The American Century: Literature since 1945 713commonest clichés to intellectual chatter, that is picked up in his books and turned
all to strangeness by omitting or fragmenting the habitual arrangements and
separations by which we seek to retain a feeling of control over our environment.
Waste is turned to magic in his work, but the sense of magic is also accompanied by
unease. Barthelme’s fiction constantly fluctuates between immersion in trash culture
and the impulse to evade, an impulse that finds its emotional issue in irony,
disappointment, and a free-floating nostalgia. Everything doubles back on itself,
nothing is not placed in implicit, ironic question marks in this fiction. Nevertheless,
what Barthelme captures in his work, along with what one of his characters has
called “the ongoing circus of the mind,” is the suspicion that, after all, it may not be
that easy to go with the junk flow – or to be what Barthelme has called himself,
“a student of surfaces.”
“Do you like the story so far?” asks the narrator of Snow White about halfway
through. He then helpfully provides the reader with an opportunity to answer:
“Yes ( ) No ( ).” This is followed by a further fourteen questions for the reader to fill
in his or her preferences. Quite apart from reminding us that this book is, after all, an
artifact, an object, the product of play and planning, the questionnaire offers a slyly
parodic comment on the currently fashionable ideas of the work of art as open and
the reader as co-producer rather than a consumer of the text. But the last question
sounds a slightly melancholic note. “In your opinion, should human beings have
more shoulders? ( ),” the narrator asks. “Two sets of shoulders? ( ) Three? ( ).” Any
world has its stringencies, its absences, restricting the room for magic and play. The
absence of several shoulders is not the most pressing of these, perhaps. But how else
would Barthelme intimate these limits and lacks but in a manner that subverts, pokes
fun at his own intimation? Barthelme is resistant to message. One of his stories, “The
Balloon” in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, even toys with the absurdity of
meaning. An enormous balloon appears over the city. People argue over its
significance. Some manage to “write messages on the surface.” Mainly what people
enjoy, though, is that it is “not limited and defined.” It is delightfully random,
amorphous, floating free above “the grid of precise, rectangular pathways” beneath
it. And “this ability of the balloon to shift its shape, to change,” the reader learns, “was
very pleasing, especially to people whose lives were rather rigidly patterned.” Clearly,
the balloon is a paradigm of the art object, the kind of free-form product, plastic and
ephemeral, that Barthelme is interested in making: resistant to understanding,
interpretation, or reflection. But, in its own odd, jokey way, as it floats free over the
citizens, it generates a ruefulness, a wry regret that carries over into Barthelme’s
other fictions. “I am in the wrong time,” Snow White reflects. “How does the concept
of ‘something better’ arise?” the narrator of that same novel asks, “What does it look
like, this something better?” It is remarkable that the sportive fantasy and verbal
trickery of Barthelme are often at their best when he is playing with loss and longing:
“Emily Dickinson, why have you left me and gone?” goes a passage in Snow White,
“ah ah ah ah ah.” Readers can certainly walk around a Barthelme verbal object, seeing
in it above all a model of how to free up language and feeling from stale associations.
But what they are likely to catch, as they walk around, is a borderline melancholia.GGray_c05.indd 713ray_c 05 .indd 713 8 8/1/2011 7:31:40 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 40 PM