The final possibility is to turn ultimacy, exhaustion, paralyzing self-consciousness and the adjective weight of accumulating history … to make something new and valid, the essence whereof would be the impossibility of making something new.

—John Barth, “Title”

After a life rich in emotional defeats, I have looked around for other modes of misery, other roads to destruction. Now I limit myself to listening to what people say, and thinking what pamby it is, what they say. My nourishment is refined from the ongoing circus of the mind in motion. Give me the odd linguistic trip, stutter and fall, and I will be content.

—Donald Barthelme, Snow White

On August 31, 1963 the New Yorker carried a story entitled “Player Piano,” which was written by an almost totally unknown thirty-year-old writer named Donald Barthelme. Although few readers or critics could have anticipated it at the time, the appearance of this brief, surreal story in a magazine as rich in literary heritage as the New Yorker must today be regarded as one of the most significant events in recent literary history. Ever since that date, the steady stream of Barthelme's fictions that have appeared in the pages of that magazine has undoubtedly served as a constant source of inspiration to other young experimental writers. Indeed, especially during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Barthelme's work probably had more impact on American innovative fiction than that of any other writer.

Even today, more than fifteen years since his New Yorker debut, much of Barthelme's work—particularly his output up through his collection Sadness—still seems enormously fresh and vital. Because of his stories' resistance to paraphrasable interpretations, their surreal landscapes, unusual characters, and fragmented, seemingly chaotic style, Barthelme's fictional methods have often been compared to those of surrealist or minimalist painters, pop artists, and such writers as Kafka, Beckett, lonesco, and Borges. More important to this study, however, is the inward, metafictional quality of his writing, the way he uses his fiction to explore the nature of storytelling and the resources left to language and the fiction-maker. As was true with Coover, Barthelme's metafictional concerns are intimately related to his other thematic interests: the difficulties of expressing a total vision of oneself in a fragmenting universe, the failure of most of our social and linguistic systems, the difficulties of making contact or sustaining relationships with others. But above all, Barthelme has been our society's most consistently brilliant critic of the language process itself and of the symbol-making activity of modern man. And like the work of Coover and William Gass, Barthelme's metafictional examinations of how our symbols and fiction systems operate—or fail to operate—offer direct and revealing insights into the sadness, anxieties, terrors, and boredom of the modern world.

Rather than attempting to examine each of Barthelme's novels and collections of fiction—a repetitious process, as it turns out—this study will first of all make some general observations about his thematic and stylistic approaches and will then examine more closely two representative early works: Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964) and Snow White (1967). This approach will emphasize the metafictional continuity of Barthelme's work and will not analyze the relatively unimportant ways his work has evolved during his career. Barthelme's literary methods and major thematic concerns have remained relatively stable over the years and, in fact, his recent works—with the exception of Great Days (1979)—seem to be suffering from too much of this very “sameness.” For a period in the late 1960s, especially in City Life (1970), Barthelme seemed very interested in exploring the possibility of using visual and typographic elements to reinforce certain moods or themes. And, as several critics have suggested, there seems to be a greater sense of acceptance or resignation in Barthelme's recent work, a less rebellious or despairing attitude than we find in the early works.¹ But for the most part Barthelme's metafictional interests have remained remarkably consistent throughout his career.

AN OVERVIEW OF BARTHELME'S FICTIONS

The title of one of Barthelme's best short stories, “Critique de la Vie Quotidienne,” offers a good summary of what has always been the principal focus of his fiction: the attractions and frustrations offered by ordinary modern life. As Alan Wilde suggests in his perceptive examination of Barthelme's work, it is this scaled-down range of interests which may be what is most distinctive about his work: “The articulation [is] not of the larger, more dramatic emotions to which modernist fiction is keyed but of an extraordinary range of minor, banal dissatisfactions … not anomie or accidie or dread but a muted series of irritations, frustrations, and bafflements.”² Certainly the reaction of Barthelme's characters to “la vie quotidienne” is easy to summarize, as a few of their remarks pointedly indicate:³

“I was happier before.”

“Like Pascal said: ‘The natural misfortune of our mortal and feeble condition is so wretched that when we consider it closely, nothing can console us.’”

“I've been sorry all my life.”

“I spoke to Sylvia. ‘Do you think this is a good life?’ The table held apples, books, long-playing records. She looked up. ‘No.’”

“The paradigmatic artistic experience is that of failure. … The word is unsatisfactory; only a fool would deny it.”

Nearly all of Barthelme's work to date has been permeated by this overwhelming sense that life is not as good as we expected it to be—“The world in the evening seems fraught with the absence of promise,” says the disgruntled narrator of “La Critique.” This lack of satisfaction on the part of Barthelme's characters is produced by a series of closely connected personal anxieties which are neatly balanced by Barthelme's own evident artistic anxieties and the anxieties presumably experienced by Barthelme's readers. Indeed, there is a significant relationship in Barthelme's fiction between his characters' struggles to stay alive, to make sense of their lives, and to establish meaningful connections with others, and Barthelme's own struggle with the disintegration of fictional forms and the deterioration of language. Often Barthelme's self-conscious, metafictional approach allows these struggles to operate concurrently within the stories (many of his main characters even being surrogate artist figures), the two serving to reinforce or symbolize each other. Meanwhile, we ourselves provide a third aspect of this relationship: as we grapple with the elements to organize and make sense of them, we provide an additional sort of analogue or reflection of this struggle with disintegration. The relationship between these personal and metafictional concerns can be seen more clearly in the following schematic listing:

In Barthelme's fiction, then, the sources of dissatisfaction as well as the means of coping with it are intimately connected for both the artist and the ordinary person. Although the specific manifestations are varied, these parallel struggles often have to do with the attempt to maintain a fresh, vital relationship with either words or women—an obsession which is evident in the works of many other contemporary male metafictionists such as Gass, Coover, Barth, Sukenick, and Federman. Moreover, Barthelme's characters are typically shown not only to be painfully aware of their own personal and sexual inadequacies but, more generally, to be disgruntled or bored with the systems they rely on to deal with their fragmented, meaningless lives. Simply stated, their fundamental problem is twofold: on the one hand, they are bored with their humdrum lives and humdrum relationships with others and are therefore constantly seeking a means of overcoming their rigidly patterned but ultimately inconsequential lives; on the other hand, Barthelme's characters fear any loss of security and are unable fully to open themselves to experience because they find it so confusing, ambiguous, and unstable and because they don't trust the systems at their disposal for coping with it. Paradoxically, then, their very awareness of the dismal realities around them makes it all the more difficult for them to face up to the frightening moment when they must go forth and confront “the new.” The narrator of “Subpoena,” after being forced to dismantle his “monster-friend” Charles, offers a good summary of these mixed feelings: “Without Charles, without his example, his exemplary quietude, I run the risk of acting, the risk of risk. I must participate, I must leave the house and walk about” (S, p. 116). Even more pointed are the remarks of the narrator of “The Dolt” (possibly Barthelme himself) regarding a would-be writer's inability to think of anything to say: “I myself have these problems. Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin” (UP, p. 65).

Thus, the question for Barthelme's characters remains: given a reality which is chaotic, and given the fact that the system of signs developed by man to help him deal with reality is inadequate—“Signs are signs and some of them lie,” says the narrator of “Me and Miss Mandible”—how does one generate enough humanly significant, exciting moments to insure that one is alive? Certainly one cannot rely on any exterior systems to help find assurances and solutions. As Alan Wilde suggests, “In a general way, what Barthelme takes his stand against are pretentions to certainty and the insistence on perfection; large demands and great expectations; dogmatisms and theories of all kinds.”⁴ Like Coover's characters, then, Barthelme's characters find themselves constantly confronting worn-out systems which fail to operate successfully—systems such as the government, the church, the military, the news media, and a changing series of intellectual systems. (Psychiatry, existentialism, literary criticism, and Freudian psychology are among Barthelme's favorite targets.) Indeed, Barthelme often seems to suggest, perhaps playfully, that the acceptance of any final claims to truth and certainty may result in a deadening of our ability to respond naturally to experience. In “The Photograph” Barthelme suggests precisely this point when he has one scientist suggest to another that they should burn the photographs they have discovered of the human soul:

“It seems to me to boil down to this: Are we better off with souls, or just possibly without them?”

“Yes. I see what you mean. You prefer the uncertainty.”

“Exactly. It's more creative. Take for example my, ah, arrangement with your wife, Dorothea. Stippled with uncertainty. At moments, we are absolutely quaking with nonspecific anxiety. I enjoy it. Dorothea enjoys it. The humdrum is defeated. Momentarily, of course.”

(GP, pp. 158-59)

As Barthelme well knows, any solution to casting off this “cocoon of habituation”—which deadens our responses to art, to other human beings, and to ordinary reality—can only be provisional in nature. But the key for Barthelme, just as it was for Coover, lies in our “keeping the circuits open,” in our remaining open to experience sufficiently so that new responses and new systems can be produced to generate the freshness and vitality we all seek. This is the overt subject matter of a number of Barthelme's best fictions, such as “The Balloon” and “Daumier,” in which Barthelme examines how art can rescue man from the ordinary.

Barthelme's much-analyzed metafiction, “The Balloon,” presents a wonderfully deft and amusing allegory about the status of an art object's relationship to both its creator and its public.⁵ As with Coover's “The Magic Poker,” the narrator of “The Balloon” opens his story by describing his creation and then reminding us of his control over it: “The Balloon, beginning at a point on Fourteenth Street, the exact location of which I cannot reveal, expanded northward all one night, while people were sleeping, until it reached the Park. There I stopped it” (UP, p. 15). Although we discover in the very last paragraph of the story that this balloon had a specific meaning and served a specific purpose for the narrator—(it is revealed to be “a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure, having to do with the unease I felt at your absence, and with sexual deprivation” (UP, p. 21), the narrator apparently does not intend for this private meaning to be apprehended by his audience. Indeed, his main interest seems to be simply to add another interesting object to the landscape of Manhattan. As he explains:

But it is wrong to speak of “situations,” implying sets of circumstances leading to some resolution, some escape of tension; there were no situations, simply the balloon hanging there … at that moment there was only this balloon, concrete particular, hanging there.

(UP, pp. 15-16)

Not surprisingly, the public experiences some initial difficulties in its attempts to analyze the balloon; but eventually the fundamental epistemological uncertainty of the times forces people to take a more practical approach to the balloon's presence:

There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the “meaning” of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena.

(UP, p. 16)

Rather than seeking external “meanings,” the public soon contents itself with using the balloon for its own private uses: “It was agreed that since the meaning of the balloon could never be known absolutely, extended discussion was pointless, or at least less purposeful than the activities of those who, for example, hung green and blue paper lanterns from the warm gray underside, in certain streets, or seized the occasion to write messages on the surface” (UP, p. 16). Soon the balloon is also being used much like any other arbitrary coordinate system to assist people in orienting themselves: “People began, in a curious way, to locate themselves in relation to aspects of the balloon: ‘I'll be at the place where it dips down into Forty-seventh Street almost to the sidewalk, near the Alamo Chile House” (UP, p. 20).

The balloon also serves another function that reveals much about the role that Barthelme believes that art can play for a regimented easily bored public. As the narrator suggests, the balloon offers an archetypal representation of the limitless freedom of the imagination itself:

It was suggested that what was admired about the balloon was finally this that it was not limited or defined. … This ability of the balloon to shift in shape, to change, was very pleasing, especially to people whose lives were rather rigidly patterned, persons to whom change, although desired, was not available. The balloon … offered the possibility, in its randomness, of mislocation of the self, in contradistinction to the grid of precise, rectangular pathways under our feet. The amount of specialized training currently needed, and the consequent desirability of long-term commitments, has been occasioned by the steadily growing importance of complex machinery, in virtually all kinds of operations; as this tendency increases, more and more people will turn, in bewildered inadequacy, to solutions for which the balloon may stand as a prototype, or “rough draft.”

(UP, pp. 20-21)

Like all good art objects, then, the balloon effectively provides a sense of freedom and a moment of distraction from the mundane […] effects of reality. Because its shifting, ambiguous surface allows it to be played with and freely interpreted, the balloon also serves as a reminder of the freedom we all have in confronting experience itself.

In “Daumier,” Barthelme explores how the fictional “construction of surrogates” allows a writer to accommodate himself to his unsatisfactory “real” life. The story—which in its labyrinthine structure resembles a miniaturized Universal Baseball Association—opens with the writer/narrator Daumier explaining to his wife the nature of the “great dirty villain,” the self: “Now, here is the point about the self: it is insatiable. It is always, always hankering. It is what you might call rapacious to a fault. The great flaming mouth to the thing is never going to be stuffed full” (S, pp. 163-64). In response to this view of the self, Daumier has decided that the construction of surrogate selves in his fiction will help ease his plight. As he suggests, “The false selves in their clatter and boister and youthful brio will slay and bother and push out and put to all types of trouble the original, authentic self” (S, p. 163). In fact, Daumier has already succeeded in creating a fictional Daumier who “is doing very well” because he knows his limits. He doesn't overstep. Desire has been reduced in him to a minimum” (S, p. 164). During parts of the story we observe this second Daumier operating in his own fictional setting, transporting a number of lovely young women across the “plains and pampas of consciousness” (S, p. 164). After a while the fictional Daumier becomes especially enamored of one particularly attractive woman, a long-legged, kindly lady named Celeste; and, as in The UBA and “The Magic Poker,” we begin to observe a “real” character becoming obsessed with his own creation. Thus the real Daumier notes at one point, “I then noticed that I had become rather fond—fond to a fault—of a person in the life of my surrogate. It was of course the girl Celeste. My surrogate found her attractive and no less did I; this was a worry. I began to wonder how I could get her out of his life and into my own” (S, p. 177).

Sensing that his one fictional construction is not really enough to sate his rapacious self, Daumier next decides to invent another surrogate, “a quiet, thoughtful chap who leads a contemplative life” (S, p. 178). This second person provides us with one of the most direct statements available of what Barthelme feels must be done to accommodate oneself to the world. After a lengthy period of self-analysis, he says, “It is easy to be satisfied if you get out of things what inheres in them, but you must look closely, take nothing for granted, let nothing become routine. You must fight against the cocoon of habituation which covers everything if you let it. There are always openings, if you can find them. There is always something to do” (S, p. 179). This solution sounds remarkably similar to the advice Henry Waugh gives himself just after he sacrificed Jock Casey: “The circuit wasn't closed, his or any other: there were patterns, but they were shifting and ambiguous and you had a lot of room inside them” (UBA, p. 143). At the story's end, the fictional Celeste has entered into the “real” Daumier's life, while he has temporarily packed away his other surrogates until he feels he will need them. Daumier seems well aware that this solution is but a momentary relief from the demands of the self, but nevertheless this projection has provided exactly the sort of imaginative “opening” that frees the ordinary from its tediousness and allows us to go on. The story concludes with Daumier himself rephrasing his surrogate's advice: “The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted. There are always openings, if you can find them, there is always something to do” (S, p. 183).

Barthelme also knows, however, that the ability of the artist to create a new, vital form of distraction is a self-generating problem, for what is new and fresh today is destined to soon lose these qualities. Often, as in “The Glass Mountain,” Barthelme depicts man striving to unlock the new only to discover that what he has produced is merely another cliché. In this story, the artist/narrator seeks to escape from his ugly, hostile surroundings to the magical realm of art; but what he finds is merely more conventions, more clichés: when he finally reaches the end of the search he tells us, “I approached the symbol, with its layer of meaning, but when I touched it, it changed into only a beautiful princess” (CL, p. 71). “The Flight of the Pigeons” deals with the difficulties of sustaining the new even more directly, as when its narrator says, “Some things appear to be wonders in the beginning, but when you have become familiar with them, are not wonderful at all. … Some of us have even thought of folding the show—closing it down” (S, p. 139). Clearly this struggle with the new has wide implications for the ordinary man as well as for the artist; indeed, as many other metafictionists have observed (see, for example, John Barth's “Title” in Lost in the Funhouse), people's tendency to become tired of the familiar is just as damaging to personal relationships as it is to the artist. Thus we should realize that the narrator's remarks in “The Party” apply to us equally as well as they do to the writer: “When one has spoken a lot one has already used up all of the ideas one has. You must change the people you are speaking to so that you appear, to yourself, to be still alive” (S, p. 61).

Compounding the difficulties of both the artist and the ordinary individual is the decay of the communication process itself at a time when modern man is becoming increasingly inundated with supposedly meaningful symbols. “You can't even eat breakfast any more without eating symbols as much as anything else,” said William Gass in a recent interview,⁶ and Barthelme's fiction constantly examines the various ways that man is betrayed by these very symbols. The main problem facing us all, of course, is the trashy, brutalized condition of language itself which makes our communication process almost completely bog down—hence the “sludge quality” of our language—how it is filled with “stuffing”—which is described more thoroughly in Snow White. As a result of his views about language, Barthelme often suggests that language itself may be responsible for the isolation of his characters, their inability to put the pieces of their lives together, and their inability to sustain personal relations. Consequently, ambiguity constantly stalks their lives. They are, quite literally, unable to make sense of their lives or of what is going on around them—though, as the earlier quotation from “The Party” suggests, there does seem to be the Beckett-like hope that if they go on, if their words go on, things may finally come together. One indication of this self-reflexive interest in the linguistic process is the way these characters so often question each other about the meaning and implication of words, though they are almost never able to come up with any definite conclusions. The failures and dissatisfactions created by these linguistic investigations serve to reflect the larger pattern of failure and dissatisfaction in their lives. Information can be gathered, of course—for example, about Robert Kennedy in “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning” or about one's father in “Views of My Father Weeping”—but final answers or insights are beyond them. This epistemological skepticism, evident in many Barthelme stories, tends to keep our attention focused on the surface of the events. When his characters—or we ourselves—try to gain “deeper” insights or teleological explanations about what has happened, the search inevitably ends futilely with our efforts often being anticipated and directly mocked.

Both “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning” and “Views of My Father Weeping” offer formal critiques of the whole information-gathering process. Each of these stories, which Jerome Klinkowitz has termed “experiments in epistemology,” is composed of brief, seemingly unrelated bits of prose which will supposedly provide enough information to clear up the basic mystery of their subjects.⁷ “Views” opens with a casual introduction of violence: “An aristocrat was riding down the street in his carriage. He ran over my father” (CL, p. 3). The rest of the story describes the narrator's frustrating efforts to uncover the meaning of this murder and of his father's character. As Coover does in his cubist stories, Barthelme here takes all the elements of a familiar literary framework—in this case, the stock characters and language of a cheap nineteenth-century melodrama or detective thriller—and manipulates our conventional expectations for his own purposes. Much of the enjoyment of the piece comes from Barthelme's uncanny ability to mimic worn-out style and conventions while totally undermining or trivializing the easy assumptions they make. This mimicry also tends to keep our attention focused on the process of the story unfolding while distancing us from its human reality.

Not surprisingly, the story's narrator finds it difficult to relate the bits of contradictory evidence he uncovers. In fact, he finds even the simplest of statements difficult to make without qualification—he is not even sure that he can identify his father. As he tells us, “Yes, it is possible that it is not my father who sits there in the center of the bed weeping. It may be someone else, the mailman, the man who delivers the groceries, an insurance salesman or tax collector, who knows. However, I must say, it resembles my father” (CL, pp. 3-4). While trying to maintain a straightforward method of investigation, the narrator soon discovers that anything he is told is qualified by later considerations. For example, when he questions a witness, he is told that the man in the carriage “looked ‘like an aristocrat’”; but this just leads him to consider the fact this description might simply refer to the carriage itself because “any man sitting in a handsome carriage with a driver on the box … tends to look like an aristocrat” (CL, p. 4). Certainly the old signposts and clichés no longer seem useful to his investigation. When he discovers that the driver's livery was blue and green, for instance, this seems like a substantial clue. But even this proves to be useless because, as he explains, “In these days one often finds a servant aping the more exquisite color combinations affected by his masters. I have even seen them in red trousers although red trousers used to be reserved, by unspoken agreement, for the aristocracy” (CL, p. 8).

Finally, when the denouement arrives, the narrator is able to talk with Lars Bang, the driver of the carriage, who explains the death away as a mere accident caused by the father himself. But within one sentence of this “final resolution,” contradictory data is added by a dark-haired girl who defiantly announces that “Bang is an absolute bloody liar” (CL, p. 17). The story ends with the word “Etc.,” an ending which, as Jerome Klinkowitz suggests, “cheats us of the supposedly false satisfaction fiction supplies”⁸ and which also suggests that we are familiar enough with the material at hand to continue the story ourselves if we should desire.

Like “Views of My Father Weeping,” the “Robert Kennedy” story also mocks our traditional epistemological assumptions. Ostensibly the story aims at illuminating the nature of an ambiguous referent—the life of Robert Kennedy—by the usual method of gathering bits of factual and interpretive information. These descriptions are assembled for us, but because the reports are so contradictory and banal, we never gain any real insight into the subject. Once more, much of the information we receive is immediately qualified or contradicted.⁹ The story opens with the news that Kennedy “is neither abrupt with nor excessively kind to associates. Or he is both abrupt and kind” (UP, p. 33). When Kennedy himself talks, his words are inevitably created out of political clichés—“Obsolete facilities and growing demands have created seemingly insoluble difficulties and present methods of dealing with these difficulties offer little prospect of relief”—pure blague—“It's an expedient in terms of how not to destroy a situation which has been a long time gestating, or, again, how to break it up if it appears that the situation …”—or useless redundancies—“I spend my time sending and receiving messages. Some of these messages are important. Others are not” (UP, pp. 36, 41, 33). As Klinkowitz has pointed out, the main thrust of the story is basically that “the conventional epistemology fails,”¹⁰ and this failure is underlined in the last section in which Kennedy is saved by the narrator from drowning. Because of the story's title and because of the dramatic nature of the events, we surely expect a revelation into Kennedy's character at last. But even here Kennedy “retains his mask” and when he emerges from the water, he offers a noncommittal and very unrevealing cliché: “Thank you” (UP, p. 44).

Because of their skepticism and self-consciousness, most of Barthelme's characters react very differently from Coover's inveterate fiction makers to the prospect of a random, absurd universe. In “See the Moon,” one of Barthelme's most famous stories, the narrator provides a striking metaphor for the epistemological dilemmas faced by so many Barthelme characters. The story opens with the narrator explaining that he is conducting certain “very important lunar hostility studies”; he goes on to explain that “at night the moon [is] graphed by the screen wire, if you squint. The Sea of Tranquility occupying squares 47 through 108” (UP, pp. 151-52). If we consider the relationship that exists between the narrator, the moon, and the porch screen he uses as a personal grid system, we find a nicely defined metaphor for the way Barthelme seems to view man, reality, and the fragile, artificial systems man has devised to help him organize his experience. Like the equally arbitrary grid system developed by Descartes for analytic geometry, the screen is a neatly patterned but artificial system which doesn't give us any clues about the real nature of the moon (Kant's ding an sich). Yet the screen is useful to the narrator in that it creates a certain temporary order and meaning; like the balloon in “The Balloon,” the screen itself remains ambiguous even though it can be used to help us locate ourselves in relation to other objects. [From] the postmodern perspective we can view all of our fictional grid systems—including science, mathematics, history, and art—to be, epistemologically speaking, really no different from this porch screen.

The narrator in “See the Moon” is therefore representative of most Barthelme characters in that he perceives the world, in Alan Wilde's words, “as a kind of haphazard, endlessly organizable and reorganized playground.”¹¹ Unlike Coover's typical characters, who tend to invent systems and then rely on them too absolutely, Barthelme's characters are often all too aware of the way reality seems determined to resist our efforts to categorize and control it. “See the moon,” says the narrator after explaining how his screen porch functions. “It hates us” (UP, p. 152). Because of his desire to discover some underlying sense of coherency in the elements of existence, the narrator has pinned objects from his past onto his wall. These objects are “souvenirs” which he hopes “will someday merge, blur—cohere is the word, maybe—into something meaningful. A grand word meaningful” (UP, p. 152). Within the story itself, these souvenirs are transformed into the text of words which the narrator produces for us with the same hope of generating some sort of meaning. Before us pass fragments of his past life, anecdotes about his family, his friends, his own experiences, none of which he is able to organize into the neat patterns, supported by explanatory cause-effect relationships, that were available to previous literary generations. Acutely aware of how his self-consciousness about the limitations of our systems hinders his ability to create pleasing, well-rounded wholes, the narrator jealously comments about contemporary painters:

I wanted to be a painter. … You don't know how I envy them. They can pick up a Baby Ruth wrapper on the street, glue it to the canvas (in the right place, of course, there's that), and lo! people crowd about and cry “A real Baby Ruth wrapper, by God, what could be realer than that!” Fantastic metaphysical advantage. You hate them, if you're ambitious.

(UP, p. 152)

Unable to connect the pieces together—hence the famous statement, “Fragments are the only form I trust”¹²—this narrator can only wistfully hope that the fragments of his existence will someday mysteriously come together. In the meantime, what frightens him the most is the prospect of initiating his as yet unborn child into this whole process:

You see, Gog of mine, Gog o' my heart, I'm just trying to give you a little briefing here. I don't want you unpleasantly surprised. I can't stand a startled look. Regard me as a sort of Distant Early Warning System. Here is the world and here are the knowledgeable knowers knowing. What can I tell you? What has been pieced together from the reports of travelers. … What can I do for him? I can get him into A.A., I have influence. And make sure no harsh moonlight falls on his new soft head.

(UP, pp. 164-65)

What we have been examining thus far has been the “first level” of Barthelme's fiction—the personal struggles of his characters with disintegration and fragmentation. On the second level, however, the reader is usually aware that Barthelme himself is engaged in the same epistemological struggles that plague his characters—struggles that are intimately related to the disintegration of fictional forms and the decay of language itself. Self-conscious about the inadequacies of such fictional conventions as linear sequence, causal explanations, and well-rounded characters, Barthelme finds himself in a difficult position as a writer. As we have already seen in our discussion of “Robert Kennedy” and “Views of My Father,” Barthelme feels that he cannot offer his readers the easy assurances which lie at the center of most realistic narratives, and he is equally suspicious about the ability of language to probe beneath the surfaces of things. In “Paraguay,” for example, Barthelme suggests that the modern experience presents special difficulties to the writer simply because of the sheer quantity of things that we are bombarded with:

The softening of language usually lamented as a falling off from former practice is in fact a clear response to the proliferation of surfaces and stimuli. Imprecise sentences lessen the strain of close tolerances. Silence is also available in the form of white noise.

(CL, p. 27)

Faced with both the “proliferation of surfaces and stimuli” and the loss of confidence in our systems' ability to explain and define reality, Barthelme's work is characterized by his refusal to present well-rounded characters, supply easy explanations, or make causal connections. As a result his characters never develop into psychologically convincing people so much as mere linguistic consciousnesses or collections of odd words. Realistic characters and events, suggests Barthelme, are patently false because the elements out of which they are created—words, plot conventions, arbitrary connections—have proven unable to depict faithfully how human beings operate in the world. So, instead, Barthelme contents himself with creating literary fragments, anecdotes, and sketches which he skillfully builds out of the clichés and verbal drek of our contemporary idiom. Barthelme's emphasis on “surface” and on process is further heightened by his manipulation of style and the technological aspects of print on the page which serve to keep the reader aware of the writing itself and to discourage the reader's search for “depth.” Wilde summarizes this tendency as follows:

The use of collage, of fragments, of pictures and black spaces; the sudden irruption of large, capitalized remarks, which may or may not comment on the surrounding text; … the constant experimentation with styles, ranging from the severely paratactic to the most involutedly subordinative: all function, of course, to call attention to the fact of writing (or ecriture, as we are learning to say), to the medium in which Barthelme and his perceptual field intersect.¹³

Thus like Coover, Gass, and other metafictionists, Barthelme often creates fictions which reflexively examine their own status as artifacts even as they proceed. The point which seems to unify the intentions of all the metafictionists is that there is a close analogy between the author's difficulties in composing and organizing a work of fiction and our own attempts to build the fiction we call our life. It is at this point that the second, reflexive level of Barthelme's fiction intersects with the first and third levels: the point at which personal and literary disintegration serve to mirror and reinforce each other.

As has already been mentioned, this third level in Barthelme's fiction is the role that we ourselves play as we confront the often absurd, seemingly random and meaningless elements in his fictions. Typically these fictions present us with a surreal mixture of the mundane and the peculiar; often the structure employed is fragmentary, with bits of words and visual elements threatening to disassemble completely into noncontiguous puzzles or, as with Kafka, mysteriously appearing to present themselves as ambiguous allegories. Like the “protagonists” of the first two levels—i.e., Barthelme's characters and Barthelme himself—we as readers probably sense that it is up to us to hold the pieces together, to find hidden clues in the elements before us, to create some sense of order and meaning without our responses being too rigidly determined. Like Barthelme's characters, we find ourselves trying to unmask the meaning of symbols and to uncover patterns—and, similarly, our efforts are usually mocked. We may even begin to share their suspicions that any order or meaning to be found is the product primarily of our own fiction-making ability, that Barthelme's stories are “merely” what they first appear to be: wonderfully deft and amusing verbal constructions that show us something of the nature of contemporary living, but which don't really “mean” anything in the way we would expect. Although I do not wish to push the “nonmeaning” aspect of Barthelme's fiction too far,¹⁴ the possibility that many of his fictions can be analyzed as constructions to be encountered as we encounter other objects in the world brings up several crucial points about contemporary innovative fiction.

Like Beckett, Joyce, and Flaubert, Barthelme often seems primarily interested in assembling all possible combinations of words, and in the process he exposes the condition of the current status of our language. Thus like many modern painters—and again like Beckett—his art is reductionary in that he throws away ideas and concentrates instead on the effect of words themselves. Given Barthelme's pessimistic attitudes about the condition of contemporary language, probably the best phrase to describe his fiction is one which he coined himself in Snow White: “the leading edge of the trash phenomenon.” In the much-quoted passage which produced this phrase, a manufacturer of plastic buffalo humps gives the following speech which reveals what Barthelme's “aesthetics of trash” is all about:

Now you're probably familiar with the fact that the per-capita production of trash in this country is up from 2.75 pounds per day in 1920 to 4.5 pounds per day in 1965, the last year for which we have figures, and is increasing at the rate of about four percent a year. Now that rate will probably go up, because it's been going up, and I hazard that we may very well soon reach a point where it's 100 percent. Now at such a point, you will agree, the question turns from a question of disposing of this ‘trash’ to a question of appreciating its qualities, because, after all, it's 100 percent, right? And there can no longer be any question of ‘disposing’ of it, because it's all there is, and we will simply have to learn how to ‘dig’ it. … So that's why we're in humps, right now, more really from a philosophical point of view than because we find them a great moneymaker. They are ‘trash,’ and what in fact could be more useless or trashlike? It's that we want to be on the leading edge of this trash phenomenon, the everted sphere of the future, and that's why we pay particular attention, too, to those aspects of language that may be seen as a model of the trash phenomenon.

(SW, pp. 97-98)

By building his novels and stories precisely out of “those aspects of language that may be seen as a model of the trash phenomenon,” Barthelme reflects the increasing banality and vulgarization that is rapidly becoming 100 percent of our society. Barthelme shares with both Coover and Gass a deep concern for the way in which language has assumed a dead, cliché-ridden character, as is demonstrated in today's mass culture represented by television, newspapers, movies, and supermarket best-sellers. For Barthelme, however, Gass's call for a new poetry of language and Coover's for a revitalization of fictional designs is useless, for the “trash” is “already 100 percent.” What is needed, then, is a means of appreciating the trash (“digging it”)—an appreciation which Barthelme assists by building new artifacts out of the verbal garbage that he finds around him.

An obvious, but perhaps inexact, analogy that comes immediately to mind would be one between Barthelme's fictions and a painter's collage, which is similarly built out of “found” elements. And, indeed, the analogy with painting in general and with the collage in particular is very useful in understanding the relationship between many of Barthelme's fictions and their “meaning.” Up until now, we have been considering Barthelme's fictions primarily as “meaning systems” which indicate, however indirectly, something about current conditions in the world. As our examination of Barthelme's metafictional impulses has already indicated, his fictions can be analyzed as “saying something” about related personal and literary dissatisfactions with the modern world. Barthelme's work also mirrors other specific aspects of the world in much the same way that a painting by El Greco or Rembrandt might indicate something about a particular country's mode of dress, its architecture, or even its system of values. On the other hand, like some of Coover's fictions, Barthelme's works often seem to function mainly as ways of looking at things; in this respect, his fictions are like the paintings by the cubists or the Italian Futurists: they aren't nearly as interesting for what they themselves have to tell us about the world as for presenting different methods of viewing or thinking about it.

Obviously these analogies with painting are inexact and are open to objection. Yet it is interesting that we have come to accept this idea of the art object as object in painting—and we have always accepted it in music—but the idea has never really caught on in fiction writing. This probably has to do with the nature of the writer's medium: words seem to always be “pointing” somewhere, to have a referential quality about them that lines and colors or sounds and rhythms do not necessarily possess (William Gass discusses this idea at several points in Fiction and the Figures of Life). Many contemporary writers, however, are seeking new means and strategies with which to focus the reader's attention on the book as object. In an important early essay entitled “After Joyce,” Barthelme discussed this idea of the work of fiction as a new reality or object in the world, rather than as a comment upon a previously existing reality. Referring to what he terms “the mysterious shift that takes place as soon as one says that art is not about something but is something,” Barthelme says:

With Joyce, and to a lesser degree Gertrude Stein, fiction altered its placement in the world in a movement so radical that its consequences have yet to be assimilated. Satisfied with neither the existing world nor the existing literature, Joyce and Stein modify the world by adding to its store of objects the literary object—which is then encountered in the same way as other objects in the world. The question becomes: what is the nature of the new object? Here one can see an immediate result of the shift. Interrogating older works, the question is: what do they say about the world and being in the world? But the literary object is itself “world” and the theoretical advantage is that in asking it questions you are asking questions of the world itself.¹⁵

Barthelme acknowledges that the point he makes here is hardly new, although it was not usually emphasized by the theme-conscious writers who largely dominated American fiction in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. But this idea lies at the center of innovative fiction of the past ten years, with its emphasis on the writer's obligation not to mirror reality or express something (be they private or social realities), but to add new objects to the world.

Let's imagine Barthelme sitting in his Manhattan apartment—his “studio,” we'll call it—about to begin building one of these “literary objects.” All around him are words. Words issue from his radio and television, which drone on tirelessly. Newspapers cover his floor, along with all sorts of popular magazines and obscure, scholarly journals. The bookshelves which line his walls are filled with the works of his favorite authors (Kleist, Kafka, Kierkegaard, William Gass, Walker Percy). Through his open window he can hear people walking down the street exchanging banalities and gossip; words even seem to linger in the air from the incredibly boring, pretentious party he went to the night before. Obviously, he has plenty of material at hand, but how to put it down, how to organize it? As a post-modern metafictionist, Barthelme sees no reason to limit what he can build to what resembles everyday life, a model which will mimic an exterior order. Besides, what with cameras, recording devices, xerox machines, and assembly lines, reality is being reproduced often enough as it is. He is not even sure that there is an exterior order; maybe cause and effect, beginnings and endings, and character motivation are just conventions developed by fiction writers. Like many other modern artists, Barthelme is also interested in getting his audience more actively involved in the artistic process; he wants to force their participation, break down the old creator/consumer barriers. So he won't order his stories in a linear way or give them the sort of “finish” his readers expect; he'll even add random elements which the reader may or may not attempt to assimilate, along with other elements ostensibly untransformed from the real world. One of his intentions is to make the reader create his/her own connections and associations in order to link them up—let them do some of the work. He is finally ready to begin writing:

We defended the city as best as we could. The arrows of the Comanches came in clouds. The war clubs of the Comanches clattered on the soft, yellow pavements. There were earthworks along the Boulevard Mark Clark and the hedges had been laced with sparkling wire. People were trying to understand. I spoke to Sylvia. “Do you think this is a good life?” The table held apples, books, long-playing records. She looked up. “No.” Patrols of paras and volunteers with armbands guarded the tall, flat buildings. We interrogated the captured Comanche. Two of us forced his head back while another poured water into his nostrils. His body jerked, he choked and wept. … And! sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love. We talked.

“Do you know Fauré's ‘Dolly’?”

“Would that be Gabriel Fauré?”

“Then I know it,” she said. “May I say that I play it at certain times, when I am sad, or happy, although it requires four hands.”

(UP, p. 3)

This passage, taken from the opening to “The Indian Uprising,” was chosen because it contains much of what is characteristic of Barthelme's fiction: the surrealism, the sense of chaos and fragmentation, the unexpected combination of words, the casual overtones of violence, the sexual despair, the sadness, the banality, the clichés. We might say, “Excellent! Barthelme has created a brilliant symbol of the modern wasteland.” But it can also be argued that although we can apply Barthelme's story to the world in this manner—just as we can apply Euclid's geometry to the everyday world—this is not to say that Barthelme's intention is really to make a statement “about the world” (just as Euclid's geometry, so it turns out, is not really “about the world” either). Indeed, the characteristics listed above may be viewed as deriving not from the nature of the world but from the nature of modern language.

To see what this means, we might imagine a sculptor who is building an object which he covers with strips of print from his morning newspaper. Someone who sees this object might say, “Oh, I see—this artist is trying to comment on the United States' involvement in Angola, along with something about dissention on this year's Yankees.” But because newsprint is the medium of this artist, it might be argued that although his object does “say” these things, it really shouldn't be analyzed as being “about” them; actually, such an object could probably best be viewed, in the self-referential sense we have been discussing, as being “about” newsprint as a medium. In short, considering the nature of the society from which Barthelme draws his materials (and his “materials” are words, concepts, systems of thought), it shouldn't be surprising that his stories frequently exhibit violence, confusion, utter banality, and cliché, hackneyed thinking. The fact that words are “trashy” and that the rational systems built out of them are full of holes can, in some respects, be seen as being beside the point for Barthelme—though not necessarily for his characters—just as painters have not been kept from using straight lines in their work despite Einstein's discoveries about the curved nature of space. Thus the process involved here can be likened to a “recycling approach” in which the drek of familiar, banal language is charged with a renewed freshness via the mysterious sea-change of art.

At the end of a remarkable piece of metafiction entitled “Sentence,” Barthelme observes that both writers and philosophers have had to face the fact that because language is a human system, it therefore has its limitations. This discovery has been “a disappointment, to be sure, but it reminds us that the sentence itself is a manmade object, not the one we wanted of course, but still a construction of man, a structure to be treasured for its weaknesses, as opposed to the strengths of stones” (CL, p. 121). This passage, which might serve as a gloss on Wittgenstein, also emphasizes what Barthelme, Coover, and Gass all use as a starting point in their fiction: that stories made of words and sentences can never escape their purely constructed, fictive nature, and that the awareness of this condition, far from being a source of despair for the author, can actually free the writer to take full advantages of the treasures of language—even bankrupt language.

Notes

1. See, for example, Alan Wilde, “Barthelme Unfair to Kierkegaard: Some Thoughts on Modern and Postmodern Irony,” boundary 2 5 (Fall 1976), 45-70.

2. Ibid., p. 51.

3. The following passages are taken from Donald Barthelme, City Life (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), p. 84; Come Back, Dr. Caligari (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), p. 177; Sadness (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974), pp. 9, 93-95; Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (New York: Bantam, 1969), p. 3; henceforth these works will be abbreviated as CL, CB, S, and UP. Also cited will be Snow White (New York: Bantam, 1968) and Guilty Pleasures (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974), abbreviated as SW and GP.

4. Wilde, “Barthelme Unfair to Kierkegaard,” p. 56.

5. The fullest critical treatments of “The Balloon” are R. E. Johnson, Jr., “‘Bees Barking in the Night’: The End and Beginning of Donald Barthelme's Narrative,” boundary 2 5 (Fall 1976), 71-92; Maurice Couturier, “Barthelme's Uppity Bubble: ‘The Balloon,’” Revue Française d'Etudes Americaines 8 (1979), 183-201.

6. William H. Gass, in interview with Larry McCaffery.

7. Jerome Klinkowitz, Literary Disruptions: The Makings of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), p. 69.

8. Ibid., p. 72.

9. Thus R. E. Johnson's remark that “almost anything the reader might determine about a Barthelme sentence will be taken away from him by some contrary movement in that sentence or another” (p. 83).

10. Klinkowitz, Literary Disruptions, p. 70.

11. Wilde, “Barthelme Unfair to Kierkegaard,” p. 52.

12. UP, p. 153. This statement has often been quoted as a statement of Barthelme's own aesthetics, something which he objects to in an interview with Jerome Klinkowitz when he says, “No. It's a statement by the character about what he is feeling at that particular moment. I hope that whatever I think about aesthetics would be a shade more complicated than that.” (In The New Fiction, ed. Joe David Bellamy [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974], p. 53.) John Leland examines the role of fragments and meaningful wholes in Barthelme's fiction in “Remarks Re-marked: Barthelme, What Curios of Signs!” boundary 2 5 (Spring 1977), 795-811.

13. Wilde, “Barthelme Unfair to Kierkegaard,” p. 52.

14. For a more complete treatment of this issue, see my essay, “Meaning and Non-Meaning in Barthelme's Fictions,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 13 (1979), 69-80.

15. Donald Barthelme, “After Joyce,” Location 1 (Summer 1964), 14.