[In the following essay, Stengel analyzes three representative stories from Amateurs in order to differentiate Barthelme's early and later short fiction and to explore the relationship between irony and human consciousness in his work.]

At his best Donald Barthelme was a highly moral and political American short story writer. Moreover, for a decade or so—from the mid-sixties to the late seventies—in a plentiful, inventive stream of stories that often appeared first in the New Yorker, Barthelme challenged and enlarged the possibilities for short story form and short story expression. As the seventies proceeded, Barthelme's imaginative energies altered substantially. This phenomenon is apparent in Amateurs, Barthelme's fifth collection of short stories, published in 1976. There are four or five first-rate stories in this group of twenty-one, and yet even in the best of these Barthelme's vision seems tamed, controlled, even restrained by some of the very forces that his earlier writing so brilliantly destroyed or at least called into question. If the two most important vectors in Barthelme's short fiction are irony and human consciousness, as well as the relationship between the two, many of the stories in Amateurs impinge irony on their subject matter from so many perspectives as to be finally not so much deeply ironic, or even anironic, but merely controlled by Barthelme's willful subjugation to his own dazzling, dexterous use of a variety of ironic stances. Likewise, if Barthelme's stories prior to Amateurs consistently reject the tendency of human consciousness to force imaginative writing into conventional, preordained shapes and containers, some of the most effective tales in this collection are about the triumph of groupthink, the victory of a particular, collective attitude to reality that squelches the desires of individuality, language, and perverse lone resistance to its kind of conformist tyranny. Furthermore, there is far too little, and far too ambivalent, a sense of the irony of just these defeats within these stories. By analyzing three vivid, representative tales from Amateurs, “The School,” “Some of Us Have Been Threatening Our Friend Colby,” and “The New Member,” I think it is possible to see a large and significant fault line between early and later Barthelme. In recognizing this graphic distinction, critics might begin to assess the gains and losses in Barthelme's attitude toward his own ironic attempts to forge a reconciliation with the world and toward his vision of human consciousness as fostering a kind of intellectual totalitarianism among otherwise independent, free-spirited, and civilized men and women.

“The School” is one of Barthelme's most frequently anthologized works, appearing as a representative sample of Barthelme's art and as an exemplum of post-modernist short story practice in a wide variety of freshman composition texts and short story collections. Yet what is one of Barthelme's smoothest, glibest, and rhetorically most confident tales is a curiously self-defeated model as well. Told by a male grade school teacher, this tale recounts, in a kind of mellifluous, catalogued ironic lament, a series of deadly mishaps involving first plants and animals, then parents, and finally reaching their children, who are students in the narrator's elementary school class. As the mayhem and horror of these spiraling disasters mount, the teacher, with only occasional qualms or nervousness, proceeds with his lesson plans, insistent that these disruptions are inevitable in a modern education and, perhaps, are irrelevant to it. When his terrified students demand to know why the school has been besieged with these unremitting catastrophes, the narrator can offer them no satisfying explanation. Furthermore, they insist that he offer them proof of the power of regeneration, the force of life over death, by making love to their attractive teacher's aide before their innocent eyes. Horrified by their request and yet fearful of ignoring their anxiety, the narrator begins to embrace the student teacher as his students become excited. Suddenly, there is a knock at the door. The narrator opens it to find a new pet gerbil waiting to enter his classroom. Barthelme concludes his parable with the sample declarative: “The children cheered wildly.”¹

Doubtless the smug, mostly self-assured voice of the narrator is meant to represent those modern educational administrators who insist on procedure, order, and ritual under any circumstances, choosing to ignore the death, violence, and chaos of the society around them as they hurry through their daily drills, schedules, and standardized agendas. Where is the humanity and ultimate purpose in an education that so ignores the brutality of the world, Barthelme asks? Yet what finally fails this story is its lack of surface tension and its ironically smiling conclusions.

Anyone who teaches this story must ask who has placed this new gerbil outside this desperately smiling instructor's door so that he can begin yet another round of falsely confident, cajoling lessons in animal and human ecology—the glib, manipulative teacher, his fellow instructors and administrators, or worse yet, Barthelme, the looming authorial presence in the tale? What is wrong with both the consciousness and the irony in this work is that it becomes, at once, too little and much too much. Barthelme is at great pains to show that the sweetly domineering consciousness of this grade school teacher is not a monstrous force but an individual, with his own uncertainties and insecurities. Still, his victory achieved by someone placing before the students new life, and thus diverting them from their meaningful, hard-headed questions about life and death and human values, is a triumph for just the collectivist brain damage that so many of Barthelme's earlier tales have assailed. Moreover, in conclusion, the children cheer wildly at what? It is the simple arrival of a new living creature, the endless ability of their teacher to deceive them, the duplicity of their school in cheating them out of a meaningful education, or, in essence, the force of Barthelme's imagination in finishing his tale with such multiple, whimsically ironic endings that even his readers become a tool of his skillful rhetorical persuasion?

What is most wrong about his charming, accomplished cautionary fable is not just its protagonist's easy acquiescence to the forces of control and submission—although earlier Barthelme stories like “City Life,” “Paraguay,” “The Explanation” and “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel” refute just the totalitarianism to which this narrator succumbs—but the smoothness of its droning narrative listing of disaster, its almost musicialization of grief and disaster recorded as a harmonic Vonnegut-like “so it goes.” In one of his finest stories, “Engineer Private Paul Klee Misplaces an Aircraft between Milbertshofen and Cambrai, March 1916,” from Sadness (1972), Barthelme recreates abstract expressionist painter Klee's experience as a thoroughly reluctant inductee in World War I and sketches a great artist's ability to make the best of any nightmare through the sheer force of his imagination. On the other hand, “The School” displays the power of a teacher and a writer to hoodwink his pupils and audience through the power of his pet gerbil, his linguistic magic acts, parlor tricks done with mirrors, and self-reflexive language. In stories before Amateurs, Alan Wide recognizes a significant shift in the writer's attitude to his use of irony: “The fact is that increasingly in Barthelme's work, if not consistently, mere acceptance is modified by a more positive, more affirmative anironic attitude of assent … Klee intimates the possibility of irony (irony completed by the anironic ideal it implies) as a graceful, even integrative gesture toward the world.”² Yet the voice of “The School” has no desire to integrate his view of education as rote procedure with the tragedies that beset his school. Rather, he wants to superimpose his rules and guidelines on his students as a means of ignoring and suppressing the painful incongruities of experience.

What's worse, this story has absolutely no rough surfaces. Barthelme's best tales have the jagged edges, the musical flat notes of jazz and collage, two of Barthelme's favorite art forms. Because of their raggedness and asymmetry, encountering such stories from any angle draws blood, invokes the shock of recognition that here is an artist deeply suspicious of the detritus of American pop culture and mass consumption, a writer who is forcing the short story into a symbolist, highly poeticized verbal and formal stylization to dramatize his anxieties about the vulgarity and emptiness of contemporary American experience. “Fragments are the only forms I trust,”³ insists the narrator of “See The Moon,” deeply aware of the moral responsibility of the legitimate craftsman to shape the fragmentation of his culture and experience into a sum that is more than the holes in its parts. “Strings of language extend in every direction to bind the world into a rushing, ribald whole,”⁴ the narrator of “The Indian Uprising” contends as he watches the takeover of New York City and his own imagination by a savage, terrorist band of Comanche Indians expertly trained in guerrilla warfare and brutal counterinsurgency techniques. With this story Barthelme clearly recognizes that though language may be capable of destroying the meaning and value of experience, the moral and political demands of art dictate that the consummate writer retain his identity and purpose, whatever the forces of oppression or liberation, justice, or injustice a society creates or inherits.

Yet despite these fictive recognitions of the writer's moral and political responsibility, by the time of Amateurs in 1976, there seem to be unsettling confusions in Barthelme's style and subject matter. No critic has analyzed Barthelme's aesthetic late career quandary as forcefully as Jack Hicks in his study of contemporary American fiction, In the Singer's Temple.

These twenty fictions [Amateurs] lack the structural and linguistic energy of Barthelme's most significant work. There is no experimentation with typography or engraving, nor is there widespread use of literary fragmentation or collage, as in “The Falling Dog” or “Departures.” … Barthelme's fiction … is a precarious balancing between lyric poetry and narrative prose; it depends on the tension between the necessary baggage of character, plot line, sustained mood, traditional syntax, and consistence of verbal style and the correcting need to deny, modify, or escape from those holding cells. It thrives on the eternal dichotomy between fiction as artistic sublimation ruled by logic, order, and coherence, and verbal expression as the more unrestricted play of the mind, particularly in its preconscious and subconscious aspects, daubing as an idiot savant at the palette. However accessible and affirmative, … the stories [in Amateurs] often lack the richness of texture and narrative invention that characterized Barthelme's finest work.⁵

With equal acuity, Hicks summarizes the philosophical tensions implicit in Amateurs and all of Barthelme's fiction: “Barthelme regards literature as a single, hierarchical system within a vastly oppressive mega-hierarchy. The act of writing is a projection of human consciousness; what is needed is a form of literature that releases consciousness from the burden of the past and from its own self-destructive tendencies.”⁶

Yet the legitimately menacing quality of “Some of Us Have Been Threatening Our Friend Colby,” an occasionally anthologized story from Amateurs and arguably one of the cleverest and most ominously controlled stories Barthelme ever composed, depicts the desiccation of individual consciousness as a creatively gleeful act. In this tale a coterie of aesthetes gathers to discuss the fate of their friend Colby, who has obviously gone too far. Collectively, their totalitarian impulses dictate that Colby meet with death by hanging and the entire duration of the story, as narrated by one of their circle, consists of their discussion of the graceful, aesthetic forms, the polite, easeful considerations they can amend to their decision to destroy their friend's right to be. A variety of special arrangements are proposed as humane accoutrements to his beheading. One friend wonders what kind of classical music—exalted or severe—should accompany the event; another speculates how the invitation to the ceremony should be worded, while yet another ponders if wire or rope is the most painless method for Colby's demise. Not only does this story brilliantly demonstrate the total triumph of the artful, artificial forms of modern life over any moral content, but the story demonstrates the unabashed victory of a horrific consensus consciousness that can easily obliterate meaning and purpose in a decadent, overcivilized society.

Yet the ultimate confusions of the tale lie in its contradictory, self-consuming senses of irony. Its smiling nihilism, this Kafka-without-claws quality, lies not exclusively in what Hicks perceives as the strength of its forces of logic, order, and coherence, personified by Colby's would-be friends, but also in Colby's enervated inabilities—and Barthelme's limited desire—to have Colby fight back, escape, or evade their grotesque but fine-tuned reasoning. Colby hardly constitutes the vital Barthelme ego, what Hicks calls an “idiot savant daubing at the pallet of his very unique consciousness.” Thus the greatest terror of the story is that finally it is consumed by what Hicks recognizes as its own self-destructive tendencies. “Some of Us Have Been Threatening Our Friend Colby” is a masterful, hilarious, smooth-as-glass depiction of how gracious and urbane citizens perform complex, strategic, and heinous acts, losing their individual identities to the dominant consciousness of a death-obsessed, death-worshipping culture. Unfortunately, one can't help but feel that completely appreciating this story means losing some small portion of one's own consciousness and irony to enjoy Barthelme's linguistic destruction of Colby as much as the narrator and Colby's other friends relish tightening the rope around his neck.

If a denuded Kafkaesque spirit hovers over this story, the full-fledged energy of Poe, Barthelme's other influential literary benefactor, gives real dimension, even poignance, to “The New Member,” one of the most unappreciated stories in Amateurs. “The New Member” is never anthologized in short story collections, has been critically avoided by scholars, and is hardly deemed essential reading for anyone attempting to assess the Barthelme canon. Yet this tale, once again about horrifying committee decisions and the partial triumph of committee consciousness, has an exuberantly playful, highly unpredictable sensibility and a well-contained sense of irony. The story ultimately demonstrates that the forces of totalitarianism threatening to engulf modern life are susceptible, even vulnerable, to their own fears, tremors, and demons of control. In this tale, which is a deadpan spoof of those collective mental processes so conditioned by Roberts' Rules of Order that they are unable to think beyond it, either a committee of archangels, a gathering of exceedingly genteel mafioso bosses and matrons, or, most likely, a group of East Side Manhattan philanthropic benefactors, meet to decide the fate of their charges. These privileged executives and doyens are so consumed with ruling a motion proper or out of order, seconding or tabling it, that they have long forgotten that people's fates and lives hang in the balance. When a novice member of the committee looks apprehensively outside their meeting room to report a huge stranger lurking at the window, her fears gradually convince other committee members to invite the outsider into their enclave. By story's end, the tribunal offers this alien presence a seat on the committee so that one of the anonymous masses whose lives are so randomly disrupted by its causal pronouncements can at last take part in their decision-making process.

One of the wittily calculated concluding ironies of this tale is that the hulking stranger, now a part of one of his society's most important committees, its dominant thought processes, immediately emerges as an insufferable tyrant. Like many creatures who live for committee duties, he instantly becomes a whimsical autocrat given to absurd decrees and stringent regulations. The new member's saving grace is revealed in the last sentence of the story. Although he demands that all members wear gray overalls with gray T-shirts, that they say morning, evening, and lunchtime prayers and do calisthenics between 5 and 7 p.m., and despite his forbidding boutonnieres, nose rings, and gatherings of one or more persons, “on the question of bedtime, [he is] of two minds.”⁷

Very few Barthelme stories achieve such a perfect balance of his concerns with human consciousness and irony with such grace and astringency. If the great danger for human consciousness in the modern world is society's terrifying drive to make all individuals think as one, how, Barthelme asks, does literature effectively dramatize that threat, and how can irony ridicule this compulsion without making the ironic impulse just another aspect of the collectivization of human thought? With this story, Barthelme makes his new member as guilty of the deadly pragmatism and fatalism as the narrow circle of lawmakers he enters, while giving this newest dictator some of his colleagues' trepidations and uncertainties. Barthelme ultimately declares here that the hope for all totalitarian systems, as the West has just recently seen with communism, is that, eventually, they may be “of two minds.”

After an initial series of stories and short story collections that viewed experimentation, formal innovation, fragmentation, and collage as fundamental means for analyzing human perception, Barthelme's later writing enters the enemy camp. What is it like to be part of absurd mental constructs like educational administration, a deadly, claustrophobic clique of aspiring artists and aesthetes, or any committee that makes life and death judgments, Barthelme asks in “The School,” “Some of Us Have Been Threatening Our Friend Colby,” and “The New Member.” The danger in these tales is that in visiting their tyrannical collective social consciousness, Barthelme fraternizes far too much with his antagonists' dilemmas. In revealing ironies within ironies inside their hierarchical systems, Barthelme can make totalitarianisms that wish to devour us seem all too humane, amusing, understandable, or aesthetically appealing. Ultimately one can ask, at least about “The School” and “Some of Us Have Been Threatening Our Friend Colby,” where does Barthelme stand in relation to these stories? Isn't he too sympathetic with his instructor's evasion of responsibility to his students in “The School,” and don't we, us the audience, as well as Barthelme, eventually enjoy threatening our friend Colby? In Amateurs, only in “The New Member” does Barthelme have the wit, moral vision, and controlled irony to explain the origins of his pet gerbil while vividly illustrating the dissension in the ranks that the sudden appearance of this beast on the threshold creates. In this ingenious fabliau, the figure hovering in the doorway is our own need to continue the lesson, to proceed with the story, to be ironically entertaining before our audience at all costs, even though we know we are as capable of manipulation, threat, and the desire to control others as individuals within the most insidious totalitarian environments. Our redeeming trait may be that, on some issues, we are of two minds.

In an otherwise felicitous essay honoring Donald Barthelme's career, John Barth in the September 19, 1989, New York Times Book Review called Barthelme the thinking man's minimalist.⁸ For all of Barthelme's economy and miniaturization, he can never accurately be called a member of the minimalist school. Nor did he strive for limited effects in a limited short story form. Indeed, Barthelme was interested in evoking major aesthetic realignments, crucial shifts in our attention spans, and substantial inversions in our grasp of language and cognition. Recognizing that the human thought process in all its scope, grandeur, and wackiness is a huge and complex subject, Barthelme could be better termed the thinking man's essentialist. He is forever a writer who realizes the need for individuality, persistence, and the constant struggle of every unique human consciousness in asserting itself against many of the monolithic, pernicious, deadly “isms” of twentieth-century life.

Notes

1. Donald Barthelme, Amateurs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 41.

2. Alan Wilde, Horizons of Assent (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 183-84.

3. Donald Barthelme, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 157.

4. Barthelme, Unspeakable, 11.

5. Jack Hicks, In the Singer's Temple (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 35.

6. Hicks, 35.

7. Barthelme, Amateurs, 164.

8. [Ed. note: Barth's essay is reprinted at the head of this volume.]