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Donald Barthelme and the Death of Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

William Stott
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Extract

That illuminating exchange occurs in “The Explanation,” a short story in Donald Barthelme's City Life (1970). I put it at the beginning of this paper because I hope by the end to have explained it.

A great many critics—Mary McCarthy chief among them—believe that the novel as we have known it is dying in America. I agree and, in the next pages, throw a few clods on its coffin. But while I think that fiction as we have known it is dying, I think fiction itself is being reborn in unlooked-for ways. This paper contends that Donald Barthelme's works—particularly his early works, the short story collections Come Back, Doctor Caligari (1964), and Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), and the minimalist novel Snow White (1967)— analyze the older fiction's failure to come to grips with reality in America as we now experience it and offer us a new kind of fiction.

Type
An American Tragedy: A 50th Anniversary
Information
Prospects , Volume 1 , October 1976 , pp. 369 - 386
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1976

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References

NOTES

1. To be sure, these themes occur in Barthelme's later writings—a fact of which he is uneasily aware: in “The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace” and “The Party,” two stories in Sadness (1972)Google Scholar, he complains that “The supply of strange ideas is not endless” and “When one has spoken a lot one has already used up all the ideas one has.” But the themes are no longer so insistent. Whereas the early Barthelme, like most American artists in the 1960s, had spasms of social concern (see, for example, his allegories “Report” and “The Police Band” in Unspeakable Practices), the Barthelme of the 1970s does not. For him, in Guilty Pleasures (1974)Google Scholar, the Watergate Nixon is fun, not an outrage. The later Barthelme seems resigned to continual pastiche and cultivated multiplicity as the only tolerable responses to the world.

2. DeMott, Benjamin, “The New World of the Novel,” Hells & Benefits (New York: Basic Books, 1962) pp. 43, 44.Google Scholar

3. Many of the fiction categories come from the endpapers of the Arena Publishing Company's 1891 edition of Hamlin Garland's Main-Travelled Roads (Boston).

4. In McCarthy, Mary, On the Contrary (New York: Farrar, 1961), pp. 249–70.Google Scholar

5. This point, a commonplace of the New Criticism, is superbly made in Wimsatt, W. K.'s “The Concrete Universal,” The Verbal Icon (Lexington, Ky.: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1967), pp. 69–83.Google Scholar

6. Fischer, John, The Stupidity Problem, and Other Harrassments (New York: Harper, 1964) p. 107Google Scholar. Fischer and Dan A. Lacy, personal communication. H. Joseph Houlihan, “ABC's of Stocking a Bookstore,” p. 35Google Scholar, and Leonard, Eliot, “Paperbacks in the General Bookstore,” p. 87Google Scholar, in A Manual on Bookselling, ed. Anderson, Charles B. and others (New York: American Booksellers Association, 1969)Google Scholar. Miller, Merle, “Novel Writing as a Career,” in Writing in America, ed. Fischer, John and Silvers, Robert B. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1960), p. 174.Google Scholar

7. “The American reality,” Philip Roth has said, “is … a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents.” “Writing American Fiction,” in The American Novel since World War II, ed. Klein, Marcus (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1969), p. 144.Google Scholar

8. Bellow, Saul, Herzog (1964; rpt. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1965), p. 201.Google Scholar

9. The ellipsis is Barthelme's: he admires Tolstoy too much to squeeze him into a phrase. The mass media is not so reticent; here is Time (October 19, 1970; ellipsis mine): “Tolstoy protected peasants against religious persecution, and Pushkin nurtured democratic ideals that inspired the 1925 Decembrist uprising. Gorky sought to restrain the more brutal urges of the Bolsheviks, and Pasternak remained a symbol of moral values. Solzhenitsyn….”

10. The gambit of a broadcast interviewer.

11. Fiction loses too: as a Barthelme hero puts it, “What an artist does, is fail” (“The Sandman,” Sadness). But Barthelme's stories prove that fiction can be made of fiction's failure. His work belongs to the school of “The Literature of Exhaustion,” as John Barth has defined it. The school's headmaster, according to Barth, is Jorge Luis Borges, whose “artistic victory … is that he confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work” (The American Novel since World War II, p. 272).Google Scholar

12. The experts are the A. C. Nielsen Company, which estimates that “the combined audience for the three network evening news shows usually runs about 35% of the U. S. television households” (this information is from James B. Poteat of the Television Information Office). The 1970 census found that 96 percent of American “households” had TV; a 1973 estimate, by Merchandising Week, suggested that an incredible 99.9 percent of America's “homes” had black-and-white TV (67.1 percent had color). See the Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1974 (Washington, D. C: GPO, 1974), pp. 504, 705.Google Scholar