of the troubled subject. A good example of this is his story ‘The Sandman’, in Sadness, which consists of a letter written by a girl's boyfriend to her analyst. It is a funny letter, which displays Barthelme's thorough knowledge of psychoanalysis but also his ambivalent position towards it.

In ‘The Sandman’, the author of the letter writes to explain why he supports his friend's wish to terminate the analysis and buy a piano instead; he proceeds to expose the power game that underlies the process of psychoanalysis. He calls the analyst ‘the Sandman’ in reference, he says, to the old rhyme (‘Sea-sand does the Sandman bring / Sleep to the end of Day / He dusts the children's eyes with sand / And steals their dreams away’ (S, p. 86); but it is also a reference to Freud's use of the Sandman figure, which he borrowed from E. T. A. Hoffmann's famous tale ‘The Sandman’. The game of allusions and references is carried further when the author uses psychoanalytic literature against the analyst, quoting from articles in professional journals. The boyfriend is in effect challenging the methodology of the analyst—his rigid ego psychology and its underlying norms of behaviour, his desire to ‘stabilize’ Susan. This, if we bear in mind the author's own unhappy experience at the hands of a righteous ‘liberal’ analyst, can, of course, be construed as an indictment. The ironic refutation of the reductive practices of the analyst is forceful, and so is the act of love and total acceptance of the other which is put in its place. But the irony is both enhanced and undercut by the fact that in the process the narrator shows considerable analytic knowledge and skill (his observations would place him as a Freudian phenomenologist, not surprisingly for a writer who here and elsewhere quotes from Biswanger, Ehrenzweig, Ricœur and Phenomenological Psychology). His interpretations of voyeurism and creativity, in particular, are the standard ones. What comes out of the discussion of the case of Susan is a plea for the integrity of the self against stabilization, violent integration or escapism.

Beyond the anecdote and the little theoretical excursion, there remains a lesson for the artist. The lesson concerns not only creation itself (here, a characteristic way of writing stories) but also a way of being in the world (the characteristic ‘Barthelmean’ being):

Let me point out, if it has escaped your notice, that what an artist does, is fail. Any reading of the literature (I mean the theory of artistic creation), however summary, will persuade you instantly that the paradigmatic artistic experience is that of failure. The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition.

(S, p. 91)

What the individual is left with is the sense of his own energy, of his existential and intellectual creativity and integrity, with the inevitable ups and downs an uncompromising awareness brings about. But this seemingly self-centred consciousness leads to new developments in Barthelme's work, of a technical as well as of a psychological nature—as can be seen in more recent work, such as Great Days (1979).

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Apart from its constant inventiveness in the use of language and fictional forms, Barthelme's writing has impressed its readers with the accuracy of the commentary on American life it provides. His work is, indeed, especially in collections such as City Life and Sadness, a critique de la vie quotidienne of urban civilization in the USA. This has been amply documented by critics and by the writer himself, but one particular aspect of it is worth pursuing here: the interactions, the interface in his work between the individual psychology and the social or political element. There is a formulation of this in ‘The Sandman’:

What do you do with a patient who finds the world unsatisfactory? The world is unsatisfactory; only a fool would deny it. … Susan's perception that America has somehow got hold of the greed ethic and that the greed ethic has turned America into a tidy little hell is not, I think, wrong.

(S, p. 93)

This remark, probably because it is formulated by a character whose explicit theme is a critique of strategies of escapism and adjustment, has a liberal modernist ring to it. But, if Barthelme deserves to be called, as he often is, a post-modernist, it is because of the way he captures and presents obliquely aspects of what we might call the cultural unconscious of America. We say ‘cultural unconscious’ not only to avoid the very dubious word ‘collective’ but also because other concepts, like ‘ideology’ or ‘epistemology’, are perhaps too heavy, too formidable for what we have in mind. But it is clearly something of the same nature, the sort of analysis of the forces at work in society as well as in discourse which Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard, among others, have been conducting over the last decade.

Barthelme's fictions are crisscrossed by a bewildering circulation of flows and forces: money, speech, affects, information in the form of quotations, clichés and noise (the opposite of information) are caught in a process of continuous symbolic exchange. At times, especially in the early stories, discourse is explicitly translated into monetary terms (either because it is worth so much on the market, say in the media—as in ‘A Shower of Gold’, CBDC; or more generally because language and speech are a commodity, a currency that can be exchanged against almost anything, as in ‘The Balloon’, UPUA). Like money, discourse can suffer devaluation because of bad currency: dreck, scraps, clichés, waste. Or else excessive accumulation and acceleration of exchanges can create an inflationary whirlwind, leading to giddiness and panic. Barthelme, in stories such as ‘The Rise of Capitalism’ (S) or ‘Paraguay’, is a remarkable analyst of the uncharted waters of post-industrial capitalism. What makes him so intuitively accurate, and so close to the more theoretical work of, say, Baudrillard, is that the economic or monetary metaphor or level is always bound up with the psychic element. Discourse, reduced to pure exchange value, stripped of all referentiality, may suddenly regain objectality or use value because of scarcity or unexpected difficulties in the utterance—as in the wonderful scene from ‘A Picture History of the War’ quoted earlier—which characterize our retentiveness, the anality and anxiety of our greed ethic. But it is never long before it loses its objecthood and becomes an empty sign system, in the blanks between words, in the aimless repetitions and fruitless rewordings, the disjunction and monotony that characterize the obsessional neurosis of the culture.

In this respect, Donald Barthelme has affinities with William Gaddis, especially with his novel JR (1975)—except, of course, that with Gaddis the shattering of codes is more complete, the text becomes purely transactional, and words are only so many particles in a network of flows, totally and instantaneously exchangeable with others: stocks, automobile traffic, TV images, static, scraps of music, and so on. The human voice, like currency, is the vehicle for an infinite exchange-ability, void of all use value, in which exchanges create only additional exchange. The apparent differences in style between the two writers (the extreme length of Gaddis's novel, and its slow accretion over the years, as opposed to Barthelme's short fictions, and their appearance in periodicals, for example) should not conceal the deeper analogies. If there is a real difference, it lies in the fact that Gaddis carries the ‘destabilization’ of discourse, its decodification, much further. Barthelme—and this is perhaps one of his limitations—shifts his ground quite often, begins again from new positions, falls back on old dispositions. Precisely because his fictions are short, the strategies are more visible—indeed, they sometimes call attention to themselves. This is not necessarily a liability, since it is one of the constitutive aspects of Barthelme's post-modernism, giving his work a contemporary (one could almost say fashionable) self-reflexiveness and sense of the cultural ambiance. Besides, the brevity of the form generates intense situations, humour and the satisfaction (for reader and writer alike) of something having been, as Barthelme puts it, ‘completed’.

But the feeling of strategies of manipulation is never very far away. Barthelme is ever the gamester, the master of language games which often carry over into self-parody and to the edge of self-destruction. One of the favourite games is in the form of dialogue. Dialogue here is seldom ‘conversational’ in the traditional sense; rather, it serves as a generator of fiction: a word, a statement, is offered, tossed about, picked up, played with, and yields a certain amount of free association, self-confession or pure verbal energy. This can be considered the more ‘successful’ form of ‘conversation’, when a certain smoothness of rhythm is achieved, a lubrication, a music, as is the case in the voice stories of Great Days. But such ‘felicitous trularity’ is not always so easily achieved. A complicity has to be established, a framework set up. That is why conversations often borrow ritualized forms: the confession, the question-and-answer test, the psychoanalytic session, the interview, and so on. All those situations have in common an informational or therapeutic objective, as well as a power relation more or less explicitly realized. But, most of all, they provide the space and the pretext for a discourse free of the requirements of ‘normal’ conversation, free to indulge in all its obsessions, repetitions, fantasies and self-defences:

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. That's a very considerable advantage, I would say

Q: I believe in it

(‘The Explanation’, CL, p. 80)

Every conversation is a form of mutual aggression and/or of mutual analysis. Sometimes this produces the standard rebellion of the ‘analysand’ against the ‘analyst’:

Q: You could interest yourself in these interesting machines. They're hard to understand. They're time-consuming

A: I don't like you

Q: I sensed it

A: These imbecile questions …

Q: Inadequately answered …

A: … imbecile questions leading nowhere …

Q: The personal abuse continues

A: … that voice, confident and shrill …

Q (aside): He has given away his gaiety, and now has nothing

(‘Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel’, CL, p. 99)

In the several stories based on a similar pattern, the answerer is a sensitive, depressed person, who believes in the power and confusion of love, against the technocratic order of textbooks of all kinds, against the inquisitorial discourse of psychology, religion or ‘science’. ‘The Explanation’ is particularly significant in this respect, since it stages the resistance of the ‘answerer’ to the questioner's technological cant and his attempts to manipulate him. The strategy is that of affects against hyperrationality, of ‘madness’ against ‘the reign of right reason’ (the content of which, according to the A figure, is rhetoric):

Q: I have a number of error messages I'd like to introduce here and I'd like you to study them carefully … they're numbered. I'll go over them with you: undefined variable … improper use of hierarchy … missing operator … mixed mode, that one's particularly grave … argument of a function is fixed-point … improper character in constant … improper fixed-point constant … improper floating-point constant … invalid character transmitted in sub-program statement, that's a bitch … no End statement

A: I like them very much

Q: There are hundreds of others, hundreds and hundreds

A: You seem emotionless

Q: That's not true

A: To what do your emotions … adhere, if I can put it that way?

(‘The Explanation’, CL, p. 79)

Confronted here are two modes of scanning the real and the discourses that attempt to structure it. And, in the comic enunciation of faulty transmission of information, the answerer probably sees, as the reader does, nothing but fantastic possible worlds of fiction, lusciously, parasitically proliferating. But, ultimately, his challenge is not even to the other as agent of organized technocratic power. Rather it is addressed to him, as the end of the quotation makes clear, as an agent and a victim of the tedium of repetition, of the slow death of non-feeling. ‘The Catechist’ (in Sadness) gives a particularly successful staging of this symbolic situation. A priest who has fallen in love with a woman is being questioned and instructed day after day by a catechist:

The catechist opens his book. He reads: ‘The apathy of the listeners. The judicious catechist copes with the difficulty.’ He closes the book.

I think: Analysis terminable and interminable. I think: Then she will leave the park looking backward over her shoulder.

He says: ‘And the guards, what were they doing?’ I say: ‘Abusing the mothers’

‘You wrote a letter?’

‘Another letter’

‘Would you say, originally, that you had a vocation? Heard a call?’

‘I heard many things. Screams. Suites for unaccompanied cello. I did not hear a call.’

‘Nevertheless—’

‘Nevertheless I went to the clerical-equipment store and purchased a summer cassock and a winter cassock. …’

(S, p. 123)

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The change that takes place with Great Days is that the dialogues seem to free themselves of the question-and-answer pattern and become more complex procedures. At the same time, the relations between the two voices are no longer ruled by aggression or investigation principles as in the examples above. Has conversation, then, become, as one of the speakers in Great Days puts it, a ‘nonculminating kind of ultimately affectless activity’? (GD, p. 159). Yes, in the sense that play has been substituted for confrontation, analysis and anxiety. As the same speaker says to his partner, ‘I respect your various phases. Your sweet, even discourse’ (GD, p. 159). This is not to say that Barthelme's later stories have become gentle psalmodies of love. If love does figure prominently in them, it is in a somewhat ambiguous way, and always with the peculiar edge of his humour: ‘Love, the highest form of human endeavour’, but also ‘Love which allows us to live together male and female in small grubby apartments that would only hold one sane person, normally’ (‘The Leap’, GD, p. 152).

But that is only one of the reasons why the later stories cannot be termed ‘affectless’ in any way. Affects, as always, are pervasive. The difference with earlier fictions is that they have become so pervasive that they are now the very object of the language games being played. ‘Morning’ begins as an exorcism of fear (‘Say you're frightened. Admit it—’). ‘The Leap’ is a ritual in preparation for the great day, the day ‘we make the leap to faith’. ‘Great Days’, similarly, is a ritual review and exorcism of past behaviour leading to the final promise to love and remember:

—There's a thing the children say

—What do the children say?

—They say: Will you always love me?

—Always

—Will you always remember me?

—Always

(GD, pp. 171-2)

But, beyond such apparent ‘culminations’, a lot of ‘nonculminating’ activity does go on in the Great Days texts. In fact, their structural principle is the performative mode. Micro-sequence after micro-sequence, games are played, promises made, inventions, rituals, exorcisms performed. Unidentified voices perform, act. In ‘The New Music’, the two voices ‘doing mamma’ fall into it like musicians going through a routine number. The texts become the record of the activity of voices; more accurately, they are the activities themselves.

Barthelme's success in this new form of experimentation is brilliant: the stories are, one feels, ‘purified’ of the whimsy and of the sometimes facile post-modernist chic of the earlier collections. They are also purified in the sense that all trace of narrative ‘dross’ has been removed from them. The surprising fact is that this genuinely innovative technique also remains accessible and enjoyable to the reader. With the precision and insight of the master craftsman, Barthelme has refined and inflected his technique, emphasizing the more creative elements of his earlier work and discarding the rest, and working into it the dynamism of the performative mode. One is reminded of Samuel Beckett's wonderful rebound in Company (1980), of his cunning use, once more, of the voice, of what in recent theories has the highest creative potential, the verbal inventiveness, the sense of play and transaction. Such a keen sense of transactions and strategies (will Barthelme ever write a play, one wonders?) radically displaces the question of metafiction. The notion itself always had, it seems, something formalistic and limiting about it. Of course, it is true that one aspect of some of Barthelme's stories does concern itself with the art and the act of telling stories, of performing discursive acts of all kinds. And their modernity certainly has to do with the way the reader finds himself actively enlisted in them, his alertness and creativity being part and parcel of a successful performance of the text, of its being ‘completed’. But then this can be said of almost every good writer, even though the modalities, of course, can be widely different. And metafiction, if it is to be successful as such, must carry the self-reflexiveness and the self-performance much further—as, for example, Italo Calvino has done in his recent meta-novel to end all meta-novels, Se per una notte d'inverno, un viaggiatore (If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, 1981). Clearly, Barthelme's originality and effectiveness do not rest on such brittle notions. His is a genuinely inventive and innovative fiction, for the many reasons we have suggested (and, no doubt, for several others as well).