"
Donald Barthelme (1931 – 1989) - Prime innovator of postmodern flash fiction.

This collection includes a Charles Baxter essay I personally found highly enjoyable and keenly insightful, The Donald Barthelme Blues. An accomplished novelist and short story writer in his own right, Baxter has much admiration for Donald Barthelme as a fiction writer who continually created new ways of approaching his material. Below are a number of Baxter quotes along with my comments. The essay itself may be read in its entirety: http://www.gettysburgreview.com/selections/past_selections/details.dot?inode=fcd... Baxter&author=Charles Baxter&story=true

“This area, familiar to us all, where bad taste, hilarity, fake authority, and cliché seem to collide, was Donald Barthelme’s special kingdom.” ---------- Charles Baxter begins his essay with the perfect Barthelme-like example, a headline in the morning newspaper: in the aftermath of a train derailment in a densely populated area, a Dow Chemical spokesperson attempts to smooth over the lethal consequences of the release of toxic chemicals: “Well, there’s been some physical reactions, yes, certainly. Especially in the area of nausea, vomiting-type thing.” One can imagine a narrator's opening line in a Barthelme short story including such phrases as "vomiting-type things."

"In Donald Barthelme’s fiction, that’s where the project begins: with the stress first on the language, the medium, and then on the problem of who owns it. Who does own language? I can evade the question by saying that no one does; it is just out there, part of the culture. But Barthelme did not practice this evasion. In his stories, all kinds of disreputable people claim to own both language and its means of distribution. They invent instant clichés that they want you to buy and use; they want you to join and submit to their formulas. Invariably, they are selling something that can only be sold if they trash up the language first. They are lively practitioners of a black art, these corn-modifiers, and Barthelme’s stories don’t mind saying so." --------- According to Baxter, this is the first key point to recognize in Barthelme’s world of fiction: many of his characters are untrustworthy sharpers who use language as a tool of manipulation. One could even say these degraded slickers are selling not only a specific product but their entire way of looking at the world. To this end, as a powerful first step, they will reduce language to so much rubbish, trite phrases and clichés.

“What Barthelme’s fiction asserts is that one of the first loyalties serious people give up in the theater of adulthood is a claim upon what they actually want. Of course, other desires are available, and can be acquired, but they are curious grafts, what other people want you to want—not desires so much as temptations, desires-of-convenience. Barthelme’s stories are obviously and constantly about such temptations, which might itself be called the temptation to become unconscious and let others program your yearnings.” ----------- Thus, the second key theme of Barthelme’s stories: the pressure we constantly feel to surrender our authentic inner selves and true desires to outside forces and institutions; in other words, molding our inner wants and desires to what others (corporations, advertisers, government, military, et al.) want us to want. Although it might appear easier to become less conscious and more asleep to our inner life, ultimately our surrender will spell disaster.

“It wasn’t activities like adultery that caught Barthelme’s attention, but the inclination to disown one’s wishes and to give in to the omnipresence of the Universal Banal. Barthelme was not a snob in this respect; plain common pleasures—food, sex, Fleetwood Mac, John Ford movies, dull days at home—find themselves celebrated (however mildly) in his pages; ordinary pleasures are all right if that is what you really want.” ----------- Again, the emphasis is on “what you really want” since the challenge is to be continually aware and not sleepwalk through life.

“Cynicism and its spiritual second cousin, irony, are regular combatants in Barthelme’s stories, but there is something wrong with both of them; the stories work hard to disclose what it is. For one thing, cynicism is hypocritical: it enjoys what it claims to despise. It is happy in its unhappy consciousness. . . . Cynicism is irony that has moved into a condition of institutional power; cynicism and power have a tendency to breed each other.” ---------- Curiously, in his book, On Moral Fiction, John Gardner accuses Donald Barthelme of not only being overly clever but also proposing and valuing a cynical, ironic view of life. As in this quote and when he writes “the narrative voice in Barthelme consistently attacks cynicism—the cynicism of official institutional spokespersons” Charles Baxter has an entirely opposite interpretation of Barthelme’s fiction and Barthelme the writer.

“I’m not sure how often it has been noticed that Barthelme’s imagery, cast of characters, and preoccupations are drawn from religious sources. . . . Such maneuvering has an element of travesty in it, a playing-around with the broken relics of religious iconography and meaning-creation; but religion appears so often and with such odd sideways intensity that it signals a persistent curiosity about the Absolute and such of its elements as authenticity (in post-structuralist thinking, a completely discredited category).” ---------- Infusing so much religion and religious philosophy into his fiction, (the 19th century religious thinker Søren Kierkegaard is mentioned frequently) Donald Barthelme seems to go against the postmodern grain in recognizing how a theology with a universal, absolute Being might demand, if not our reverence, then certainly our attention.

“In Barthelme’s early stories, modern culture is gleefully and relentlessly unmasked: engineers, doctors, politicians, newspapers, television quiz shows, and the plastic assembled-with-glue language they use. There is a certain violence in the ripping off of the masks here, a ferocity that produces a prose poetry (Barthelme probably would have hated the term) of rage and clarity.” ---------- This is certainly my experience reading many Barthelme short stories. For example, a three-page story entitled The Piano Player quickly moves from a butterfly in a mailbox to a conversation about ugly children, a desire for a red Triumph TR-4, a ham for dinner, wearing football shoulder-pads, playing with Silly Putty, fear of the piano and then, finally, the father being murdered by the piano. Clear images; unmistakably clear violence.

The prime reason I find Donald Barthelme’s short stories so captivating: in my view he successfully and uniquely portrays our common brave new postmodern world experience - the shift in information, particularly computer-produced information, the omnipresent mass media, world-wide instant communication and the leveling of separate cultures into one global culture. I suspect he will have an even larger readership in the years to come.

( )

"
Donald Barthelme (1931 – 1989) - Prime innovator of postmodern flash fiction.

This collection includes a Charles Baxter essay I personally found highly enjoyable and keenly insightful, The Donald Barthelme Blues. An accomplished novelist and short story writer in his own right, Baxter has much admiration for Donald Barthelme as a fiction writer who continually created new ways of approaching his material. Below are a number of Baxter quotes along with my comments. The essay itself may be read in its entirety: http://www.gettysburgreview.com/selections/past_selections/details.dot?inode=fcd... Baxter&author=Charles Baxter&story=true

“This area, familiar to us all, where bad taste, hilarity, fake authority, and cliché seem to collide, was Donald Barthelme’s special kingdom.” ---------- Charles Baxter begins his essay with the perfect Barthelme-like example, a headline in the morning newspaper: in the aftermath of a train derailment in a densely populated area, a Dow Chemical spokesperson attempts to smooth over the lethal consequences of the release of toxic chemicals: “Well, there’s been some physical reactions, yes, certainly. Especially in the area of nausea, vomiting-type thing.” One can imagine a narrator's opening line in a Barthelme short story including such phrases as "vomiting-type things."

"In Donald Barthelme’s fiction, that’s where the project begins: with the stress first on the language, the medium, and then on the problem of who owns it. Who does own language? I can evade the question by saying that no one does; it is just out there, part of the culture. But Barthelme did not practice this evasion. In his stories, all kinds of disreputable people claim to own both language and its means of distribution. They invent instant clichés that they want you to buy and use; they want you to join and submit to their formulas. Invariably, they are selling something that can only be sold if they trash up the language first. They are lively practitioners of a black art, these corn-modifiers, and Barthelme’s stories don’t mind saying so." --------- According to Baxter, this is the first key point to recognize in Barthelme’s world of fiction: many of his characters are untrustworthy sharpers who use language as a tool of manipulation. One could even say these degraded slickers are selling not only a specific product but their entire way of looking at the world. To this end, as a powerful first step, they will reduce language to so much rubbish, trite phrases and clichés.

“What Barthelme’s fiction asserts is that one of the first loyalties serious people give up in the theater of adulthood is a claim upon what they actually want. Of course, other desires are available, and can be acquired, but they are curious grafts, what other people want you to want—not desires so much as temptations, desires-of-convenience. Barthelme’s stories are obviously and constantly about such temptations, which might itself be called the temptation to become unconscious and let others program your yearnings.” ----------- Thus, the second key theme of Barthelme’s stories: the pressure we constantly feel to surrender our authentic inner selves and true desires to outside forces and institutions; in other words, molding our inner wants and desires to what others (corporations, advertisers, government, military, et al.) want us to want. Although it might appear easier to become less conscious and more asleep to our inner life, ultimately our surrender will spell disaster.

“It wasn’t activities like adultery that caught Barthelme’s attention, but the inclination to disown one’s wishes and to give in to the omnipresence of the Universal Banal. Barthelme was not a snob in this respect; plain common pleasures—food, sex, Fleetwood Mac, John Ford movies, dull days at home—find themselves celebrated (however mildly) in his pages; ordinary pleasures are all right if that is what you really want.” ----------- Again, the emphasis is on “what you really want” since the challenge is to be continually aware and not sleepwalk through life.

“Cynicism and its spiritual second cousin, irony, are regular combatants in Barthelme’s stories, but there is something wrong with both of them; the stories work hard to disclose what it is. For one thing, cynicism is hypocritical: it enjoys what it claims to despise. It is happy in its unhappy consciousness. . . . Cynicism is irony that has moved into a condition of institutional power; cynicism and power have a tendency to breed each other.” ---------- Curiously, in his book, On Moral Fiction, John Gardner accuses Donald Barthelme of not only being overly clever but also proposing and valuing a cynical, ironic view of life. As in this quote and when he writes “the narrative voice in Barthelme consistently attacks cynicism—the cynicism of official institutional spokespersons” Charles Baxter has an entirely opposite interpretation of Barthelme’s fiction and Barthelme the writer.

“I’m not sure how often it has been noticed that Barthelme’s imagery, cast of characters, and preoccupations are drawn from religious sources. . . . Such maneuvering has an element of travesty in it, a playing-around with the broken relics of religious iconography and meaning-creation; but religion appears so often and with such odd sideways intensity that it signals a persistent curiosity about the Absolute and such of its elements as authenticity (in post-structuralist thinking, a completely discredited category).” ---------- Infusing so much religion and religious philosophy into his fiction, (the 19th century religious thinker Søren Kierkegaard is mentioned frequently) Donald Barthelme seems to go against the postmodern grain in recognizing how a theology with a universal, absolute Being might demand, if not our reverence, then certainly our attention.

“In Barthelme’s early stories, modern culture is gleefully and relentlessly unmasked: engineers, doctors, politicians, newspapers, television quiz shows, and the plastic assembled-with-glue language they use. There is a certain violence in the ripping off of the masks here, a ferocity that produces a prose poetry (Barthelme probably would have hated the term) of rage and clarity.” ---------- This is certainly my experience reading many Barthelme short stories. For example, a three-page story entitled The Piano Player quickly moves from a butterfly in a mailbox to a conversation about ugly children, a desire for a red Triumph TR-4, a ham for dinner, wearing football shoulder-pads, playing with Silly Putty, fear of the piano and then, finally, the father being murdered by the piano. Clear images; unmistakably clear violence.

The prime reason I find Donald Barthelme’s short stories so captivating: in my view he successfully and uniquely portrays our common brave new postmodern world experience - the shift in information, particularly computer-produced information, the omnipresent mass media, world-wide instant communication and the leveling of separate cultures into one global culture. I suspect he will have an even larger readership in the years to come.

( )