Ever
since Donald Barthelme's first story appeared in The New Yorker in 1963
and his first collection of stories (Come Back, Dr. Caligari) appeared
in 1964, his short fiction was both much complained about and much imitated.
Critics complained that Barthelme's work was without subject matter, without
character, without plot, and without concern for the reader's understanding.
These very characteristics, of course, placed Barthelme with such writers as
Robert Coover, William H. Gass, Ronald Sukenick Raymond Federman, John Hawkes,
and John Barth on the leading edge of so-called "postmodernist
fiction."
The
term "postmodernist" is difficult to define. Most critics, however, seem to agree that if
"modernism" in the early part of the century manifested a reaction
against nineteenth century bourgeois realism i(n which writers such as James
Joyce and T. S. Eliot, frustrated conventional expectations about the
cause-and-effect nature of plot and the "as-if-real" nature of
character), then postmodernism pushes this movement even further so that
contemporary fiction is less and less about objective reality and more and more
about its own creative processes.
According
to the basic paradigm that underlies this movement--grounded on European
phenomenology and structuralism and further developed in psychology,
anthropology, and sociology--"everyday reality" itself is the result
of a fiction-making process whereby new data are selectively accepted and
metaphorically mutated to fit preexisting schemas and categories. One critical
implication of this theory is that literary fictions constitute a highly
concentrated and accessible analogue of the means by which people create that
diffuse and invisible reality that they take for granted as the everyday.
To
study fiction then is to study the processes by which reality itself is
created. The primary effect of this mode
of thought on contemporary fiction is that the story has a tendency to loosen
its illusion of reality to explore the reality of its illusion. Rather than
presenting itself "as if" it were real-a mimetic mirroring of
external reality-postmodernist fiction makes its own artistic conventions and
devices the subject of the story as well as its theme. The underlying
assumption is that the forms of art are explainable by the laws of art;
literary language is not a proxy for something else, but rather an object of
study itself. William H. Gass notes that the fiction writer now better understands
his medium; he is "ceasing to pretend that his business is to render the
world; he knows, more often now, that his business is to make one, and to make
one from the only medium of which he is master--language."
The
short story as a genre has always been more likely to lay bare its fictionality
than the novel, which has traditionally tried to cover it up. Fictional self-consciousness in the short
story does not allow the reader to maintain the comfortable assumption that
what is depicted is real; instead, the reader is made uncomfortably aware that
the only reality is the process of depiction itself--the language act of the
fiction-making process.
Readers
schooled in the realistic tradition of the nineteenth-century novel found
Donald Barthelme tough reading indeed. For Barthelme, the problem of language
is the problem of reality, for reality is the result of language
processes. The problem of words,
Barthelme realizes, is that so much contemporary language is used up, has
become trash, dreck. Barthelme takes as
his primary task the recycling of language, making metaphor out of the castoffs
of technological culture. For Barthelme, as for the poet always, the task is to
try to reach, through metaphor and the defamiliarization that results, that ineffable
realm of knowledge which Barthelme says
lies somewhere between mathematics and religion "in which what may fairly
be called truth exists."
It
is the extreme means by which Barthelme attempts to reach this truth that makes
his fiction so difficult. Barthelme has
noted that if photography forced painters to reinvent painting, then films have
forced fiction writers to reinvent fiction. Since films tell a realistic
narrative so well, the fiction writer must develop a new principle. Collage,
says Barthelme, is the central principle of all art in the twentieth century.
The point of collage, he notes, is that "unlike things are stuck together
to make, in the best case, a new reality. This new reality, in the best case,
may be or imply a comment on the other realities from which it came, and may
also be much else. It's an itself, if
it's successful." One of the
implications of this collage process is a radical shift from the usual
temporal, cause-and-effect process of fiction to the more spatial and metaphoric
process of poetry.
The most basic example of Barthelme's use of
this mode is "The Balloon," the premise of which is that a large
balloon has encompassed the city. The persona of the story says that it is
wrong to speak of "situations, implying sets of circumstances leading to
some resolution, some escape of tension." In this story there are no
situations, only the balloon, a concrete particular thing that people react to
and try to explain. Although we discover
at the end that the balloon is the objectification of something personal to the
speaker, we realize that because the speaker's feelings must be objectified in
images and language, it is removed from life and cut free of meaning. The participant or viewer then becomes an
artist who constructs or manipulates whatever responses the balloon
elicits. The balloon is an extended
metaphor for the Barthelme story itself, to which people try to find some means
of access and which creates varied critical responses and opinions.
The
fiction of Donald Barthelme required a major readjustment for readers who came
to it accustomed to the leisurely linear story line of the traditional novel or
the conventional short story. To plunge into a Barthelme story is to immerse
oneself in the flotsam and jetsam of contemporary society, for his stories are
not so much plotted tales as they are parodies and satires based on the public
junk and commercial media hype that clutter up and cover over our private
lives. Because they are satires, many of the stories are based not on the lives
of individuals but on the means by which that abstraction called society or the
public is manipulated. Consequently, some of Barthelme's pieces insist that the
reader have a background knowledge of contemporary philosophic thought (albeit
philosophic thought that has become cheapened by public chat), while others are
based on popular culture.
Barthelme
is not really interested in the personal lives of his characters; in fact, few
seem to have personal lives. Rather, he wishes to present modern men and women
as the products of the media and the language that surround them. Furthermore,
he is not so much interested in art that serves merely to reflect or imitate
the world outside itself as he is concerned to create art works which are interesting
in and for themselves.
The
basic fictional issue overshadowing the work of Donald Barthelme is this: If
reality is itself a process of fictional creation by metaphor-making man, then
the modern writer who wishes to write about reality can truthfully only write
about that very process. To write only
about this process, however, is to run the risk of dealing with language on a
level that leaves the reader gasping for something tangible and real, even if
that reality is only an illusion.
Tomorrow: Robert Coover's
"The Brother"
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