Donald Barthelme: A Study of the Short Fiction. - book reviews

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1993 by Gary R. Grund

The criticism of Barthelme's fiction-making is a lot like the fiction itself--uncomfortable, dislocated, and contentious. Over the last decade, though critical response has been strongly positive, the number of evaluations of Barthelme's work has markedly decreased, especially in contrast to the previous decade. Part of the problem has been, presumably, not just the waning of interest but that criticism of his work has never been additive or incremental. For example, some earlier writers pointed to the importance of collage or "assemblage" in Barthelme's art, but subsequent studies rarely drew conclusions from this premise. Rather, what followed a spate of articles and books exfoliated, almost wildly, in a variety of directions and modes, the critical enterprise enacting the literary act.

The two subjects of this review--Richard F. Patteson's edition of Critical Essays on Donald Barthelme and Barbara L. Roe's contribution to the Twayne Studies in Short Fiction series, Donald Barthelme: A Study of the Short Fiction-attempt to redress the balance, though in two rather different ways. Overview has always been difficult, both of Barthelme criticism as well as of his fiction. He himself suggested that "prose poems" or "contes" better fit the texture and fabric of his works ban "short stories," so criticism has ranged from an appreciation of his brilliance to a sense of foundering in "a sea of . . . psychic garbage." One critic's love of irony is another's disdain of farce.

Richard F. Patteson's collection, however, presents a very judicious selection of critical perspectives on Barthelme's short and longer fiction from Come Back, Dr. Caligari in 1964 to Paradise in 1986. Most of the staunchest views on Barthelme have shown up in the book reviews, from which Patteson has extracted the most telling, often because the most extreme, although Patteson's intelligent prefatory introduction adumbrates even stranger pronouncements from Barthelme's reviewers. Gore Vidal, for instance, indicted Barthelme along with two other conspirators in the death of the novel, Barthes and Barth, as "the French pox." Nevertheless, it was in the reviews that Barthelme's work was made, for good or ill, the centerpiece of postmodernism. At their worst, merely trading witticisms, at least the reviews localized the disputes for both admirers and detractors. In the broadest terms, they reveal a characteristic principle in Barthelme's short fiction and novels: the tension between everyday life and the possibilities of art.

And this is the same tension that animates the longer critical analyses that Patteson also includes. It is in this fuller section of the collection that the problems involving the authority and genres that Barthelme throughout his artistic life anatomized are more forcefully presented. What is really fascinating is to see how frequently, despite their angles of vision, Barthelme's critics return to the sense of fragmentation, disjunction, and even stranger juxtapositions that constitute his brand of metafictional "realism." With literature "disenchanted" of its narrative forms, symbols, and its very language, the essays included by Patteson more often than not assess the provisional decreation of conventional reality and the creation of another in Barthelme's writing, characterized by suspended judgments, by disbelief in hierarchies and, according to Richard Gilman, "by mistrust of solutions, denouements and completions, by self-consciousness issuing in tremendous earnestness but also in far-ranging mockery."

Barbara L. Roe, while confining herself to Barthelme's short fiction, comprehensively studies his work in order of chronology. This approach is at once its own reward and punishment in that what gains are made in organization get lost in overly general analyses. What does survive, however, is valuable, especially in Part I, where critical evaluation is paralleled to world changes, such as those of the 1960s, which brought Barthelme's fiction to national attention. Barthelme's garish posturing in his New Yorker pieces in the 1960s are notorious in this regard, annoyingly engaging the reader to confront his/her conditioned expectations. Of greatest interest, however, is Part II, where Roe presents a series of interviews with Barthelme by Jerome Klinkowitz, Larry McCaffery, J. D. O'Hara, and herself, along with Barthelme's short 1983 self-analysis, "Not-knowing." The interviews reveal the same precise crafting as his fiction. Part III concludes the collection by presenting short extracts of other critical perspectives.

Both Patteson and Roe, in different ways, try to account, I believe, for Barthelme's understanding of the relationship between the man and his fictions. They both attempt to analyze what a writer does when he thinks that language no longer communicates effectively and than reality can no longer sustain mythic devices. Barthelme's fiction proves that although art may not be able to transcend its own materials and limits, it can accommodate itself to this condition by incorporating the devaluation of the word, as George Steiner called it, into its very cloth.