Donald Barthelme "60 Stories"

Donald Barthelme

The first time I read "The Indian Uprising" several years ago, I was irritated. Why would anyone want to write something so deliberately incomprehensible? What are these things, sentences or snakes? Whatever they were, they slithered out of my attempts to grab hold of their meanings, but they also curled themselves around my own fictive arms and it was hard to fling them off. I could not get rid of them, and I knew I'd have to come to terms with this writer sooner or later.

It turned out to be later. I eased my way in with some other experimental writers – Nicholas Mosely, John Barth – and when I decided my own writing was just too damn conventional, I thought – who better to look at than Barthelme? Why not make use of this container that is the MFA work and go into what he's doing? He became part of the study plan, I bought his book, I found essays, and there was also that fantastic wormhole of Google.

I thought this, from Gus Negative's Scriptorium, was excellent: For if any single theme can tie together an ourve so multifarious as Barthelme's, it is surely his tireless exploration of flux and transience, comic irruptions of the surreal into the mundane, junkyard cultural detritus bound up with old wire in a madman's basement to make beautiful, poignant artifacts.

Barthelme: postmodern; Barthelme: actualist (I love that one); a million labels stick to this guy – that must be a good sign, something he's doing works so well that no matter what camp someone is in, they want or imagine Barthelme's part of their posse, even if his writing seems to undermine the notion of labels. I thought I'd slap one onto the worn luggage (hardly new, I'm sure): “Buddhist-Dadaist”.

“Buddhist” is based on no scholarship, just the title of his book of essays, “Not Knowing”. Hmm, dead giveaway, I can practically see the stains of the lama beads on the pages. And the way his writing undermines the reliability of any narrative - how nice, shiny, void-like (and he might add lemony-fresh). (And yes, I'm now waiting for my own copy of "Not Knowing" to arrive in the mail.)

“Dadaist” - that one comes from sentiment, from knowing some Dada types first hand, from Monty Python, from any number of things. There's much to be said for intentional absurdity, for wanting to crack open the tyranny of the unquestioned, unchallenged, mundane patterns of life. Having that connection, at last,  I was delighted to see the cultural residues of the Dada running through "The Indian Uprising". Now, I had a way in.

I read through 60 Stories coming up to “The Indian Uprising”, an excellent preparation in and of itself. Maybe later I'll blog a bit about the other stories but time presses. I had hoped to describe Barthelme using his style, but I don't have the chops.

For me, in the first (new) read, “The Indian Uprising” is a collage: the piece coheres because it has a framework, the borrowed, conventional shape of the story of a violent insurrection threatening the safety of the narrator. But the largest chunks of the battlefield depiction are not direct renderings of story, but pasted in scenes of another story and funny, random bits of cultural debris. And rather than being static bits, each of those pieces are animated, little snippets of moving film rather than newspaper.

The effect is similar to those reading tasks researchers have recently devised, where a paragraph of text has letters badly misspelled or replaced with words having no meeting in that context and yet the paragraph can be read and understood. But in this early read, I'm not sure he wants that framework to hold, though he wants its traces.

Another read: now his use of direct juxtaposition allows him to have the narrative through-line (the uprising) reverse roles with what might have been taken as a secondary image, the story of his relationship with Sylvia. This takes over the lead role in the story and the through-line itself is relegated to the role of image. The story jumps right into this switch in the first paragraph with the delightfully surreal sarcasm of “the hedges had been laced with sparkling wire” a war image mixing a suburban scene with ad copy style that acts as a mini bridge to the domestic “'Do you think this is the good life?' The table held apples, books, long-playing records. She looked up. 'No.'” 

Another read, another approach, going a bit deeper in - it is the story of the relationship told in a wild impressionistic style, and it is Sylvia herself who leads the insurrection. The last sentence captures beautifully a glimpse into the face of the wild, unfathomable other:  I removed my belt and shoelaces and looked (rain shattering from a great height the prospects of silence and clear, neat rows of houses in the subdivisions) into their savage eyes, paint, feathers, beads. Fantastic, in every sense of the word.


Barthelme himself writes (in the excellent summary of Gus Negative) that “without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.” And in his writing, you see this happening within the story, within the paragraph, and within the sentence where succeeding clauses often become pivot points into entirely different layers of meaning: “On the map we considered the situation with its strung-out inhabitants and its merely personal emotions” or “I opened a letter but inside was a Comanche flint arrowhead played by Frank Widekind in an elegant gold chain and congratulations”.These sentences take unexpected turns yet still work, are not just random nonsense.

An author who would claim that "not knowing" is of the essence would be skeptical that any single thread of narrative is reliable, that it can offer more than a comforting illusion of understandable, linear progressions of causes leading to effects and to more causes. Wouldn't trying to trace real life in such progressions be as futile as trying to map wavelets in a pond?

For me, Barthelme's prose captures this bewilderment while keeping clear the emotional situation of the loss and confusion the protagonist is facing. And in moving through its collage elements, revealing different layers, he does a great job in capturing the quality of mind itself as it moves through so many associations, memories, desires, and fears in its course of trying to figure out what the hell is actually going on. In that sense, the story is representational.

And yet all of the time that this is happening, the author is aware of the object he has created. And here, the text and its construction are meant to be seen, the snowglobe holding the spectacle of the story itself being part of what we are meant to take in.

I love how Barthelme engages with theory, how it is not an adornment in his writing, but an internalized part of a personal sensibility. He feels free to challenge all assumptions and patterns, including whatever critical theorists (of which he was one) are coming up with.This will be important for me to keep in mind as I begin to use this course work to discover theory.

It seems he keenly feels the absurdities in the common patterns of language: he understands how to make a leap mid-sentence from the mundane and predictable to an unexpected, often very funny, associations. I felt my own assumptions exposed and I usually got a good laugh out of it. He had the hang of freely thinking and writing that  - it seems to pour out, not to be mapped out and fussed over. There is an affection for his readers, in their ability to see beyond all of those patterns and delight in those surreal moments and the freedom they offer.