712 The American Century: Literature since 1945and by all his characters (who practice their several disciplines, their different roles
and subject vocabularies). Works written since Giles Goat-Boy, such as Letters,
Sabbatical: A Romance (1982), The Tidewater Tales (1987), The Last Voyage of Sinbad
the Sailor (1991), and The Development (2008), continue Barth’s passionate play
with various forms, the numerous ways in which we tell ourselves stories to live
them and live in them. For him, that play is at once imperative and inspiring, a form
of necessity and a liberation, something coextensive with breathing. Some of his
characters sometimes may yearn, as one of them puts it, “to give up language
altogether.” But that, as Barth feels and indicates, is to “relapse into numbness,” to
“float voiceless in the wash of time like an amphora in the sea.” It may seem attractive
occasionally, but to evacuate voice is to erase identity, place, and presence. To abandon
language and its difficulties is to surrender to death.
Two writers who have sketched out very different possibilities for postmodernism,
and, in doing so, created distinctive fictive landscapes, are Donald Barthelme
(1931–1989) and John Hawkes (1925–1998). The distances between them,
despite their common allegiance to work of art as object, an opaque system of
language rather than transparent account of the world, are suggested by two remarks.
“Fragments are the only forms I trust,” observes the narrator in one of the stories in
Barthelme’s second collection, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968). “The
need is to maintain the truth of the fractured picture,” Hawkes insisted in an early
interview. Hawkes is interested in creating strange, phantasmagoric landscapes,
dreamscapes in a way, that evoke, always in their own terms, what he has called “the
enormities of ugliness and potential failure within ourselves and in the world around
us,” “our potential for violence and absurdity as well as for graceful action.” Barthelme
is just as committed as Hawkes is to the displacement of the writer from the work.
He is also committed to the displacement of the work from the world, so that the
work becomes simply, as Barthelme puts it, “something that is there, like a rock or a
refrigerator.” But, whereas Hawkes’s fiction has a quality of nightmare, entropic
stillness, Barthelme’s stories and novels are witty, formally elegant, slyly commenting
on themselves as artifacts. Hawkes began his writing, he said, with “something
immediately and intensely visual – a room, a few figures.” Then, eschewing interest
in plot, character, setting, and theme, he aimed for what he called “totality of vision
or structure.” Using corresponding events, recurring images and actions, and a prose
style that seems to freeze things in times and retard readerly attention, he creates
landscapes of evil and decay. As his characters traverse these landscapes almost
somnambulistically, their and our feelings vacillate between fear, dread, and the
bleakly, blackly humorous. Barthelme, however, begins his writing in the verbal
rather than the visual. “Oh I wish there were some words in the world that were not
the words I always hear!” complains the title character in Barthelme’s first novel,
Snow White (1967). Barthelme obliges with a verbal collage, full of odd juxtapositions
and unpredictable swerves: a linguistic equivalent of Pop Art, in a way, which picks
up the shards and fragments, the detritus of modern life and gives them a quality of
surprise. “We like books that have a lot of dreck in them,” admits the narrator of that
same novel. And it is precisely the dreck of contemporary conversation, from theGGray_c05.indd 712ray_c 05 .indd 712 8 8/1/2011 7:31:40 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 40 PM