THE PSYCHOANALYTIC ISSUE

IN THE SHORT STORIES

OF
DONALD BARTHELME

by
ROBERT JOHN MOORE, M.A.

AThesis·
Submitted to the Schoo1 of Graduate Studies
in Partia1 Fu1fi1ment of the Requirements
for the degree
Doctor of Phi1osophy

McMaster University
May, 1988
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY(1988} McMASTER UNIVERSITY
(English) Hamilton, Ontario

TITLE: The Psychoanalytic Issue in the Short Stories of Donald Barthelme

AUTHOR: Robert John Moore, B.A. (McMaster University)
M.A. (McMaster University)
SUPERVISOR: Professor Norman Rosenblood
NUMBER OF PAGES: ...,,,·,) 3'15'
 ABSTRACT

As the title of this thesis indicates, this work is a study of key

psychoanalytic issues deemed to be central to a proper appreciation of the
work of the contemporary American writer, Donald Barthelme. Much has been
written about Barthelme's fiction in recent years (he has, for example,
been the subject of four full-length studies in the last five years), but
the approach taken by criticism in general to his work misinterprets what
seems to me to be one of the most interesting and relevant issues raised
by his work. Conventional wisdom assumes that Barthelme's short stories
represent a uniquely successful challenge to the notion that fiction need
embody meanings which originate in the author. It is asserted, in other
words, that Barthelme's fiction has for all intents and purposes utterly
subverted potential criticism which might attempt to establish a
relationship between text and author. In the effective absence of an
"author," Barthelme's prose is taken to represent a radically innovative
form of discourse, a form of discourse which has influenced an entire
generation of experimental writing.
The context in which Barthelme's fiction is appreciated by criticism
is informed by distinctively postmodern aesthetics. In particular, what
critics identify as postmodernism's emphasis on "an aesthetic of process"
(Hutcheon 1985, 2) has served to throw the entire concept of the artist or
the author as the source of meaning in a text open to serious question.
Postmodern fiction presents itself as a form of situation, a variety of
experience in which author and reader are free to recreate meaning and
recreate themselves in a dynamic gestalt through the process of text.
What is most repugnant to postmodernism is the rule of definitions of the
self that are anterior to the text, definitions that limit the existential
freedom of the self to recreate itself in situation. Barthelme's fiction
is widely proclaimed to be exemplary postmodern writing in the sense that
it has created a form of discourse in which the author--a potentially
limiting source of prefigured meanings--is effectively absent from the
text, and can therefore be discounted as a factor in any interpretation of
the meaning of the text.
This study will show that the voice of the author in Barthelme's
short fiction is neither absent nor as irrelevant as criticism would have
us believe. Indeed, this study will show that Barthelme's fiction says
essentially the opposite of what has hitherto been assumed with regard to
the relevance of the authorial voice to the meaning of the fiction.
This study is psychoanalytic in the sense that it will isolate the
latent features of Barthelme's prose based on readings of patterns of
association as they occur in the manifest content of the stories. To this
point no criticism has considered the relevance of these patterns of
association in Barthelme because it has been assumed that, in the absence
of a legitimate authorial voice in his work, such patterns either do not
exist, or if they do exist, they were deliberately woven into the fabric
of the prose by an ironic author familiar with Freud.
With a careful and comparative analysis of his earliest stories to
serve as a reference point, this study proposes to demonstrate basically
two things: first, that Barthelme's fictions have from the beginning
implicitly affirmed the notion that an understanding of the psychoanalytic
issues attached to the voice behind the fiction has been crucial to an
appreciation of the full meaning of any given story; and second, that the
psychoanalytic issues of concern to the authorial voice in Barthelme have
not changed to any significant degree over the twenty years Barthelme has
been publishing fiction. The implications of the latter point are
especially worth noting: proof of the presence of a consistent authorial
voice would require a radical readjustment to the popular view of the
meaning of Barthelme's fiction.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks are due to my supervisor, Professor Norman Rosenblood,
who has offered over the course of the last eight years his encouragement,
his assistance, and his patience. Professor Joseph Sigm~~ also provided
valuable assistance in reading and commenting on the manuscript.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER TWO: THE POSTMODERN CONTEXT 33

CHAPTER THREE: 11
BALLOON MAN DOESN'T LIE, EXACTLY 11 69

CHAPTER FOUR: AN ANTHOLOGY OF SELF 132

CHAPTER FIVE: THREADS OF THE DISCOURSE 236
CHAPTER SIX: A CONCLUSION 305

NOTES 318
APPENDIX A 322
WORKS CITED 326

V11
 A NOTE ON THE TEXTS

Quotations taken from Donald Barthelme's works are taken

from the texts listed in Works Cited. The following
abbreviations have been used:

};_ Amateurs
CBDC Come Back, Dr. Caligari
CL City Life
DF The Dead Father
GD Great Days
GP Guilty Pleasures
.§ Sadness
Sx Sixty Stories
OTMDC Overnight To Many Distant Cities
UPUA Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts

VHI
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
 BARTHELME: In a commonsense way, you write about the impingement
of one upon the other--my subjectivity bumping into other
subjectivities, or into the Prime rate. You exist for me in my
perception of you ••• That•s what•s so curious when people say, of
writers, this one•s a realist, this one•s a surrealist, this one•s
a super-realist, and so forth. In fact, everybody•s a realist
offering true accounts of the activity of the mind. There are
only realists. 1

Donald Barthelme published his first collection of short stories, ~

Back, Dr. Caligari, just over twenty years ago. Since that time his work
has consistently attracted the attention of important critics. As the body
of his fictions grew over the subsequent years, so too did a substantial
body of commentary (indeed, so varied and so substantial were both the body
of the fictions and the body of the criticisms that in 1977 Jerome
Klinkowitz, Asa Pieratt, and Robert Murray Davis published Donald Barthelme:
A Comprehensive Bibliography and Annotated Checklist). Barthelme•s place
among writers of contemporary fiction is such that it is difficult to find a
work of criticism that deals with postmodern or contemporary American
fiction that does not at some point consider Barthelme•s contribution.
Without question Barthelme is generally regarded as an important writer, a
leading contemporary figure who is almost always placed among authors like
Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Gass, and others in critical pantheons of seminal
American and international writers. It is virtually a commonplace to
identify Barthelme, as for instance do the authors of the bibliography, as
"one of the most significant writers in America," or as "one of the leading

1
 2

practitioners of innovative American fiction 11 (Klinkowitz 1974, 7). Richard

Gilman has called Barthelme 11 0ne of a handfull of American writers who are
working to replenish and extend the art of fiction .. (27). John M. Ditsky,
in 1975, described Barthelme as 11 easily the most written about of the
'experimental' writers .. {388), and Morris Dickstein identifies Barthelme as
11
the greatest influence on our developing writers 11 (270). Jack Hicks says
that Barthelme's work 11
has established him as the best of the
metafictionalists, both here and abroad. His work has consistently been
that of one of the finest stylists in contemporary American fiction ......
(81). According to Larry McCaffery, 11
especially during the late 60's and
early 70's Barthelme's work probably had more impact on American innovative
fiction than that of any other writer 11 {1982, 99). In that same study,
McCaffery calls Barthelme 11 our society's most consistently brilliant critic
of the language process itself and of the symbol-making activity of modern
manu {100). Jerome Klinkowitz, in 1980, fifteen years after Barthelme's
first collection of stories was published, called Barthelme 11 one of the more
prolific but also the most imitated fictionalists working in America today 11
(62). Finally, no less a figure than William Gass recently observed in an
introduction to one of Barthelme's stories in Esquire that Barthelme 11 has
permanently enlarged our perception of the possibilities open to short
fiction .. (1986, 46). As these few illustrations suggest, mainstream
criticism attests to the worth and importance of Barthelme as a writer of
influence.
This summary is not to suggest, of course, that there exists any real
consensus among Barthelme's critics as to the ultimate worth of his
contribution. Several critics complain, for instance, that, while Barthelme
 3

is unquestionably a clever and accomplished stylist, his subject matter is

finally too trivial. Indeed, if there is one aspect of Barthelme•s work
with which even his most sympathetic critics find fault it is, as Morris
Dickstein puts it, that his work is "too full of the trivial and the
inconsequential, the merely decorative or the merely enigmatic., (270).
Richard Gilman, too, is uncomfortable with Barthelme•s tendency to indulge
in what he takes to be "cheap incongruity or the merely bi zarre 11 ; Gilman
characterizes this tendency as a 11 certain kind of unseriousness which is not
quite the same thing as high, conscious, daring frivolity" (27). Dickstein
suggests that Barthelme•s real problem as a writer is that he lacks "a great
subject, .. something 11 immediate 11 enough 11 to draw him at least halfway out of
his irony and aesthetic detachment., (271).
The question of how to account for Barthelme•s apparent 11 Unserious
frivolity .. represents something of a shibboleth for anyone seeking to
identify a pattern or to establish a consensus of opinion in the available
criticism as to the value of Barthelme•s work. Almost without exception
critics applaud the sometimes remarkable effects Barthelme•s style is
capable of producing. However, these same critics will often lament the
absence of what Dickstein somewhat ambiguously refers to as a ''great
subject, .. and therefore they deplore Barthelme•s failure to entertain a
subject sufficiently serious to imbue the trivia in his work with a
reasonable significance.
In some sense the problem of how to deal with Barthelme•s apparent
unseriousness, and the surfeit of trivia it produces, is a representative
problem in the criticism of postmodern fiction as a genre. It involves a
problem critics have had (and continue to have) in developing an
 4

aesthetic--a new norm, if you will--to allow them to account for the
continuing assaults on the old norms that arguably is one of the principal
subjects of postmodern fiction. The problem of subject in postmodern
literature is a function of postmodern art's principal subject, the
essential meaninglessness of the world as it relates to the processes and
products of the art. Postmodern art is understandably concerned with
surfaces, the thing that impinges most in a meaningless environment. The
criticism that postmodern art in general, and Barthelme's fiction in
particular, is apt to draw, therefore, is that it is finally only a trivial
reworking of the already trivial. But art, as Annie Dillard says,
"including the art of surface, must do more than dazzle" (10). Art must
mean something. Dillard uses the instructive image {after Magritte) of the
egg in the cage to distinguish in collage between the arbitrary image (a
function of accident or novelty) and the significant image. Though similar
in appearance to the arbitrary image, the significant image is quite
different in design. It is the difference between placing an egg as opposed
to an onion in the birdcage: it is the egg which serves to create that
hallmark of a work of art, what Dillard calls its "calculated" or "unified"
effect (11). Traditionally, it has been this unified effect that has served
to distinguish a good from an inferior work of art. And so the question is
inevitably begged of postmodern fiction, which has been so radically
influenced by collage: "When is a work of art •about • meani ngl essness and
when is it simply meaningless?" (Dillard 12). It is not an easy question to
decide. There are standards and criteria to which one might make appeal,
but there is some question, as we shall see, of the appropriateness of some
current, and most traditional, criteria as they might be applied to
 5

postmodern fiction. This is Philip Stevick on the challenge posed by the

new fiction to criticism:
In short, almost all of the equipment which we have for defining a
direction in the history of art, setting it off from what has gone
before and what comes after, breaks down in the face of those
writers whom we would easily call non-traditional writers of
fiction, an incongruous and highly individual lot •••• What we do
not need is criticism of new fiction as pure technique, disengaged
from its cultural ambience, 'read,' explicated, exhausted, like a
metaphysical lyric ••• What we do need is an aesthetic of new
fiction. (337)
It is not my intention in this thesis to 11 explicate 11 the new fiction in the
sense that Stevick intends, but rather to demonstrate that Barthelme's
contribution to the new fiction has been generally misinterpreted to this
point. It may not require anything so grand in design as a 11 new aesthetic 11
to appreciate Barthelme's fiction, but the work certainly requires some
adjustment of focus in the terms of the old aesthetics as they are applied
to that work.
One very surprising aspect of the criticism of Barthelme's fiction to
date is the fact that the stories themselves are rarely, if ever, analyzed
in detail. Even in the more developed studies by Moleworth, Courturier and
Durand, and Stengel, Barthelme's stories are addressed in the most general
terms. On the one hand, this tendency to generalize about Barthelme's work
is understandable. In the first place, his collected short stories number
over one hundred and thirty fictions. Generalization about such a large
body of fictions is inevitable. In the second place, critics generally seem
to appreciate that Barthelme's stories represent a provocative challenge to
traditional criticism. They therefore tend to focus on the aesthetic
implications of the stories {the relationship to postmodern aesthetics in
particular).
 6

What is remarkable about this typical approach to the exegesis of

Barthelme•s fiction is that these same critics generally applaud the subtle
and complex use Barthelme makes of language. Alfred Guerard has suggested,
for instance, that Barthelme•s use of syntax and diction represents a
successful attempt to render in prose the subtle, complex, and sometimes
contradictory processes of thought (31). And yet, no critic that I know of
has analyzed in any depth the use of that language in any story by
Barthelme, and this is nothing short of astonishing. Of the books devoted
to his work, Stengel •s devotes the most attention to individual stories {his
study concentrates on sixteen stories), but even his more detailed analyses
tend to stand some distance back from the stories, and to gloss over the
actual mechanics of the prose.
Barthelme is something of a minimalist; his prose is extremely
compressed. So compressed is his discourse that an analogy could easily be
drawn between the means by which Barthelme arranges language and the
processes that result in poetry. Indeed, the stories require something
approaching the same sort of exegetical rigour one might apply to the
analysis of a long poem. Analysis which concentrates on the aesthetic
implications of Barthelme•s prose in general is, of course, useful and
worthwhile, but a real understanding of what Barthelme is attempting, and
expressing, in his prose demands that very careful attention be paid to the
mechanics of that prose.
The number of stories Barthelme has written poses certain advantages
and disadvantages for his critics. The sheer number of the stories, for
instance, makes a comprehensive analysis of all, or even a healthy
percentage, of the stories utterly impractical. Inevitably one faces the
 7

problem of selection, of arriving at, and then justifying, the criteria that
will determine which stories are selected for special attention. Central to
this thesis is the idea that Barthelme•s prose is descriptive of a
subjectivity that has remained relatively constant. What is therefore
required in the way of selective criteria is one that provides for a
chronologically representative selection of stories for analysis. The
stories that I will examine, therefore, except for a particular emphasis on
four stories from the first collection, are drawn in roughly equal measure
from the eight collections published over the last two decades.2
What I have also elected to do in light of my contention that
Barthelme•s prose has remained relatively constant in terms of both form and
content is to examine in some detail the first stories Barthelme published.
These stories will be examined for common features in an attempt to profile
what is most essential in Barthelme•s earliest prose. These stories will
serve to define the features of what I will call "the central fantasy" in
Barthelme, a particular and constant configuration of latent content that I
hope to show remains at the heart of Barthelme•s fiction throughout {for the
purposes of convenience in subsequent references to them, I will designate
these four stories the synoptic tales). The analysis of four stories in
this group is meant to allow for sufficient representation and emphasis of
what I intend to show are the remarkable (and heretofore unacknowledged)
similarities among these first stories.
An appreciation of the aesthetic principles that have determined the
form and content of his fictions is, of course, crucial to a study of this
kind. Therefore, I propose to devote an entire chapter to the examination
of these principles. This examination will take basically two forms. I
 8

want to begin with a consideration of the current critical attitudes toward

Barthelme•s prose in an attempt to illustrate what I take to be the
1imitations of the current criticism. Furthermore, because Barthelme is
generally taken to be a postmodern writer, and because Barthelme in his
fictions adopts key postmodern aesthetic principles, the question of
postmodernism as a distinctive approach to the act of making fiction will
have to be considered in the context of this discussion.
Following this consideration of the current critical attitude toward
Barthelme•s work, I intend to show, through the analysis of two short
stories, 11
The Balloon" and "I Bought A Little City," that Barthelme•s art
is, on a fundamental level, about the discharge and control of what
Barthelme himself terms in one of his short stories, 11 the psychoanalytic
11
issue .. (f!!Q£ 9). Following the analysis of The Balloon 11 and "I Bought A
Little City, .. I will list the several features of Barthelme•s aesthetic
using detailed analysis of certain key fictions to illustrate this list.
This thesis intends to show that, despite the postmodernistic claims
made in, and about, Barthelme•s prose as to the irrelevance of authorial
design, the outmodedness of searching for such a thing as meanings in his
fiction, and the discontinuity of the subjective in the authorial voice, the
fiction is, in principle and in practi£e, a demonstration of the relevance
of authorial design, the assumption of meaningfulness, and, most important
of all, the continuity of the subjective voice in Barthelme•s fiction.
Crucial to the demonstration of especially the latter point is a
demonstration that all of his fictions have been critically determined by
11
the central fantasy.•• As we have a·lready noted, however, it is utterly
impractical to examine all of Barthelme•s stories in any detail. A peculiar
 9

problem for this thesis with regard to the sheer number of Barthleme's
stories is the fact that this thesis is oriented toward the careful analysis
of associative material as it is developed within the closed frame of
individual fictions; in the absence of the demonstration of associative
relationships among various parts as this associative material occurs within
an individual story, generalizations about the latent content of a given
story are difficult to justify. Notwithstanding this problem, if this
thesis hopes to deflect the charge that it has analyzed only those stories
which would favour the universal presence of the central fantasy in
Barthelme•s work, it is incumbent upon it to find some means to show that
the central fantasy is a present and vital factor in all of Barthelme's
fictions. For the sake of this needed comprehensiveness I have prepared a
list of key manifest motifs which appear, to various degrees, and in various
combinations, in every Barthelme story. Considerable space has been devoted
to the explanation as to how these motifs tend to function in context.

While virtually all critics of Barthelme agree that his prose is

descriptive of some form of psychic disturbance, it is generally felt that
it is more appropriate to describe Barthelme's fictions as forms of cultural
as opposed to individual 11
brain damage... As a consequence of this view, no
studies of Barthelme's work examine the peculiar psychology depicted in
Barthelme•s work in any detail whatsoever. Generalizations are typically
made as to the lack of ego strength in the narrators, or about the cultural
factors contributing to the chronic degree of the alienation of his
characters, but criticism has yet to examine the prose for a detailed
psychological profile of the typical 11
Voice 11 heard in Barthelme's fiction.
 10

Nor has criticism examined in any detail how that psychology serves to
structure the precise terms of the texts; critics either see no significant
degree of similarity among the voices heard in Barthelme, or, in light of
the work's declared 11
postmodernism, 11 critics view the issue of authorial
design on this level as essentially irrelevant to the interpretation of the
prose. This thesis asserts that the question of authorial design, far from
being irrelevant to an appreciation of Barthelme•s fiction, is absolutely
crucial. Further, this study intends to show that Barthelme•s fictions are
the varied utterances of a consistent voice whose 11 Character, 11 capable of
being described in psychoanalytic terms, is responsible for the peculiar
shape and substance of Barthelme•s fictions.
Using a method of text analysis derived from Freudian dream analysis,
this study will consider fictions in terms of their manifest and latent
content. The mode of analyzing psychoanalytic causality is based on drawing
connections in the text through the examination of patterns of association
as they occur in the text. The method requires that the following means of
association be considered:
a) similarity of treatment of characters by narrator (called
11
displacement 11 )
b) similarity of response by character to other characters
11
( di spl acement 11 )
c) fusion of common elements in symbols (called 11 Condensation 11 )
d) connotations of imagery that illuminate and explain (a), (b), (c), and
(d).
e) origin of, and response to, conflict by characters and narrator
(
11
defenses 11 used)
 11

f) links between episodes in the plot: implied or overt

g) consideration of associations attached to major symbol, episode,
character, or object.3
By weighing all of the above as they occur in the rich fabric of Barthelme•s
prose, a far more complete picture of Barthelme•s method and meaning than is
presently available in criticism can be made available to the reader.

The method of this study is threefold. First, the associations within

the closed field of each individual fiction will be analyzed using the means
listed above. Only those patterns of association which each fiction
develops within the closed frame of that particular fiction will be used to
assess the meaning of the symbols, characters, relationships, objects, etc.
However, this study asserts as part of its thesis that a consistent
authorial voice is behind each fiction and manifests its presence in
critical patterns of association in all of Barthelme•s fiction. Therefore,
the second method of analysis of this study will be to consider patterns of
association in the larger field of the corpus of Barthelme•s work. This
movement into the larger field of association probably represents the most
important contribution this thesis will make in that the demonstration of a
vital relationship between the 11 author-principle 11 and the fictions will have
radical implications for the criticism of Barthelme.4
This study is psychoanalytic in that it adopts the Freudian view which
suggests that dream and text have much in common. Specifically, this study
adopts the view that both dream and text are composed of manifest and latent
content. It therefore follows that the means of dream analysis can be
applied to text as a means of revealing material which might not otherwise
 12

be available for commentary. This study, however, does not assume in any
way that the latent content of the text should be regarded as equivalent to
the 11 meaning 11 of the text, or that psychoanalysis in any way 11
Solves 11 a work
of literature. Rather, what the psychoanalytic point of view provides is
access into the text to get at structures of determination that might not
otherwise be available to criticism. In that Barthelme•s fiction represents
an attempt to describe a state (some would say 11 States 11 ) of mind,
psychoanalysis would seem to be peculiarly advantaged to provide especially
valuable commentary on his prose.
One of the standard objections to psychoanalytic criticism (an
objection frequently sounded in postmodern aesthetics) is that it uses the
text to illustrate models anterior to the text. According to this
objection, if the text is approached in this manner, it can lead to a
general disregard of the text, of the particular and specific way a text is
put together. A recognition of this potential liability leads us to the
third method of criticism this study will adopt. This study is concerned
only to show that the psychoanalytic method can be applied to Barthelme•s
fiction in the interests of providing a much more complete picture of this
seminal writer's work. Whenever possible, therefore, especially with regard
to a consideration of the patterns of association in the larger field of
Barthelme•s work, this study will pursue an inductive as opposed to a
deductive approach. As much as possible, the psychoanalytic nature of the
author-principle in Barthelme will be described in terms the texts
themselves insist upon. In other words, since this study has no interest
whatever in explaining, demonstrating, or defending the psychoanalytic
method per se, every effort will be made to allow the patterns as they occur
 13

in the text to dictate the terms of the psychological mechanisms giving rise
to these patterns.

A basic distinction in the analysis of fiction comes down to the

distinction between literature as reflection of personality and
consciousness, and literature as an objectively rendered means of
transcending consciousness or personality. Those who argue that literature
is a means of transcending consciousness argue that literature serves to
render irrelevant all definitions of the self or personality that depend on
coherence and durability. This, for instance, is Leo Bersani 's definition
of what he calls that "ideal utterance": It would be "wholly without
mystery--nonreferential, nonrelational, and devoid of attitudes, feelings,
tones. It would, most radically, imply the absence of any coherent and
durable subjectivity. Literature would no longer reveal a self; rather, it
would provide models of nonstructurable desires, of scenes of desire
irreducible to a history of personality" (1976, 231). What basically
distinguishes this thesis from all other approaches to Barthelme is that
this thesis assumes that literature is a projection of human consciousness,
a series of linguistic gestures which are best examined as tracings of the
consciousness out of which they originate. Alfred Guerard observes that,
"In diction, in pace and pauses and the larger ordonnance of syntax,
Barthelme's style really captures the movement of thought" (31). Guerard is
exactly right: not only does Barthelme's prose capture the movement of
thought, I would argue that these movements of thought "reveal a self"
behind Barthelme's prose--the consistent and quantifiable "voice" of the
author. All other criticism of Barthelme opts for the postmodern view of
 14

literature as represented by Bersani•s remarks quoted above, that is, that

Barthelme•s work represents an escape from the self. As we shall see in our
examination of 11 The Balloon 11 especially, Barthelme argues (both in and out
of his fiction) for the view that his work must stand for itself, that his
art is not about something, it is something. Jerome Klinkowitz says this
about Barthelme•s fiction: 11
The key to Barthelme•s new aesthetic for
fiction is that the work may stand for itself, that it need not yield to
complete explication of something else in the world but may exist as an
individual object, something beautiful and surprising and deep 11 (1980, 80).
Klinkowitz•s view of Barthelme•s prose is essentially the mainstream view,
but this view completely undervalues what I take to be the only subject of
worth in Barthelme: Barthelme•s prose is descriptive of a state of a very
particular and very constant subjectivity.
What it comes down to is the attitude we as readers choose to take
toward the authorial voice in Barthelme. Critics who argue for the absence
of self in Barthelme tend to agree that Barthelme•s prose is marked by a
distinctive authorial voice, but while that voice is distinctive, its
distinctiveness ironically lies in our inability to locate its source.
Barthelme•s fiction thus tempts us into looking for authorial design, for
the source of the tracings of consciousness we find scattered everywhere in
the prose, but the fiction always manages to undermine that search and ends
by mocking our attempt to trace a source.
Critics who argue for the absence of a graspable subjectivity in
Barthelme•s prose point out that this absence is served in part by
characters who are hardly characters at all in any traditional sense. Most
critics view Barthelme•s characters as little more than phonemes. Thomas
 15

Docherty, for instance, calls them merely "oral surfaces": "Lacking

intentional determination in their de-centred conversations, they can also
be imputed to lack a depth of characterological psyche, being reduced to
merely a series of •speech events• within the larger speech act of the
fiction as a whole" (110). Larry McCaffery, one of several critics who
would agree with this estimation, suggests that Barthelme•s "characters
never develop into psychologically convincing people so much as mere
linguistic consciousnesses or collections of odd-words" (115). Neither, it
is argued, are these characters to be taken as re-worked configurations of a
central consciousness. Rather, what they serve to represent are
independent, autonomous "views" of reality. The fictions in which these
characters function, therefore, "aren•t nearly as interesting for what they
themselves have to tell us about the world as for presenting different
methods of viewing or thinking about it" (McCaffery 1982, 118). The key
phrase here is "different methods." In other words, according to this view,
Barthelme•s fictions amount to disconnected, discontinuous views that are
not descriptive of, or traceable to, a single or central subjectivity. As
Docherty says, Barthelme produces "not individual characterization, but if
anything, the •voice of America• at a certain historical moment" (113).
In contradistinction to most of Barthelme•s critics, I would argue that
Barthelme is more than innovative stylist who lacks a great subject.
Barthelme has genuine subject, even a great subject, which serves as the
source of the unity and consistency of his work, a source which accounts for
what some critics take to be a surfeit of the trivial in his work. I will
argue that the subject of Barthelme•s work is a state of mind, a
subjectivity, a "self." It shall be the intention of this thesis to show
 16

how Barthelme•s fiction is constructed as a form of feeling, and to show

that those feelings embodied in the forms constitute a complex, a profound,
and most of all, a coherent subject.

In an article on Barthelme•s fiction, Alan Wilde points out that

appreciation of Barthelme•s work depends to a degree on seeing the
differences between modernist and postmodernist irony. According to Wilde,
postmodern irony is different from modernist irony in the manner in which it
responds to the notion of the abyss: the modern 11 anironic 11 assumes the
existence of a heterocosm 11 ( 47), whereas the postmodern substitutes 11 the
11
apparent randomness of simple contiguity 11 for the Symmetry of modernist
disorder 11 (48). Wilde argues that, while the postmodern•s preoccupation
with the trivial (the chaos of objects) may seem at first glance to lack or
even reject a human reference, the human reference is nevertheless present,
albeit in a form that is likely to frustrate what Wilde refers to as 11 the
same analytic techniques regularly applied to the classics of modern
literature .. (49): 11
But the lack of an easily paraphrasable theme or an
extractable moral, or, on the other hand, of a pattern of search and, if not
resolution, then closure, doesn•t necessarily imply the absence of human
reference of one kind or another 11 (49-50). Wilde goes on to define these
human references in Barthelme, not as the 11 larger, more dramatic emotions to
which modernist fiction is keyed [in particular, the fiction of Woolf,
Joyce, and Faulkner] but to an extraordinary range of minor, banal
dissatisfactions .. (57}. It is at this point that Wilde•s argument and the
argument of this thesis part company, for while I would join with him in
calling for a critical technique capable of appreciating the 11 human
 17

reference 11 in postmodern fiction (appreciating the fact that Barthelme's

prose represents an attempt to establish a genuine 11 link between the
fictional form and the forms of feeling .. [55]), I cannot concur that the
range or the depth of that human reference in Barthelme is, as Wilde puts
it, 11
a muted series of irritations, frustrations, and bafflements 11 (25).
Here we have no minor distinction. What Wilde is suggesting is that the
trivial in Barthelme can be worked into a pattern of human reference, a form
of feeling, but that the feelings that have found their way into form are,
by their very nature, hardly worth considering.
Betty Flowers is one of those critics of Barthelme who would likely
agree with Wilde that an identifiable personality (that is, one composed of
those 11 1arger, more dramatic emoti ons 11 ) is all but absent from his work.
Flowers, exploring the analogy proposed in one of Barthelme's stories of the
narrator-as-patient and the reader-as-analyst, concludes that the analogy,
while provocative and at first promising, is fundamentally unworkable in
Barthelme as a model of interpretation because the patient-narrators of
Barthelme are strangely absent. The distinction between the narrator as a
fictional construct and the author as actual personality is, of course,
crucial, and nowhere in her article does Flowers suggest that we can assume
in Barthelme that one is meant to stand for the other. And yet it is
interesting that Flowers is inevitably seduced into an identification of the
11
patient, 11 not merely as the narrator, but as Barthelme's voice, and
finally, as Barthelme himself. She speaks, for instance, of trying to come
to terms with the elusive narrator by 11 entering the world of the author 11
(43). She attempts to come to terms with the narrator by assessing the
psychology of the characters:
 18

In this way, not only is the reader discouraged from making any
identification with the characters, but he is also prevented from
forming any sort of sympathetic alliance with the narrator ••• The
reader cannot maintain the role of analyst because the author does
not maintain the role of patient. Aware of the critical observer,
he builds through the story an elaborate disguise with which he
hides his true identity •••• The reader ••• can find neither the
center of Barthelme's world nor even Barthelme himself. Not only
is there no central vocabulary, no central point of view, but the
fictive entity of the author himself is inconsistent, perhaps even
'unreal,' a sort of ghost-like virtuoso reflected from the
thousand different mirrors of his language, but ultimately hidden
from the gaze of The Other. (43}
Both Wilde and Flowers, then, if for different reasons, conclude that
Barthelme as personality is essentially absent from his work. He is found
to be absent despite what is patently a series of repeated teasing
invitations in the text to try and catch him. There is a sense in Barthelme
that a full appreciation of what is happening in the prose depends on the
presence of a consistent identity, and yet, when looked for, that identity
proves too elusive. The prose is thus acknowledged as a successful series
of disguises which precludes significant knowledge of the author beyond the
level of the most casual and oblique acquaintance. Barthelme, as
experienced from such a perspective, reads as an extremely clever and
elusive presence whose features, as they are manifested in the prose, lack
all but provisional coherence.

We began this chapter with the observation that Barthelme is widely

acknowledged as one of the most important, most influential of postmodern
writers. As an index of that regard (both in North America and Europe},
three full-length studies of his work have been published in the last few
years, Charles Moleworth's Donald Barthelme's Fiction: The Ironist Saved
From Drowning, Maurice Couturier's and Regis Durand's Donald Barthelme for
 19

the Methuen Contemporary Writers series, and most recently, Wayne C.

Stengels•s The Shape of Art in the Short Stories of Donald Barthelme. What
I now propose to do is to look at these more developed studies of
Barthelme•s work in terms of the questions raised above as to the nature of
the narrative voice in his work. Each of these studies views the question
of the identity of the narrative voice in Barthelme•s work as a central
issue, but all three of these studies, as we shall see, conclude that that
the identity of the narrative voice in Barthelme changes. Indeed, they
suggest that the mutability of that voice is linked to one of the central
themes of Barthelme, the mutability of the Self. Of special interest to
this thesis is Courturier•s and Durand•s study in that their aesthetic is
informed by psychoanalytic (specifically Lacanian) criticism. But let us
begin with Molesworth•s 1982 study of Barthelme as ironist.

As the title of his study suggests, Molesworth•s argument is that irony

is that element in Barthelme•s fiction most responsible for his style.
Molesworth asserts that Barthelme•s irony is so pervasive that it devalues
every kind of value on virtually every front. As a consequence of this
immanent sense of irony in Barthelme, the work is sometimes open to the
charge of being "trivial" in that Barthelme is apt to be more concerned with
the technical aspects of writing than he is with either character or plot.
According to Molesworth, this absence of character or plot, the traditional
sources of unity in fiction, occasionally leads to what appears to be
disorientation for the sake of disorientation (20). Molesworth•s estimation
of Barthelme is consistent with that of Wilde and Flowers and the rest who
have observed that the abundance of trivia in Barthelme•s work is a
 20

consequence of the felt absence of a subject. Notwithstanding this absence

of subject, Molesworth points out that there exists in Barthelme a constant
tension between 11 the deepest psychological needs and the shallowest cultural
artifacts 11 (5). These deep psychological needs are expressed, he says, by
11
a fictional voice that is both coy and disaffected, naively desirous and
dispassionately suave .. (17). Significantly, in light of our discussion
above concerning the intuited but finally elusive narrative voice of the
author, Molesworth identifies another source of tension in the difference in
the texts between the sense 11 0f a highly ski 11 ed author 11 and 11 especi ally
maladroit characters .. (36). According to Molesworth, Barthelme's characters
are not characters at all in any traditional understanding of the term:
In large terms, there are few characters in Barthelme's fiction
with distinctive pychological identities. The paradigm I have
discussed is repeated often, though with differing details. But
this is the result of Barthelme being more •maker• than •author,•
more collagist than oracle or psychological realist. All the
language is in his hands. This paradigmatic character tends to
become identified with the author, especially for readers trained
on the ironic realism of writers such as Joyce. And this confused
identity of author and character takes on a profile that is
distinctive, at least in its own terms. (70}
Venturing briefly into psychoanalytic criticism, he suggests that while
the prose has a distinctive voice, that voice is ultimately 11 depersonalized 11
due to the ••1 ack of a firm sense of a subjecti vi zed ego in either the
characters or the narrative voice 11 (37}. What Molesworth refers to a 11 lack
of subjectivized ego 11 is that same absent entity or consistent narrative
voice noted by Wilde and Flowers. He concludes that Barthelme•s fictions
are depersonalized fictions, fictions not 11 characterized by the
representations of states of mind 11 {37).
For Molesworth, the paradigmatic character manipulated by the
11
meta-voice 11 (70) in Barthelme serves to direct us to a distinctive
 21

authorial voice, but this voice is depersonalized, a voice with many

accents: 11
What we hear in Barthelme is something like an anonymous voice,
or to use a figure from one of the media, that amalgam of voices that
confronts us as we turn on the selector dial on the radio 11 (36).
(Curiously, Molesworth does not identify what seems to me to be the more
11
immediate and relevant source of the figure he uses: it is from The Dolt 11
(UPUA) in which the son enters wearing a serape made up of radios all tuned
to different stations). Molesworth suggests that 11
Barthelme's own voice is
both without authoratative force and yet completely in control 11 (36).
Further, he asserts that the 11
constant shifting and displacement of
authority .. in Barthelme's completely 11 depersonalized prose 11 amounts to 11
rule
by no one 11 (36). Even if we wanted to say something precise about that
ambiguous voice, says Molesworth, we would 11
have to deal with
nonquantifiable elements 11 {37).
Throughout his study, then, Molesworth, like the critics we have looked
11
at to this point, identifies the authorial voice in Barthelme as anonymous 11
and yet, in a qualified sense, clearly that of the author. He stops short
of analyzing the character of that voice, except in the most general terms,
because he believes that he would have to deal with what he calls
nonquantifiable elements.

While they are more willing than Molesworth to 11 quantify 11 the elements
which constitute the character of the authorial voice in Barthelme,
Couturier and Durand nevertheless share Molesworth's basic conviction that
the source of that voice remains hidden. Courturier and Durand agree that
Barthelme's stories represent 11 Countless discourses which do not seem to
 22

reflect the workings of an individual mind or unconscious, but rather a

great variety of both" {18). For these two critics it is a mark of
Barthelme's genius and the ultimate worth of his style that it is not
possible to view the several voices manifest in his stories as the accents
of a single "meta-voice" (Molesworth's term), at least not a voice about
which much of real significance can be said. Nevertheless, despite this
conclusion, the course of Couturier's and Durand's argument follows a quite
different path from those we have examined thus far.
Their interpretation is psychoanalytic in orientation, as is the
orientation of this thesis, and they therefore make certain assumptions
about text. They accept, for instance, that text's such as Barthelme's
represent a form of discharge and control of unconscious material. And yet,
as we will observe, they are led to conclusions about Barthelme's prose that
are antithetical to those of this thesis. The issue that distinguishes
their study from this one concerns the ultimate knowability of the
"character" who serves as the authorial voice in Barthelme•s fiction.
Like Molesworth, Couturier and Durand see a direct relationship between
Barthelme's style and the need to perpetuate the anonymity of the
cantrall i ng voice: "Barthel me manages to divert our attention away from
himself by drawing it toward the technical feats 11 (20) (note in this
statement the tacit assumption that there is a 11 Self 11 in the text whose
presence, and whose absence, is at issue). The fact of this self is further
substantiated by their assertion that Barthelme's principal concern as a
writer--that is, his principal subject--is 11 the interaction between the real
(its signs and its meanings) and the self (its imaginative power and its
emotions) .. (26). Concerning the impression that there are several 11
Selves 11
 23

in Barthelme, as opposed to a single, consistent "self," Couturier and

Durand suggest that the source of this impression lies in "the most striking
aspect of all his stories ••• the absence of the subject, of a stable,
confident self" (33). According to Couturier and Durand, the unstable ego
of the authorial voice in Barthelme always has trouble distinguishing
between it and the outside world; it is because this ego is unstable that
each story sounds as if it were spoken by a different voice. The only
constant about this voice, in other words, is its inconstancy.
Like Flowers, Couturier and Durand observe that the image of the
virtuoso speaker in Barthelme splits itself into so many reflections that it
is "ghost-like"; that is, the identity of the speaker is more subject to
intuition than to reason. Couturier and Durand do, however, make some
attempt to define the features of this speaker. As we have noted, they are
assisted in their analysis by a crucial assumption, an assumption Flowers et
al are not prepared to make: Couturier and Durand adopt the psychoanalytic
view that the apparent unrelatedness of certain textual elements has an
analogy in unconscious material as it is viewed by the conscious mind. The
ubiquitous sense of the inability to stabilize the environment in Barthelme
is a consequence of 11 brain damage ••• some unidentified traumatic event, of
which we may know only the symptoms,the signs; a void, a deprivation, a
disaster, leaving behind a host of painful affects, like fear, guilt,
anxiety and disconnection .. (34). This "brain damage" cannot be escaped in
Barthelme because its source is unconscious, and like the unconscious 11 there
is no running away from it; it will manifest itself all the time 11 {34). The
texts are thus highly conditioned by 11 the ambivalent retention/excretion of
the speaker 11 (37), expressing unconscious concerns, but in a form calculated
 24

to frustrate conscious analysis. Couturier and Durand are prepared, then,

at least conditionally (using the model of the concealed, but inescapable
unconscious) to suggest that the discursiveness of the individual texts is
related to the discursiveness of a consistent voice behind all of the texts.
In other words, the apparently arbitrary pourings of the speaker who speaks
these stories are manifest effects which at once serve to express and
conceal latent (unconscious) features of a consistent "self."
So far as they are willing to go Couturier and Durand analyze the
character of this voice with great skill. They more carefully distinguish
the character of what Molesworth referred to as "unsubjectivized ego" as a
"deprived superego, stricken with the loss of the good object [the father]"
(32). My quarrel with their study is not so much with any specific
suggestions they offer with regard to the character of this voice--its
deprived superego [what exactly they mean here is unclear], its ambivalent
use of language, its fascination with divorce and estrangement, its
preoccupation with the preterite life--but rather wih the conclusion they
draw as to the degree of "closure" possible in Barthelme. According to
Couturier and Durand, "What Barthelme offers is a bright theatre of meaning;
he does not impose closure and continuity where a condition of fracture and
carnivalesque disparity obtains" (73). Couturier and Durand thus end their
study by affirming the fundamental anonymity of the narrative voice in
Barthelme, asserting that the very nature of the prose precludes our ever
knowing a voice of any genuine, consistent, or developed character.
According to these critics, the search for the concealed source of the
artist's discharge and control of unconscious material in Barthelme is bound
to be frustrated because Barthelme has managed to do what no one before him
 25

has been credited with doing: he has the made the unconscious a conscious
part of his work, or so Couturier and Durand would have us believe:
Surrealistic fictions are crammed with phenomena which (it seems)
can only be, in Freudian parlance, the product of primary
processes; they do not seem to spring from an individual•s
conscious mind but from his unconscious--which makes them very
disturbing, of course. The "learned reader" {who is usually a
very sensible person) cannot accept what he fails to understand or
master; like the analysand who is telling his dream to his
analyst, the reader submits the images to a •secondary processing•
and blots out the elements that ruffled his imagination by
rationalizing them. Traditionally, it had always been considered
that such images could be dreamt, not made up. It seems that
Barthelme has mastered this difficult art, that he can extract
anything he likes from his Mad Hatter•s top hat. (57-58)
What these critics are suggesting, then, is that Barthelme•s text contains
no "dreams" (or more to the point, his "dreams" are manufactured so
skillfully that they can pass for legitimate figurations of unconscious
material), and, therefore, his text cannot be psychoanalyzed except in a
very general and highly qualified sense. Couturier and Durand suggest that
Barthelme•s "brain damaged" prose only approximates the form of dream; the
randomness and the persistant absence of referentiality in his fiction comes
from the model of the dream in which the manifest context displays the same
features. According to Couturier and Durand, Barthelme, an accomplished
post-Freudian anarchist, has managed the ultimage post-Freudian
deconstruction: he fabricates dreams using the constitutive principles of
dream distortion, but without appeal to actual primary processes. Barthelme
has thus, in an act calculated at some level to frustrate the "moralizing"
of psychoanalysis, created dreams that have no actual unconscious or latent
content. In Barthelme, then, if we accept Couturier•s and Durand•s view, we
have the dream but no dreamer, or to borrow a figure from Yeats, the dancer
at last separated from the dance. The implications of this position are
 26

profound; this position represents the most radical assertion we have

considered to this point of the independence and discontinuity of
Barthelme's authorial voice. Couturier and Durand even go so far as to
suggest that the projective fallacy is all but irresistible in Barthelme
because his 11 dreams, 11 being essentially false, void of any traceable
11
unconscious material, are more apt to be 11 filled in 11 by the reader: The
rational interpretation of the text becomes ••• problematical ••• it is bound to
reflect the desires of interpreter as much as the intentions of the artist ..
(59). The position they ultimately take as to the knowability of the voice
behind the fabulations is therefore absolutely consistent with the position
advocated by the prose itself, that is, that meanings, or 11 morals, 11 are
useless, and that closure must be resisted at all costs:
The reader feels extremely embarrassed; he has no idea what these
fictions are about because there are just too many subjects
evoked ••• There is no satisfactory way of summarizing such stories,
since a narrative line always depends on the 11 moral, 11 a prime
meaning--which is absent here. (64)
11
Citing a passage from Barthelme's story 11 Daumier, 11 the self cannot be
escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted .. (§, 181),
Couturier and Durand insist that Barthelme's style resists the 11
Supposed
in~vitability
11
in the reading of fiction that leads the reader to identify
11
a distinctive voice 11 (66). As far as they are concerned, Barthelme, like
several other postmoderns, has managed to escape the self: 11
The text [Snow.
White] is erroneously taken by another critic as the discourse of the
author; naturally, if this were the case, Barthelme would have failed to
'escape the self' 11 (67). What is curious here is that Couturier and Durand
seem to ignore the fact that the crucial term in the quotation they cite
from 11
Daumier 11 is 11 distracted, 11 not 11 escaped. 11 The fact is that the text of
 27

the story 11 Daumier 11 proclaims that, despite its own considerable 11

ingenuity
and hard work, .. the self 11 cannot be escaped... Couturier and Durand, in
assuming that the 11 discourse of the author .. is absent in the first place,
have themselves been distracted. They conclude this issue, as they must,
11
with the observation that Barthelme's fiction is a collection of random
sequences and fragments, .. a fiction that leaves readers 11 free to develop any
interpretation they like 11 inasmuch as it is a fiction 11 Which does not create
any value and does not leave any residue .. (69).
Couturier and Durand are well aware of the critical impasse such an
attitude is apt to engender: 11
Yield to the indeterminacy of the text and
the text remains an enigma; wave your troubles away and its uniqueness is
lost. In both cases interpretation is defeated .. (72). As the conclusion of
their book indicates, their study ultimately serves to navigate between what
11
they perceive as the twin threats of indeterminacy and closure: Between
the violence of interpretation and the suicidal temptation of mimeticism,
the critical act follows an arduous course. It can't go on, it will go
on ..... {74). Without doubt this Beckettesque flourish at the end of their
study, a study profoundly informed by structuralism, has a certain appeal.
There are, of course, aspects of the text that cannot, and should not, be
forced with procrustean zeal into some or another interpretative frame of
reference; meanings and morals are always dangerous, inevitably reductive.
Further, Couturier and Durand are quite right to be wary of the danger of
the affective fallacy when dealing with Barthelme's especially oneiric
prose. I am not convinced, however, either by Barthelme's prose with its
tactical distractions of the reader, or by Couturier and Durand et al, that
such is the case in Barthelme. In fact, I would suggest that this view
 28

represents a gross misreading of Barthelme. What we have in Barthelme is

not the absence of latent content but a sophistication beyond the usual
degree of the defenses of secondary revision. Barthelme is well-versed in
the phenomenology and the same (especially French) postmodern aesthetic
principles that inform Courturier•s and Durand's study. A reading of his
work (the novel Snow White in particular) shows that he clearly knows his
structuralism, and that he obviously knows his Freud. I suspect that,
consciously or unconsciously, he has used this knowledge to "distract"
readers like Couturier and Durand who perhaps come to the text prepared to
enter postmodernism•s bright theatre of equivalences in which no meaning or
moral can obtain. Barthelme has exploited the critical predispositions of
his age to help cover the trail of the ghost-like virtuoso whose voice can
be heard behind his fictions, but whose source is difficult to trace.
In "The Myth of the Postmodernist Breakthrough," Gerald Graff proposes
a thesis which touches on this argument. According to Graff, the postmodern
vision is not so much a breakthrough as an intensification of the single
tradition of romantic and modernist art, an art "in which man is totally and
irreparably alienated from a significant external reality, an objective
order of values" (393). In postmodernism, this alienation is manifested by
a "celebration of the undifferentiated" (393). In Barthelme, therefore,
Graff sees the abundance of the trivial as an expression of what he calls
the "law of equivalences" which states that "nothing is intrinsically more
'interesting• than anything else" (401). Graff's view that the law of
equivalences rules in Barthelme is the same in principal as Couturier's and
Durand's notion of a bright theatre of meaning in Barthelme. Graff's
acceptance of the rule of this law of equivalences, however, represents a
 29

gross misreading of the fiction which, far from practising what it

everywhere seems to preach about the inherent valuelessness of all objects,
consistently and meaningfully selects and arranges certain objects from the
heap into significant patterns. Careful and comparative readings of
Barthelme reveal that the law of equivalences has a rather more restricted
ambit in Barthelme, at least, than Graff would have us believe.
There can be no argument that the postmodern, who lives in an
increasingly relative universe, has had to face an increase in the sheer
quantity of objects in his world. Adding to the confusion is the fact that
objects generally are no longer connected to objective systems of meaning.
However, it would be a mistake to assume therefore that the objects in the
world the postmodern inhabits are devoid of meaning. What has happened, in
brief, is that the source of the process by which objects are made
meaningful has shifted from the objective to the subjective. If we watch
the way a postmodernist like Barthelme picks among, and sorts out, the
clutter of his world--the way he differentiates--we are likely to be
rewarded with the observation of meaningful patterns, patterns that lead us
back to a constant subjective source. Once these patterns have been
established, the world of otherwise trivial objects as it appears in the
prose is no longer an undifferentiated heap of extra-personal, equivalent
objects, but rather a meaningful arrangement of otherwise meaningless
detritus. The problem, of course, is, first, to find the patterns, and
second, to assign them a meaning.

Published in 1985, Wayne B. Stengel's The Shape of the Art in the Short
Stories of Donald Barthelme is the least satisfying of the three major
 30

studies. Not only is the book marred in several places by inaccuracies,

Stengel's analysis of Barthelme in no way accounts for much of what is
present in any of the sixteen stories upon which he concentrates. The basic
problem with his study lies in his view of the moral purpose of Barthelme's
aesthetic. Stengel feels that Barthelme's character-artists are able to
define the self as a 11 dynamic organism.. (15) through their art. The typical
Barthelme character has, according to Stengel, managed to turn 11 the
essentially negative force of [his or her] irony into a creative, affirming
value rather than allowing it to become another caustic voice adding to the
debris it castigates .. (12). Barthelme's dynamic character-artists, remaking
themselves in situation, thus represent 11
Barthelme's moral solution to a
meaningless world 11 (15).
The basic flaw in Stengel's interpretation of Barthelme's view of self,
as it is represented in the stories, is that it is far too sanguine. I
would argue virtually the opposite of Stengel when it comes to assessing
Barthelme's view of the self. The self I read in Barthelme is neither
dynamic nor open to change on a fundamental level. The self as Barthelme
depicts it is, rather, a virtual constant, inured in the detritus and the
patterns of a past it cannot escape. The process of making art is, as
Stengel asserts, an attempt constantly to remake the self in the face of a
meaningless reality, but Barthelme views that attempt as futile.
With regard to Stengel's view of the knowability of the shaping voice
behind Barthelme's fiction, let it suffice at this juncture to point out
that Stengel is in basic agreement with the critics we have cited to this
point. Since Stengel feels that Barthelme's protagonists demonstrate the
notion that an individual can and does continually remake his identity in an
 31

attempt to affirm a new reality, he is not disposed to see any great

similarities among Barthelme's protagonists except in their 11 moral 11 attitude
toward the value of art. He is, however, inclined to view the various
protagonists in Barthelme as the masks Barthelme-as-artist has created and
discarded in his efforts to remake himself: 11
0ften the reader feels that
not only is the protagonist hiding his identity but that Barthelme is as
well 11 (19).
Much of Barthelme's art, according to Stengel, is occupied by 11 his
endeavors to play with his audience, to distance and alienate them from his
identity and that of his characters.. {23). Barthelme is thus 11 a parodist
who mocks the idea of reading a text to determine authorial design. His
success is in his ability to elude his reader's search for his character's
strategies and motivations .. (23). It is this view of Barthelme as an author
who first invites, then utterly frustrates, the reader's search for some
credible and useful explanation of his character's 11 Strategies and
motivations .. that this thesis directly challenges.

Donald Barthelme is generally acknowledged to be a postmodern writer.

One identifies Barthelme as postmodern, of course, with some hesitation
given the range of forms and styles of postmodernism, to say nothing of the
difficulty of defining what is meant by the term postmodern.
Notwithstanding the complications attached to identifying Barthelme's work
as postmodern, it is clear that his work has been profoundly influenced both
in terms of its design and its interpretation (as we have seen to this
point, especially in the case of Couturier and Durand) by distinctively
postmodern aesthetics. Crucial to an appreciation of Barthelme's work,
 32

therefore, is an appreciation of the postmodern context within which his

work must be considered. It is not an easy subject about which to
generalize, but I believe that some introduction to postmodernism as set of
aesthetic principles is necessary in this study; if nothing else, the
discussion of postmodernistic criticism in particular will serve to
underline the distinctive approach this thesis has taken to Barthelme's
prose.
In the following chapter, key features of postmodernism as they might
apply to the interpretation of Barthelme's fiction will be addressed. What
I basically intend to argue is that postmodernist arguments against the
relevance of meaningfulness or the relevance of authorial design in the text
have limited applicability to the interpretation of Barthelme's fiction.
CHAPTER TWO: THE POSTMODERN CONTEXT
 34

Postmodern is a term applied to an approach to art, and to a style of

art, as presented in various media. Obviously there is much that might be
said about the development of postmodern art, but since my interest is to
provide an aesthetic context within which to view Barthelme's contribution,
I want to limit discussion here to those issues attached to the postmodern
aesthetic I would deem relevant to the particular approach this study will
take to Barthelme's work. In this chapter, therefore, I will discuss
postmodernism in terms of the following: as it compares to modernism; its
metafictional aspect (including the problem of language, and the problem of
meaning); and finally, the place of the author in the postmodern text.

It must be acknowledged at the outset of this discussion that the term

postmodern itself is somewhat controversial. Consensus among critics as to
the meaning of the term, or even that such a thing as postmodern literature
exists in the first place, simply does not exist. One of the problems with
the term, it is argued, is that it is simply too imprecise to be of any real
value. As one critic says, "The meanings of 'postmodernism' are as varied
as the phenomena its users attempt to describe" (Antin 143). John Gardner
rejects the term because it "sets up only a vague antithesis to 'modernism',
meaning only, in effect, more like Italo Calvino than like Saul Bellow"
(Gardner 81). Ihab Hassan, one of the less partisan critics of postmodern
fiction, agrees that term itself is "not only awkward and uncouth; it evokes
what it wishes to replace or suppress, modernism itself" (1980, 117).
However, concludes Hassan, "what better name have we to give to this curious
age?" (1980, 119). Well, as it happens there are several names currently
competing to describe "this curious age" of fiction: surfiction,
 35

anti-realist, anti-fiction, metafiction, conceptual fiction, late-modernism,

avante-garde texts, the new fiction, fabulation, and contemporary fiction
are among them.l As David Antin suggests above, the terms applied to the
fiction do tend to vary with what a given critic views as the most
distinctive or determining feature of the prose.
It might be argued that postmodernism is only an extension in practise
of essentially modernistic aesthetic principles. I would argue, however,
that it is possible to distinguish postmodern fiction as a distinctive style
or an approach to the act of making fiction. Further, so far as Gardner•s
contention that the term postmodern only serves to vaguely distinguish
Bellow from Calvino is concerned, I would argue that there are several
determining criteria available that distinguish the work of the postmodern
writer from the work of his contemporaries, work which might easily embody
certain elements of the postmodern point of view.

It might be appropriate to begin our enquiry into postmodernism by

asking what we mean when we speak of modernism. Is there any useful way of
summarizing the work of the so-called modernist period? Irving Howe in ~

Decline of the New, a study of modernism, says that 11

it is quite impossible
to sum up the central assumptions of modernism, as one can for Romanticism,
by listing a sequence of beliefs and visions. Literary modernism is a
battle of internal conflicts more than a coherent set of theories or
values ... (21). Howe calls modernism 11 a drama of doubt'' and says that it is
especially difficult to say anything final about modernism because for the
.. great figures of modernism ••• everything depends on keeping a firm grip on
the idea of the problematic ... Nevertheless, it is possible to say something
about what was distinctive about the modernist temperament because, as Howe
 36

himself puts it, even the iconoclastic modernist finds that he or she
11
cannot resist completely the invading powers of ideology and system.. (21).
Baruch Hochman in The Test of Character {1983), a study which traces
the development of the view of character in modernist literature, identifies
Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce as the three most important modernist writers, the
writers who gave best and most innovative expression to modernist aesthetic
principles. Hochman sees one of the first of these principles of modernism
as the rejection of the seemingly solid social and moral surfaces of the
11

self 11 {154}. For the modernist, the stable surfaces of the external world
were not stable at all but rather these surfaces disguised a disturbing and
universal flux. One generalization one can make about modernism, therefore,
is that the modernist writers were far more interested in describing the
world as it is experienced by an individual consciousness than they were in
descriptions of a stable and fixed field of objectively available phenomena.
Instead of locating the consciousness of their characters in the world,
Joyce and Woolf especially were interested in recording the world as it
impinged upon the consciousness of their characters. As Robert Alter puts
it, the modernist turns his 11 attention inward to the movements of the
protagonist•s mind, 11 a shift of emphasis which serves to fragment 11
the
external world into a staccato series of overlapping interior impressions ..
(141}.
What modern writers were doing was challenging the basic authority of
objective, extra-personal value in favour of an exploration of existential
or subjective authority. As modernism matures that development is marked by
11
increasingly militant insistence upon the primacy of human consciousness
over an inessential external world" (Harris 173). The work that emerges
from modernism focuses on the play of individual sensibility, the mobility
 37

of affective responses, and especially the flow or stream of consciousness.

The shift of emphasis from objective to subjective values resulted in the
subversion of the old monolithic coherence of traditional realism. In the
attempt to render inner states into prose, the modernist writer sought to
reproduce in prose his acceptance of things as they are (however strained
that acceptance sometimes seems to be). He sought to capture the complexity
and contradiction of experience as he or she knew it, avoiding as much as
possible 11 the need to impose upon it a falsifying order of causes and
consequences, an order of causality on which the traditional novel insists ..
(Rosenheim 21).
Modernism was made possible by new views of human consciousness. These
new views, which completely redefined the private man•s relationship to his
society, to the world, and to himself, encouraged writers to organize
language the way thought itself is organized. Under the influence of the
views of Freud in particular, modernist writers sought to incorporate into
11
their work the very processes which accounted for consciousness itself, the
involuntary associations and relationships, memories and anticipations,
observations and imaginings which defy conventional dimensions of time and
space and unconcernedly cross and recross the gap between fact and fantasy ..
(Rosenheim 134). The result is prose and poetry which may defy logic and
reasonableness but which remains, nevertheless, intelligible on what might
be called an emotional level; in modernist prose what appears strange in
terms of conventional modes of expression achieves an unprecedented sense of
reality, an unprecedented sense of how experience is actually experienced by
consciousness.

Ihab Hassan in Paracriticisms says that postmodern art is fundamentally

 38

"anti-art" that it is designed, not unlike the Dadaist art of modernism, to

challenge certain assumptions we may cherish about the significance of works
of art (1975, 21). A consideration of the anti-art bias is as good a place
as any to begin this examination of the postmodern aesthetic.
Anais Nin in her modernist vision of the future novel, speaks of "a new
swift novel" that would build upon the innovations of modernism. It would,
she says, be 11
born of Freud, Einstein, jazz and science 11 (Nin 332).2
Postmodern prose is the new swift style which has grown out of, and to a
degree supplanted, modernism's preoccupation with the vicissitudes and
processes of consciousness. Postmodernism, for reasons we'll explore below,
rejects the modernist idea that consciousness mimetically rendered in
restructured prose would provide a lasting or viable subject for prose.
Indeed, it is this rejection of the modernist idea that 11 Consciousness (the
certainty that 'I' exist for 'myself') defines existence" (Waugh 135) that
probably best serves to distinguish the modernist from the postmodernist
aesthetic.
As a direct consequence of postmodernism's lack of faith in a
distinction between the world and the discretely conscious "Self, 11 irony has
become an essential feature of the postmodern aesthetic. Irony is integral
to the postmodern because, as Larry McCaffery puts it, 11
Fiction cannot hope
to mirror reality or tell the truth because 'reality• and 'truth' are
themselves fictional abstractions whose validity has become increasingly
suspect as this century has proceeded" (1982, 5). The surfictionalist
Raymond Federman puts it this way: "If the experiences of any man (in this
case the writer) exist only as fiction ••• then these experiences are
inventions. And if most fiction is (more or less) based on the experiences
of the one who writes ••• there cannot be any truth nor any reality exterior
 39

to fiction" (1973, 427).

Modernism, however, still was prepared to place some faith in the power
of art to mirror reality on some level. There is, therefore, a qualitative
difference between modern and postmodern irony. Alan Wilde in an article on
Barthelme's irony offers this distinction between the two forms of irony:
•••modern literature confesses a longing to overcome the ironic
vision with the countervision of an 'anironic,' resolving unity.
And it is precisely that concept of a heterocosm, the image of a
perfectly ordered world, which in its autonomous perfection
becomes both moral and referential, that postmodern literature
rejects (or attempts to reject), even as it carries on and
redefines the problem of the artist's relation to the reality that
surrounds him.(47)
The rejection of what Wilde terms the "anironic" vision of a resolving unity
is what distinguishes postmodern from modern irony. For the purposes of
this study, the crucial phrase in this passage from Wilde is "attempts to
reject." As we shall see, and as this thesis will ultimately argue, the
question of whether or not Barthelme's writing does or does not posit the
existence of a heterocosm is by no means closed. Let it suffice for now to
point out that postmodern works of art, whether or not they implicitly refer
to a reality outside the text or not, are typically designed, as
Rimmon-Kenan says of the modern text in general, "to prevent the formulation
of any 'finalized hypothesis' or overall meaning by making various items
undermine each other or cancel each other out, without forming neatly
opposed possibilities" (121).
One example Ihab Hassan offers to demonstrate that in the postmodernist
text the "art cancels itself" is the last sentence of Beckett's How It Is
which tells the reader that the book he has just completed has been about
"how it wasn't" (21). Beckett's attack on the view that art is some sort of
mirror of reality, an attack couched within the very work itself, is an
extremely common device in postmodern fiction. It is aimed at one of the
 40

central assumptions attached to art itself, at least art as it is practised

and received in the West, for postmodern art is extremely concerned to show
that a work of art is not a frame set up around a fixed set of
significances; it tries to demonstrate that even in the act of making art,
art is fundamentally incapable of establishing meaningful patterns,
especially if the source of those meanings is certain patterns and meanings
presumed to exist in the world outside the frame of the work of art.
Jacques Erhmann•s statement that literature 11
as a dumping ground for fine
feelings, a museum of belles lettres has had its day 11 is typical of
utterances found in the many manifestoes attempting to define the postmodern
aesthetic (248). In the universe the postmodern sees himself as inhabiting
there simply is no room for such things as fine feelings, basically because
fine feelings require some sort of stable or absolute context in which to
signify. In the relative and conditional world of the postmodern, no such
patterns or systems can be acknowledged because they would threaten the
evolving subjectivity of the individual.3 The postmodern sensibility views
any system as a potential threat to what an existentialist would term an
"authentic" existence. It is not surprising, therefore, that postmodernist
art tends to insist on its status as an artificial object. It proclaims
itself an experience among experiences with no special claim as a standard
or vessel of the real since consciousness is, by its very nature,
discontinuous. According to Scholes, Proust is only one of several
modernist precursors of postmodern skepticism about art per se; Proust's
particular contribution may have been the way he exploded 11 the empirical
notion of characterization so essential to realistic and naturalistic
fiction, by demonstrating the artificiality of the real and the reality of
the artificial .. (1967, 20). For a sensibility caught in the field of flux
 ~~~----

41

Beckett calls "the haze of conception-preconception." a work of art

inevitably is rendered as irrelevant as a discarded mask or skin (1970, 11).
Postmodernism is predicated on this attitude toward the art it creates:
"Art consists of the forms we leave behind in our effort to keep up with
ourselves. define ourselves, create ourselves as we move along" (Sukenick
1981, 35-36).4

Many critics who take the auto-referentiality of postmodern fiction to

be its most distinctive feature, refer to the fiction as "metafiction."
While I would question that the term is the most appropriate descriptive
term for the fiction, I would not question the importance of appreciating
the source and effects of postmodernism•s meta-fictionality.
Metafiction, a term coined by William Gass and popularized by Robert
Scholes, refers to any "writing which self-consciously and systematically
draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose certain
questions about the relationship between fiction and reality .. (Waugh 2).
Metafictional prose is therefore highly self-conscious in that it aims to
explore 11
a theory of fiction through the practice of writing fiction 11 (Waugh
2). As Jack Hicks puts it in his book In The Singer•s Temple, which
examines the work of certain postmodern writers, the postmodern
metafictionalist sensibility 11 does not accept the world •out there• as a
referent for its own existence but works. instead, from second-order
literary and intellectual materials .. (21). The postmodern writer, thrown by
various and complex forces back upon the resources of his own private
sensibility, turns, albeit somewhat abashedly, to the corrupt and corrupting
vehicle of fiction in an effort to supply himself with a more relevant sense
of that subjectivity.
 42

Metafiction is necessarily concerned with language, particularly

language•s inability to describe what is real, its inability to bridge the
gap between word and experience. As an approach to the act of making
fiction, metafiction justifies itself with the assertion that, while it may
be impossible to use language to represent the world, it, nevertheless,
remains possible to "represent" the discourses of the world.
The self-reflexiveness of metafiction could be said to have both a
positive and a negative aspect; that is, even as metafictions work to
deconstruct the reality quotient of the machine of fiction by exposing the
operation of its gears, it nevertheless works to construct an alternative
reality, a means of escaping, if only momentarily, the consequences of using
language. What metafiction attempts to do through the presentation of
various exercises of subjectivity is to try to provide "a useful model for
understanding the construction of subjectivity in the world outside the
novels" (Waugh 3). Metafiction may thus be viewed as not merely an attempt
to decry the failures of language and various forms of discourse: it has a
decidely positive and constructive aim because metafiction is, in fact, "a
series of searches for a way out of a cultural labyrinth" (Hicks 21).
The basis of all metafiction is suspicion about the worth of discourse.
This is not to say, of course, that the metafictional impulse is uniquely
modern. Cervantes, whose novel Don Quixote is generally regarded as the
first novel, directed his book in part against what took to be a corrupt
romantic view. Indeed, Don Quixote even directs metafictional irony at the
book, Don Quixote, even as it directs an attack against that romantic view.
The early history of the novel (as represented by the work of Cervantes,
Fielding, Defoe, Sterne) is, in fact, marked by this tendency to construct a
novel discourse in reaction to a previous and presumably irrelevant mode of
 43

discourse. With this dynamic in mind, it is possible to view the true novel
(as its name suggests) as something entirely new, manufactured out of, and
to a degree defining itself in contradistinction to, old materials. Thus it
might be observed that while there are a great many books that adopt the
form of novels, the proportion of genuine novels is necessarily small.
The metafictional bias of the novel, always lifting out of the heap of
old discourses on the wings of a novel approach, has reached such a pitch in
our century that silence, the ultimate denial of anterior discourse, has
been considered as a viable form of expression. This crisis has come about,
not merely because fiction as a legitimate or authentic mode of expression
has come into question, but because language itself has been identified as
the original source of man's sense of dislocation from a meaningful context.
The fundamental problem with language is language's enormous capacity
to make sense out of the world. This capacity to make sense, to suggest the

presence and the operation of a coherent system, might seem at first blush
an agreeable quality. The problem lies in language's corollarative tendency
to limit and, in fact, transform the world in the very act of describing it.
Instead of serving to connect the self to the world, language, in a
shifting, discontinuous, relative universe, is seen to serve to distance
that self from the world, and ultimately, the self from the self. Language
is designed to "engage the systemizing mind" (Johnson 83). However, once
the principles which hold any system together are undermined or are defeated
altogether, language is turned into a potentially inimical force which
serves to keep the discontinuous self from relevance in the world. What the
postmodern writer wants in his prose, therefore, is language that is "not
repressive but expressive" (Hicks 57). Language becomes expressive,
ironically, when it abandons its claim to transparency (mimesis) and draws
 44

attention to its status as autonomous object, its opacity, in other words.

The inevitable consequence of modernism's determination to challenge or

subvert the transparency of language was postmodernism's various (and
necessarily repeated) attempts to create language even in the act of
destroying it: "[late] Modernism assumes that language must necessarily
die, that it can no longer be the ground of unity between speakers, but
only, through its death, the ground for a possible unity of self, for a
radical and singular sense of self" (Kuspit 238). Postmodernism thus takes
it as a given that language must represent only itself; that is, draw
attention to itself as a discourse among various other discourses of the
world. In Fiction and The Figures of Life, William Gass declares that
novels are made up of words and only words. According to Gass, moving
through and beyond the language of fiction into the "soundless dreams"
afforded by viable mimesis involves a certain risk for the reader--such
dreams lead him "out of sight" and distract him from what is really going on
in fiction. For readers accustomed to identifying with the situations and
characters rendered in fiction, the declaration that fiction is, as it were,
not wearing any of the clothes we remember having seen on it is a shock:
"That novels should be made out of words, and merely words, is shocking
really ••• It's as though you had discovered that your wife were made of
rubber: the bliss of all these years, the fears ••• sponge" (1970, 39).
Postmodern fiction thus purports, as Gerald Graff puts it, to be "a form of
energy not accountable to the orderings anyone makes of it and specifically
not accountable to the liberal human values most readers want to find there"
(403). In Barthelme's short story, "Me and Miss Mandible"(CBDC), the
protagonist's "great discovery" is semiotical: " ••• signs are signs,
 45

and ••• some of them are lies" (109). This is the great discovery of
post-Saussurian postmodernism in general. As a result, postmodern fiction
is typically made up "of signs and relationships which are freely
constructed and have no necessary connection to the world" (McCaffery 1982,
23}.
We have noted that the postmodern writer accepts ipso facto that language
improperly attended to is most apt to serve, as Gerz puts it, as a vehicle
of "dispossession and alienation" (Gerz 280). Dispossession and alienation
occur because language, which intends to connect the self to the real,
actually serves to obliterate the real in the very act of description: "The
given can thus be known only through the non-given (the symbol), without
which we would have no access to empirical reality" (Waugh 58). Once the
given (the thing itself) is replaced by the non-given (the representation of
the thing itself), one is turned from the potentially open and rich field of
the given and into the closed and self-validating, self-justifying world on
the non-given. As Gerz puts it, "The individual becomes, instead of a
holder of language ••• [he becomes] language's object and as such a speechless
part of the contradictory order established by it" (281).
Absolute escape from the tyranny of what Waugh calls the "non-given" of
language, whatever the form of the discourse, is simply not possible in that
the only true escape from language lies in the absolute rejection of its
use, or silence. And silence, as Susan Sontag points out, can't ever be a
viable option for the artist (1969, 12-14). For the creative artist, then,
continued use of language in the creation of discourse is thus predicated on
an approach to its use that incorporates a distinctive sense of the danger
language inherently poses to a radical and singular sense of self. The
postmodernist continues to use language in the full knowledge that words are
 46

merely signs and that their claim on meaningfulness is limited: "The

written word is an object in its own right; it is different from meaning
which it defers and which cannot be grasped except by other signs that we
place in the 'empty• space of the signified" (Culler 258).
The search for an expressive as opposed to a repressive form in which to
apply language is, in a very real sense, what the history of literature is
all about. (As Italo Calvina points out, "The whole struggle of literature
is in a fact an effort to escape from the confines of language" [77].)
Postmodern "expressiveness" manifests itself in metafictional attacks on
language's inherent repressiveness (language as vehicle for the transmission
of systemized thought}, an attack which is sounded, nevertheless, amid a
celebration of what Howe calls language's "most primitive quality", that is,
its "incantatory, magical and automatisitic power to arouse emotions and
engage the consciousness" (Howe 20). The result is a kind of paradoxical,
intensely ironic utterance in which the speaker constantly works to
discredit the very discourse he or she is using.
Postmodern writers argue that only by insisting on the limited
significance of language does the possibility exist to use language to say
something of genuine significance. It should be noted that Barthelme is an
acknowledged leader among writers who keep finding ways to put language to
new uses. R.E. Johnson compares Barthelme's use of language to an act of
exorcism whereby the very nullity of significance in words is turned to
advantage: "His language is self-subversive, but it drives out its
devil--or god--that seven more might enter, calling for seven times the
expulsion effort. Far from being an exercise in frustration, this offers
the possibility for more life: word-making times seven. Nothing may
precede language; but language, as interpretation of nothing, is not only
 47

something, but the basis for another something ad infinitum" (87).

This simultaneous renunciation-validation of language which Barthelme
and others exploit to such unusual advantage is central to postmodern
fiction. Robbe-Grillet's "whole art," for instance, as Roland Barthes says,
"lies in destroying meaning in the very act of revealing it" (Morrisette 12)
(or as John Cage has put it, "I have nothing to say and I'm saying it"
[quoted by Michelson, 56]). Robbe-Grillet's approach to fiction is
epitomized by his efforts to act as the pure chosiste or, the neutral
describer of things. The so-called chosisme are intended to have no
significance beyond their status as objects (9). They are not meant to
refer the reader to a thing in the world outside the text, nor are they
meant to refer to the author: they have no depth or significance beyond
what is immediately available in the text. In traditional narrative or
conventional realism, depths are by right deemed superior to what lies on
the surface. In the prose of Robbe-Grillet, however, the surface is
everything because, according to Robbe-Grillet, the surface is all that
a writer can describe.S This principle of description which underlies the
so-called "new realism" thus reverses the traditional aims of fiction in its
absolute reJection of the application of "the 'crust' of interpretation and
hidden meanings" to the prose: "Any explanation or interpretation can only
be de trap or gratuituous, when confronted by the thereness-or reality of
situations, gestures, and things" (Morrisette 27). The ObJects created in
Robbe-Grillet's fiction are things made out of nothing; that is, they are
intended to stand alone as their own significance and make no appeals for
significance to sources outside the text (signifie). The position taken by
most postmodernists on the problem of language may be thus be summarized as
follows: words are objects and contain no transcendent meaning or depth
 48

beyond that which you, the reader, invest them with in the act of
re-creating them in the act of reading.

At the risk of oversimplification, let me suggest that what the

postmodernist spirit rejects in all so-called art is basically the
celebration of the artifact as vessel of special and permanent significance,
a celebration which happens, in the case of literature, at the expense of
the potentially rich and liberating experience of reading. Postmodernism
insists that the significances embodied in the artifact are second-hand and
predetermined. Consequently, acceptance of those significances on the part
of the reader is therefore alienating; the act of interpretation (the text
refers to this in the world and that meaning is essentially the same for you
and me) only serves to distance one from one's experience of oneself in the
highly relative world one inhabits.
Many would argue that the fiction that results from this aesthetic
which conceives of form as a means to suppress content is either
unrealizable or, quite literally, unreadable. Donald Kuspit points out in
his study of intentionality in postmodern art, The Critic as Artist, that,
purification of the medium amounts to an infinite regress of
artistic form, until form becomes a tautology of the artistic
object. As long as the tendency toward a tautologous
self-definition of art is in force, the artistic object can be
said to exist in a novel mode of natural givenness. The naivete
with which it simply taken to be its own form amounts to a taboo
about thinking about it, to reflecting on its ground rather than
assuming, as Frank Stella puts it, that 'what you see is what you
see.• Thinking about it is to move from perceiving it to
conceiving it.(4}
The problem nascent in this approach to form is where to draw the line
between meaningful disarray and pure nonsense. In the case of the
postmodernist literary artifact, the ideal would be constituted out of
language akin to the language Poulet imagined could be created, a "living,
 49

gliding language that simultaneously creates and destroys

expectations ••• wrenching language free from habitual meaning without quite
casting it into nonsense 11 (Hicks 23). But is such language possible? Those
who question whether such art and such language is possible point out that
the element which keeps art from slipping over the precipice into nonsense
and noise is the selective (and usually, highly informed) perspective of the
artist.# They would argue that the artist must impose a pattern and an
order on the elements he fits inside the frame otherwise there would be no
point in having a frame in the first place. If the work isn't nonsense one
has to assume that a pattern has been placed in the work, even if the
pattern is calculated to celebrate accident and the absence of meaning (the
fact that so many postmodern writers are also tailors of manifestoes giving
reasons for the absence of reason in their work is suggestive).
In an interview with Joe David Bellamy, William Gass said that the real
danger with looking for meanings in literature is that 11 it provides a sense
of verification (a feeling) without the act of verification (a process) 11
(33). Under the influence of this false feeling of meaningfulness, readers
tend to set up what Susan Sontag calls in her essay 11 Against Interpretation..
.. a shadow world of meanings 11 (1982, 99). According to this view,
interpretation is tantamount to an act of ravishment by the imperial forces
of allegory, an act that violates and subverts the integrity of the text.
We have seen in our consideration of the elements of anti-art and
metafiction, and now the rejection of depth or meaning in discourse, that
the meaning of postmodern fiction is couched in peculiar fashion in the
surfaces of the fiction itself (hence Ricardou's famous assertion that
fiction is 11
no longer a mirror taken out for a walk; it is the work of
internal mirrors ubiquitous and at work within the fiction itself 11 [130]).
 50

The problem of meaning (or decidability or determinacy) is therefore the

central issue in the criticism of postmodern fiction. If we are to accept
the pronouncements of the writers themselves, the act of interpretation is
always an imposition, a supremely gratuituous and even violent incursion
into the field of indeterminacy the text aims to achieve. According to this
view, interpretation merely serves to manufacture a pseudo-significance, an
artificial sense, or an allegory, which only serves to re-name and thus
effectively obliterate the text. And yet the fact remains that unless the
text is interpreted on some level, however cautiou~~ nothing is
accomplished, the text remains, quite literally, irrelevant. As Couturier
and Durand put it, summing up the challenge postmodern fiction poses to
interpretation, 11
Yield to indeterminacy and the text remains an enigma; wave
your troubles away and its uniqueness is lost. In both cases,
interpretation is defeated 11 (72).
I am prepared to argue that this defeat of the validity of
interpretation is altogether pyrrhic, grounded on a number of dubious
assumptions. At the outset we must recognize that the postmodern call for a
discourse that will serve as a non-interfering vision of the world in all of
its pre-meaningfulness is predicated on a contradiction in terms. The fact
remains that the only way a text can exist is to come between a reader and
his view of the world, to interpose itself as a series of structured and
structuring experiences. While it is perfectly possible to mitigate against
determinacy in a text (a matter of degree), beyond a certain point, a
de-structured text of, let's say, equivalent signs, ceases to be a text at
all. It is inescapable that, without some sense of structure or pattern
available in the text to the reader, the text will cease to function because
it cannot engage the reader. I would therefore argue that the creation of
 51

what Barthes calls an opaque text is doomed to fail on two points, the
first, theoretical, and the second, practical. The theoretical failure lies
in a fundamental contradiction the idea of non-meaning which is itself (as
the wealth of commentary by postmodern writers on the subject of
meaninglessness attests) an extremely meaningful idea. Second, as this
thesis hopes to prove in the analysis of Barthelme•s prose, it is inevitable
that an author through his use of metaphor will infuse the text with certain
subjective, habitual patterns of association that will ultimately serve, as
it were, to lift the author's voice out of Erhmann's babel of equivalent
meanings. What we might call the character of that pattern is crucial in
that it serves to structure the experience of our reading.

Postmodern aesthetics suggest that the question of where the author

figures in the postmodernist text is inappropriate and even irrelevant. The
text, it is argued, merely is: it represents itself. According to
structuralists and those adhering to their approach, the supreme text is the
text that cannot be recovered. Meaning is no longer the responsibility of
the author; meaning, if such a thing can be said to exist in texts at all,
has become the responsibility of the reader who, in a dynamic gestalt with
the text, makes his own meaning. The text of this new fiction does not
intend to posit a rigid and quantifiable meaning but serves to lead the
reader back to himself as co-creator, and finally sole creator, of his own
texts. Jean-Francoise Bory says that, "with new books, the reader will
begin to read his own text, his environmental text around him, into which he
is permanently plunged. And so the endless reading begins ••• from now
onwards, [it] is a matter of reading the world-text" (288). Alvin Greenberg

calls the new novels the "novels of disintegration" because they depend on
 52

fragments 11 distorted and out of focus because seen without perspective (or
without context) [my italics] 11 (14); these .. new books 11 offer the reader
pieces of a puzzle, a puzzle he has the opportunity to arrange into some
meaningful {if only temporarily meaningful) pattern.~
Authors of postmodern fiction are, like their critics {and not
surprisingly, some of the most important postmodern writers are, or have
been, literary critics themselves, e.g. Barthes, Barth, Federman, Sukenick,
Coover, Ricardou, Robbe-Grillet, Derrida, Sollers, Sontag, Gass,
Kostelanetz, Bory, Calvino), are notoriously chary of any talk of meaning
or, a related concept, intentionality, in their work. Almost without
exception they are inclined to deflect responsibility with regard to the
matter of significances away from themselves and toward the reader.
Robbe-Grillet, discussing Dans le labyrinthe, says that the work can indeed
be 11 recuperated 11 by the reader looking for meaningful patterns in the work,
but he adds that, 11
If I thought that it could not, I would not continue to
write. I would have attained my goal 11 (Culler 259). Corollarative to the
notion of reader responsibility for meaning is the notion that the idea of
11
author 11 is basically irrelevant. Indeed, so integral is this new view of
the author to postmodernism that Barthelme's much-quoted line from Snow
White-- 11 Try to be man about whom nothing is known 11 {SW, 56), an ironic
inversion of Henry James' advice to writers to know as much as possible,
could serve admirably as a motto for postmodernist writers.
From the point of view of the postmodern writer, fiction at best should
be viewed as a machine, Furthermore, the only ghost admitted into the
machine originates in the mind of the reader; the author behind the fiction
does not, for all intents and purposes, exist. Indeed, one of the immediate
corrollarative consequences of the increasing opacity of language was a new
 53

status accorded the author of fictions: just as literature could no longer

claim to represent the world, it could no longer claim to represent its
author.
In traditional realist fiction the reader was always allowed to
entertain the sense that behind the text stood a controlling intelligence
and personality, a genuine character whose presence could be felt and, to a
degree, known through the reading of what that author had written. Robert
Alter points out that nineteenth-century realism can be viewed as an attempt
on the part of its authors to control the world by capturing it and drawing
it inside the private sphere of their own imaginings (97ff}. A reader
reading Dickens or Balzac, for instance, can be excused, therefore, if he
cannot escape the feeling that he is in touch with the character of the
individual author on a very profound if abstract level. For the postmodern,
however, the question as to whether this contact is actual or open to
verification is beside the point: once readers are encouraged or even
allowed to assume that the text belongs to an author, the potentially
liberating act of reading has been critically undermined. Unlike
nineteenth-century realism, postmodern fiction is not designed to be an
exercise in authorial domination over a given environment. It is, rather,
the self of the reader and not the self of the author that postmodern
literature is designed to reflect and explore. As Maurois says in his
introduction to his study of Borges' fiction, "Any great and lasting book
must be ambiguous ••• it is a mirror that makes the reader's features known"
(x}. Thomas Docherty is exactly right, then, when he observes that, "what
is at stake in post-Modern writing is not the triumph of an established Self
over an Other environment, but rather the very position of such a Self at
all for reader and writer" (xv-xvi}.
 54

In the new fiction, the new realism, the writer, formerly assumed to be
a source of meaning, the architect of patterns of significance in
traditional fiction, worKs to efface himself as much as possible from the
text. The ideal booK, says Ronald SuKenicK, has no real author; it would,
in fact, have "no plot, no character, no chronological sequence, no
versimilitude, no imitation, no symbolism, no subject matter, no 'meaning' 11
(43). In the postmodern worK of fiction the responsibility of the writer
has become to keep ! priori meaning out of the text. Richard Pearce
suggests that the new fiction not only demands that the reader enter the
frame of the novel and assume a greater responsibility for meaning, it
questions that arrival at meaning should be an end at all for author, text,
or reader: in the new fiction the "narrator is no longer situated between
the subject and the reader, he no longer stands on a fixed vantage, and no
longer encloses the subject within the frame of his visual
imagination ••• what the reader sees is no longer a clear picture contained
within the narrator's purview, but an erratic image where the narrator,
subject, and the medium are brought into the same imaginative field of
interaction, an image that is shattered, confused, self-contradictory, but
with an independent and individual life of its own" (48). Jacques Ehrmann
imagines a similar field of interaction as the object of the new fiction:
the new fiction, Ehrmann says, leads to "an unworn, unbroKen mass, a wave of
proliferating signs; a sort of unassembled film which one might designate as
the discourse of the world; an ensemble, heap, accumulation of all the
discourses, of all the signs, of all the traces that no frontier~ whether
temporal or spatial, historical or cultural, cou'd hinder by its dotted
line ••• In this babel all meanings are equivalent .. (248-49).
 55

In his book, The Practice of Fiction in America (1980), Jerome

Klinkowitz supports the paradoxical claim made by many postmodern writers
and critics that postmodern fiction serves to represent in some way the mind
of the author even as it manages to render that representation irrelevant as
far as any consideration of the "self" of the author is concerned. On the
one hand, Klinkowitz can make this claim: "For a writer the whole point of
literary technique is fullest possible release of the energy of his
personality into his work, and when one comes into contact with that force,
the whole superstructure that one had assumed to be the point of literature
begins to burn away" (116). However, using Barthelme's Great Days to
illustrate, he also says the following: "The writer's presence is thus
completely effaced, and what is left is only the words themselves" (118).
In the postmodern text, therefore, the "energy" of a writer's "personality"
is released in such a way that the "writer's presence is completely
effaced." A few pages later, he develops what he means by "only the words
themselves" which remain in the postmodern text (he's using Clarence Major's
Emergency Exit to illustrate his point): "Hence language which all too
dangerously can refer outward here leads inward, toward the author's own
created structure. For all practical purposes, language has been
deconceptualized. All references are contained within the novel's own
world" (122).
From what we have already said about postmodernism--its approach to
form and language and the whole question of where the source of meaning
should lie--it's clear that Klinkowitz supports the avowed aims of
postmodernism with regard to the questions of referentiality and
intentionality. The import these and related claims of nonreferentially
have for anyone who accepts the existence of the unconscious, at least as it
 56

is understood by Freudian psychology, is immediate. One need only turn to

Simon Lesser's description of how fiction is read to see the challenge to
the psychoanalytic point of view posited by postmodern fiction's claim of
nonreferentiality: "In response to fiction we fall into a kind of
long-sustained trance, a semihypnotic state in which the conscious mind
focuses on the more manifest meaning of developments while the unconscious
penetrates to the implication to which the intellect chooses to be blind"
{109). It's easy to see that Lesser is dealing here in precisely those
terms and concepts that would seem to Klinkowitz and others to be most
incompatible with postmodernist aesthetics; terms like "trance" and
"semihypnotic" and a concept like hidden meaning have no relevance to
postmodernism as we have described it this point.
In the following discussion I intend to outline in a general but
essential fashion the applications psychoanaltyic literary criticism can
have in the analysis of postmodern literature. Perhaps it might be
appropriate to begin this discussion where psychoanalytic assumptions about
the nature of fiction would be most immediately felt in any criticism of the
work, the nature and the meaning of character in postmodern literature.

Notions of character in fiction have changed considerably over the last

twenty years. In an excellent recent analysis of character, Thomas
Docherty, in Reading (Absent) Character: Towards a Theory of
Characterization in Fiction {1983), outlines in a most useful and
comprehensive manner the nature of character as it obtains in postmodern
literature. The source of the shift in perspective with regard to character
in postmoderism centres on the whole question of the efficacy of what
Docherty calls "mimetic adequacy" {x). What Docherty means here by mimetic
 57

adequacy is the theory of character (which has held sway since the time of
Aristotle) which measures character on the basis of that character's
resemblance to persons in the real world: "A written character, then, is
mimetically adequate or 'lifelike' not when it totally replaces a real
person, but rather when it works, like a reflection, to imply the presence
of a real person somewhere else; in other words, it is mimetically adequate
to reality if it points out from itself to an implied reality, if it refers
us to the real world, in short. And finally, integral to such a theory is
the notion that fiction constitutes no part of reality, but somehow exists
alongside reality, analogous to it, but not part of it" (xi). According to
Doherty, the problem with this approach to character in fiction, an approach
exercised most recently by critics like W.J. Harvey and Patrick Swinden, is
that mimetic adequacy, like the notion of reality on which it depends,
amounts to little more than "a vague critical concept" if examined carefully
(x). The problem postmodern aesthetics has with a concept like mimetic
adequacy, as we have seen, is that makes fiction a mirror of something else,
implicitly denying the unique reality embodied in the text on the assumption
that there is a fixed and meaningful reality to be described in the first
place. What follows naturally from this mimetic approach is the notion that
characters are to be judged for worth on the basis of their formal unity, a
unity expressive of certain fixed ideas or meanings that lie somewhere
outside and anterior to the fiction.
Docherty makes the crucial point that the reader reading character in
fiction mimetically tends to equate character with meaning which has as its
source, the voice of the author:
Further, since the •meaningful' character is the focus of critical
attention in this mode of reading, we are guaranteed a fixed or
essential meaning of the fiction as whole, which we comprehend
through the characters and their relation to their fictive
 58

environments. But whose meaning or truth is this? According to

the mimetic approach to character, we make the leap from an
understanding of the meanings of singular characters to the truth
or message being expressed by their author; the characters are
simply the porte-parole of an author, and it is his or her meaning
which we readers seek. With this leap, the activity of the reader
is actually erased, in a sense; for once the novel is read and the
authorial message understood, the actual process of reading the
novel, of discovering (or actually constructing) that meaning can
be legitimately forgotten. The end result, authorial meaning, is
all. In other words, the reader•s activity of creating character
and meaning is being elided, and with that elision goes any notion
of real interaction. (xii-xiii)
What serves to replace this process of 11 elision.. in postmodern fiction is
the breaking apart or fragmentation of character. The fragments that occupy
the place formerly held by unified character are intended to represent what
Docherty calls the 11 instants of subjectivity.. of a 11 more mobile subject••
(xiv). The result of this refusal on the part of the postmodern writer to
work the fragments into a forced and artifical wholeness is that the reader
is offered the opportunity to be involved in a more dynamic gestalt with the
text: 11
Post-Modern characterization ••• grants the reader the possibility of
escape from a fixed selfhood into an existence as a series of subjectives,
always in first-person (and hence direct) contact with the environment ..
(xvi ).
We have already noted that postmodernism has in effect placed itself
between traditional mimetic forms and formlessness. The mimetically
determined character of traditional forms represents, as Docherty notes
above, the implied voice of the author--the more developed (unified) the
mimesis, the stronger our sense of the fixity of the author•s voice, a voice
we equate with meaning. The problem with the presentation of subjective
fragments, a procedure which aims to subvert the arbitrary and seeming unity
of mimetic character, is that the fragments cannot simply be thrown together
arbritrarily in the text. The postmodern text, then, is faced with the task
 59

of circumventing any suggestion that a god-like author is behind the text,

even as it works to forestall any suggestion that the fragments before us in
the text are undifferentiated clutter. Docherty suggests that the way to
reconcile these contrary claims lies in the concept of a kind of implied
author: "In any case, one way out of the dualism and hypocrisy which forms
the central shaping fiction of character in the novel seems to be found in
this location of the character in the •voice• of the text, or the transient
subjectivity of its speaker" (Docherty 35-36). The fragments of
subjectivity we see in the text can therefore be said to express a pattern,
a pattern which leads us back to an implied author. This implied author,
however, is quite unlike traditional mimetic prose•s implied author: this
implied author must be "transient" and mobile and therefore out of the reach
of any fixed patterns of meaning.
This view that character in the new fiction is, as Bersani describes
it, "a psychology of fragmentary and discontinuous desires," has its origins
of course in existentialism (1970, 7). Existentalism posits basically that
a person can create his self anew at every moment of his existence.
Therefore, as Natalie Saurrault for one has argued, it is fallacious to
speak of "the self" in any case since neither person nor character can be
fixed.
If we accept, even conditionally, this existential view of the self,
how can we justify applying psychoanalysis to the literature written under
the influence of this view? Psychoanalysis, after all, is presumed to
proceed on the basis of certain fixed assumptions about the nature of the
self. It suggests that every person shares certain anterior desires and
that these common desires, depending how they are satisfied, to a great
degree determine character. Psychology may allow for a significant margin
 60

of divergence among men based on their particular experiences in the world

but, in its acceptance of the unconscious, it is basically a view predicated
on the authority of what the existentialist would disparage as 11 essences. 11
Therefore, from the point of view of the postmodern, psychology is a
hostile science, a procrustean and reactionary instrument used, as one
critic puts it, to 11 0bjectify the subjective 11 (Hutcheon 1984, 98); the
postmodern is inclined to view psychoanalysis as the translation of the
all-important present subjective possibilities into meaningless anterior
objective fixities. Psychoanalytic criticism is accused of allegorizing the
text into something it is not, thus defeating the purpose of the text which
is to resist being localized as a series of clues leading back to a constant
11
and knowable voice: The objection--and the obvious one--to the use of
dreams as a model for art is that it reduces art to a psychological
framework for something else 11 (Hutcheon 1984, 109). According to Susan
Sontag, 11 Contemporary zeal for the project of interpretation in general is
often prompted ••• by an open aggressiveness, an overt contempt for
appearances 11 (l982, 98). Interpretation, she says, all too often
11
excavates,and as it excavates, destroys; it digs 'behind' a text, to find a
subtext which is the true one... Sontag pillories Freud in particular for
attempting to ..erect another meaning on top of the literal one 11 : For Freud,
according to Sontag, the 11 manifest content must be probed and pushed aside
to find the true meaning--the latent content--beneath 11 (1982, 98).
Those who castigate Freudian analysis of fiction have some basis to
their arguments. Even were we to ignore that fact that Freud himself never
insisted on the permanence or irrefutability of the structures he suggested,
the charge of reductionism is difficult to avoid. Psychoanalysis of fiction
is a translation of the text into other terms, but certainly any criticism
 61

of any work of art does essentially the same thing. Indeed, as Sontag
herself appreciates, the very act of reading requires that we affect some
translation and "repudiate" the text. The point Sontag is making
obliquely--and the point I wish to make in support of psychoanalytic
criticism--is that it is not interpretation per se that is suspect: the
real issue centres on the degree to which interpretation seeks to offer
itself as a substitute for the text. There is no reason that psychoanalysis
treated as a suggestive as opposed to a conclusive view of human character
cannot serve to enlarge our understanding of the text.
Psychoanalysis' former emphasis on the importance of the id encouraged
a certain "closure" when it came to assessing character. As Doherty points
out, finding Freudian instinctual (id) motivation for a character amounts to
limiting the freedom of the postmodern character to his past (19). However,
there is in the current emphasis in psychoanalysis on ego psychology as
opposed to id psychology an almost existential recognition that what a
person does has a significant effect on who he is and who he might become.
A case could therefore be made that this recognition that the ego has a
greater influence in the formation of the identity than was formerly thought
(based on the later writings of Freud) represents tacit support of the
postmodern notion that the text is descriptive of a developing and mobile
subject. As Leo Bersani says, there is no reason that psychoanalysis need
serve as "a reductive expose of the writer's 'secrets' or 'problems';
rather, it [can serve to expose] those patterns of desire which may be the
affective basis for the formal organizations of art in general [my
italics]"(1976, 30).
This study intends to examine the networks of associations in Donald
Barthelme's prose in an attempt to offer objective descriptions of the state
 62

of mind inside the fictions. These associative patterns will be presented

as evidence in support of the thesis that certain fixed unconscious patterns
are critical structural elements in his fiction. This approach is motivated
by the conviction that, ''Psychoanalysis can give us an articulate
formulations of the laws governing the relation between the said [the text]
and the unsaid [what is fixed and permanently sealed in the text and is more
or less available to every reader]" (Bersani 1976, 43}.
There is no point in disputing that there are certain limitations and
liabilities attached to the psychoanalytic approach, both on theoretical and
on practical grounds. Everyone is familiar with the cruder type of
psychoanalytic critic, for instance, whose studies are "confined to the
revelation of oedipal material and the hunt for sexual
symbolism"(Tennenhouse 7). Because the psychoanalytic critic has in
psychology access to a fairly developed allegorical system of causes, the
temptation to translate the text into a system of meanings is sometimes
difficult to resist. The best psychoanalytic criticism, however, takes the
text fully into account. It applies psychoanalytic principles as a means of
discovering a satisfactory account for the order of words, all the time
exercising a rigorous attenion to intrinsic textual concerns. It begins and
ends in the text.
Postmodern literature demands that we look inside rather than beyond
the text for meanings. It implicitly warns us away from seeking any
reflection of a personality in the work. It seems to do all that it can to
discourage readings that might localize that personality. And yet, if we
approach the text as a form of subjectivity, even the most rigorously
postmodern text would seem to invite interpretation as an act of
personality. As we have noted above, Robbe-Grillet's fiction probably
 63

represents one of the most informed and rigorous attempts on the part of any
writer, living or dead, to efface the self from the fiction. His method has
been from the beginning calculated to, as he says, "make something out of
nothing, something that would stand alone, without having to lean on
anything external to the work" (quoted by McCaffery 1982, 2). Ironically,
what Robbe-Grillet•s experiments with fictional form have demonstrated (and
his influence on the directions taken by succeeding novelists of less talent
and determination is incalculable) is that psychology is not irrelevant to
fiction, rather it is integral.
George Szanto, in Narrative Consciousness (1972), discussing the
literature that has descended from Flaubert through Kafka through to Beckett
and Robbe-Grillet says this about the place of psychology in the text:
The narrator•s unconscious has ascribed certain values to
environment, to images both of the external world and of
psychological pictures (memories and possibilities); the result is
not a description of the world, but a Rorschach test of the
perceiving individual. Each conscious narrator is a universe
insofar as he has been able to internalize his environment, to
systemize it for himself, and to see each new moment in it as part
of the system he has constructed for himself. Everything fits
somewhere; if it does not, some might call it absurd, so the mind
must struggle to find its proper place.(8)
Szanto later suggests that the chosiste of Robbe-Grillet (objects viewed in
a purely objective light) are really the result of "subjective choices of a
psychology enforcing its obsessions onto a conscious and recording
mind ••• colored by the needs of that mind" (130). Bruce Morrisette in his
study of Robbe-Grillet also points out that Robbe-Grillet•s rejection of
"all interiority, including psychological states and reactions" ends in
ambiguity (29). Morrisette agrees with Gaston Blanchard that a work of art
must be connected in some vital way to the unconscious of its creator: "a
work of art can hardly derive its unity from anything other than a
complex ••• if the complex is missing, the work, cut off from its roots, can
 64

no longer communicate with the unconscious .. (quoted by Morrisette, 54).

Frederick Crews in his defense of the psychoanalytic method
incidentally points to one of the inherent paradoxes of the postmodern
concern for avoiding what it takes to be the reductionism of psychoanalytic
interpretation:
An aesthetic theory which ignores the possibility that latent and
manifest content, unconscious and conscious purpose may be
imperfectly harmonized [in a text] is •••more reductive than a
theory in which art represents a complex 'overdetermined'
adjustment to various psychic interests. One must decide whether
to see art as a mental activity or as a direct apprehension of
truth and beauty. The former attitude is less exalted, but it
leaves the critic free to trace the actual shape of a work,
including its possible double meanings or confusions and its
shifts of intensity and mood.(l2)
As Crews puts it in another context, psychoanalytic readings of literature,
rather than serving to dwindle the work to an illustration of models of
theory, can serve to make the work .. richer and stranger than ever 11 (169).
The trick is to incorporate into the psychoanalytic approach these
principles: first, that the work signifies on several levels and no meaning
is the final or single meaning; second, the picture of the self as it is
articulated in psychoanalysis is itself a thing of flux, incomplete and
developing; finally, rigorous attention must be paid to all that is present
in the text, not merely to those features that fit easily into a given
psychoanalytic meaning.
In a recent symposium on deconstruction featuring the Yale
Deconstructuralists, Louis Mackey asserted that what the Marxist and the
Freudian approaches have in common is that, 11
i n a sense, [they] already know
what is going on in a text, they have a preconception of what's going on,
whereas at least the ideal deconstructionist reader is open to whatever
might pop up ••• The Freudian knows that there is some libidinal thing down
there that he's going to find when he scrapes the barnacles off the
 65

underside of the discourse" (Davis 1985, 80). Barbara Johnson counters this
familiar objection by saying that the ideal Freudian reader "would also want
to discover things they weren't expecting to find" (80). She goes on to make
the ironic and telling point that Freud may not have known that the method
he pioneered was "Freudian"; in other words, an inherent feature of the
Freudian model is that it is committed to remaining open to, as Mackey says,
"whatever might pop up" (80).

"We know that all literature is a form of disguise, a mask, a fable, a

,. ~

mystery: and behind the mask is the author" (Edel ix). Notwithstand/our
knowledge that an author does indeed lie somewhere behind the mask of his
prose, how much can we say with any confidence about the features of that
face behind the mask; the question which must inevitably be begged by this
study asks for a precise differentiation between what we read as the real
author behind the fiction and what we read of the implied voice inside these
fictions. Unfortunately, it is next to impossible to define with any
precision the exact nature of the relationship between the author and his
voices. This study assumes that an unconscious or latent content, which has
its origins in the mind of the author, has some influence in the shaping of
the fiction. It also assumes that we are directed to that content through
the behaviours and attitudes of the narrators and characters which appear in
the work--the voices the author adopts.
It is generally accepted that the voice we hear in the text cannot be
absolutely equated with the author's own voice and yet, by the same token,
so compelling is the temptation to draw at least tentative or qualified axis
of correspondence, that all critics tend to assume the equation to some
degree (even to speak of a book as being "so and so's book" is to make
 66

certain giddy assumptions). While we must accept that the text is not the
author•s own voice, just as certainly, we cannot keep from acknowledging
that the author•s voice is tangled up in the text in some vital way. The
postmodern approach to fiction has, of course, only served to complicate an
old dilemma: 11
By breaking the conventions that separate authors from
implied authors from narrators from implied readers from readers, the
[postmodern] novel reminds us (who are •we•?) that •authors• do not simply
•invent• novels. Authors work through linguistic, artistic, and cultural
conventions. They are themselves •invented• by readers who are •authors•
working through linguistic, artistic, and cultural conventions, and so on 11
(Waugh 134).
Postmodern fiction typically appears to have been written by what
Natalie Saurraute has called an anonmymous 11
I," a figure "who is at once all
and nothing, who as often as not is but the reflection of the author
himself, has usurped the role of hero, occupying the place of honor. The
other characters, being deprived of their own existence, are reduced to the
status of visions, dreams, nightmares, illusions, refections, quiddities or
dependents of this all-powerful 1
I 111 (56}. Unlike the author of realistic
fiction, the postmodern author makes no claim to have a reality independent
of, or more concrete than, his fiction; from the point of view of the
postmodern writer, everything is fiction, from the dictionary to the
children•s bedtime story. One curious manifestation of this expansion of
the definition of fiction is the delight certain authors take in introducing
themselves into their fictions. So common is this Hitchcock-like mechanism
that one could easily list it as a characteristic device (Calvina, Sukenick,
Federman, Barthelme, Coover, Barth, and especially Borges and Nabokov are
examples of authors who explicitly feature ••themselves,. in their own work
 67

which spring immediately to mind). The point made by these authors who
literally introduce themselves into their work is that the idea of an author
is absurd: authors can only have as much reality in their reader's mind
(and possibly in their own minds as well--see especially Borges• short story
"Borges and I") as any other fictional construct. This ironic insistence on
their real-life authorial identities only serves to underline their status
as fictions. As Christensen says, metafictionalists who place themselves
"as a structural element in the novel" ironically deepen the impression that
authors are something to believe in. However, she concludes, since "The
historical author will of course always exist outside and apart from the
work itself •••metafiction only operates with an additional factor: the
fictional author" (13).
But the explicit inclusion of themselves in their own fictions is only
a minor feature of a broadly based assault by postmodern writers on the
knowability of the voice behind the fiction. As we have noted above, the
attack on any ontogenetic fixity we readers seem to hear in the voice of the
author is an oblique attack of the fixity of meaning itself (Hutcheon 1984,
144). And yet, even in this style which posits itself as the utterance of a
mobile and discontinuous subject, the sense of an author remains: as with
the authors of the most traditional fiction, the postmodern author is
"uppermost in our minds; his presence haunts us; we watch him struggle with
his characters; in the long run, he is the only one who holds our
attention"(Boyd 33). We can observe this tendency to identify a constant
voice behind the fictions in the criticism of all postmodern writers. This
tendency isn't simply a demonstration of the persistance of old
interpretative bias, it is a consequence of postmodernism•s assumption of
what Saurraute calls "the all-powerful '! 11' (56).
 68

As far as the question of precise nature of the relationship between

the 11 personality 11 exhibited in a work of art to the actual, historical
personality behind the fiction is concerned, no final correspondences
between them can or even need be drawn. Boyd says of Borges and Nabokov
that their writing is an attempt to 11 save the self by making it visible in
the work, but both writers are also acutely aware of the promise of failure
11
inherent in such an effort 11 (151). The key phrase here is the promise of
failure 11 : the 11
Self 11 we seek in the author simply lies beyond our reach;
the author is not merely the sum of the words he has given us for he or she
exists both in and beyond the page. It is the world beyond that is closed
to us. Since 11 mere words provide the only access we have to that self and
we cannot go beyond what they say, .. we should direct our energies at
studying what exactly the words say (Boyd 35).
Fiction may well be a reflection of the author's self in all of its
multiplicities and depth, but it remains a reflection of a self that must be
viewed as open to change. More important, it is a self which, as Freud
himself understood, can never be known in any final sense. Notwithstanding
this welter of hesitation as to the worth of speaking of 11 authors 11 in
anything but the most qualified sense, there does remain an 11 author 11 we can
locate in the text, a consistent and unified subject, a 11 profound and secret
thematic self 11 located somewhere behind the prose (Bersani 1970, 16).
CHAPTER THREE: 11 BALLOON MAN DOESN 1 T LIE, EXACTLY ...
 70

I want to initiate analysis of Barthelme's view of art and the

relationship of thE~ artist to his art by comparing two stories, 11
The
Balloon 11 (UPUA) and 11
I Bought A Little City''(A) C'The Balloon.. was first
-- -
published in 1966, and 11
Bought was published in 1974).
11 11
The Balloon.. is
generally acknowledged as one of Barthelme's most important stories, a story
that is generally taken to define, in uniquely organic terms, Barthelme•s
aesthetic of fiction. As the following analysis hopes to show, however,
criticism of the story to this point has utterly failed to appreciate the
full dimensions of Barthelme•s aesthetic as it is embodied in this story.
To help illustrate issues raised in our discussion of 11 The Balloon, ..
comparison wi 11 be made to a 1ater story, 11
Bought. 11 In terms of style,
tone, and subject matter ••sought 11 would appear to have very little in common
with 11
The Balloon ... However, as I intend to show, despite dissimilarities
of manifest elements, both stories are descriptive of exactly the same state
of mind. More to the point, both stories say essentially the same thing
about the artist's relationship to his art and to his world.

11
The Balloon 11 begins with the narrator's description of how he
introduced a large balloon over Manhattan one night while the people were
sleeping. He has his engineers expand the balloon until it covers an area
 71

approximately forty-five blocks by twelve blocks over the centre of the

city. The narrator takes care to note the variety of reactions to his
balloon but observes that the initial reaction of the city to the balloon
could be summarized as 11 a calm, •mature• one 11 (23). Part of the reaction
the narrator judges as mature is agreement by the people that the meaning of
the balloon can never be known in any final or absolute sense. There is
some argumentation at the start about the meaning of the balloon but
argument soon gives way to activities that suggest that the balloon has been
accepted, activitiE!S such as decorating the balloon with paper lanterns or
writing messages on its surface. The children of the city respond to the
balloon as they would to a new toy. They climb all over its surface and use
it for a variety o,f bouncing games. The children, because they have grown
accustomed to 11 the city•s flat, hard skin, .. find the pneumatic surface of
the balloon 11 extremely exciting.. {24).
Not all the r1eactions to the balloon are positive, however. Some
people have difficulty trusting the balloon and some are even hostile. The
source of the hostility toward the balloon on the part of some stems from an
inability to detenmine either the source of the balloon•s helium supply or,
what is perhaps more important, the purpose of the balloon. The narrator is
aware that he could have circumvented this difficulty by painting some sort
of pseudo-scientific information on the side of the balloon but he resists
the impulse. The frustration of the authorities eventually gives way to a
universal acceptance of the balloon on the part of ordinary citizens who
soon are feeling Cit certain warmth towards it.
The narrator invests the phenomenon he has manufactured with particular
phenomenological significances: he observes, for instance, that this single
 72

balloon functions 1in the way a symbol might in that it "must stand for a
lifetime of thinking about balloons" (25). The narrator also notes that the
attitude of each citizen toward the balloon is a complex thing; each
attitude is a reflt:!ction of, in the words of the narrator, "a complex of
attitudes" (25). The narrator then develops, by way of illustrating both
how complex and ho'w divergent reactions to the balloon can be, three
reactions to the balloon. The description of these attitudes serves as the
central part of the story, and concludes with the observation that critical
opinion on the balloon remains divided (several excerpted "blurbs" of
divided critical opinions are included in the text).
The population of New York event ally completely accepts the presence of
the balloon over their city. So complete is this acceptance that the people
begin to locate themselves in relation to the balloon, much as they would
with a building or a park. The narrator is careful to point out that the
intersections that occur between the anomalous balloon and the conventional
features of the skyline must remain crucial: "But it is wrong to speak of
•marginal intersections,• each intersection was crucial,none could be
ignored (as if, Wcllking there, you might not find someone capable of turning
your attention, in a flash, from old exercises to new exercises, risks and
escalaltions). Each intersection was crucial, meeting of balloon and
building, meeting of balloon and man, meeting of balloon and balloon" (28).
It is this capacity of the balloon to offer "mislocation of the self" out of
rigid patterns th,at ultimately is what is most admired about the balloon.
The balloon, principally because of its capacity to change its shape and to
provide special "·intersections" between itself and reality, offers a vital
opportunity to a city and a population suffering stress in the grip of
 73

patterning, proscr·i pti ve "machinery."

The story concludes rather abruptly and ambiguously with a direct
address on the part of the narrator to the lover who has been absent from
his life. It is revealed that the balloon was, in fact, some sort of
surrogate object: "I met you under the balloon, on the occasion of your
return from Norway; you asked if it was mine; I said it was. The balloon, I
said, is a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure, having to do with the
unease I felt at your absence, and with sexual deprivation •••• " It will now
be put away in storage, he tells her, to await "some other time of
unhappiness, sometime, perhaps, when we are angry with one another" (29).
"The Balloon" is desig.ned to functions on several levels at once. On
the most immediate level the story creates a simple, evocative image in the
balloon that is accessible, like the balloon in the fiction itself, on a
relatively unsophisticated level. But the story, as it were, surrounding
the simple object is very complex, open to interpretation on any of several
levels.
Critics are in general agreement that "The Balloon" is one of
Barthelme's best stories. As evidence of the importance of this particular
story, all of the major studies of Barthelme's work single out "The Balloon"
for developed ana~ysis. This attention is appropriate in that the story is
one of Barthelme's most representative stories in a double sense: first, it
exemplifies the bf~st that Barthelme's style is capable of achieving; second,
its principal subject is patently the process of making and interpreting the
fictional object.
Virtually evr~ry critic who has commented on "The Balloon" has pointed
out that the story represents a statement by Barthelme on what a modern work
 74

of art should be. Stengel in his study of Barthelme says that the story
represents Barthelme's "most signficant single definition of art in a
dehumanizing society" and that the story is nothing short of "a paradigm of
Barthelme's ideal modern art object" (205). Richard Schickel also points
out that the balloon is a metaphor for the modern art object and the
problems people have in coming to terms with such objects (15). According
to Couturier and Durand, who feel that "The Balloon" is "clearly one of
[Barthelme's] best fictions" (69), "what is being discussed in this fiction
is not the unlikely UFO [the balloon] but the fiction itself" (71}. Larry
McCaffery says as much calling "The Balloon" an "allegory about the status
of an art object's relationship to both its creator an its audience" (1982,
105).

Probably the most cogent analysis of "The Balloon" to this point is

that offered by R.E. Johnson. Johnson sees "The Balloon" as fiction
designed to create meaning even in the act of destroying it: the story,
according to her, is "Both open and closed ••• one of those fictions Frank
Kermode describes as a both a projection and a 'disconfirmation' of the
possibility and impossibility of closure" (75-76). She agrees that the
balloon is meant to serve as an symbol for the fictional object and suggests
that the significance developed through that symbol is that "Content exists
only as a vehicle for the manifestation of form and thus [the balloon
is] •••effectively empty" (74). The meaning of the story, therefore, is that
there can be no meanings, a conclusion which is of course consistent with
the mature perspective celebrated in the story itself. Referring to the
explanation offere~d at the conclusion of the story in which the narrator
 75

reveals what meaning the balloon has for him, Johnson contends that the
balloon, if it does indeed "develop a central coherence, [this revelation]
mandates, and thus destroys its promised vitality" (80). The point is well
taken for what are we to make of a story that, on the one hand argues for
the indeterminacy of the object, but on the other attempts to mandate a
coherent interpretation of the same object? Johnson sees the true source of
vita1i ty in the story, not in the putative open significance of the ba11 oon,
but in the tension between various narrative codes (myth, fairy tale,
phenomenological inquiry}. These codes work against one another and thereby
serve to confound "any monistic reading, any attempt to establish the logos
of the text" (80}.
The narrator's rather glib and "spontaneous autobiographical
disclosure" which is offered at the end of the story, therefore, in light of
the argument running through the story up to the moment of that disclosure,
must be seen as gratuituous. Larry McCaffery, commenting on the narrator's
eleventh hour disclosure, says, "the narrator apparently does not intend for
this private meaning to be apprehended by his audience" (1982, 105). In
McCaffery's reading of the story, the balloon may well have a "private
meaning" but that meaning remains only the narrator's meaning, limited
because, like the meaning everyone else in the story attaches to the
balloon, it has b1~en determined by the needs and proclivities of an
exclusive subject"ivity. The narrator's meaning is no more meaningful, in
other words, than any of the meanings which arise along the various
intersections between balloon and subjectivities which the story describes.
Like McCaffery, Johnson views the narrator's disclosure as limited in
significance, a disclosure which in context merely serves to confirm "that
 76

only outside of thE! story can the question of [the] origins [of the balloon]
be explored 11 {74). What lies outside the story, of course, is the meaning
that we as individual readers are apt to discover as a function of the
various attitudes we bring to the experience: 11
As a single balloon must
stand for a lifeti1ne of thinking about balloons, so each citizen expressed,
in the attitude he chose, a complex of attitudes., (25}.

The balloon as Barthelme conceives it as symbol is meant to function in

the text in a manner significantly different from a traditional literary
symbol, say, Hawthorne's scarlet letter or the whiteness of Melville's
whale. The symbol of the scarlet letter, for instance, was designed by
Hawthorne to represent potentially several things at once {the device of
multiple choice, or the controlled division of sympathies). The scarlet
letter may be a complex symbol, but the range of its significances is
nevertheless proscribed by the text. The balloon, on the other hand,
appears to make no attempt to control the division of sympathies. It is
designed, not merely to entertain several possible significances at once, it
appears to be designed to entertain every possible interpretative overture
made to it. Where~ the potential significance of Hawthorne's scarlet letter
is manifold, the potential significance of Barthelme•s balloon appears to be
unlimited. As a symbol that can mean anything, the balloon is quite unlike
a symbol in any tr·aditi anal understanding of the term.
According to Iser, texts like 11 The Balloon,., and symbols like the
balloon, are mode,~n in that they characteristically eschew meaning as an
absolute. The modernist text works to maximize the potential margin of what
Iser calls the "configurative meaning" which arises out of an intersection
 17

between the text and the individual mind of the reader:

The text provokes certain expectations which in turn we project
onto the text in such a way that we reduce the polysemantic
possibilities to a single interpretation in keeping with the
expectations aroused, thus extracting an individual, configurative
meaning. The polysemantic nature of the text and the
illusion-making of the reader are opposed factors. If the
illusion were complete, the polysemantic nature would vanish; if
the polysemantic nature were all-powerful,the illusion would be
totally destroyed. Both extremes are conceivable, but in the
individual literary text we always find some form of balance
between the two conflicting tendencies. The formation of
illusions, therefore, can never be total, but it is this very
incompleteness that in fact gives it its productive value. (1980,
59-60)
Iser's "configurative meaning," of course, would obtain in any work of
fiction. What the postmodernist text seeks to do, however, is to delimit
the polysemantic possibilities of the text to the most radical degree
possible.
What Bathelme is telling us with his balloon is that the relevance of a
certain kind of literary symbol has passed; no matter how rich the potential
meaning of these t1raditional symbols, these traditional symbols simply
remain too narrow and rigidly defined to be of much use to Barthelme's
postmodern citizens locked into a corrupt meaningfulness, and looking for a
way out of their unhappiness. By way of alternative, Barthelme's narrator
offers New York in the form of the balloon (as Barthelme offers us in the
form of ''The Balloon") an object of tremendous surface but negl i bl e content;
it is ours to adapt to our private needs. Barthelme's balloon is meant to
be a signifier that has no final meaning of its own--our experience as
viewer determines content. Because of this lack of significance, the story
tells us, the balloon serves to refer us back to ourselves. The balloon, if
we accept this interpretation, is the ideal postmodern object, for
postmodern fiction is designed to prevent the reader from making any simple
 78

translation from the language and events of the fiction into the objects and
events of his presE!nt reality.

Barthelme is fond of comparing fiction (unfavourably) with the more

plastic arts, painting and scupture (see especially his interview for The
Paris Review). In many ways Barthelme's balloon resembles a work of the
postmodern scul ptu1~e he is so fond of in form, design, and intention. In
several essays of art criticism written in mid-sixties (the period in which
"The Balloon" was written), the New York art critic Lucy Lippard describes
the postmodern scu·l pture that is pushing forward what she calls "the
dematerialization !Of art" (the title of one of her essays). Her
descriptions of those sculptures might easily serve as description of the
balloon Barthelme has put on display over New York. Here are two examples
of that criticism, the first describing the work of Don Judd and Robert
Morris, and the second describing the work of Sol LeWitt:
They are monolithic, in that they are single shapes, though that
is neither here nor there; they make no attempt to change or
activate the space they fill, neither do they refer to anything
outside of themselves. Yet by filling space they do change it,
even if the change is minimal and inactive.(143)
Because their entire structure ••• is laid open to view, they are
among the most cohesive works made in the genre. Nothing about
them is secret. No angle is better than any other angle from
which to view them. There is no core, no 'relationships' within
or without the pieces ••• and they come as close to not changing the
space they fill as anything can ••• despite their rigorous rejection
of all chance and inflection, their apparently ultimate order,
they are subject to the most drastic change and modulation
[because the perspective of the viewer is bound to change].(145)
Barthelme's balloon is the literary equivalent of these conceptual
sculptures, objects divested of significance--"nothing about them is
secret"--but which nevertheless aim to signify in a unique way.
 79

Of course, Ba•·thelme's literary 11 Sculpture 11 has antecedents in modern

literature as well .. This is Robbe-Grillet in 11 A Future for the Novel, .. for
instance, on the question of 11 Signification 11 in literature:
Instead of this universe of 'signification• (psychological,
social, functional), we must try, then, to construct a world both
more sol·id and more immediate. Let it be first of all by their
presence that objects and gestures establish themselves, and let
this pre!sence continue to prevai 1 over whatever explanatory theory
that may try to enclose them in a system of reference, whether
emotiona'l,sociological, Freudian, or metaphysical. (276)
What these 11 more solid and more immedi ate 11 objects of postmoderni sm are
designed to do in this insistence on their 11 presence" is to subvert certain
traditional assumptions about the meaningfulness of art objects. These
postmodern art obj1ects are a function of a new understanding of reality and
consciousness which suggests that absolute concepts (like Beauty and Truth
and even Meaning itself) can have no real value to the individual. By the
new 11 consciousness 11 I mean the knowledge that, as Leo Bersani says, 11
We must
live in a continually changing series of discrete presents, which is to say
that we must always be absent to ourselves, always moving to a future
presence.. which will in turn 11 evade us 11 {1976, 208-209). Symbols with fixed
meanings are irrelevant and even inimical because they serve to localize
consciousness. The symbol with the fixed meaning, to put it in terms 11
The
Balloon,. suggests, is merely another predetermined pathway in 11 the grid of
precise, rectangular pathways under our feet 11 (28). Follow those paths, the
story warns you, and you are kept enthralled to society•s "complex
machinery .. and in a state of 11 bewildered inadequacy .. (29). The
indeterminacy of the postmodern literary experience is intended to offer its
audience the happy possi bi 1i ty of what "The Ball oon 11 calls
"randomness •••mislocaton of the self 11 (28). This mislocation allows us 11 to
 80

abandon our position in the present ••• and to move beyond that localized self
into a series of discontinuous subjectivities. The Romantic liberty of
trancendence of the localized self is thus established ••• "(Bersani 1975,
208-09). Robbe-Grill et •s fiction aims for this same sense of "mi sl ocati on"
in the reader; according to Bruce Morrisette, Robbe-Grillet's art seeks to
place together "grCituituous objects and the play of 'objective' chance (as
the surrealists insisted)" which then serve to illuminate, as Robbe-Grillet
himself says, "the enigmatic connections which bind everyday life to art"
(25).
The balloon in "The Balloon"--and more to the point, "The Balloon"
itself--is obviously designed to create and sustain the continued life of
those "enigmatic connections": "Each intersection was crucial, meeting of
balloon and building, meeting of balloon and man, meeting of balloon and
balloon" (28). There can be little question that the story ostensibly
honours the aesthetic credo so many writers and critics have articulated for
the new fiction. 111
The Balloon" is meant to be, as George Szanto says of the
new novel, "not a jproduct but a medium, not the writing about something but
the process of something being transmuted; the process becomes the created
object" (9).

Interpretation of the story thus comes down to whether the balloon is

as "empty" of what Johnson terms "monistic" significance as it seems to
proclaim itself to be. Is it possible to interpret the balloon beyond
saying simply (if such things can be said simply) that the significance of
the balloon is that it has no significance? Does the balloon accurately
 81

11
reflect the essence! of 1iterature as it is defined by postmoderni sm?: The
essence of literature is not representation, not a communicative
transparency, but an opacity, a resistance to recuperation which exercises
sensibility and intelligence .. (Culler 258).
Warren and Well E!k argue that in the literary object we, as readers,
11
grasp some 'structure of determination• in the object which makes the act
of cognition not an arbitrary invention or subjective distinction but the
recognition of some norms imposed on by reality" (152). The question is, of
course, are the str·uctures of determination we may or may not infer in the
balloon meaningful in any objective sense, or is the insistence of these
structures as 11
i11111ature'' as Barthel me suggests in this story and in his
fiction in general? Ihab Hassan frames the essential question raised by the
contrary positions taken by those who argue essentially either for or
against structures of determinacy: "Is all criticism, then, a rationalized
response to a 'voice' that the critic pretends to hear and which he never
hears twice the same" (1975 xv)?

"The Balloon" ~s a highly developed and (if the advice of some critics
can be credited) convincing argument for postmodern undecidability. I would
agree that the sto1·y can indeed be read as polemic, a polemic illustrating
certain crucial features of the postmodern aesthetic. It • s fairly obvious
that the story argues for the irrelevance of authority, the autonomy of the
object or text, thE~ creative responsibilities of the reader/observer, the
capacity of art to deliver the reader/observer to himself and, most
important as far as this study is concerned, the fundamental absence of
content or meaning contained by the object itself. What I hope to
 82

demonstrate is that the story contains within it, and utterly fails to
resolve, the basic paradox confronting postmodern fiction; that is, it
argues against the strictures of meaning, for non-referentiality and the
freedom of the reader to re-make the object according to his disposition,
even as it works to attach a very specific and personal meaning and
significance to the object intended to argue against the need for
extra-personal meaningfulness. I intend to challenge the view that "The
Balloon.. is a convi,ncing example of art that allows for the maximum
possibility of what Iser calls 11 configurative meaning. 11 I am prepared to
argue that the stor·y, in fact, posits and develops a very precise meaning
for the balloon as symbol, a meaning which limits in a radical fashion the
development of those 11 Crucial 11 enigmatic connections between it and those
with whom it comes into contact.

It is important to distinguish between what the narrator says the

balloon should mean and what he actually says about the balloon. It's easy
to miss the fact that there are, in fact, two balloons in this story: the
balloon experienced by the people of New York and the balloon experienced by
the people of New York as that experience as viewed by the narrator. As
readers, our only view of the balloon is by way of the narrator who
absolutely controls that view: no one else in the story speaks: everthing
said, done, or thought in the story is funnelled athough a single conduit,
the narrator. The story, in other words, contains a fundamental paradox:
it everywhere proclaims the value of unlimited and unrestricted
11
intersections 11 between balloon and not-balloon, even as it limits the
 83

intersections available to the reader to one intersection: unlike the

citizens in the story, the only balloon we as readers ever view is "The
Balloon," a very particular view of the balloon determined by the narrative
voice. Of course, the number of intersections this balloon allows as a
fictional object is, in a very real sense, unlimited: "The Balloon" has the
potential to mean something different to every reader, and something
different with every reading. Surely the issue, however, is not the mere
possibility of configuration, but rather the scope or margin of
configurative meaning an art object allows. "The Balloon" advertises itself
as a kind of prototypical postmodern symbol working to enlarge that margin
of configuration to the widest extent possible. It seems to make itself
avail ab1e to any interpretation. And yet--and it is very easy to miss--the
story 1imi ts the mE~ ani ng of the balloon we as readers experience in a
profound way.
Proof of the balloon's limited meaning does not lie with the narrator's
glib autobiographical disclosure. This explanation of the balloon's
"meaning" is simply too calculated. The story has taken considerable pains
to prepare us for such attempts at meaningfulness: in the carefully
developed context ,of other "meanings" determined by the wishes and needs of
viewers of the balloon, this disclosure is meant to be seen as just one more
meaning attached to an object that can happily accomodate any meaning. But
is the balloon we see in the story really capable of welcoming polysemantic
possibilities?
The balloon we are shown is not, in fact, the same "frivolous and
gentle" (22) balloon that evidently hangs over New York. Rather, the
balloon we see is actually a very highly determined and very peculiar
 84

symbol--a symbol capable of entertaining only a very limited margin of

configurative meaning: the symbol of the balloon in "The Balloon," and "The
Balloon" itself, has meaning. Ironically, the proof of this meaning is
concealed in the canplex of attitudes described in the story.
The physical qualities of the balloon as they are described to us by
the narrator (who designed the balloon) are an important clue as to the
meaning of the balloon. It is described several times in the story: it has
"muted heavy grays and browns for the most part, contrasting with walnut and
soft yellows. A deliberate lack of finish ••• gave the surface a rough,
forgotten quality ••• " (23); it has a "warm gray underside" (23); "And the
underside of the batlloon was a pleasure to look up into, we had seen to
that, muted grays amd browns for the most part, contrasting with walnut and
soft, forgotten yellows" (26); the balloon has "warm, soft, lazy passages''
(28). The repetition of certain features--the muted grays and browns and
yellows, and especially the forgotten qualitX of this balloon--gives this
balloon a very distinctive character as an object. It is not anything like
a tabula rasa, or a blank canvas. It is a particularly sensual and
psychologically distinctive object.
In the middle of the story the narrator offers developed examples of a
variety of attitud1es engendered by the balloon. It is necessary that we
quote these reactions at length:
As a single balloon must stand for a lifetime of thinking about
balloons, so each citizen expressed, in the attitude he chose, a
complex of attitudes. One man might consider that the balloon had
to do with the notion sullied, as in the sentence The big ballon
sullied the otherwise clear and radiant Manhattan sky. That is,
the balloon was, in this man's view, an imposture, something
inferior· to the sky that had formerly been there, something
interposed between the people and their 'sky'. But in fact it was
January,, the sky was dark and ugly; it was not a sky you could
look up into, lying on your back in the street, with pleasure,
 85

unless pleasure, for you, proceeded from having been threatened,

from having been misused. And the underside of the balloon was a
pleasure to look up into, we had seen to that, muted grays and
browns for the most part, contrasted with walnut and soft,
forgotten yellows. And so, while this man was thinking sullied,
still there was an admixture of pleasurable cognititon in his
thinking, struggling with the original perception.
Another man, on the other hand, might view the balloon as if it
were part of a system of unanticipated rewards, as when one's
employer walks in and says, 'Here Henry, take this package of
money I have wrapped for you, because we have been doing so well
in the business here, and I admire the way you bruise the tulips,
without which bruising your department would not be a success, or
at least not the success that it is.' For this man the balloon
might be a brilliantly heroic muscle and pluck experience, even if
an experience poorly understood.
Anothe!r man might say, 'Without the example of---, it is
doubtful that---would exist today in its present form,' and find
many to agree with him. Ideas of 'bloat' and 'float' were
introduced as well as concepts of dream and responsibility.
Others engaged in remarkably detailed fantasies having to do with
a wish either to lose themselves in the balloon, or to engorge it.
The private character of these wishes, of their origins, deeply
buried and unknown, was such that they were not spoken of; yet
there is evidence that they were widespread. It was also argued
that what was important was what you felt when you stood under the
balloon; some people claimed that they felt sheltered, warmed, as
never before, while enemies of the balloon felt, or reported
feeling, constrained, a 'heavy' feeling. (25-27)
There is much in this passage that warrants discussion. Probably the most
important thing to note is that this survey, while it purports to examine
several complex attitudes, is limited to really only two attitudes: the
"heavy" feeling the first man experiences and the "muscle and pluck"
pleasure fantasy of the second man. Let us assume for the moment that the
narrator who is translating these complexes for us is really expressing his
own complex of attitudes through these "fictional 11 attitudes. The picture
of a complex that emerges, while it is ambiguous, is remarkably consistent.
On the one hand, there is in the attitude the impulse to challenge the
authority of the balloon, a feeling associated with being sullied, a
function of having been threatened or misused in some way. Out of this
 86

feeling, nonetheless, is "an admixture of pleasure ••• struggling with the

original perception." Next we are introduced to another "poorly understood"
experience (one informed by the unconscious?), this time one of pure but
particular pleasure. The fantasy in which the man receives sudden,
unexpected, and unqualified approval from authority is as extreme in its own
way as the first man's determination to wallow in the darkness and ugliness
of the January sky.
The final paragraph invites nothing short of a Freudian reading of the
balloon. The notions of "bloat" and "float" it introduces, suggesting the
overindulged, oceanic bliss one might have known "originally," further urges
the reader toward a view of the soft, forgotten balloon with its offer
warmth and shelter·, as a symbol of the breast.l The radical contrast in the
last paragraph between the feelings of being sheltered and warmed, and the
"heavy" feeling, serves as a further confirmation that the scope of
attitudes this balloon is capable of entertaining is really rather narrow.
In brief, then, the attitude one feels under this object as it is viewed by
our narrator is one which swings between extremes of abjection and elation,
feelings consistent with a personality with very poor ego strength and given
to regressive fantasies of oceanic attachment to the breast. As it happens,
characters who alternate between precisely these same extreme and
unrealistic feelings are common in Barthelme.
The manifest content of this story is about the potential mislocations
afforded the self by art. It is an argument for postmodern lack of
intentionality in the art object. The latent content, on the other hand,
offers a psychological profile of the narrator behind the balloon, a profile
of desire with muc:h blurring at the edges, but distinctive in many crucial
 87

respects. The 1atE!nt content shows how inured that identity is in

"original" and "forgotten" patterns of rigid thought which all but preclude
anything but tempo1·ary mi sl ocati on.

The balloon that appears in Barthelme•s "universe of signification,"

1ike the postmodern art object, is intended to prev ai 1 over systems of
explanation addressed to it, thus allowing it continued life as what
Robbe-Grillet terms a more "solid" and more "immediate" presence (the story
says as much in proclaiming the concrete particularity of the object). What
critics have failed to appreciate about this story is the fact that, even as
it serves to define the proper function of the art object, the story is
saying something very revealing, and even disturbing, about Barthelme•s view
of the artist. To begin to appreciate this "meaning" of the story we must
first appreciate that the balloon the artist-narrator imposes on the
population of New York has a very special and localized private significance
to him. Though the balloon is shared and open to interpretation, it
remains, from its inception to its removal, his balloon in every sense of
the word. Without question, the act of installing the balloon over the city
has much in common with the display of an art object, but the fantastic
proportions of the! display and the pure arrogance of the act itself also
renders the entire! balloon episode as a display of another kind.
This balloon is the narrator•s literal and figurative toy. This very
personal object is so captivating that it quite literally conquers and
completely dominates the imagination of one of the world 1 s great cities.
Everyone who relates to the uninvited balloon, in effect, is relating to the
narrator: the power of the balloon is the narrator•s power: the power to
 88

frustrate authority, to entertain, in short, to metaphorically 11 absorb.. and

11
engorge 11 an entir1e population. Viewed from this perspective, the entire
episode of the balloon is nothing short of a grandiose fantasy on the part
of a narrator who, gathering from his 11 autobiographical disclosure, .. is
badly in need of some attention:
I met you under the balloon, on the occasion of your return from
Norway; you asked if it was mine; I said it was. The balloon, I
said, is a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure, having to do
with the unease I felt at your absence, and with sexual
deprivation, but now that your visit to Bergen has been
terminated, it is no longer necessary or appropriate. Removal of
the balloon was easy; trailer trucks carried away the depleted
fabric, which is now stored in West Virginia, awaiting some other
time of unhappiness, sometime, perhaps, when we are angry with one
another. (29)
The fact that the balloon is taken back and put away at the end of the
story suggests that the artist-narrator has control over it, but, we are
told, this same balloon will appear again the moment it is needed. This
balloon serves, in other words, as a fixed integer of meaning in a repeating
pattern of behaviour. What makes this view of the balloon especially
strange is the fact that its principal function for the population in
general is to allow them the opportunity to change out of old and fixed
patterns of behaviour. The balloon is thus expressive of a certain
ambivalence on Barthelme's part as to the nature of art. On the one hand,
art offers the ch<lmce of a new, enlarging experience (mi sl ocati on from rigid
patterns of thought and behaviour), and on the other, art is nothing more
than a kind of mirror, reflecting back and reinforcing what is already known
and felt.
From the point of view of the artist-narrator in this story, the art
object represents an opportunity for the unrestricted expression of a very
 89

powerful, even omn'i potent ego. In a re 1 ated story, 11

The Temptation of St.
Anthony 11 (S), the 11 Saint" plays a role similar to that of the artist-narrator
in 11 The Balloon 11 : an entire city is held under the sway of his personality.
The conflation of ~rt and will that is latent in 11 The Balloon.. is made
manifest in this story in that the saint's 11 Will 11 serves as a major landmark
in the city (153). The saint is not an artist per se but he shares two
qualities with the artist: he is a dealer in special mysteries, and, like
the artist in 11 The Balloon, .. he claims a specialized sensibility that
dominates an entir1e city. It is worth noting that the people hate this
saint because 11 he 'thought he was better than everybody else' 11 (151). My
point here is that the artist-narrator in 11 The Balloon, .. for all of his
protestations of altruism and his insistence on the palliative nature of his
object, is really using the balloon in a 11 hateful 11 way, to satisfy very
personal and very selfish needs.
Though the balloon is advertised by the artist-narrator as offering
everyone the opportunity to mislocate and find new selves in the experience
of the balloon, no one seizes this initiative. Indeed, the story makes the
point that, like the narrator, people tend to see and experience in the
balloon only what their desires and wishes determine they should see and
experience. The citizens of New York, however, are acting and re-acting in
a manner thoroughly consistent with the design and structure of the balloon.
The balloon is not a ~ object, and neither is it an object born of a
mislocation on the part of its creator. It is, in fact, a very old and
fixed object, thoroughly imbued with a meaning in the mind of its creator.
The object has been manufactured to serve as a substitute for a lost object,
a lover in this case. Assuming that the balloon as art object has
 90

mislocating and healing properties for the population in general (although

this is certainly open to question), from the point of view of the
artist-narrator, the act of making art in the form of this balloon hasn•t
mislocated him in the least. Indeed, it is doubtful whether anyone is
mislocated to any significant degree by this balloon. For the population of
New York the balloon is only a distraction, a game, and finally only an
extension of themselves. The artist behind it all isn•t served in any
positive sense by the balloon either; that is, the balloon doesn•t serve to
lift him out of the fixed grid of psychological pathways he follows: he
remains fixed psychologically in one place, an omnipotent omnipresence
manipulating the event while hidden somewhere behind the scenes. At the end
of the story, this balloon isn•t destroyed or abandoned in favour of another
object. Rather, it is simply put away until this same balloon is needed
again, a meaningful and many-layered symbol which obtains in a rigid and
morbid pattern.
11
The Balloon.. suggests on almost every level that art has a great deal
in common with fantasy. From the point of view of the narrator, the fantasy
of the balloon substitutes the clever and decisive assumption of control
over the attention of an entire population for the evident lack of control
exercised over an inconstant and inattentive lover. The act of making art
is thus depicted als an ambivalent act: according to this story, the artist
is a figure who enjoys an extraordinary degree of authority and control.
Literally whole populations are held under the sway of his imagination. And
yet, he remain an essentially powerless, duplicituous, and even pathetic
figure, locked into confining patterns from which his art affords him no
escape.
 91

Like "The Balloon," "I Bought a Little City.. is, at least in terms of
plot, a simple and straightforward story. In 11 Bought 11 the narrator buys a
city and, like some despotic ruler with absolute power, goes about imposing
his will upon it. After completely redesigning pattern of the streets and
shooting several thousand of the city's dogs, the narrator falls in love
with the wife of Sam Hong, a man who sells Oriental novelties. She rejects
him and the disappointed narrator sells the city at a loss-- 11 I took a bath
on that dea1 11 (58)--and retires to a sterile and inconspicuous life in
Galena Park, Texas. The lesson he learns is, 11
don't play God 11 (58), but he
ends the story sti 11 tormented by 1ove: 11
Sti 11 covet Sam Hong •s wife, and
probably always will 11 (58).
As is usually the case with Barthelme, the surface simplicity of a
story belies considerable complexity. In 11 Bought 11 the narrator's meglomania
is presented in unequivocal terms whereas in 11 The Balloon 11 the egoism
inherent in the ac:t of taking over an entire city is qualified as an act
akin to aesthetic altruism; the egoism that originally inflates the balloon
that takes over NE!W York •s sky is obscured in the story by the balloon •s
putative democrat~c availability, its supposed capacity to dislocate
identity. On the other hand, justification for the vulgar act of taking
over Galveston is never offered: the act is presented in unequivocal terms
as patently and unwholesomely selfish, an act committed by a self-serving
egoist with a contempt for democracy.
In many ways 11 Bought" is the inverse of "The Balloon," a complementary
version of a story that has attracted far more critical attention because it
serves as a representative fiction. As I intend to show, however, in terms
 92

of what each story says about the meaning of art, and the artist's
relationship to the art he creates, "Bought" is just as representative.
Moreover, the meaning of both stories centres on certain shared
"psychoanalytic issues," issues which Barthelme implicitly posits are
integral to the process of making art as he knows it.
One of the most basic things the two stories have in common is a
narrator who exhibits a particular attitude toward his environment. The
narrators of both stories are childish meglomanics whose childishness is
manifested most obviously in their determination to make the world over in
their own image. As it happens, both men impose their personal visions on
entire cities in the form of an art object. Appropriately enough, the
objects they choose to create in the exercise of their meglomania are a
balloon and a puz2:le, the literal and figurative toys of a single, willful
individual. In both stories, the artistic value of the objects is highly
qualified, though the terms by which each is qualified are quite different.
On the manifest level neither the balloon nor the puzzle are designed to be
valued in terms of' their inherent worth or sophi sti cation as art objects (as
art objects, both balloon and puzzle are rendered in context as essentially
bereft of meaning). The difference between the two objects on the manifest
level primarily lies in the context in which they are developed. In the
context of "The Balloon" the balloon is developed as the expression of a
sophisticated and radical conception of art. As we have seen, on one level
the balloon has a private meaning, but we are meant to view that private
meaning as virtua"lly irrelevant in light of the malleable balloon's capacity
to resist closure and invite the dynamic participation of the viewer. The
Mona Lisa puzzle ·in "Bought," on the other hand, is presented as the
 93

ultimate untransfo1rmed kitsch object, a hackneyed and 11 Cl osed 11 reproduction

that makes no claim whatever to serve, enlighten, or dislocate the viewer.
11
Bought's 11 art puzzle even lacks a developed ironical context, the sort of
irony that transforms similar objects (like Andy Warhol's soupcans, for
instance, or his series of portraits of Marilyn Monroe) into sophisticated
works or art (or rather, sophisticated statements about the nature of art,
and its relation to certain cultural values). Unlike the balloon, the Mona
Lisa puzzle doesn't appear designed to serve as any kind of comment on the
nature of art or the artist. And yet, as I am prepared to argue, the puzzle
functions exactly like the balloon in terms of the meaning Barthelme invests
it with on a latent level; the Mona Lisa puzzle in 11 Bought 11 does represent
as developed a comment on the nature of art, and the relationship of the
artist to his art, as the balloon does in 11 The Balloon ... All that is
required to see the similarities between puzzle and balloon is a careful
reading of the associative matrix in which Barthelme develops the two
objects.
11
Bought 11 develops around basically three episodes: the redesign of the
city as a puzzle; the wholesale shooting of the dogs; and the unsuccessful
attempt to seduce Sam Hong's wife. The story is so designed as to suggest
on the manifest level that the three episodes are essentially unrelated
except in the most general terms. A more careful reading of the story,
however, reveals that all three episodes are related versions, to use terms
the story itself suggests, of the same 11 Vile 11 act of the 11 imagination. 11
Just as the story is drawing near its conclusion, the narrator recites a
telling little poem:
I own a little city
Awful pretty
 94

Can't help people

Can hurt them thou9h
Shoot their dogs
Mess 'em up
Be imaginative
Plant some trees
Best to 1eave •em .a1one
Who decides?
Sam's wife is Sam's wife and coveting
Is not nice. (57)
What this infantile rhyme intimates is that, in the mind of the narrator, the
various episodes that occur in his pretty city and the coveting of Sam's pretty
wife are tangled up together. What I intend to show is that the three episodes
are integrally related, to show that each is part of carefully disguised
expression of the fantasy we referred to above as the central fantasy.
The first episode in Galveston centres around a plan the narrator and a city
resident devise to allow citizens of Galveston more privacy. "Private looking,"
says the narrator, approving the plan, 11
that's the thing" (53). What they devise
is a scheme to break up the patterns of the streets and reshape property lines
(there is an echo here of 11 The Balloon": the purpose of the balloon was to
mislocate citizens otherwise committed to 11 a grid of precise, rectangular
pathways under our feet" [28]). The model upon which they base their new design
is an unlikely one, "a jigsaw puzzle with a picture of the Mona Lisa on it" (53).
The result of this scheme is that everyone feels, as the narrator puts it, like
the people are "living in the middle of a titantic reproduction of the Mona Lisa"
(54).
In the second episode, purely as a demonstration of his "proprietorship"
(54), the narrator shoots six thousand dogs in one day, an act which gives him
"great satisfaction" (55). Despite the scope of this slaughter of the innocent
dogs, nothing is accomplished: the dogs in Galveston still outnumber the
citizens by a margin of two to one. Feeling some sense of remorse, the narrator
 95

decides to write a piece about himself in the local newspaper denouncing himself
as "the vilest creature the good God has placed upon the earth." In the article
he goes so far as to question whether it is appropriate to call "so vile a
critter" as himself a man in the first place. In doing this, he feels he's
behaving like Orson Welles (an allusion to Citizen Kane, a movie about a lonely
man with enormous power whose fate turns on a lost toy}: " ••• I'd seen that Orson
Welles picture where the guy writes a nasty notice about his own wife's terrible
singing, which I always thought was pretty decent of him, from some points of
view" (55). Having invited a challenge to be held accountable, the narrator is
confronted by one man who steps forward carrying "a bad-looking piece of pipe"
(56} to protest the killing of the dogs. The man is angry about the death of his
dog, Butch, a dog that obviously served as something of a surrogate son to this
man and his wife: "Butch was all Nancy and me had ••• We never had no children"
(55}. The man leaves, but not before cursing the "black-hearted" narrator in no
uncertain terms. He warns the narrator that he '11 "roast in the eternal flames
and there will be no mE!rcy or cooling drafts from any quarter" {56) for what he
has done to him and his family.
As we noted above 1, the power of this narrator is enormous, indeed, almost
absolute. He himself, in fact, characterizes the whole Galveston exercise as an
attempt to play God (58}. The power to satisfy his every wish and whim is,
however, limited in on·ly one way in the story: he can't have Sam Hong's wife.
It is in this incident, particularly in the construction he places on the
incident, that the full significance of the Mona Lisa episode is revealed.
When the offer is made to her, Sam Hong's wife politely resists the
narrator, pointing to her "young and intelligent-looking" husband giving off
unfriendly looks from lt>ehind the cash register of their store. Furthermore, she
 96

points out that shE! already has "one and one-third lovely children" (57).
In the context of the story, the way the wife is described is crucial: "She
was smaller than I was and I thought that I had never seen so much goodness
in a woman's face before. It was hard to credit. It was the best face I'd
ever seen" (57). What is crucial in understanding this description are the
associations it awakens with regard to the Mona Lisa puzzle episode: a man
who has transformed an entire city into a gigantic portrait representing one
of the most famous and celebrated beautiful faces in western civilization
falls desperately in love with a small, obscure, unnamed Oriental woman (the
only woman who app1ears in the story) whose principal di sti ngui shi ng feature
is her face, the 2est face, in fact, he has even seen. Now it could be
argued that the choice of the Mona Lisa as the subject of the puzzle and
subsequent design of the city is a casual or arbitrary one. After all, the
narrator undertakes the project to satisfy one of the citizens whose home he
destroyed when he took over the city. The idea and the puzzle itself are
suggested by Bill Caulfield, one of these displaced citizens. And yet, the
pattern of equivalences which occur on either side of the beautiful face
these two women hold in common is so consistent and so balanced that it is
hard to resist seeing his purchase and subsequent transformation of
Galveston into a titantic painting as a displacement for his real wish, that
is, to secure the love of a married woman who is, and will forever remain,
outside his grasp. The little jingle he repeats in the story ("Got a little
city/ Ain't it pre!tty" [54]; "So I owned this little which was very, very
pretty" [56]; "Got a 1i ttl e city/ Awful pretty" [57]) serves to continually
reinforce the fact that the city is serving as a displacement for the pretty
 97

wife (and mother) he covets.

There is another detail in the story which serves to re 1ate the Mona
Lisa episode to thE! Sam Hong's wife debac 1e. A man comes to the narrator
about the imposition of the Mona lisa design on the city complaining that he
feels like he's "living inside this gigantic jive-ass jigsaw puzzle" (54).
The narrator is on'ly too happy to confirm this interpretation: "Seen from
the air, he was living in the middle of a titantic reproduction of the Mona
lisa, too, but I thought it best not to tell him that" (54). Two things are
especially worth noting about this incident. The first is that the narrator
finds that he is unable to decide whether this man's eyes are "gleaming or
burning•• (54). The narrator's inability to decide on the true nature of the
intense feeling generated by what has happened to the city suggests that he
himself may be ambivalent with regard to how he feels about the procedure
which has also placed him in the middle of the Mona lisa.
The second thing worth noting about this incident is that the placing
of everyone in his city inside a titantic, gigantic image of a woman may
reveal a wish on the narrator's part to return to the mother. This possible
construction would mean little were it not for the fact that the issue of
pregnancy is a fac:tor in his relationship with the Chinese wife and mother
he longs to possess: she makes the unusual claim in rejecting him that she
is one-third pregnant. As with the look in the man's eyes who complains
about being inside the Mona Lisa, the narrator once again evinces a certain
ambivalence about this fact: "She didn't look pregnant but I congratulated
her anyhow" (57). What this conflation of Mona Lisa and Sam Hong's wife
appears to represent is the expression of the narrator's desire to possess
the woman who is i11.nother man's wife but who is also the gigantic woman that
 98

once enclosed him ·in the womb, the mother. This desire, of course, is one
of the most danger10us, the "vilest," a son can feel, which leads us to
consider how the d10g episode figures in all of this.
After killing the dogs, the narrator makes a point of calling himself
the vilest creature who ever lived and the aggrieved "father" of Butch
agrees, cursing him to eternal torment in the flames of hell. And yet the
guilt felt and the crime confessed to here seem out of all proportion to
each other. An explanation for this curious behaviour on the part of the
narrator may lie in the fact that the killing of the dog-son Butch places
the narrator in an extremely complex position psychoanalytically speaking, a
position which may account for this uncharacteristic display of guilt and
abjection. We notice, first of all, that the narrator carefully contains
and controls all phases of the episode, from crime through confession to the
meeting of one of his victims. Why then does he find it necessary to play
out this charade of uncharacteristic abjection? The answer may lie in a
concealed motive for killing the dogs. He suggests that his reason for
killing the dogs is not to trim their numbers but to assert
"proprietorship," to make a show of the control he has over his city, a show
of strength. We have already noted that the Butch incident serves to
associate the dogs with children {specifically, sons), an association which
has the effect of placing the narrator in the role one would normally
associate with the powerful, talionic father. But there is also some
suggestion that the narrator identifies with the dogs and the slain dog-son
Butch: in his printed confession he calls himself a critter and asks
whether "so vile a critter could be called [a man], etc. etc." {55).
Challenged by a pipe-wielding father who obviously cared about his dog-son
 99

(the pipe is mentioned twice}. He successfully meets the threat of this

father by threatening to hit him with 11
a writ of mandamus .. (56}, in other
words, evidence of superior strength under the law. The narrator, then,
plays the role of ji son who is so strong he can openly challenge fathers;
his role here as d1~stroyer-of-family challenged by a phallic and betrayed
father is an acknowledgement of guilt, but the role also serves to make him
the one who can threaten the family and offend the father with virtual
impunity. The result of this episode, in psychoanalytic terms, is that a
kind of stalement obtains: the situation represents a complex fantasy, a
kind of game in which all parties are satisfied, guilt is acknowleged, but
nothing is really resolved. The narrator's reaction to the whole episode
confirms this: 11
He went away happy with his explanation. I was happy to be
a black-hearted man in his mind if that would satisfy the issue between us
because that was a bad-looking piece of pipe he had there and I was still
six thousand dogs ahead of the game, in E. sense [emphasis added]" (56). The
last phrase is telling in that the killing of the dogs has accomplished
virtually nothing on any level: the manifest and latent situations which
obtained before the killing of the dogs remain the same, and the secretive,
private game the narrator is playing at continues as before.
There is another small piece in the puzzle of this story that supports
the idea that the narrator identifies at some level with the dogs he shot.
Just before he announces that he has fallen in love, he says this: "So I
owned this little city which was very, very pretty and I couldn't think of
any more new innovations [like killing the dogs] just then or none that
wouldn't get me punctuated like the late Huey P. Long, former governor of
Louisiana." The next sentence reads: "The thing is, I had fallen in love
 100

with Sam Hong's wifeu (56). The contiguousness of the names Long and Hong,
the association of the fear of being shot (punished) with the coveting ·of
another man's wife, the association of the fate of the dog-son Butch with
his own if he gets too "innovative"--all of these associations are pieces of
a puzz1e which ·when put together serve to suggest that the narrator sees
himself in the position of the son who covets the mother and both fears, and
identifies with, the father he hopes to dispossess.
Right after he is rejected by Sam Hong's wife, a curious event takes
place: the narrator goes out into the street and finds a cop who he sends
to get Colonel Sanders• Kentucky Fried Chicken, extra crispy. "I did that
just out of meanness," he says. "He was humiliated but he had no choice"
(57). This sudden desire for hot food (extra crispy) delivered by a
humiliated authority figure, a desire which immediately follows his
rejection by Sam Hong's wife, is a condensation. The sudden need for food
very likely represents oral compensation for the loss of the mother, the
loss of the love and security known at the oral stage of development. The
humiliated cop is a displacement for Sam Hong, the real object of his anger;
lik~ the father of Butch, the cop is also the dispossessed authority-figure
over whom the s,on can exert superior authority. The insistence on extra
crispy food picks up on the burning motif that runs through the story (seen
already in the burning eyes of the man inside the Mona lisa and the eternal
flame curse the~ father of Butch). Burning is i tse 1f a condensation in the
context of this story for it embodies both the crime--the burning passion
for the inviolable woman--and the punishment--the flames of eternal
damnation.2
 101

Throughout the story, the narrator has been very careful to avoid being
what he calls being too 11 imaginative 11 (the word, in fact, is used a total of
seven times in the story). The narrator equates creative exercise of the
imagination with the display of the self and he is acutely aware from the
start that too much exposure of that self is likely to bring disaster down
upon him. More specifically, it is likely to bring him to the attention of
God, the punishing father who is introduced at the close of the story, the
father who has more imagination. In the end he does, in fact, discover that
he shouldn't have tried to play God because God's 11 got a better imagination
than I do.. (58). In the mind of the narrator, the entire Galveston project
has represented a kind of challenge to paternal authority, and the locus of
that challenge has been the family: 11
Probably I went wrong by being too
imaginative, although really I was guarding against that. I did very
little, I was fairly restrained. God does a lot worse things, every day, in
one little family, any family, that I did in that whole city 11 (58). The
sense the narrator has that God exercises his imagination within the family
in particular, coupled with the fact that the narrator then associates God's
exercise of power in the family with his own exercise of power in the city,
shows that this whole Galveston affair has been, in the mind of the
narrator, a family affair (he puts people out of their homes, he kills a
member of one family and tries to steal the wife out of another). The
punishment the narrator is accorded by God (the father) is an exact
realization of the! talionic curse the offended father in one broken family
1aid upon him. HE! ends the story burning in a place that admits of no hope
of change:
 102

But [God's] got a better imagination that I do. For instance, I

still covet Sam Hong's wife, and probably always will. It's like
having a tooth pulled. For a year. The same tooth. That's a
sampling of His imagination. It's powerful.
So what happened? What happened was I took the other half of my
fortune and went to Galena Park, Texas, and lived inconspicuously
there, and when they asked me to run for the school board I said
No, I don't have any children. (58)
For crimes against the family, for trying to usurp God-the-father's role, he
suffers a particulilrly apt form of punishment: an oral aggressive, he is
literally de-toothed, a procedure which also suggests castration. The fact
that the punishment is prolonged and focussed on the same tooth suggests the
obsessive and speC'ific nature of the crime he committed.
But as horrib.le as his punishment is, it is not complete. Certainly he
ends up thoroughly reduced (half his fortune gone), leading a sterile and
inconspicuous life, still coveting and anguishing over the woman he cannot
have. However, what also must be taken into account is that he still has
half that original fortune, he still covets as before, and, in a clue
typical of the clu1es compacted into the dense associative puzzle of this
story, he's relocated in Galena Park, a city in the same state with a name
composed of letters from the name Galveston. What this resolution of the
story suggests is that the narrator has not resolved his 11 Vile 11 appetites in
the least, despite his punishment. What the closing does suggest, however,
is that, owing to a failure on the part of a paternal figure only marginally
more powerful than the son ( 11 Who deci des? 11 ) , the son is all owed to continue
as before. What he has learned (and his new situation indicates as much) is
to be less imaginative; in other words, in the future the narrator wi 11
endeavour to be even more 11 inconspicuous 11 as he continues to go about the
pursuit of his interests.
 103

On the manifest level, this story is about selfishness and overweaning

acqui si ti veness car·ri ed to groteque extremes. Wayne Stenge 1, whose
interpretations of Barthelme can usually be relied upon to weigh only what
is available in thf~ manifest content, suggests that this story is 11 a fable
about the impotence of the powerful 11 : 11
Extending the mindless consumerism
of [other Barthelme stories] to gargantuan proportions, the narrator of "I
Bought a Little City" not only purchases other individuals but commands an
entire town. Yet 1r1i thout a goa 1 for his possession and with p1ay as his
only means of deve·lopment, the speaker discovers that his acquisitive
desires have robbed him of humanity and imagination without giving him the
woman he loves 11 (119). This interpretation of 11 Bought 11 does credit to
Barthelme•s ability to provide some kind of credible sense to his stories on
the manifest level, but it offers little that would account for much of the
surface detail in the story. Stengel s •s reading of the story is a reading
which chooses to ignore altogether the subtle patterns of relationships that
Barthelme has developed among the various parts of this story. As a fable
about the impotenc1e of the materially powerful, "Bought" makes for slight
reading: there is nothing original or particularly insightful about
consumerism or materialism or even human nature in the story on this level
at all. What is evident once the associative puzzle of the story is solved
is that the narrator does have 11 a goal for his possession.. in mind as he
takes control of his little city--possession of the mother-figure--and it is
a goal that is never very far from his mind.

What 11 The Balloon" and 11 Bought" serve to demonstrate is that

 104

Barthelme•s art is critically informed by psychoanalytic issues that have

their origin in th~~ subjectivity of the artist. In both these stories, the
art the protagonists create is distinguished by two main features: first,
it makes the claim that it means nothing; second, it works on another level
altogether to attach a very specific and private meaning to that object. As
we noted above in another context, Barthelme•s critics are inclined, almost
without exception, to see in Barthelme•s art a successful attempt to
undermine "the idea of reading a text to determine authorial design"
(Stengel 23). As my analysis of "The Balloon 11 and "Bought 11 has
demonstrated, howe!ver, authorial design is evident. Both of these stories
implicitly argue f'or the relevance and meaningfulness of authorial design in
the interpreation of an art object. On the manifest level in "Bought"
especially, the issues that determine the form art objects take are
presented as arbitrary or accidental. The objects created are toys,
putatively all surface and almost no substance. What could be more
accessible, prosa'ic, and "unintentional" than a simple toy? However, in
both stories the textual environment in which these perfectly prosaic toys
are presented is lhi ghly determined. To understand what these objects mean,
therefore, it is important that we not separate the object from the terms or
conditions of its presentation; the meaning of the gigantic sky-filling
balloon and the titantic city-puzzle comes from their performance in the
context of a pattern of desires. We spoke above of the wide margins of
"configurative meaning" possible in the modernist text. We noted how
critics have accepted that the balloon in particular is an ideal modern art
object in that it maximizes the possibilities of configurative meaning. And
yet, as I hope my reading of the two stories has shown, the actual margin of
 105

configurative meaning in Barthelme, if the stories are carefully attended

to, is really very narrow. In context, Barthelme informs us through a
complex arrangement of association, that these objects are deeply imbued
with meaningfulness that does not leave them open to configurative
interpretation except within very restricted limits.

11
The Balloon.. and 11 Bought 11 each develop around what might be termed a
missing subject; that is to say, in both stories, we observe a pattern of
consequences that r·esults from a hidden cause. The constitutive feature is
common to all of Barthelme's fiction: even in stories in which no past
events or situations are explicitly pointed to as determining factors,
Barthelme manages to create the impression that the events in the story, the
behaviour of his characters, the attitudes of his narrative voices, are all
the result of a determining but concealed subject. On the manifest level,
the prose presents itself, as in 11 The Balloon," as surface surrounding empty
space. The fact is, however, that the surfaces of Barthelme's prose
describe a common and very particular shape.
In 11 Florence Green, .. for example (the third of the synoptic tales), the
pseudo-brilliant Baskerville manoeuvres throughout the text in what he
himself declares is an effort to forestall the reader's boredom. Essential
to this procedure of forestalling boredom is Baskerville's maintenance of
the ambiguity surrounding the psychoanalytic issues potentially buried in
the text. With regard to the aesthetic determining the content of "Florence
Green, .. then, it might be observed that the text develops around a kind of
implied absence in the text. This notion--that Barthelme's fictions develop
around what would be viewed as an absence in traditional realistic
 106

fiction--is important to an appreciation of how Barthelme's fictions are

designed.

11
The Phantom of the Opera's Friend 11 (CL}is a good story to begin to
consider the issue of the missing subject in Barthelme in that the story
demonstrates, not only how Barthelme's fiction characteristically develops
around a missing subject, the story also demonstrates in fairly explicit
fashion Barthelme's tendency to implicate himself in his fictions,
specifically, as the source of the psychoanalytic issues which so critically
inform those fictions. like so many of Barthelme's stories, 11
Phantom 11
condenses several subjects into a dense and resonant form. In the opening
sentence of the story, the narrator points out that the Phantom lives 11 five
levels below the Opera, and across the dark lake 11 (101}. As we shall see in
the following analysis of this story, the association of depth and dark with
the home of the Phantom at the centre of this story is entirely apt; the
Phantom we seek is, as his name suggests, a figure of shadow and hidden
substance, and thE~ truth of his situation is difficult to locate in the
conflicting and strangely incomplete manifest surfaces of this story.
In 11
Phantom 11 , Barthelme elects to rewrite a literary objet trouve, the
story of the Phantom of the Opera. As is his habit, he adapts the model in
a radical way to suit his own purposes. The changes Barthelme makes to the
original are alwa,Ys instructive: the most obvious changes he has made to
the original in this case involve the introduction of the narrator, whose
story this really is, and the elimination of the heroine and the revelation
scene, one of the most famous in film history. In this version, the woman
remains wholly in the background, replaced, as it were, by the narrator, and
 107

a different kind of love.

In the Phant~1, Barthelme has hit upon a figure who seems, after a few
minor but significant alterations, virtually tailor-made for a role in his
fictional universe.. What makes the Phantom so ideal a choice for Barthelme
is that so much of what is figuratively and psychologically true of
Barthelme•s characters is literally true of the Phantom. The Phantom is a
failed artist and an outcast. A deformed monster constrained to hide his
twisted face behind a mask, he nevertheless represents, principally because
of his talent as an artist, a creature of enormous contradiction. Owing to
the peculiar contrctdictions inherent in his character, his talent, while it
may be 11 immense 11 , ~s doomed to remain "buried 11 (102). The manifest cause of
this old artist•s r-elegation to the death-in-life existence of the
underground man is a woman, Christine, his "lost love" (103). What is also
wonderfully appropr·i ate with regard to the sympathies nascent in the
1iterary model of the Phantom, and the imagery which surrounds the typical

Barthelme protagoni1 st who burns with forbidden and compromising desires, are
the Phantom•s disfiiguring 11 terrible burns 11 (106). These are the burns which
originally drove him underground, the scars of which he still bears like
stigmata signifyin~J his devotion to a lost but still burning love.
A superficial! reading of the story reveals little about the intense
but ambiguous relationship between the narrator and the Phantom. The story
is told from the narrator•s point of view and it centres on the narrator•s
inability either to account for his attachment to his friend, the Phantom,
or his inability, despite considerable justification, to break off this
unreasonable attachment to the Phantom. Throughout the story the narrator
vacillates between a kind of pride in the Phantom-- 11 I rejoice in his immense
 108

buried talent 11 (102)--and a sense of shame and frustration over their

friendship: 11
Why must I have him for a friend? I wanted a friend with whom
one could be seen abroad. With whom one could exchange country weekends, on
our respective estates! I put these unworthy reflections behind me .....
(105). The frustration the narrator feels is born out of a recognition that
his attachment to the trapped Phantom is a kind of trap for himself as well:
11
Everything that can be said has been said many times. I have no new
observations to make •••• How many nights have I spent this way, waiting upon
his sighs •••• What was required was the boldness, the will to break out of
old patterns ..... (103). For some reason--reasons which, it must be
stressed, are simply not available in the manifest layer of the story--both
narrator and Phantom lack the will to break out of the morbid, old patterns
which hold them each in thrall.
The narrator behaves like someone with very little ego strength, and
despite some sense of disappointment over the Phantom as friend, he clearly
views the Phantom as some sort of ego ideal. Much of the narrator's
identification with the Phantom may come from the fact that the Phantom's
unreasonable devotion to Christine, the lost and former love of his life, is
a simulacrum of his own devotion to the Phantom. Of the Phantom, he says:
11
His situation is simple and terrible. He must decide whether to risk life
aboveground or to remain forever in hiding, in the cellars of the Opera..
(102). Yet the narrator's situation is equally 11 Simple and terrible 11 for he
must decide whether to risk life without the Phantom or to remain forever in
11
waiting, Waiting upon his sighs 11 (103). The narrator observes this of the
Phantom: 11
Yet the vivacity with which he embraces ruin is unexampled, in my
experience .. (105). One of the ironies of the story, of course, is that this
 109

observation is equally true of the narrator himself.

The narrat1)r convinces the Phantom to seek the services of a doctor, a
plastic surgeon. The surgeon and his associate, a Or. w., MA qualified
alienist" (107), offer the hope of a cure, a way out of the old pattern.
But when the appointed hour comes for the Phantom to deliver himself into
the hands of the doctor, and a possible release from his enthralment, he
doesn't appear. The narrator, in a manner consistent with the ambivalence
he has so far e:Khibited with regard to the Phantom, doesn't know whether he
should feel any disappointment over the fact that the Phantom's and his own
situation will now continue as they always have:
But when I call for the Phantom on Thursday, at the appointed
hour, he is not there.
What vexation!
Am I not slightly relieved?
Can it be that he doesn't like me?
I sit down on the kerb, outside~he Opera. People passing look
at me. I will wait here for a hundred years. Or until the hot
meat of romance is cooled by the dull gravy of common sense once
more. (107}
The bulk of what is communicated to the reader about the Phantom's
character originates in the narrator's view of his relationship to the
Phantom. It is in this relationship that is the richest source of
information about the Phantom's obessions. According to the narrator, the
Phantom is what he is, not out of love, but out of hate: "Is one man," he
asks, "entitled to fix himself at the centre of a cosmos of hatred, and
remain there?" (104). According to the narrator, the personality of the
Phantom alternates between "what can only be called fits of grandiosity"
followed inmediately by a "deep despair" (104}. The archaic nature of the
feelings that have driven this rejected, obsessive, disfigured lover
underground are made explicit in this exchange between the narrator and the
 110

doctor: "But was it not the case that originally, the violent emotions of
revenge and jealousy--, 11 says the doctor. 11
Yes, .. replies the narrator.
11
But replaced now, I believe, by a melancholy so deep, so all-pervading-- ..
( 107). What this says about the Phantom •s state of mind is that it has its
source in an original love, a love lost in an atmosphere marked by jealousy
and revenge. In tlhe absence of that 1 ave, the Phantom, 1 ost in an
all-pervading melancholy, has been driven to live the life he now leads, the
underground life of an artist.
What is important to note in the story, given the few details we have
to work with, is that the relationship to Christine which is so crucial to
the Phantom•s condition is marked by a certain ambivalence:
Sometimes he speaks of Christine:
1
That voice!•
•But I was perhaps overdazzled by the circumstances •••
1
A range from low C to the F above high C!
1
Flawed, of course •••
1
Liszt heard her. •que, c•est beau! 1 he cried out.
•possibly somewhat deficient in temperament. But I had
temperament enough for two.
•such goodness! Such gentleness!
• I would pull down the very doors of heaven for a--• (103-04)
This series of exclamations represents the sum total of direct information
we are given about the Phantom•s relationship with Christine. Before we
consider it, let us consider some of the information we are given about the
Phantom in general which might serve circumstantially to fill in some of the
gaps in these protestations of love.
The first thing the Phantom is quoted as saying in the story itself has
to do with the wine he has stolen from the cellar of the Opera•s Board of
Directors. This is how the Phantom characterizes the theft: 11
I tell you,
it made me feel like a director myself! As if I were worth two or three
millions and had at fat, ugly wifet•• (101). What the Phantom reveals here is
 111

that he associates the theft of food with the theft of the role of the
powerful Director. The Phantom also associates the stealing of the food
with possession of the Director's wife. The fact that he fantasizes about
stealing the hated Director's wife is significant in its own right but the
fact that he chooses also to make the wife the object of his hostility and
to characterize her as fat and ugly is also telling. After all, at the
heart of his unhappy situation is a preoccupation with Christine, the woman
he would have made his wife--a lost love.
Later in the story, the Phantom sends the narrator an urgent note.
Only the conclusion of that note is disclosed: "All men that are ruined are
ruined on the side of their natural propensities" (105). The precise nature
of the "natural pr·opensities" alluded to here are never explained. However,
we do know that the Phantom's ruination is tied directly to his prolonged
obsession ("all of this is generations cold" [104]) to repossess his "lost
love" (104). Returning now to that series of exclamations recorded by the
narrator, if regaJ~ded closely we can see that they contain a number of clues
as to the nature of the ruinous natural propensities alluded to above. On
the one hand, he 1remembers Christine as a great singer of extraordinary
range, a creature of great gentleness and goodness. On the other hand,
however, a more rational Phantom suspects that he may have been "overdazzled
by circumstance" (a kind of blindness) and sees her as deficient in
temperament. In other words, the Phantom believes that together he and
Christine--the abundant temperament and the beautiful instrument--would have
made a single and complete being.
How are we to reconcile this "bedazzled" view of Christine with the
fact that the Phantom sits at the centre of a world of hate, that he
 112

fantasizes about stealing the fat, ugly wife of the Director? The
ambivalence of these feelings is epitomized in the excessive but incomplete
expression of love that serves as the culminating utterance of his feelings
for Christine: "I would pull down the very doors of heaven for a--". For
what? Why does he trail off into silence at this point? And why, we are
tempted to ask, is it heaven and not hell, which typically serves to come
between lovers, that must be attacked to get at her to do whatever it is he
hopes to do but cannot tell us?

Halfway throuHh the story, the narrator's voice breaks off and Gaston
Leroux is suddenly introduced as the author of The Phantom of the Opera, the
voice behind the voice we have been listening to to this point. Leroux is
tired of writing The Phantom of the Opera and so he puts the manuscript in 8

closet and tries t'> switch to another story, "The Secret of the Yellow
Room.'' What follows, however, is the narrative of The Phantom pi eked up
exactly where it left off. This "authorial" intrusion is extremely
suggestive in context. The most immediate consequence of Leroux's intrusion
is to multiply the number of levels on which this story is functioning. The
•phantom,• as the title of Barthelme's story suggests, is really about the
narrator and the matter of his compelling 11 friendship" with the Phantom.
With the introduction of Leroux, however, Barthelme gives us a variety of
obsessive attachment on a third level (Phantom to Christine and his opera;
narrator to Phantom; Leroux to the narrator and Phantom) and thereby
ultimately implicates his own voice in the complex and reflexive pattern of
obsessions he has created.
We noted above that Barthelme locates his Phantom five levels below the
surface. As it happens, Barthelme has so constructed his story as to make
 113

that internal observation true in another sense: it could be said that with
the sudden introduction of Gaston Leroux the number of possible points of
view active inside this narrative is increased to five.

Fig. 1. The Phantom of the Opera's Friend

11 11

At the very farthest remove from the centre is Barthelme himself, the
phantom-artist about whom, in any final sense, nothing can be known.
Barthelme, of course, has always been present at some indirect and
inaccessible remove behind the author-principle, but the manner of the
introduction of Leroux as obsessed author of a version of the 11
Phantom has
11

the effect of invoking the ultimate author behind these several authors,
involving Barthelme in a unique way in the pattern of obsession. In other
words, with the introduction of Gaston Leroux-as-story-writer especially,
Barthelme-as­
Astory-writer implicitly implicates himself with a writer who for some
 114

unknown reason cannot stop writing the story of the Phantom, even when the
deliberate and conscious attempt is made to write another story.
The point of 11iew with which we are made most familiar is that of the
narrator. And yet, the story is designed in such a way as to imply that the
factors which bind the narrator to the Phantom are part of an overall
pattern of obsessi10n. The story is so structured as to provide us with the
profile of an obsession but, by dint of complex layering, the story makes it
difficult to establish the actual source and nature of that obsession or to
the relationship b1etween one form of obsession and another. Is the story
suggesting, for instance, that Leroux's compulsion to write the story of the
Phantom has something to do with the Phantom's obsession with his opera? Or
is the story suggesting that the narrator's attachment to the Phantom is a
function of the fact that he sees in the Phantom's situation a figuration of
his own? What the story does suggest, in fact, via negativa, in the
scrupulous absence of evidence in the story that might suggest the contrary,
is that all of the versions of obsession in the story, implied or otherwise,
are related in a profound but secret way. At one point in the story, the
narrator hears the Phantom's music. His description of what he hears of
that music aptly describes what we hear of Barthelme in the story we're
reading: "Faintly, through many layers of stone, I hear organ music. The
music is attentuated by unmistakable. It is his great work Don Juan
Triumphant. A communication of a kind" (102).
The next point of view after Leroux's operating within this story is,
of course, that of the narrator, and of all the obsessives and potential
obsessives in this story, we know the most about him and his attachment to
the Phantom. At the next level is the Phantom himself whom we view
 115

primarily through the eyes of the narrator. Located at the very heart of
this story, and at. the centre of all these layered perspectives, is another
work of art, the Clpera the Phantom has been working on while pursuing his
underground existe~nce. That work is entitled Don Juan Triumphant and we
know nothing about. it as fact beyond what is suggested by the title.
Nevertheless, in the context Barthelme provides, that title is highly
suggestive. Like the omniscient Barthelme who chose the story of the
writing of the Phcmtom of the Opera as his vehicle, and 1ike Leroux who
chose the narrator- and his Phantom as his special vehicle, the Phantom has
chosen Don Juan (the word chosen here is probably misleading given the
example of compulsive Leroux, an artist who cannot help but choose the
Phantom).
Why is Don Juan the chosen vehicle/persona for the Phantom? And why,
given the Phantom's seeming defeat at the hands of love, is the opera about
a triumph? We know that Don Juan is a particular type. The character has,
in fact, since given his name to a complex exhibited by men who display an
ambivalent attitude toward women. Like the Joker in Barthelme•s story 11 The
Joker's greatest Triumph 11 (CBDC), a Don Juan is a lover, but he is also an
11
abominator of women 11 (157), a man who basically fears and even hates women.
Si nee he feels th1·eatened by women, a Don Juan would tend to view the act of
love, not as a tender, reciprocal attempt at intimacy between equals, but as
an act of conquest. The type is common in Barthelme. The mysterious Shel
McPartland (a name suggestive of an empty and fragmented self) in 11 The
Reference 11 (A) is one of the more obvious examples of the type: 11
He has too
much love and respect for women. He has so much love and respect for women
that he has nothing to do with them. At all 11 (148).
 116

How all of these inferences drawn from the title of the Phantom•s
magnum opus are relevant to the problem that keeps the Phantom underground,
of course, remains problematic and circumstantial. Without a careful
consideration of all of the patterns of associations developed in the
context of the story (patterns we have considered here in only a preliminary
way), there just aren•t sufficient grounds provided in this story ("a
communication of a kind 11 ) to draw anything more than highly suggestive or
speculative inferences.

In .. Engineer-Private Paul Klee" (S), Barthelme seems to be showing how

the artist can use his art to turn a threatening situation to his advantage.
The story is important in any analysis of Barthelme•s aesthetic because it
shows in pt·actise that Barthelme views art as equivalent in some respects to
an act of forgery. We shall note in 11 Florence Green .. that Barthelme•s
narrator, Baskerville, chooses to use the story he tells as a kind of game
in which the object for the reader is to find a putative psychoanalytic
issue he declares is hidden somewhere in the text. That missin9 subject
could possibly be inferred from a reading of the manifest level of the text,
but the text is very careful to keep that subject, while always before the
reader, carefully out of reach. In 11 Engineer-Private Paul Klee," Barthelme
designs a different kind of game for the reader than he does in "Florence
Green,•• but the point of the game, and what that game implies about the
relationship in fiction between what is said and what is meant, remains the
same.
In the story, the painter Paul Klee is working as a painter-artist
in the Air Corps, doing work which requires no great skill or imagination
 117

(Paul Klee, of course, is the name of an actual artist of the Bauhaus school
who, as it happens;, did serve in the German army in World War I). While
transporting three! planes by train, Klee emerges from a restaurant while on
route to discover that one of the planes is missing. Unable to find the
plane he draws a picture of the empty canvas and then decides to apply
Reason to solve his problem: "Reason dictates the solution. I will diddle
the manifest. With my painter's skill which is after all not so different
from a forger's, I will change the manifest to reflect conveyance of two
aircraft ••• " (69). Satisfied with this solution, he goes in search of
chocolate for which he has developed a sudden craving.
The story is structured as a series of alternating first-person
disclosures by Paul Klee and by the Secret Police. The Secret Police are
more important to this story and what it is saying about the nature of art
than they may at first seem. When they first introduce themselves, they
explain that they are after secrets, the secrets which are the basis of the
power they seek: "Omnipresence is our goal. We do not even need real
omnipresence. ThE! theory of omnipresence is enough. With omnipresence,
hand-in-hand as it were, goes omniscience. And with omniscience and
omnipresence, hand-in-hand as it were, goes omnipotence. We are a
three-sided Waltz" (66). These Secret Police, however, suffer from
"melancholy" because, as they put it, "We yearn to be known, acknowledged,
admired even. Whclt is the good of omnipotence if nobody knows? However
that is a secret, that sorrow" (66).
The Secret Police watching Paul Klee observe the missing aircraft.
Like Klee, they a1·e threatened by what has taken place. The threat to them
arises out of the fact that a missing plane is an affront to their view of
 118

themselves as omni!Present. Put along with Klee in an embarrassing and

threatening situation by the missing plane, they are delighted with Klee's
forgery of the man'ifest. Indeed, they use exactly the same terms Klee
himself uses to describe his painter-forger's skill: "We have previously
observed him diddling the manifest with his painter's skill which resembles
not a little that of the forger" (69). The story ends with the Secret
Police still secret and Paul Klee completely unaffected by what has occured.
Klee, who has made a drawing of the potential disaster, has even come out
ahead of the game: "I wait contentedly in the warm orderly room. The
drawing I did of the collapsed canvas and ropes is really very good. I eat
a piece of chocolate. I am sorry about the lost aircraft but not overmuch.
The war is temporary. But drawings and chocolate go on forever" {70).
On one level this story is a simple and straightforward celebration of
the artist's power to control his situation, to turn potential threat into
private gain. The space the missing aircraft occupied is translated into an
artifact that Klee can sell for more chocolate, if he so desires. The
world, meanwhile, is none the wiser. Klee's skill as an artist keeps the
Secret Police and the World War from disturbing his insular and modest
little existence--drawing and chocolate go on forever. Reading the story as
a celebration of the skill of the artist, however, represents a gross
oversimplification of what actually takes place in this story. According to
Wayne Stengel, the story is designed to show "the ability of a great artist
to create from the raw materials of a hostile world"; it "celebrates the
power of the artist to make an object of beauty from what is lost or missing
from what otherwise might be a source of distress or embarassment" (55-56).
Stengel believes that the Secret Police represent "social insanity," the
 119

"policed madness [which] drives a country to war and ••• attempts at total
control over its citizens" (56). Stengel views Klee as the "man who has
become the happy creator of his own reality•• and suggests, therefore, that
the story affinns Klee•s own ••triumphant belief that an artful, creative
life is a kind 1:>f forgery, which occasionally pennits one to live in the
imagination, even if reality is savage and destructive•• (56-57).
This seems to me to be an altogether naive reading of this story, a
reading which is possible only because it chooses to ignore the fact that
art is equated ,,_i th forgery. It is a reading of the manifest 1eve 1 of the
story, a readin1g which, in tenns of a principle of interpretation the story
takes pains to develop, chooses to accept at face value the forged version
of the truth couched in the manifest, chooses to ignore the fact t~at

something has obviously gone missing. Stengel•s reading of Barthelme•s

manifest cJfent is suspect in light of the artist-as-forger principle, but
there are other ••secrets .. in the story which should make us suspicious of
that 11 mani fest ...
First of all, there is almost nothing in the story to support Stengel's
notion that Kle1e can be separated all that easily from the corrupt values
couched in the background of this situation. First of all, there is the
matter of the s~etting of this story, the First World War. The story takes
place during th,e World War, but the war is extremely remote from Klee. The
story, in fact, exhibits absolutely no interest in the war at all and
certainly not as any kind of drama of horror and waste. From Klee•s point
of view, the war is a job, a mundane and innocuous job, a job in which he
even takes a measure of pride {he insists that he and his fellow painters of
fuselages be called painter-artists). 11
lt's not a bad life, .. he says,
 120

11
There is always bread and wurst and beer in the station restaurants .. (65).
There is, therefor,e, no internal justification to set Klee's artistic values
up in contrast to those exemplified by the War. The solipsistic Klee's
interests are strictly limited to himself and extend no farther than the
reach of his most immediate appetites.
As far as the notion that the Secret Police stand for the madness that
drives a country to war or represent a force which seeks total control over
its citizens is concerned, again, there is little in the story beyond the
suggestive import of their title to support this view in the story.
Actually, the Secret Police come off as a rather pathetic, ineffective, and
even sympathetic group. They are patently weak and vulnerable, and the
absurd secrets they do discover--Klee's ''feet rest twenty-six centimeters
from the baggage-car stove 11 (66)--are harmless. The fact that they end up
in essentially the same position as Klee, compromised by the loss of the
plane, and the fact that they view the role of the artist in exactly the
same terms as Klee himself, lead one to suspect that they are not as
inimical and hostile as their role would seem to suggest.
Finally, and most problematic of all, is the question of the value and
meaning of Klee's art as it is represented in this story. The comparison of
the artist to the forger Klee himself makes is hardly a flattering one but
it is certainly a telling one. Klee reasons that he cannot construct a
convincing duplicate plane and therefore elects to 11 diddle the manifest ...
Why is this act of erasure and minor act of forgery (one assumes that all he
has to do is to change the number three to the number two) compared to the
skill of an artist? A forger is a technician more than he is any kind of
artist, a specialist in facsimiles, not interpretations. Furthermore, a
 121

forger is a kind of liar, a kind of thief whose work profits only the thief.
If the presence of the Secret Police or the backdrop of the War are meant to
serve as justifications for this petty criminal act than why does Barthelme
so arrange it that Klee remains unaware of the presence of the Police, and
why does he have this artist evince no interest at all in the war, that
great subject lying all around him, the same war that gave such impetus to
modernism in general? What this Klee does in diddling the manifest is to
say, in effect, 11
Screw the world! I may be responsible for the loss of this
plane but I 1 m clever enough to avoid having to be responsible to anything
beyond myself.•• As further evidence of the inherent pettiness and
selfishness of the act, Barthelme has his Klee develop a sudden craving for
candy, as if to say that the artist has earned some kind of childish oral
reward for his cleverness. As proof of the importance Barthelme accords
this association between making art-forgery and eating sweet food, it is
underscored by being repeated in the last line of the story.
The artist Klee•s diddling of the manifest is the central act in this
story. What this act offers the reader on a metafictional level is
something of an oblique and qualified warning by Barthelme to the reader
that artists diddle the manifest to serve private and hidden agendas. If
the reader is at all sensitive to this warning, he is obliged to look at the
text, at some level, as a sustained act of forgery, a forged manifest
designed to conceal the absence of a genuine but now missing subject. As it
happens, there is a subject of this story missing from the manifest level,
and even if its whereabouts is not immediately apparent, it is a part of the
story we•re reading. The search for the missing and secret subject in this
story begins with the Secret Police.
 122

What Stengel's reading of the story overlooks is the fact that the
story is as much a1bout the Secret Police as it is about Paul Kl ee. The most
obvious evidence 01f this is that the story is literally shared between them.
In Stengel's view, a view firmly supported by the manifest layer, the Secret
Police have nothing to offer us. They are not artists, they are
meglomanical brute:s, different in purpose and in method than Klee. Klee, on
the other hand, is. an artist, a man of refined sensibilities. How do we
know this? We know this because his name is Paul Klee, and Paul Klee, as
everyone knows, wats a great artist. And yet, what do we see of worth in
this artist whose worth should be rendered so much more apparent inasmuch as
the exclusive sour-ce of comparison lies in the broadly drawn foil of a
Secret Police? The fact is that, except for the famous name and all that
that name might encourage us to infer about quality of spirit and such, the
Paul Klee Barthelme gives us in this story is, as great spirits of genius
go, something of at disappointment. What Barthelme has done with Paul Klee,
in fact, is to do what he always does with found objects--he has hollowed
out the centre and replaced the original matter with substance of his own
peculiar manufacture (as in the balloon in "Balloon" and the Mona lisa in
"Bought"). The Paul Klee we see in this story is a petty, unremarkable,
spoiled, self-serving, duplicituous fake who values his own appetites as
much as he does his art. Barthelme has so tailored his portrait of the
artist-forger that the Secret Police attached to him emerge as a somewhat
grotesque but esse!ntially sound reflection of the man they watch. A careful
reading of the story reveals that their need to control and manipulate
events is different from Klee's, not in kind, but only in scope.
We watch events unfold in this story from both of their perspectives,
 123

each alternating point of view contributing to our interpretation of the

simple facts of the story. Notice, too, that, despite the difference in
tone, they agree absolutely as to the procedures and attitudes one adopts
when dealing with the world. In what amounts to a more devastating
assessment of the artist than the business comparing artists to forgers,
Barthelme so arranges it that the Secret Police and Klee depend, not just on
secretiveness per se, but on the very same secret to protect them.

There is a third perspective implicitly at work here, one that encloses

the perspective of the Secret Police just as their perspective encloses that
of Klee: the ••artist-forger 11 of 11 Engineer-Private Paul Klee, 11 the story
which also has a manifest disguising a missing freight. There is much in
the story that kee~ps urging us to consider this third artist • s place in the
story. The number three, for instance, is very important in this story:
besides the third perspective of the omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent
implied author, there are three characters in the story, the Secret Police,
Klee, and Klee•s ~1irlfriend Lily (who doesn't appear); originally, there
were three planes,. reduced to two when one went mysteriously missing; the
Secret Police speak of their sad three-sided waltz. Their waltz is sad
because their situation is paradoxical: they want to go public, to be
admired, but their· secrets are powerful only if they remain secrets. They
are like the impoverished ego that longs to be universally admired, but for
some reason fears exposure, and so finds itself in a melancholy position it
cannot resolve: it needs to participate and control, but it is deeply
fearful of the loss of the advantage of anonymity. The Secret Police are
also like the omniscient narrator by dint of the perspective from they
 124

choose to operate: like that omniscient narrator, the first secret about
them is where they are.
What all of this serves to imply about the omniscient voice of this
story is that he, too, dances a three-sided waltz involving himself, the
story, and the reader. The missing subject that lurks inside the diddled
manifest of this story has been so skillfully concealed by Barthelme's
artist-forger's skill that it can only be inferred from events and
relationships left in the text. As spare as that material is, i~ is
nevertheless highly suggestive. It suggests, for instance, that Barthelme
has a rather ambivalent view about the motivation for making art. It
suggests that the character of the artist is distinguished by meglomania, by
a fundamentally weak ego that cannot risk exposure but dreams of universal
appro bation. But perhaps most suggestive of all is the notion carefully
embroidered into this story that the manifest artifact is a forged version
of the truth, a forgery designed to conceal a secret--a missing
subject--that, if exposed, would thoroughly compromise the position of the
artist.

"The Dolt"(UPUA) is another story in which the central subject matter

is the process of making art, in this case, fiction. It makes essentially
the same sort of statement made by "Engineer-Private Paul Klee" as regards
the handling of the mi~sing subject in the text. Edgar, the artist-narrator
in this story, a man living "in worlds of hurt" (64), is having trouble
completing a story he has been required to write as part of something
called the National Writer's Examination. The interior fiction which is
included in its entirety inside the frame tale is an historical romance. It
 125

concerns a love triangle involving a Prussian Baron, his younger wife, Inge,
and a young former priest named Orsini who the Baron conscripts and places
in a regiment of giants {the detail of the giants is important, see below).
The story is a depiction of an oedipal triangle in classic terms, complete
with descriptions of the young Orsini's "passion, that was present, as it
were in a condition of latency" (70) and a vengeful and betrayed
father-figure who exposes the lovers to the "blood-lust of the pandours",
and so is flung "headlong into a horrible crime" (70).
Edgar is married to Barbara, a former hooker, a woman described as
"very sexually attractive ••• but also deeply mean" {65). Barbara is a
version of the women in "Mandible" or the woman that emerges from the
composite portrait of all the aggressive, predatory, debilitating women we
will meet in the synoptic tales. Typical of the type, her sexual
attractiveness is malign, a source of hurt and confusion to her husband.
Also according to type, she treats Edgar with contempt. Specifically, she
treats him as if he were a chi 1d: "There is not a grown person in the
United States that doesn't know that," (65) she says to him as she proves
how well she can handle questions on the exam he has failed twice. {The
answer to the question is The Battle Hymn of the Republic. This is no
casual detail. It is, rather, another example of just how dense and
over-determined the fabric of Barthelme's fictions are: it is wonderfully
apt that the oedipally enthralled Edgar who is writing a love-and-war story
about oedipal transgression and punishment should suffer embarrassment over
this particular so1ng, a battle hymn about war and retribution meted out by a
punishing father-God.)
At the close of the story, as the tension between Barbara and Edgar
 126

over this story is reaching a crisis, their son enters. Note the manner in
~

which he is described: "At that moment the son manque entered the room.
The son manque was eight feet tall and wore a serape woven out of two
hundred transistor radios, all turned on and tuned to different stations.
Just by looking at him you could hear Portland and Nogales, Mexico" (72).
Edgar tries "to think of a way to badmouth this immense son leaning over him
like a large blaring building. But he couldn't think of anything" (72).
The story ends with one of Barthelme's usual depictions of a crisis that
cannot be resolved, a crisis that conflates aesthetic and psychic morbidity:
"Thinking of anything was beyond [Edgar]. I sympathize. I myself have
these problems. Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but
worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin" (72-73}.
What makes this story especially relevant to our discussion of the
manner in which Barthelme introduces and subsequently manages a missing
subject in his work is that Edgar-the-writer of short stories is a "dolt"
because he can't bring himself to write the middle of his story: "'I don't
have the middle!' he thundered. 'Something has to happen between them [says
Barbara], Inge and what's his name,• she went on. 'Otherwise there's no
story.• looking at her he thought: she is still streety although wearing
her housewife gear. The child was a perfect love, however, and couldn't be
told from the children of success" (71) (the child Edgar is alluding to here
is his daughter, his youngest child, Rose, who in her white bathrobe looks
to Edgar like "a tiny fighter about to climb into the ring" [64]). What is
significant about this issue of the missing middle of the story--the part of
the story which ce·rtainly would have depicted the intercourse between the
young Orsini and Inge, and their subsequent violent deaths at the hands of
 127

the "brutal and much-feared" {67) pandours--is that that missing narrative
is, in effect, present in the frame tale, in the story of Edgar; the middle
of the story that Edgar cannot write is depicted, or expressed, in the
oedipal latent content of both the frame tale and the interior fiction. The
frame tale and the interior fiction are depictions in different terms of the
same situation. The only substantive difference between the frame tale and
the interior fiction in terms of content is that the interior fiction is a
more dramatic and colourful version of the former. To understand how the
missing middle has been written into the frame tale, the reader has to
appreciate how much Edgar's and Orsini's respective situations have in
common.
There are, in fact, five versions of the same character in "The Dolt,"
Orsini, Rose, the son manqu~, Edgar, and the author of "The Dolt." Let us
begin with Orsini. Orsini's situation is a classic depiction of an oedipal
situation: he "enjoyed a peculiar status in regard to the lady; he was her
lover, and he was not" {68). The young and trusted officer lusts after and
subsequently beds his fatherly benefactor's young wife, and so becomes
involved in "a horrible crime" {70). As Don Juan served the Phantom as
persona, Orsini serves Edgar. In "The Dolt," however, there is more
concrete evidence that the relationship between the created persona and the
creator is an intimate one.
Edgar has two children, Rose and the unnamed son manque who enters just
as the story ends. Both these children are displacements for Edgar, and the
displacement is accomplished in the frame tale primarily through the figure
of Orsini. In her white fighter's bathrobe. Rose serves a displacement for
the former priest {innocent) turned military officer {fighter) who once
 128

served in a regiment of giants. The "perfect love" Rose is to her father

what Orsini is to Inge, a perfect but illicit love. Edgar's "inunense" son
manque is a more complex figure. The use of the term manque relates this
son to Orsini who was treated as a son by the Baron, but failed to fulfill
the responsibilities of his assumed role. Edgar feels threatened by this
son and associates this gigantic son leaning over him with an enormous
building. The son manque is also a displaced depiction of Orsini who is
both a father and a son: as a former priest, he is a kind of father, and is
his latest role, he is treated as a kind of son. Also associating the son
manque with Orsini is the fact that Orsini "has the bad luck to be a very
tall man" (68) (the son manqu~ is eight feet tall. See also the issue of
height in "The Hiding Man," Chapter Four). Furthermore, the association of
the giant son with a threatening building picks up on the fact that in the
interior fiction the crime against the father-figure takes place in the
Baron's chateau, a chateau that is besieged, and so, figuratively, brought
down upon the head of the transgressing son-figure. From Edgar's point of
view, the son manque is a hybrid, part father and part son: he is Edgar's
son but his size makes him as big as a father to Edgar.
Then there is Edgar himself, the one who stages the oedipal triangle in
the interior fiction, a fiction which for some reason not explained in the
text he cannot bring himself to finish. Most of what we know about Edgar
originates out of his relationship to his wife. What we know about Edgar is
that he is married to a lubricious and powerful woman who threatens his
sense of himself by treating him like a child (or son).
The final incarnation of the figures involved in the same problem is
the most problematic. In the final sentence of the story, quoted above, the
 129

putative "author" of "The Dolt" intrudes into the text for the first time
with an explicit identification with Edgar and Edgar's
psychological-aesthetic predicament: "I myself have these problems." This
authorial intrusion serves to do two things: it multiplies the number of
figures in the constellation of figures caught up in the "problem," and it
multiplies the number of fictions that now claim to have no middle--Edgar's
untitled interior fiction; the story of Edgar as told by the authorial "I";
and Barthelme's "The Dolt." The implication is, however, that each fiction
does in fact contain a middle, albeit it is a middle that is "missing" from
that text.

What is i nteresti n1g about each successive 1 ayer is that each surrounds at
least one incomplete version of itself. All of these layers are wrapped
around the putatively missing middle in Edgar's unfinished story, the
 130

discovery of the trusted 11 SOn 11 and the betraying 11 mother 11 in bed together.
As we shall see in analysis of the synoptic tales and the rest of
Barthelme•s storie!s, it is this moment that provides for the missing subject
matter of much of Barthelme.

A story that is very similar to 11 The Dolt 11 in terms of the equivalence

it draws between a fairly explicit and unresolved oedipal situation and the
inability to resolve or complete an interior fiction is 11 And Then 11 (a). As
in 11 The Dolt, .. the artist-narrator in this story cannot bring himself to
11
finish the story he 1 s been writing: The part of the story that came next
was suddenly missing, I couldn•t think of it ..... (105). The oedipal love
triangle in 11 And Then 11 is one of the most explicit in Barthelme, to the
point where the police sergeant•s wife, Cynthia, is manifestly identified
11
with the artist-narrator • s mother: • Yes! • I shouted, •she •s my mother!
And although she is a widow, and legally free, she belongs to me in my
dreams! 111 (110).
One possible means the narrator entertains to complete the missing part
of the interior fiction involves a version of the children•s fairy tale,
.. Goldilocks and the Three Bears ... Significantly, in light of what we have

noted to this point about the tendency to multiply fictional layers around a
missing core, the bears in 11 And Then 11 begin to multiply: ..... and the
seventh bear descends from the flies on a nylon rope and cries, 1
Mother!
Come home! t• and the eighth bear-- 11 ( 111).

Caught between the threatening presence of the police sergeant leaning

over him and unable to resolve 11 these terrible contradictions.. (112) with
his mother, the resolution this narrator imagines for his psychic-aesthetic
 131

impasse is the literal immolation of his obsessions. By destroying those

obsessions, howevE!r, his own ruination is almost guaranteed: 11
I will
reenter the first room, cheerfully, confidently, even gaily, and throw
,
chicken livers flambe all over the predicament, the flaming chicken livers
clinging like inciindergel to Mother, policemen, bicylces, harpsichord, and
my file of the National Review from its founding to the present time. That
will •open up• tht~ situation successfully. I will resolve these terrible
contradictions with flaming chicken parts and then sing the song of how I
contrived the ruin of my anaconda• (111 ). The image of the major figures
and 11 parts• in his regressive, unresolved and wholly debilitating obsession
burning together suggests the very fiction we are reading: "And Then 11
likewise draws all of these constituents together into one great burning
11
predicament. 11 The 11 COntrived 11 story about the ruined phallic anaconda (an
image which suggests impotence) reads very much like a version of
'
Barthelme•s story 11 And Then ... As in 11 The Dolt, .. the missing portion of 11 And
Then 11 (which could be entitled 11 The Ruin of my Anaconda 11 ) lies in the
11
missing 11 (disguised) latent content of the story itself: the material
derived from an analysis of the associations of 11 And Then.. is the unfinished
part of 11 And Then ...
CHAPTER FIVE: THREADS OF THE DISCOURSE
 -133

We turn now to a careful and specific consideration of four of

Barthelme's short stories. What follows is an analysis of Barthelme's first
short stories, originally published between 1961 and 1963, and collected in
his first book of short stories, Come back, Dr. Caligari. The stories will
be analyzed in the order in which they were originally published, beginning
with "Me and Miss Mandible" and ending with 11
Florence Green is 81. 11
"Me and Miss Mandible," 11
Florence Green is 81," "Hiding Man," and "The
Big Broadcast of 1938" are four of the first five stories Barthelme ever
published, which should serve to mitigate somewhat against the charge that
only those stories from Come Back, Dr. Caligari that support the views of
this thesis were selected. In fact, any four stories from Come Back, Dr.
Caligari, and indeed, any four stories from anywhere in Barthelme would have
served just as we'll as the focus for analysis. The first stories were
selected as a means of underscoring the fact that the subject of Barthelme's
fiction has been, from the very outset, a state of mind.
It should be noted that these four stories are not the first four
stories Barthelme ever published. "The Viennese Opera Ball," the fourth
story Barthelme published, just after 11 Hiding Man," is not included in this
series. This story would been included in the synoptic tales except that it
is the first example of a type of story that Barthelme has published every
so often over the years. 11
The Viennese Opera Ball" is representative of
Barthelme's least successful kind of story. As Molesworth suggests, this
story is one of a type in Barthelme that virtually precludes interpretation
 -134

except in the most general te~s: "These stories demonstrate Barthelme's

indebtedness to an avant-garde program of radical
experimentation .... Barthelme evidently felt the need to go all the way into
incoherence before he could clearly define the limits of his art" (74). As
a type, these stor·ies are simply too aleatory, too open to too many
interpretations, to be of any real use in a study of this kind. I have
therefore elected to substitute "The Big Broadcast of 1938," chronologically
the next story Barthelme published, to bring the number of original stories
analyzed up to four.
The following analysis of "Mandible" represents the most developed
criticism of any 'Single story in this thesis. There are several reasons for
this. First, since the discussion of this story represents, not only an
introduction to Barthelme's prose, but the first demonstration of the
approach this thesis will take to all of Barthelme's fiction, the analysis
of "Mandible" is especially developed. Second, "Mandible" is the first
story Barthelme ever published. Because this thesis asserts that
Barthelme's prose is so designed as to describe the operation of a founding
subjectivity, a profile of the psychoanalytic issues nascent in the very
first fiction Barthelme published would have to be expected. Third,
"Mandible" is innately deserving of greater attention because, despite the
fact that it is the first story Barthelme ever published, the story remains
one of Barthelme's best and most representative fictions.
The analyses of the succeeding three stories in what I am calling the
synoptic tales are more streamlined and less exhaustive because these
examinations are to some extent build upon material already explored or
explained in the analysis of "Mandible." Nevertheless, the concentration on
 -135

detail in these analyses sti 11 represents a significant increase in anything

available outside this thesis. As noted in the opening chapter of this
study, for various reasons exegeses of Barthelme's stories tend to
generalize about his work. Despite the fact that Barthelme's prose
resembles poetry in its concentration of effects within a dense, resonant,
and limited frame of reference, no criticism that I know of has approached
this highly condensed prose with the kind of rigour that needs to be
applied. Indeed, so concentrated is Barthelme's prose that even the
following analysis of "Mandible," which runs some 12,000 words, manages to
consider only the better part of the relevant associative material active
within the frame !Of the story.
Of the three stories, "Hiding Man" has probably attracted the most
attention in criticism, and "The Big Broadcast of 1938" the least.
"Florence Green" llas attracted more than its share of critical attention and
is generally recognized as an important story. Primarily this is because it
explicitly introduces the concept of the "psychoanalytic issue" as a
potential, if somewhat problematic source of meaning in Barthelme•s
aesthetic (not insignificantly, "Florence Green" is suggestively placed as
the opening story in Barthelme•s first collection of short stories, a fact
which lends a certain emphasis to the entire question of the psychoanalytic
issue as it obtains in his work}.
It is perhaps appropriate at this juncture to emphasize again exactly
what it is that this study is seeking in the stories. We have spoken above
of Robbe-Grillet as that author whose work probably best exemplifies the
postmodern argument that writing is "not derivative of an anterior reality,
that it does not refer us to that reality, and that it is itself the reality
 -136

with which we must deal .. (Docherty xi). I want to allude to his example a
final time. Roland Barthes, in his introduction to Morrisette's study of
Robbe-Grillet's fiction, says that, while he recognizes the originality of
~
Robbe-Grillet's vision, he agrees with Morrisette thatAis wrong to assume
that Robbe-Grillet's prose is cut off from all reference. The principle
r~orri sette adopts, and which Barthes supports, is that some of the objects
and situations in the prose are patently obsessive; that is, they are
repeated often enough to imply that they have a meaning {based on the
assumption that what is repeated has meaning). According to Barthes,
Morrisette is able to show in his study that certain "objects ••• reintroduced
with variations throughout a given novel, all imply an act, criminal or
sexual, and beyond this act, an interiority .. (13). In other words,
Morrisette is able to show that Robbe-Grillet's fictions are based on a
story, and that this story has a meaning: "The result is that, provided
with a story, et psychology (pathological), and a subject that are if not
symbolic at least referential, the Robbegrilletian novel is no longer the
'flat' design of early criticism; it is a thing not only full but full of
secrets. TherE!fore, criticism must begin to search out what lies behind and
around this object: it seeks for 'keys' (and usually finds them)" (15).
This study intends to show the presence and function of what Barthes calls
11
interiority 11
~in Barthelme's writing by observing patterns of obsession that
have their ori9in in the pathology of the authorial voice; what my method
requires is thl:! discovery and subsequent analysis of the Keys .. within 11

individual stories, keys distinguished by repetition. Following the

discussion of patterns within an individual story, we'll proceed to a
superimposition of texts in an attempt to describe the features of what we
 -137

will call the central fantasy. The central fantasy is composed of latent
common denominators which might otherwise have escaped detection and which
cannot be explained by traditional methods of literary criticism.

The narrator of 11 Me and Miss Mandible 11 (CBDC), identified only as

Joseph, the author- of the journal we read, has been sent back to elementary
school to relearn lessons he somehow failed to appreciate on his first
visit. The author-ities responsible for this arrangement are interested, not
only in punishing Joseph, but in rehabilitating him: they expect him
eventually to rejoin the ranks of functioning adults. His adult career as a
Claims Adjustor came to an abrupt and ignominious end when it was discovered
that he had acted in the interests of an elderly woman, a Mrs. Anton Bichek,
and against the interests of his company.
His teacher, Miss Mandible, and indeed everyone else with whom he comes
into contact, is content to treat him as an eleven-year old child in spite
of obvious physical evidence that he is a fully-grown, thirty-five-year old
adult. His days ·in school are enlivened by the anticipation that Miss
Mandible, who has in Joseph's opinion, a 11 lubricious eye 11 (102), will make
some sort of sexual advance. Eventually she does, they are discovered, and
the story ends with Joseph on his way to another doctor for observation, and
Miss Mandible feeling 11
ruined but fulfilled" (105).
For Joseph, life, specifically the rigours of adult life, is conceived
of as a kind of puzzle, complete with clues, a mystery to be solved; his
fall from experience back into innocence happened because he "misread a
 138

clue 11
(109). The agency responsible for providing the clues is referred to
consistently as s·imply the .. authorities ... The nature of that authority is
somewhat obscure, but what is clear is that Joseph tends to equate all forms
of authority: th4:! authorities that put him back in school, the army, and
the larger systems of America itself, are expressions of the same basic
failed system of authority. The journal, of course, owes a great deal to
Kafka, especially his novel The Trial (Joseph's name is an obvious reference
to Joseph K.) and the short story, 11
The Metamorphosis... As in Kafka's The
Trial, the persecuting authority in 11 Mandible 11 has no real face; its
influence, although immanent, is arbitrary, and the source of that authority
is difficult to trace.
Encouraged by Joseph, who plays the role of victim with a strange
enthusiasm, we cannot fail but to identify America as the source of Joseph's
troubles. Yet for all of his bitter insight into the debacle that is
American life, Joseph never once overtly resists its corrupt machinations,
nor is he inclined to openly protest his innocence. He acts, in other words
(as distinct from what he says), as if he and not America were the guilty
party. Observe, for instance, how he rationalizes his decision to accept
the grotesque situation in which he has been placed: 11
Therefore, when I was
installed here, although I knew an error had been made, I countenanced it, I
was shrewd; I was aware that there might well be some kind of advantage to
be gained from what seemed a disaster. The role of the Adjustor teaches one
much [emphasis adlded] 11 (99). It is only by carefully reading the partisan
testimony of the journal, with a particular eye to the suggestiveness of the
language in the prose, that a more feasible rationale for the predicament of
this consummate ' 'Adjustor can be realized.
1 11
As we shall see, the prose of
 139

Joseph's "clandestine" journal cum diary is layered (98), a nexus of merged

meanings. It is written in a prose style designed to exploit the
suggestiveness of language, to encourage multiple and sometimes
contradictory connotations (as in, the statement 11 the role of the Adjustor
teaches one much 11 ) . If we are to get at the source of Joseph's problem, and
the nature of the "advantage" he now hopes to gain, we will have to accept
at the outset that one of the things this shrewd Adjustor is adjusting is
the truth of his situation.
The second childhood to which Joseph has been forced to regress is
fraught with strange tensions, intrigue, and a very real danger.
PsychoanalysisD with its unique concern with the concealed influences of
infantile experience.on adult life, would appear to be happily situated to
provide some kiind of commentary on this short story. There is much that can
be said about the meaning of the story, particularly with regard to what
might be deemed the philosphical or sociological dimensions that seem to
accrue around the image of America as purveyor of lies and false promises.
However, interpretation that doesn't take unconscious content into account
would inevitably fail to account fully for much that happens in the story,
especially the ambiguous conclusion. The story is clotted wih incidents and
peculiar associations that resist classification; clearly, the implications
~~
of Joseph's situation go far deeper than might~apparent. America is part of
Joseph's problem, but the truth behind his situation has a much more
intimate source and reference.

On the manifest level, Joseph's journal provides us with abundant ana

substantive reasons for accepting what would otherwise be viewed as a
 140

humiliating situation. He asks to be seen, more than anything, as a victim,

a victim of too fine a sensibility, the unfortunate bearer of a "great
overgrown heart" (104). He describes the world he knew as an adult as "a
vast junkyard" (99). This regression into the stultifying world of a second
childhood is some~hat justified, then, given that the alternative is life in
a wasteland.
The story is structured to encourage the view that the American Dream
and Joseph•s personal breakdown are functions of a general lack of semiotic
integrity: 11
But I say, looking about in this incubator of future citizens,
that signs are si~1ns, and that some of them are lies. This is the great
discovery of my ti,me here 11 ( 109). This 1 ack of correspondence between sign
and significance i1s carefully and repeatedly cited as the cause, both of
Joseph 1 s inability to find love and for the perpetuation of a corrupt and
debilitating myth of American righteousness. Joseph•s estrangement from
1ove and his estr;angement as an American citizen are, however, different

issues--the former is a personal, psychological issue, while the latter is

primarily a philosophical matter (albeit with psychological implications).
Nevertheless, Joesph is either unwilling or unable to see his personal
problems as anything but a function of his having misread the signs of his
culture. Does the failure of America to keep its promises adequately
account for Joseph 1 s unwillingness to protest his situation? Does it
account for the singular absence in him of resentment over, or even of
disappointment with, his present situation? Before we begin to address
these question, \'jle must first de a1 with a more fundamenta 1 question: what
is the exact nature of the "advantage 11 sought by this innocent,
too-wholesome, all-suffering victim who accepts (and even seems to seek out)
 141

punishment?
With regard to his failure to read signs correctly on the personal
level, according to Joseph, he and his wife Brenda were led into their
unhappy marriage because each had 11 misread 11 a series of clues. Joseph, for
his part, naively assumed that because he had obtained a wife with all the
right 11 Wife signs [beauty, charm, softness, perfume,cookery] he had found
love 11 (109). Brenda had likewise been taken in by false signs: 11
Brenda,
reading the same signs that now misled Miss Mandible and Sue Ann Brownly,
felt she had been promised that she could never be bored 11 (109). Similarly,
what the flag 11
betokens 11 about America doesn't represent the reality that
exists beneath thE~ veneer of its "general ri ghteousness 11 : Pl ucked from my
11

unexamined life among other pleasant, desperate, money-making young

Americans, thrown backwards in space and time, I am beginning to understand
how I went wrong, how we all go wrong" (100). In Joseph's view life in
"pleasant" Americ.a requires a certain "desperation.. on the part of its
citizens; provided one is prepared to participate in the conspiracy of the
relevance of American values, a measure of solace is seen to be forthcoming.
Miss Mandible, for instance, after she seduces Joseph, for purely personal
reasons feels that America has kept faith with her: 11
Although she will be
charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, she seems at peace;
her promise has been kept. She knows that everything she has been told
about life, about America, is true 11 (11). Miss Mandible, like Joseph,
equates her private desires with the American Dream. What is curious about
this particular passage is that, in spite of the bitter irony with which
Mandible's delusive conflation of spheres is presented, Joseph has made and
will continue to make the same mistake. And while it appears that only Miss
 142

Mandible is served by such a shifting of personal responsibility, the fact

is that Joesph is no less served the procedure.
America and an endemic sense of uncertainty are surely involved in
Joseph's situation, but the failure of America to provide signs of absolute
integrity doesn't begin to account for the particular dimensions of Joseph's
11
tragic 11 situation. The great discovery that signs are only signs and that
some of them are lies is one of enormous significance and marks Joesph as a
man whose sensibilities are developed well beyond those of the Americans
around him. However, notwithstanding the virtue of this insight, there is
no suggestion at all in the story that the 11 fundamental flaw" (108) in him
which precipitated his fall from grace is effected in the least by his
insight into the truth of what America represents: he remains at the
conclusion of the journal a prisoner of forces he can neither understand nor
control. The gre,at discovery made in Joseph's return to the class room may
well be that signs are signs and that some of them are lies, but why is it
that this metaphysical epiphany does nothing to mitigate against the more
insidious consequences of a deeper mystery, a mystery that Joesph will
utterly fail to solve?
The fact is that it is not America or semiotics that preoccupies Joseph,
it is love: "The sixth grade at Horace Greeley Elementary is a furnace of
love, love, love" (106). His descriptions of the preterite world he has
been thrown back into tend to concentrate around this, its most significant
feature: for Jos.eph, it is "an atomsphere ••• charged with aborted
sexuality," an atmosphere that 11 buzzes with imperfectly comprehended
titillation" (lon. "But I did not create this atmosphere," he says, once
again refusing to take any responsibility for the situation, "[but] I am
 143

caught up in it like the others" (107).

The atmosphere! of Joseph's past is dominated in a particular way by
females; it is a world in which the predatory Miss Mandible and Sue Ann
Brownly, with her typically feminine "malign compassion," vie for the
opportunity to involve Joesph in dangerous sexual intrigue. Significantly,
it is also a world that Joseph is in no hurry to leave: "Here I am safe, I
have a place; I do not wish to entrust myself once more to the whimsy of
authority" ( 107).
In this furnace of love, love, love, the environment he has not known
since a child, Joseph finds himself in a position to solve the riddle of his
past. Like a sort of Oedipus, he spends his time weighing certain clues to
the mystery of his origins, the experiences that have resulted in his
unhappy hybrid status of part man and part chi 1 d: "All of the mysteries
that perplexed me as an adult have their origins here, and one by one I am
numbering them, exposing their roots" {109) (this passage has something of a
ironic metafictional component to it as well, inasmuch as the journal is
comprised of numb,~red sections, sections in which various roots of the
mystery are expos1~d). Joseph is viewed by the children as "a mutation of
some sort but eSSI:!ntially a peer" (103): in light of the correspondences
between his situation and that of the Oedipal archetype it is significant
that the particular physical form his "mutation" takes reminds one of
Oedipus: according to Joseph, the students treat him as if he "had only one
eye, or wasted, metal-wrapped legs" (103).
What of Joseph's own views on love? In what is surely a flourish of
ironic ambiguity, he says the following: "••• it is only in the matter of my
sex that I feel my own true age; that is apparently something that, once
 144

learned, can never be forgotten" (103}. What are we to understand by the

phrase, "my own true age"? The manifest surface of the journal would have
us believe that its author enjoys maturity and confidence as a sexual adult.
But is there any evidence in the text to support such a view? It certainly
is remarkable that Joseph, a confessed casualty in all other spheres of
development, should claim to have kept his sex consistent with his physical
age, free from the failures of confidence that otherwise go unchecked in his
person {if the thing once learned and never forgotten is some sexual
technique, Joseph's view of what constitutes his "true age" is impoverished
in the extreme). His assertion that sex represents his only viable claim to
maturity is especially perplexing given that the journal otherwise makes so
much of the fact that he looks and thinks like an adult: "I am thirty-five,
I've been in the i:t.rmy, I am six foot one, I have hair in the appropriate
places, my voice ·is a baritone, I know perfectly well what to do with Miss
Mandible if she ever makes up her mind" (97}. His physical and mental
faculties, then, are in no way those of a child. In fact, there is every
indication in the journal that in all things excepting his sex, Joseph is an
adult male.
Joseph's "true age" sexually is probably closer to eleven, the age of
the children in the class he is now forced to occupy. Sexual maturity
includes the capaiCi ty to view women, at 1east to a degree, as something
other than vicious, malign, lubricious, duplicituous, callous, and finally,
dangerous at close quarters. The journal, however, entertains no other view
of women than thclt for Joseph, just another of those "individual egos crazy
for love" (108} he sees all around him, women come equipped with mandibles.
Joseph may indeed know what to do with Mandible in a physical sense, but a
 145

large part of the reason he•s back in school is that he has no real idea
what to do with her psychologically; sex as a physical act may lie within
the ambit of his maturity, but sexuality is another matter. The irony of
Joseph•s insistence on his own true age and on the fact that he carries with
him the thing "once learned" and "never forgotten" is, of course, that he is
telling the truth on one level: the thing once learned and never forgotten
is the lesson of sex he learned as a child, and never got over. The "roots"
of the problem that plagued him as an adult reach deep into the
psycho-sexual conflicts of childhood.

Freud identified three component phases of the oedipus complex. We

need not speak of any chronological order of passage or even of the
necessity that all three phases be present before the oedipus complex can be
identified as such. However, as I hope to show, all three of these primal
phantasies are expressed in "Mandible" and lie at the very heart of the
mystery Joseph will fail to solve:
Among the occurrences which continually occur in the story of a
neurotic•s childhood, and seem hardly ever absent, are some of
particular significance which I therefore consider worthy of
special attention. As models of this type I will enumerate:
observation of parental intercourse, seduction by an adult, and
the threat of castration." (1974, 406)
What I propose to do is to organize the analysis of the "imperfectly
comprehended ti ti 11 ati on" ( 107) in this journal around these three
occurences.

Clark Blaise, in his novel Lunar Attractions, expresses what is a

fundamental predicament of children in terms most useful for our discussion:
"In those days, my parents were to me not people, not personalities, but
 146

contending principles in the universe .. (10). From a psychoanalytic point of

view, this is wonderfully put: with his passage into the oedipal phase of
development, the child finds himself situated between two contending
principles. The result of that tension, the degree to which it is
successfully resolved, will determine the nature of his personality, and so,
the quality of his life.
Robert Con Davis, in a study of The Odyssey, makes the analogy between
the child's passage through this difficult period and Odysseus• passage
between the twin threats of Scylla and Charybdis. The paternal principle,
according to Davis, corresponds nicely to Scylla, an 11 insuperable and
adamantine ••• image of irresistable demand ••• [that] incorporates several
aspects of the rigidity and authority of paternal prohibition .. {1981, 22).
Freud points out that the successful resolution of the castration anxiety
that attends the oedipus complex depends to a great extent on the efficacy
of the father; that is, it is the strong and potent and stable father who
must exercise his prohibitive authority over the son. Everything depends on
the strength of the father's law and the father's concommitant capacity to
be empathetic. For the child, a demonstration of anger against this father
constitutes an unacceptable risk.
We have already observed that Joseph is especially careful to avoid an
outright challenge to the authorities, thereby circumventing the threat of
talionic punishment. In his life, so far as we know, he has never openly
challenged the 11 authorities, 11 despite the fact, as his journal makes
abundantly clear, he doesn't for a moment believe that their claim to
authority is valid. One of the insistent preoccupations of the journal is
the arbitrariness, and even the absurdity, of authority. Whenever he is
 147

faced with a situation in which authority has been arbitrarily and unfairly
exercised in a kind of ethical vaccuum (the Mrs. Bichek affair, the painting
of the trees while in the Army, the installation in the elementary
classroom), Joseph accepts "the whimsy of authority" (109) without a murmur
of overt protest. Something keeps him silent: 11
When I was first assigned to
this room I wanted to protest, the error seemed obvious ••• but I have come to
believe it was deliberate, that I have been betrayed again" (108). From
this statement we get an indication of how his mind works when faced with
the whimsy of authority: notice the shift from the impatience with the
authorities (an impatience which, if allowed to mature into expressed
hostility, would lead him to openly rebel) to a conspiracy theory. The
agency behind his predicament then takes on a face, but it seems an
altogether unlikely face: he suspects "his wife of fomer days" (100) of
being behind his problem. The agency manifestly responsible, the paternal
authority represented by Henry Goodykind of The Great Northern Insurance
Agency, is thus effectively let off the hook. For reasons not immediately
apparent in the text, a woman is suspected of being the cause of his
misfortune. It is important to note that there is no evidence whatever
offered in the text on the manifest level to support the notion of a literal
conspiracy, yet for reasons of his own Joseph is predisposed to excuse the
obviously responsible male authority and to focus the hostility he does feel
on an unlikely source, his former wife, Brenda. Even the name "Henry
Goodykind" expresses the benignity of the paternal principle here, whereas
it is the rather forbiddingly named Miss Mandible who serves as the local
agent for the maternal principle, and the object of Joseph's hostility (as
we note below in another context, Joseph tends to view all of the women
 148

currently in his life as versions of the same woman).

There is much evidence in the text that Joseph, despite his

determination to present himself as a man "with a great, overgrown heart"
(104) and to play the hapless, gentle victim of a corrupt and insensitive
system, is concealing an enormous amount of hostility, hostility that finds
only oblique and disguised expression in his attitudes and behaviours. For
instance, we note that Joseph's former "life-role" as a Claims Adjustor
"compelled" him to spend his time amid the debris of our civilization:
"rumpled fenders, roofless sheds, gutted warehouses, smashed arms and legs"
(99). The imagery here, with the exception of the roofless shed, all has a
human reference (the word "rumpled," suggesting wrinkled clothes, is used
when referring to the fenders instead of the more likely word "crumpled").
The word that Joseph chooses to use to account for his involvement in what
might otherwise be considered a morbid line of work is compelled, which
serves to underline a sense of distaste, but more important, a lack of
responsibility for a (pre)occupation in such mayhem. He suggests that
prolonged service in this role has taken a psychological toll: "After ten
years of this one has a tendency to see the world as a vast junkyard,
looking at a man and seeing only his (potentially) mangled parts, entering a
house only to trace the path of the inevitable fire" (99). Reading
Barthelme one has to be very sensitive to the manner in which the ambiguity
and connotative power of language is exploited. In the sentence beginning
"After ten years ••• ," we have an excellent example of language used
ambiguously. Notice how the verb tense shifts in the middle of the sentence
to the series of gerunds, "looking," "entering," "seeing": the effect is
 149

slightly jarring, suggesting that some internal disturbance, however mild,

has taken place. On the figurative level, the sentence represents an
eloquent, even a poetic indictment of the banality and the brutality of
modern life, a point of view with which we, as readers, are likely to
sympathize. On another level, however, a more literal level (a consequence
of the verb shift), Joseph has made what amounts to a confession of
unwholesome "tendencies": in other words, when Joseph looks at a man, he
sees only potentially mangled parts; when he enters a house, he looks for
the ways it might be burned down. Quite literally, then, when Joseph looks
at the world he looks through the eyes of a murderer and an arsonist. You
cannot help but be struck by the way in which this journal is constructed so
as to at once justify passive and irresponsible behaviour on the basis of
sensitivity and compassion, even as it allows for the expression of what
might easily be construed as the vicious terms of an anger its author cannot
otherwise express.
In his relations with the children in the classroom and with Miss
Mandible, Joseph's actions are uniformly those of an obliging and even model
student. A closer look, however, reveals a subtle difference between the
way he behaves with the other boys and the way he behaves with the females
of any age. The difference is not so much a matter of behaviour--on the
manifest level he treats both sexes with equal care, repeatedly professing,
and apparently demonstrating, interest in their welfare--it is much more a
matter of the attitude he brings to these relationships. It is only if we
look at the consequences of his behaviour, and then compare those
consequences with the peculiar way in which his journal characterizes his
relationships with either sex, that the difference becomes apparent.
 150

In the journal entry for September 22, Joseph informs us that he is

11
being solicited for the volleyball team [emphasis added] 11 (99). He
declines, 11
refusing to take unfair profit from [his] height... Does this
episode simple represent a display of good sportsmanship and personal
integrity on Joseph's part? This reading is certainly the reading the
journal invites. This behaviour is certainly consistent with Joseph's
pattern of going to great lengths to avoid any form of competition or
confrontation with males, even with boys who would seem to pose no physical
threat. Nonetheless, there is a subtle indication that there might be
another reason behind Joseph's unwillingness to press the advantage of his
adult status. The clue the text offers here is the word 11 Solicited, 11 a word
that suggests that some kind of sexual overture has been made to Joseph.
It's as if taking advantage of his mature physical prowess would somehow
draw him into a sexual situation he would rather avoid.
11
In a second of the isolated challenges to [his] largeness .. (103), he
is challenged to a fight by Harry Broan. It is a challenge Joseph
characterizes as being (on Harry's part) nothing short of 11 a suicidal
undertaking 11 (104). Again, as in the volleyball incident, gentle Joseph
11
declines: I replied that I didn't feel up to it 11 (104). This challenge is
patterned on the model of the son's challenge to the father's largeness and
authority. For some sons, this kind of adventure is quite literally a
11
Suicidal undertaking... What is especially interesting about this
particular challenge to Joseph's 11 largeness 11 is the manner in which it is
resolved.
This confrontation is an extremely complex depiction of the father-son
rivalry from two points of view; Joseph manages the entire confrontation so
 151

that he plays both father and son in an effort to play out a fantasy
reconciliation. Apparently, for Joseph this reconciliation with the
father-figure is a necessary and preliminary step in the seduction of Miss
Mandible. The most obvious role the adult Joseph plays in this situation is
that of the large and powerful father whose authority is challenged by the
smaller and weaker son. Joseph as father-figure behaves in an unusual way:
to avoid competition, he is completely willing to abandon a legitimate claim
to power and authority. From Harry-as-son's point of view, this resolution
is a dream come true; playing the role of overt filial challenger over to
what rightfully belongs to the larger man, Harry suffers no loss of life or
face as a result of an ill-advised challenge. The father-figure is
successfully challenged and the two become, as Joseph puts it, "friends
forever" (104).
But this journal is the childish Joseph's journal, and the suspicion is
that it is Joseph who is the real "son" looking for the means to identify
with, and propitiate, a threatening father. In terms of the latent content
of the confrontation with Harry, Joseph is able to act out a fantasy
resolution of the conflict with the father by acting out the role of the
passive, obliging father who is willing to allow the son to successfully
challenge him. For Joseph to express his real intent here as son, however,
it would also be necessary to have Harry play the father to his son. He
manages to do just that by associating Harry with the father. Harry's
dimensions as father-figure are realized in two ways. Notice first of all
that Harry is himself a figure of some authority: when he addresses his
challenge to Joseph he is attended by his "followers." More important,
though, is the fact that Harry's authority comes from his rich father who
 152

made a fortune manufacturing something called the Broan Bathroom Vent. For
Joseph's show of restraint in not killing Harry, he is offered an unlikely
reward by "Ventsvi 11 e" Harry: Harry takes Joseph aside and "privately"
offers him "all the bathroom vents [he] will ever need, at a ridiculously
modest figure" (104). Harry offers, in other words, to share his father's
source of power. Joseph thus manages to align himself through Harry with a
"rich" and powerful father.
The nature of that paternal power comes from a rather evocatively named
appliance, the bathroom vent. It doesn't take a great deal of ingenuity to
see in the "bathroom vent" a vivid metaphor for the sphincter (the name
"Broan" could be a composite of "brown" and 11
roan," which, given Harry's
background, makes for a suggestive sobriquet). Joseph, in choosing to align
himself with bathroom vents "forever," reveals his own infantile
preoccupation with his bowels. Why would control of the bowels be important
to Joseph? Control of the bowels represents a momentous event in a child's
development, an event which has a great deal to do with the way that child
deals with authority. Learning to control his bowels is the first time that
a child must learn to deny a drive to pleasure by making concessions to
forces outside himself. Control of the anal sphincter also represents the
child's first civilized behaviour in that self-regulation is the mark of all
civilized behaviour. One sure means of demonstrating defiance of authority
at this stage is through the deliberate lack of
self-regularization--bathroom venting, in other words.
Putting all of the associations surrounding this episode together, what
do we have? On one level we see Joseph, an adult male with a real claim to
authority, assuming a passive role, a role passive to the point of impotence
 153

(recall that Joseph doesn•t feel "up to it"). We see the victorious and
aggressive child Harry who, rather than exploit his advantage, chooses to
align himself with Joseph, the father-figure of diminished authority. On
another level we see Harry sharing the father•s riches with the childish
Joseph, rewarded for his passivity. Together, these two "friends forever,"
who have negotiated a way through a suicidal confrontation, join in a
relationship that depends on the richness that comes from venting aggression
in the relative safety of the bathroom. What we see demonstrated in this
episode is, in fact, the subtle skill of a consummate claims adjustor with a
genuine flair for insurance. The oedipal confrontation between father and
son is resolved to the satisfaction of both father and son. The price of
this compromise, however, is very high. The current form of Joseph•s
punishment perfectly expresses the consequences of this particular
resolution to the oedipus complex: chronic and moribund passivity and
impotence (castration), continued interests in a powerful and forbidden
mother-figure, and general psychological retardation of aspects of the self
that are prevented from developing beyond the infantile stage.

The primal scene, the second of the three components of the oedipus
complex, is defined by Rycroft as the child 1 s "conception of his parents
having intercourse as an idea around which fantasy has been woven rather
than a recollection of something actually performed" (123). Usually these
fantasies arouse in the child a mixture of dread and excitement in that they
express both the desire for the mother (seduction) and the fear of
castration that will result if the seduction takes place. Joseph•s journal
is emphatic on the point that his childhood is the source of the personality
 154

disorders that have left him, as he puts it, "ever so slightly awry" {108).
Not surprisingly, while sifting through the clues and contradictory signs
that might lead him to divine the mystery of his past, Joseph is drawn into
a version of the primal scene fantasy. The most developed and suggestive
allusion to primal scene fantasy (one that highlights the damage that can
result from a lack of its proper resolution) centres around the Movie-TV
Secrets episode.
In the context of this classroom, Movie-TV Secrets is a catalogue of
secret adult sex upon which the children in the class, especially the girls,
batten their fierce sexual curiousity. Exchanged as tokens of love, these
magazines serve the most ambitious and aggressive of the girls, Sue Ann
Brownly, as a guide to the adult role she can expect to play "when she is
suddenly free from this drab, f1 at class room" {106). At one point the girl
Frankie Randolph makes an "overture" to Joseph by sending him a copy of
Movie-TV Secrets (it is interesting to note that the only passive female in
the story--a girl who "hides her head under the desk" (105) after she sends
the magazine--has a name composed of two masculine names). Sue Ann, seeing
the challenge, "pulls from her satchel no less than seventeen of these
magazines, thrusting them at [Joseph] as if to prove that anything her rival
has to offer, she can top" (105). Joseph "shuffle[s]" through them "noting
the broad editorial perspective [emphasis added]". Following his reading,
he reacts with what for him is an exceptional show of emotion: "I am angry
and shove the magazines back at her without even a whisper of thanks."
One of the "secrets" contained in these magazines is one likely to fuel
Joseph's anger: girls, once they reach sexual maturity, are given a
terrible power over men. An ad for "Hip Helper" promises "hipless
 155

eleven-year olds" that once supplied with the proper equipment they 1 11 be
able to "Drive him frantic" (105). Joseph 1 s remark on the subject
constitutes a remarkable insight into the nature of displacement: "Perhaps
this explains Bobby Vanderbilt 1 s preoccupation with Lancias and Maseratis;
it is a defense against being driven frantic." Joseph sees the fascination
boys of this age have with cars as a "defense" against the "drives" that
will leave them vulnerable to "frantic" disequilibrium. Little wonder that
Sue Ann, who according to Joseph is already equipped with "a woman 1 s
disguised aggression, 11 carries so many of these powerful magazines around in
her satchel. (It is interesting that Barthelme has changed the usual
advertisements for breast enhancement typically featured in these magazines
to an advertisement for the improbable, and probably unmarketable, "padded
rumps" of Hip Helper. This shift to the frantic-inducing hips and away from
the pre-oedipal and non-threatening breast may connote the threat boys face
when the hips of the mother, as opposed to the breast, become a source of
interest).
The most important "secret" in the magazine, however, concerns the love
triangle of Liz-Eddie-Debbie: all sixteen examples of editorials are
concerned with the causes and consequences of this scandalous love triangle.
The great "secret" the magazine shares, in other words, is that a rival can
come between a married man and woman. Joseph 1 S eye is drawn to one picture
in particular: "The picture shows a rising young movie idol in bed,
pajama-ed and bleary-eyed, while an equally blowzy young woman looks
startled beside him" (105). "Here s what really happened!," proclaims the
1

magazine. Joseph then makes a strange comment about the picture: "I am
happy to know that the picture is not what it seems; it seems to be nothing
 156

less than divorce evidence" (105). What does it "seem to be" to Joseph?
From the point of view of the children in the classroom, this adult couple
are performing a version of the fantasized primal scene. But the picture is
also associated with a depiction of a betrayal in a marriage bed. The
picture thus could serve to depict a warning to potential "young" lovers of
the consequences of answered desires. The picture would represent a very
powerful statement to the "bleary-eyed" oedipally determined son, the son
who sees himself in his mother•s eyes as a "rising young ••• idol"; a picture
of this kind would at once serve to warn of the dangers of exposure while
exciting curiousity with a glimpse of the forbidden sexual act. As it
happens, for the oedipally determined and psychologically retarded Joseph,
the picture serves, not only as a clue to his past, but it accurately augurs
his future: his pending tryst-disaster with Miss Mandible in the cloakroom,
the major culminating event of the story which is a version of the primal
scene. This is the episode as it is described in the entry for December 9,
the last entry in the journal:
Disaster once again. Tomorrow I am to be sent to a doctor, for
observation. Sue Ann Brownly caught Miss Mandible and me in the
cloakroom, during recess, and immediately threw a fit. For a
moment I thought she was actually going to choke. She ran out of
the room weeping, straight for the principal •s office, certain now
which one of us was Debbie, which Eddie, which Liz. I am sorry to
be the cause of her disillusionment, but I know that she will
recover. Miss Mandible is ruined but fulfilled. (110-11)
Like most of the events in the story, this event signifies on a number
of levels. It is uniquely constructed within the context of the story to
provide Joseph with a seduction of the mother-figure, Miss Mandible, and
second, it displaces to the figure of the child Sue Ann, the trauma that
attends the betrayal inherent in the primal scene. From Sue Ann•s point of
view, she is the injured party: her love object, Joseph, who is to her what
 157

Miss Mandible is to him, a parent-figure of the opposite sex, betrays her by

choosing the rival mother-figure.
This episode in the 11 cloaked room 11 of fantasy serves Joseph in many
ways. Notice that both Sue Ann and Mandible are the objects of violence
here: Sue Ann is choked and Mandible is 11
ruined. 11 Mandible's ruination not
only has the extra-textual connotation of the loss of reputation, it has an
inter-textual denotation: the word is used in only one other context in the
journal, to describe the nature of Joseph's punishments: 11
A ruined
marriage, a ruined adjusting career ..... (107). Miss Mandible, in other
words, is punished in exactly the same terms that Joseph has been punished.
On the unconscious level of this journal, her punishment suits her crime in
that she represents the sexually attractive mother-figure who figured in the
original ruination of Joseph's life.
Typically, Joseph denies any hostile feelings or sense of satisfaction
for the injuries done to these women (Sue Ann is only provisionally a child,
see below): 11
I am sorry to be the cause of her disillusionment, .. says
Joseph. With a gesture of apparent selflessness, he appeals to the
authorities to hold him and not Miss Mandible responsible: 11
I have tried to
convince the school authorities that I am a minor only in a very special
sense, that I am in fact most to blame--but it does no good. They are as
dense as ever. My contemporaries are astounded that I present myself as
anything other than innocent victim 11 (111). Why does Joseph feel that he
should be held responsible? After all, both Miss Mandible and he are
adults, and throughout the journal it has been Miss Mandible and not Joseph
who has been consistently identified as the source of the passion between
them. Indeed, if we can credit the journal, Miss Mandible is equally, if
 158

not more, to blame than Joseph. Notwithstanding Miss Mandible's manifest

culpability, Joseph is determined that he should be held responsible. This
is a case, common in fantasy, of being able to eat your cake and have it
too.
"Guilt hangs about me" (106), declares Joseph at one point in the
journal. On the manifest level of the journal, however, the justification
for this guilt, so oppressive and so constant, is never offered. It is only
if we look at the consequences of his behaviour that we see some cause to
credit that sense of guilt. Joseph is able to accomplish much in his short
stint in the classroom: he manages to seduce Miss Mandible even as he
punishes her and Sue Ann for their malign compassion and their sexual power
over him; he proves the authorities as dense as ever; he escapes blame and
even wins the admiration of his contemporaries. What everyone, of course,
fails to realize about this skillful "adjustor" is that the best way to
escape responsibility is to declare your guilt in such a way that that
declaration could not be taken seriously. Further, were one inclined to
accomplish what Joseph has accomplished, the ideal place to act from would
be the last place the authorities would think to look: from the safety of
his rather special minor status, free from the burden of responsibility that
would fall to an adult, Joseph strikes back at the agents responsible for
relegating him permanently to the psychic purgatory of his childhood.

The girl Sue Ann is shaken but she wi 11 "recover," and the woman Miss
Mandible is "fulfilled" despite the loss of her job. Neither appears likely
to suffer any long term ill-effects as a result of the "disaster" in the
 159

cloakroom which marks the end of their relationship with Joseph. Each of
their recoveries serves to underline the fact that Joseph is doomed to
remain behind, a minor in a very special sense, part boy and part man. Sue
Ann's recovery points to the child's proper development out of the oedipal
desire for the parent of the opposite sex and Miss Mandible's recovery
demonstrates the kind of fulfillment possible in a sexual relationship
between consenting adults. Unlike Joseph, Miss Mandible and Sue Ann have
found the means to escape from, and matriculate out of, the stultifying
atmosphere of this classroom. The real victim of "disaster" is Joseph, the
one who shows no hope of recovery or escape. His behaviours have, if
anything, only served to deepen the terms of his regressive, psychologically
retarded status; Joseph, as "frantic" as ever, ends the story essentially
where he began it, on the way to a doctor for observation. One of the
reasons he is likely to remain in the position he's in is that the
culminating primal scene with Miss Mandible is very likely a reprise of a
seduction scene which we can only assume took place in his past, on that
first passage through the system: "Disaster once again."

As the title of the story indicates, "Me and Miss Mandible" centres
around Joseph's relationship with Miss Mandible. Despite the fact that she
is a correpondent in what amounts to the oedipal seduction that figures as
the central event in the story, she remains a somewhat obscure figure. Lone
representative of the adult world in the classroom, she is described always
in terms of either her breasts or her eyes. For instance, as we have
already noted, the first thing we learn about Miss Mandible is that she, and
not Joseph, has a "lubricious eye." There are several other references to
 160

eyes in the story which together comprise an important pattern.

The pattern of emphasis on the eyes is likely a result of Joseph's
studied passivity; Joseph prefers passively to observe situations and to see
himself as acted upon, an attitude which forces others to act and thus
reveal themselves: "But I prefer to sit in this too-small seat with the
desktop cramping my thighs and examine the life around me" (97). In Joseph's
world, much is expressed through the eyes: "But Miss Manidible was watching
me, there was nothing I could do" (100); "She watches me constantly, trying
to keep sexual significance out of her look; I am afraid the other children
have noticed 11 (100); ..... Sue Ann watches me with malign compassion" (100);
"We accept courageous assurances without blinking" (100); "The next thing I
knew I was here ••• under the lubricious eye of Miss Mandible 11 (102); "I leaf
through Movie-TV Secrets and get an eyeful" (103); "But I cannot deny that I
am singed by her long glances from the vicinity of the chalkboard" (103);
"Conflagrations smolder behind her eyelids, yearning for the Fire Marshall
clouds her eyes" (104); "Sue Ann has observed Frankie Randolph's overture,
and catching my eye ••• "{105); "From time to time Miss Mandible looks at me
reproachfully, as if blaming me for the uproar" (107).
It is also worth noting that Joseph's "feeling of having been through
all of this before" has a peculiar effect on his legs: 11
But I prefer to
sit ••• cramping my thighs"; "Yesterday [Sue Ann] viciously ki eked my ankle
for not paying attenion [to her]. It is swollen still 11 (100): Joseph feels
that he is regarded 11 as if [he] had ••• metal-wrapped legs 11 {103); 11
Sue Ann
Brownly kicking me in the ankle ••• Her pride in my newly acquired limp is
transparent, everyone knows that she has set her mark upon me, that it is a
victory in her unequal struggle with Miss Mandible for my great, overgrown
 161

heart" (104); 11
At recess I can hardly walk; my legs do not wish to uncoil
themselves .. (107). Although Joseph actually limps, there is a tendency on
his part to view the limp as something not part of his self: the limp is
Sue Ann's 11 mark 11 ; the limp is 11 acquired 11 ; the students look at him "as if 11
they see metal-wrapped legs; the legs do not wish to 11 uncoil themselves ...
This tendency to shift the source of the 11
Sign 11 of feeling is also
evinced in the eye motif: it is Miss Mandible's lubricious eye that is
"clouded" with passion, not Joseph's. One can appreciate that, in terms of
the story as fantasy, it is important that Miss Mandible be identified as
the souce of appetite, even to the degree that she becomes something of a
caricature (as her name suggests) of voracious appetite. However, as I have
suggested all along, there is reason to suspect that the true source of
desire may be Joseph.
Projection is a form of defense against unpleasant unconscious wishes.
It serves, essentially, to change the subject of the feeling, which is the
person himself, to someone else. Projection is usually preceded by some
form of denial, i.e. one denies that one feels a given emotion, or has such
and such a wish. The projective defense against neurotic or moral anxiety
might find expression, for instance, in the notion that everyone around you
is burning in a furnace of passion while you, the actual source of the heat
projecting your desires, remain a model of cool and chaste innocence in your
conscious estimation. The dynamics of this defense may serve to explain why
Joseph "acquires" the limp that is Sue Ann's mark upon him, and why Miss
Mandible is consumed by desire for the Fire Marshall. When Joseph is made
the Fire Marshall, the act is "interpreted by some as another mark of .!!!l
somewhat dubious relations with our teacher [emphasis added]" (103). In the
 162

context of the classroom and the prose--contexts in which some signs are
lies and cannot be trusted to signify with any degree of reliability--the
armband Joseph wears, emblazoned with the word "FIRE," i rani cally serves to
identify accurately the true source of combustion. It is appropriate that
Joseph, who so consistently inflames women of every age, who will himself,
as it were, be consumed by passion, is thus marked off from his peers. In
spite of his repeated denials and projections, he quite literally wears his
true heart on his sleeve. We see in Claims Adjustor Joseph's role as the
Fire Marshall (the person whose job it is to control rather than start
fires) how the unacceptable impulses of this latent arsonist are at once
disguised and expressed through hypertrophy of an opposing tendency; despite
what Joseph says, it is evident from his behaviour, and from clues scattered
and displaced throughout the text, that he wants to start fires, not put
them out.

Miss Mandible is only one of a small constellation of women that

surround Joseph. There is the primary triad of Sue Ann Brownly, his former
wife Brenda, and Miss Mandible, and there are two secondary figures, his
mother and Mrs. Anton Bichek. Joseph tends to view all women as the same
woman: Sue Ann is an immature version of Miss Mandible, and Brenda, the
wife of his former days, seems to be an earlier version of the same type. Of
Sue Ann, Joseph observes, defining the type, "she is clearly a woman, with a
woman's disguised aggression and a woman's peculiar contradictons" (98).
This view of women is so deeply entrenched in his thinking that he doesn't
regard them as individuals so much as representatives of a type. In fact,
so strong is this tendency to respond to a woman on the basis of a type
 163

established in his past, that Joseph has trouble keeping the members of the
major triad separate in his mind: 11
0ddly enough Sue Ann reminds me of the
wife I had in my former role, while Miss Mandible seems to be a child 11
(100). Only by collating the features and characteristics assigned to each
of the women that tend to merge together in his mind, can the nature of the
11
disguised aggression .. and 11 peculiar contradictions .. of this composite woman
be seen in relief.
Miss Mandible's peculiar contradiction is suggested by her name: the
mandible is a lower jaw, literally of any animal, but more typically it
refers to the jaws of an insect. The name thus connotes a kind of oral
threat, the source, perhaps of the disguised aggression Joseph senses in
her. Mitigating this threat, and lending her a peculiar contradiction, is
her physical attractiveness. The~ physical distinction Joseph notes is
her bust, and the description of that bust directs us to its maternal,
nourishing aspect: 11
Miss Mandible is in many ways, notably about the bust,
a very tasty piece .. (103). In Joseph's mind, Miss Mandible is at once the
source of a powerful attraction and the source of threat--a very tasty piece
who is capable of inflicting a very terrible bite. As it happens, the
events of the story bear out the threat latent in her name as Joseph is
effectively destroyed as a consequence of his attraction to this forbidding
creature. To the oedipally awakened child, the mother is both an object to
be desired and, because the father can be a powerful rival, an object to be
feared. From a psychoanalytic point of view, the name, Miss Mandible, is
wonderfully apt: the promise of the 11 Miss 11 is balanced by the threat of the
11
Mandible, 11 expressing fear of castration, the fear of being eaten. Little
wonder, then, that Joseph assumes an attitude of studied passivity in his
 164

attempt to get close to this woman.

Sue Ann, although aged between eleven and eleven and a half, is a
budding version of her rival Miss Mandible, to whom she is often compared.
Just as Joseph is a minor in a very special sense only, Sue Ann, although a
child, 11
is clearly a woman 11 (98). Throughout the story, Joseph vacillates
between these two women: 11
••• my own a11 egi ance, at the moment, is divided
between Miss Mandible and Sue Ann Brownly ••• of the two I prefer, today, Sue
Ann ..... (97). Sue Ann, disfavoured by her putative status as a child, will
eventually fail 11
in her unequal struggle for [Joseph's] great, overgrown
heart, .. but she represents, nevertheless, a faithful version of nascent
femininity, a kind of premenstrual monster of debilitating possibilities.
For Joseph, her attack on his ankle is typically womanlike. Following the
attack, he makes a telling observation: 11
How lifelike, how womanlike, is
her tender solicitude after the deed! 11 (104). Once again, as in the case of
Miss Mandible, we note that women make only unreliable demonstrations of
tenderness. What is more reliable is the sense that they conceal a
crippling threat.
Sue Ann and Miss Mandible are only the latest contestants in a struggle
for Joseph's heart that apparently has been going on for a long time. In
Joseph's mind, as we noted above, Miss Mandible is a version of Sue Ann, and
Sue Ann is version of Brenda, the wife of his former role. They are all, in
other words, versions of the same creature. The description Joseph offers
of that marriage is instructive:
Her name was Brenda, and the conversation I recall best, the one
which makes me suspicious now, took place on the day we parted.
'You have the soul of a whore,' I said on that occasion, stating
nothing less than the unvarnished fact. 'You,' she replied, 'are
a pimp, a poop, and a child. I am leaving you forever and I trust
that without me you will perish of your own inadequacies. Which
 165

are considerable. (100)

It is important to recall that Joseph suspects Brenda of being behind the
betrayal that has brought him to this classroom. We noted above that this
seemed unlikely inasmuch as, on the manifest level of the text, there is
nothing whatever to suggest that she had anything to do with it. Indeed,
the vehemence with which she breaks off her attachment to Joseph "forever"
makes her an especially unlikely suspect. However, on the latent level, the
level on which she is associated with Miss Mandible and Sue Ann, it is
another matter: the source of Joseph's betrayal is an unnatural attachment
to a woman from his past--the mother-figure, currently being played by Miss
Mandible. On this level, his suspicions regarding Brenda constitute an
ironic and accurate "clue" as to the hidden truth of his tragic situation.
The terms of Brenda's invective are worth noting: given what we know
about Joseph from his journal, this listing is no casual or merely
mean-spirited listing of faults. There can be no question, even in Joseph's
own mind, that he is a kind of "child": "Only I, at times (only at times),
understand that somehow a mistake has been made, that I am in a place where
I don't belong" (98). The suggestion that he is a "poop" is supported by
his eternal alliance with Harry Broan and the bathroom vent. The charge
that he is a pimp is more problematic. A pimp is someone involved in the
degradation and exploitation of the sexuality of women, a man who profits
from that exploitation. It's a fairly strong charge Brenda is making, and
at first blush there would seem to be little evidence in the text to support
it. One piece of evidence supporting it, of course, is the fact that Joseph
calls her (and, by implication, all women) a whore. What more than proves
the worth of Brenda's estimation on this point, however, is Joseph's deeply
 166

felt conviction that all women exploit sex to their advantage; for Joseph,
all women appear to be fundamentally false in that they are capable only of
pretended tenderness and solicitude, a pretense aimed at disguising their
desire to exploit men for private gain.
Of his relationship with his actual mother, Joseph provides us with a
single, but highly suggestive, clue: 11
The peanut butter sandwiches that my
mother made me in my former existence have been banished in favour of ham
and cheese 11 (103). For Joseph, whose mother is no longer around, 11
0ne of
the advantages of packing my own lunch ••• is that I am able to fill it with
the things I enjoy... No further mention is made of his family, but it is
interesting that the one reference to his actual mother celebrates his
independence from her in oral terms. Her contribution to his nourishment
has not been merely put aside or replaced, it has been banished, a word that
ironically describes his own status in the world of men; if we are correct
in our analysis of the unconscious content of this story, it's an
appropriate word to use in light of the fact that his continued dependence
on the mother has resulted in his banishment. Joseph may take a measure of
comfort from this small but aggressive show of independence, but we note
that he is only too willing to attach himself to Miss Mandible's 11 tasty
bust, 11 thus demonstrating his continued oral dependence on the mother (it is
also significant that he stores his lunch right next to the armband reading
11
FIRE 11 which Miss Mandible awards him as a mark of their 11 dubious
relationship 11 ) . We certainly should not make too much of a single and
relatively undeveloped reference to the mother, but viewed within the
framework of associations in the journal in toto, the banished peanut butter
sandwiches are yet another 11 Clue 11 in a richly developed pattern of
 167

ambivalence toward women evinced by Joseph in his journal.

There is one other woman in the journal who deserves our attention,
Mrs. Anton Bichek. The mistake that lands Joseph in his present predicament
happens as a result of his relationship with this woman. Without Joseph's
encouragement, he tells us, this elderly woman "would never have had the
self-love to prize her injury so highly" (102). Joseph evidently teaches
her enough about self-love and the prizing of injuries for her to press a
claim against the Big Ben Storage and Transfer Company.
The mistake that lands Joseph back in the classroom is a romantic one,
romantic in two senses. First of all, it is romantic in the sense that he
chooses principle over policy. There is definitely something wholesomely
romantic about the gesture he makes for Mrs. Bichek; it seems the act of an
individual risking much in the service of some ideal. The act is akin to
that which a Boy Scout, the traditional ally of the old lady, might have
undertaken on her behalf. But the entire episode is romantic in a second
sense: in choosing the interests of Mrs. Bichek over those represented by
Big Ben and Henry Goodykind, Joseph displays a "tragic" willingness to seek
the "satisfaction" of the maternal at the expense of the paternal (the word
"tragic" is used twice to characterize the scope of the "mistake" he makes).
Consistent with the oedipal dimensions of the act, the paternal authorities
subsequently lose "faith" in Joseph's ability to play his "role" correctly,
and he is symbolically castrated: he literally has his manhood taken away
from him. (The "Big Ben Storage and Transfer Company," the name of the
company against whose interest Joseph acts, is rich in suggestion: the name
Big Ben connotes both a large male, which would be appropriate in light of
the oedipal challenge to the father-figure the mistake represents, but it is
 168

also the name of a famous clock. The association with time is telling in
that Joseph is, in effect, punished by time; forced to replay his past, he
is locked in time. The Storage and Transfer portion of the name picks up on
the fact that the latent content that is so important to this story is
material that has been stored for a very long time. This stored material
depends on the careful transfer of unconscious material into conscious
form.)
Transformed into a child manque, part defective adult and part lame
preadolescent boy, Joseph is to be given a second chance in the very place
where "all of the mysteries that perplexed [him] as an adult have their
origin": "The next thing I knew I was here ••• under the lubricious eye of
Miss Mandible." A crucial episode from the "first voyage 11 will be replayed:
Joseph will be given the chance by the authorities to either resist, or
succumb to, the temptation to seek the 11 satisfaction 11 of the maternal. If
he behaves and acts in accordance to the demands of his "role"--for him, a
system of imperfectly understood expectations--he will be allowed to become
an adult. If he succombs to temptation, however he rationalizes his guilt,
he will be forced to remain a 11 mutation, 11 an adult still chasing a figure he
should have left behind in childhood.

Returning to Davis' analogy of the paternal Scylla and the maternal

Charybdis which the child must, like Odysseus, navigate between, we see that
in "Mandible .. the paternal has failed to exercise sufficiently reliable
authority. The child in Joseph, if he is to recover, will need a paternal
authority who is both powerful and a source of empathy, a figure not given
 169

to the exercise of power on the basis of "whimsy." Paternal authority, as

it is represented in "Mandible" is not, as Davis suggests in should be,
"insuperable and adamantine": it is too closely associated with Pmerica and
a system of failed signs to serve Joseph a reliable model of behaviour.
Paternal authority has failed Joseph in another way: it was the
"dense" authorities, after all, who insisted on placing Miss Mandible within
his grasp, who provided him with the perfect situation for a seduction. It
was authority that insisted on leaving him to his own devices in a sexually
charged atmosphere, the most glamourous object in an environment virtually
without rivals. The failure of authority allowed Joseph to drift too far in
the direction of the Charybdis of the maternal as represented by Miss
Mandible, "a whirling maelstrom of contradictory motions ••• a lack of fixity"
(Davis 22). The Charybdic maternal in "Mandible" is the locus of
aggressive, lubricious drives; like Joseph, she is prepared to violate a
powerful code of behaviour in the service of appetite. In such a
predicament, situated between two such failed parental principles, Joseph is
bound to fail: he cannot manage the necessary identification with the
father to draw him away from the vortex of the mother, and thus his tragic
struggle with childhood issues persists into adulthood and repeats in a
disastrous cycle.
Although he longs to be normal--"let me be, please God, typical"
(108)--Joseph seems to know at some level that this attempt to change a
personality that he himself realizes needs ''reworking in some fundamental
way" (108) is doomed to fail. It will fail, says Joseph, because "Miss
Mandible will refuse to permit me to remain ungrown" (109). While Joseph
appreciates that he needs reworking at a fundamental level, he absolutely
 170

refuses to accept any responsibility for his behaviour in the seduction that
keeps him "ungrown." It is this failure to acknowledge his desire, his
insistence on his own innocence, that, in effect, closes the circle of his
neurotic attachment to the pattern of behaviour that leaves him frozen in
perpetual childhood. This unwillingness to accept responsibility also
accounts for the two levels on which this story operates.
We have seen how this story carefully layers and weaves together two
major themes. The manifest theme, developed around the discovery that signs
are signs and that some of them are lies, is that American culture makes you
crazy. This theme, however, is subordinate to the psychological theme
developed around Joseph's unresolved infantile wishes which have their
origin in the oedipus complex. The manifest theme is subordinate in the
sense that the journal consistently organizes itself around the machinations
of Joseph's relationship to Mandible, and gives the existential theme of
failed signs the more personal and intimate reference of Joseph's
psychology; the theme of failed signs simply isn't developed in an original
way, or in any way that would suggest that it take precedence over the
psychological theme.
Without question, the theme of the corrigible schemata and the theme of
unresolved infantile wishes function in concert, the meanings of each
developing, and developed by, the other. In 11 Mandible, 11 Joseph is involved
in basically two quests for identity: an existential quest on behalf of
other "pleasant, desperate, money-making" young Americans leading the
"unexamined" life (what the existentialists might deem an 11 inauthentic
existence .. ), and a parallel, simultaneous quest to solve a personal mystery
that has its source in his own childhood. In terms of the the former quest,
 171

Joseph is only marginally successful. Certainly he makes discoveries of

great consequence, both to himself and to his culture in general, and his
journal might be serve as a kind of minor manifesto denouncing the bad faith
of America as the source of misleading signs. The irony of the journal on
this level, of course, is that it is America, and not Joseph, that needs the
fundamental reworking. These "great discoveries," however, appear to do him
or those around him little good: they fail to effect to any significant
degree the "reworking" he admits he needs. In terms of the more fundamental
quest for the root causes of his current psychological malaise, he is not
even marginally successful.

II
11
Hiding Man" is set in a darkened theatre. Burligame, who expected to
find the place empty, discovers that a stranger, a Negro, is watching the
film with him. While the film, Attack of the Puppet People plays across a
torn screen, the Negro cross examines Burligame. Their conversation centres
on certain events from Burligame's past, particularly the events surrounding
his estrangement from the Catholic church. Burligame, a detective of some
sort and a member of an underground, tells of his difficulties at Our Lady
of the Sorrows school where he was taught the meaning of sin. He ran away
from this school, and the priests have been after him ever since. Of
special concern to Burligame is the relationship he had with the athletic
priest, Father Blau, who took a personal, "vested" (31), and finally
disturbing interest in him. Eventually the Negro stranger, Bane-Hipkiss,
 172

peels off his black skin to reveal that he is a white man, a priest. an
agent the church has sent to bring back Burligame. Burligame refuses. they
struggle, and Burligame manages to overcome Bane-Hipkiss by plunging a
syringe into his neck thereby transforming him into a barking animal.
What immediately strikes one about this story i_s its dream-like,
nightmarish quality. The story is set in a world like the world of film and
the world of dream, a world in which anything can happen and everything
seems possible:
Time and space do not exist; on a slight groundwork of reality,
imagination spins and weaves new patterns made up of memories,
experiences, unfettered fantasies, absurdities and improvisations.
The characters split, double, and multiply; they evaporate,
crystallize, scatter and converge. But a single consciousness
holds sway over them all--that of the dreamer. For him there are
no secrets, no incongruities, no scruples, no laws. (Strindberg
1973' 33)

This excerpt from Strindberg's introduction to his A Dream Play provides an

apt description of the atmosphere in "Hiding." In 11 Hiding, .. one dreamer
holds sway over all of the characters who split, double and converge in the
story. The darkened theatre into which Burligame has fled is very much a
theatre of memory and dream; the dream he dreams is a dream of identity.
For Strindberg's dreamer there were no 11 Secrets 11 • The same, however,
cannot be said of Burligame: somewhere, concealed in his past, concealed in
the curious mixture of ritual and confession of this story, is a secret he
keeps hidden from himself. As in 11 Me and Miss Mandible," 11
Hiding Man" is
designed to conceal and express a hidden truth, a mystery. Unless we, as
readers, pay very close attention to the clues surrounding this mystery,
very little of what Burligame tells us will make much sense. On the most
superficial level only this story is about a boy's (and now a man's)
 173

estrangement from the Catholic church. The church-school here functions in

essentially the same manner as the school in 11 Mandible 11 ; the story is only
incidentally about the Catholic church as a failed source of authority. The
true source of the thing Burligame is running away from has a deeper and
more intimate source, and is much more difficult to define.
In the story, film is referred to as 11 ritual 11 (36), as 11 Celebration 11
(36), and as a source of 11 Vision 11 {37): .. People think these things [films]
are jokes, but they are wrong, it is dangerous to ignore a vision ..... (37}.
The films that play in this very special theatre are all of a kind: they
represent to Burligame, the hiding man, a source of private rituals,
celebrations, and visions that point to a private truth that is more real
(and so, more 11 dangerous 11 ) than the alternative, public rituals available
outside the theatre, especially those of the church. In the apparently
ludicrous and grotesque visions of the schlock horror films that make up the
exclusive fare of this theatre, Burligame's private vision is defined.
No fewer than twenty-two titles are cited in the course of the story.
Most of the titles appear to be actual titles of horror films produced in
the late fifties and early sixties, presumably the period during which
Burligame was coming of age. The litany of these titles is taken from a
genre of film particularly popular with adolescents. It is appropriate that
this type of film is featured in this particular theatre: the psychological
effect of these films usually always depends on the equation of sex and
violence. The films tend to exploit the fear adolescents bring to the
subject of sex, the fear attached to the release of powerful, destabilizing
sexual feelings. It is not unusual for these films to therefore equate
sexual expression with the release of the beast, a beast that punishes or
 174

destroys the sexually awakening teenager.

No listing of the various titles can capture the subtle contextual use
Barthelme makes of each title. At certain junctures in the narrative, a
title or two will be introduced as a means of dramatizing, in the grotesque
and vulgar terms of the genre, Burligame's unconscious wishes and fears:
Burligame as Screaming Skull or Beast With a Thousand Eyes or Teenage
Werewolf. Burligame's identity, his sense of himself and his vision of
reality, is thereby translated into the crude psycho-sexual terms of the
nightmarish horror films he would have seen as an adolescent. For him, a
crucial component of his identity is tied up in this genre: "And yet, is
this not a circumstance before which the naked Burligame might dangle, is
that not real life, risk and danger, as in Voodoo Woman, as in Creature from
the Black lagoon?" (30).
At one point in the story, Burligame describes more precisely what
these films represent to him. According to Burligame, the films that play in
this theatre are all "superior examples of the genre, tending toward
offscreen rapes, obscene tortures: man with hugh pliers advancing on
disheveled beauty, cut to girl's face, to pliers, to man's face, to girl,
scream, blackout" (25). Evidently the film that provides for the exclusive
source of the rituals, visions, and celebrations of his private life
conflates sex and violence, particularly violence against women; the sex
these films portray is at heart, and in essence, sadistic, a violent and
calculated assault on the "beauty" of women.
The most important of these films is the film that plays throughout the
events of the story thereby serving as something of an organizing metaphor,
Attack of the Puppet People. As Burligame tells Bane Hipkiss, "pay
 175

attention to the picture, it is trying to tell you something, revelation is

not so frequent in these times that one can afford to diddle it away 11 {36).
Barthelme structures 11 Hiding 11 so as to insure that we 11
pay attention to the
picture 11 : he inserts several episodes from Attack into the frame tale,
inserting them at various junctures. Based on the following three episodes
we can splice together a crude story line for this film:
Hard pressed u.s. Army, Honest John, Hound Dog, Wowser
notwithstanding, psychological warfare and nerve gas not
withstanding, falls back at onrush of puppet people. Young
lieutenant defends Army nurse {uniform in rags, tasty thigh,
lovely breast) from obvious sexual interest of splinter men. {27)
On screen famous scientist has proposd measures to contain puppet
people, involving termites thrown against their flank. The
country is in a panic, Wall Street has fallen, the President looks
grave. (28)
Mutant termites devouring puppet people at great rate, decorations
for the scientists, tasty nurse for young lieutenant, they will
end it with a joke if possible, meaning: it was not real after
all. {30)
The title Attack of the Puppet People is taken from an actual film,
released in 1958 by American International {the film is generally regarded
as an unimaginative version of the far more subtle and successful The
Amazing Colossal Man, also mentioned in this story). Barthelme, as he so
often does, has taken an objet trouve, an artifact from popular culture, and
as it were, has hollowed out the original to fill it with the stuff of his
own creation. The original film was about a lonely and diabolical old
dollmaker who shrank people to one foot in height so as to control them and
keep them from leaving him. Barthelme•s version would appear to have left
little of the original intact, but a closer look reveals that the Pinocchio
motif of the original has been retained in Barthelme•s version, albeit in a
somewhat distorted fashion {in another reference to the film in the story
 176

Hipkiss has to lift his voice slightly at one point to "carry over the
Pinocchio noises coming from puppet people .. [25]).
Both versions of the the film, Barthelme's and the original, are
versions of the original fairy tale which featured a benevolent old toymaker
whose love for his creation was such that the doll is eventually transformed
into a real boy. Central to this tale is the lesson Pinocchio has to learn
on the road to selfhood; that is, Pinocchio has had to learn to overcome the
id, principally because his hidden and uncivilized wishes are betrayed by a
nose which grows and gives him away. He has to learn, in other words, to
abandon the pleasure principle in favour of the reality principle. In the
American International version, the benevolent old father-figure, instead of
loving his child and encouraging his maturity into independence, is an­
amazing but malevolent colossal man who uses magic-science to reverse the
procedure of the original- tale and literally belittle adults to the size of
children that can never leave him. In Barthelme's version, the puppet
people have become the source of the threat and have to be destroyed by the
scientists because, in terms of the original tale, they have failed to
control their feelings, feelings epitomized in the film by their obvious
11

sexual interest." It is the sexual interest of these puppets that

precipitates and fuels the conflict that results in their destruction.
At the centre of the conflict, .. a young lieutenant defends an Army
nurse ... The object of the puppet people's sexual interest, this nurse is
twice descibed as "tasty," implying that the puppet people are especially
interested in oral gratification. Perhaps the most revealing expression of
this interest occurs in the passage describing the terms of the reward the
young lieutenant receives for having defenqtthe nurse from the sexual
 177

"onrush" of the puppet people: "tasty nurse for young lieutenant." The
word "nurse 11 is used here is such a way as to allow for it to serve as both
verb and noun: in other words, on one level the line suggests that the good
lieutenant is allowed to nurse from the "lovely breast 11 he has defended.
The film, as Barthelme deconstructs it, is a "ritual" depiction of the
oedipus complex. The puppet people are "splinter men": on one level, they
are like Eliot's hollow men, crazed casualties of modern life. But on a
deeper level they represent children, or, as in Burligame•s case, the
childish aspect or splinter of a man still fixated on the nursing mother.
These puppet people are children inflamed by sexual interest in a woman they
cannot have, and so they make war on the family (represented by the couple)
despite "psychological warfare" and "nerve gas"--the psychological pressures
put in place to curb and deflect such sexual interest. So powerful are
these appetites that, from the point of view of the child, his entire world
is threatened: "The country is in a panic •••• " The family is defended by
paternal forces {the army, scientist, President) and the unsuccessful
puppet-children are psychically destroyed.
For a few moments in the film success with the nurse seems possible,
just as it does for the oedipal son who first imagines he can replace the
rival and absent father ("the President looked grave"). But ultimately the
puppet people are punished by the authorities in telling fashion: mutant
termites devour the flanks of the puppet people--the mutant or unnatural
termites who act as agents of the oral punishment are a response to the
initial unnaturalness of the oral attack of the puppet people.
The puppet people of this central 11
vision" represent a displacement of
Burligame•s own childish self. In 11 Hiding" three figures serve to represent
 178

the child Burligame: the puppet people, Burligame•s actual childhood self
as recalled in manhood, and a mysterious boy who makes several enigmatic
appearances in the story. Before considering Burligame's own case history
as he recalls it for Bane-Hipkiss, I want to consider the significance of
this boy.
Alluded to three times in the story, this figure and the symbolic value
that develops around him are developed in a manner that is typical
Barthelme. This is how the technique works in 11 Hiding 11 : we are given a
series of what can only be described as impressions of a figure; that figure
is glimpsed several times as the fiction circles and returns in a compulsive
manner to an image it cannot quite define (this circling of the plot will be
characterized in our analysis of 11 Florence 11 as the 11 Whirlpoo1 11 techique).
Each appearance constitutes a subtle development over the last: more detail
added, other details repeated, some dimensions enhanced. The image is
further constituted associatively on the basis of the specific context of
each occurence of the image. What Barthelme is exploiting here is the fact
that exactly the same sentence, word for word, detail for detail, could
connote radically different meanings in different contexts. A simple image
repeated in various contexts can accumulate astonishing degrees of
suggestive meaning (the meaning tends to be suggestive because the same
words are being used, a fact which tends to discourage the conviction that
something different is being said).
Here are the three passages in which this child appears, bereft, of
course, of context:
Keep eye on EXIT, what about boy in lobby, what was kite for? (25)
Boy in lobby wore T-shirt, printed thereon, OUR LADY OF THE
SORROWS. Where glimpsed before [the question the reader must be
 179

asking himself as well]? Possible agent of the conspiracy, in the

pay of the Organization, duties: lying, spying, tapping wires,
setting fires, civil disorders. {26)
And what of young informer in lobby, what is his relevance, who
corrupted wearer of T-shirt, holder of kite? (28)
The boy is not referred to in "Hiding Man" except in these three instances,
nor is his precise "relevance" ever established. However, as sketchy as the
acquaintance is based on these four sentences, the figure, modelled by
association, has considerable substance and "relevance." Of course,
limitations of space simply don't permit analysis of the contextual
implications of this boy's appearances (why he appears when he does), but we
can say something about what he means based on a number of associative
connections.
What most concerns Burligame is that the boy may be in the employ of
the "conspiracy," an "informer" of the same "organization" that has pursued
Burligame since he left Our Lady of the Sorrows school. The physical
description of the boy is limited to three details: he is a boy wearing a
shirt emblazoned with the name of Burligame•s old school, and he carries a
kite. The T-shirt and the fact that he is a boy obviously serves to connect
him to Burligame•s childhood self: "I was the tallest boy ••• at Our Lady of
the Sorrows" (37). There are, however, no other kites in the story. What
might the kite signify? Because Burligame asks, "what was kite for?," we
are encouraged to look for a significance. A kite is a toy and might
therefore serve to identify the boy with play, or lost innocence. The kite,
like of the puppet people with whom Burligame identifies so strongly, is
tied by a length of string which ultimately precludes its freedom.
What the boy represents is a version of Burligame, a "splinter" of an
identity that is strewn all over the highly charged environment this fiction
 180

describes. A kind of puppet of the organization (he even carries in the

kite his own string), the boy is the 11 corrupted 11 and belittled infantile
self of Burligame, that part of him that is still under the control and the
influence of the myterious organization. Waiting in the lobby, attending
Burligame•s secret visions and ritual, the boy stands for that part of
Burligame that is invoked when he withdraws into his private fantasy world.
Notice, too, that the duties Burligame imagines for the boy (lying, spying,
tapping wires, setting fires, civil disorders) are all compatible with
Burligame's present state of mind; all of the activities mitigate against
human contact, mitigate against relationship. Moreover, as we shall see in
our examination of Burligame's case history, these activities are versions
of activities that occupied Burligame as a child {both the puppet people and
boy with the kite are involved in aggressive, even hostile behaviours which
suggest that they represent Burligame's own concealed, displaced anger).

Throughout 11 Hiding Man, .. the story works to associate the movie theatre
and the church in the reader's mind, just as they are inextricably
associated in Burligame•s. One of the most interesting means by which this
is accomplished is through a mysterious odour that Burligame can't identify.
Throughout the story, at various junctures, and usually in response to moves
made in his direction by Bane-Hipkiss, Burligame attention is drawn to a
strong adour of flowers coming from under the seats: 11
0dor of sweetness
from somewhere, flowers growing in cracks in floors, underneath the
seats ••• Can't identify at this distance, what does Bane-Hipkiss want? (29);
11
flower smell stronger and sweeter, are they really growing under our
feet ••• ? (31); and finally, as Bane-Hipkiss closes in, 11
The sweetness from
 181

beneath the seats is overpowering ..... {36). As always, it is difficult to

say with any authority what this smell represents. However, what is clear
is that Burliagame associates the 11 0verpowering 11 smell with the approach of
Bane-Hipkiss, the disguised Father. On the manifest level, what Burligame
is associating here is the smell of candy and such typically emanating from
the floors of movie theatre and the strong smell of incense that Catholic
children would naturally associate with priests and the church. Another
important clue as to the latent significance of this smell, and his sense
that is 11 0Verpoweri ng 11 and 1 ike the smell of flowers, comes 1 ate in the
story: the planting of 11 gladiolus, iris, phlox" (37) is featured in the
short list of activities which occupy the unsuspecting fathers to whom
Burligame feels he represents a threat (see discussion of the story•s
conclusion below).1
The smell is one way the story develops the Catholic church and the
movie theatre as alternative sources of identity. Burligame has escaped
from the church, a vision he discovered to be corrupt, and retreated into
the movie theatre. The movie theatre, though it represents a private
theatre of meaning, is deeply informed by the church he knew as a child. As
dissimilar as the church and the movie theatre may at first appear, they are
linked by common visions, rituals, and celebrations. In both church and
theatre, one seeks out 11 that vision which most brilliantly exalts and
villifies the world" (35). As in the church confessional, in the movie
theatre a form of surrender takes place: "Alone in the dark one surrenders
to Amazing Colossal Maq all hope, all desire ••• " (35). The fundamental
issue relating church and movie theatre is an absorption in the sins of the
flesh: both church and film have provided Burligame with "visions 11 that
 182

both exalt and villify women.

As we have seen in "Mandible'' (and will see in "Florence Green" and

"Broadcast"), Barthelme is concerned to provide his characters with case
histories, case histories that have been refined and compressed into a few
essential, formative episodes. In "Hiding Man," Burligame's current view of
women, as suggested in his attachment to the genre of horror film he
watches, is partially explained by what he tells us of his case-historical
experience with women:
'My impure thoughts were of a particularly detailed and graphic
kind, involving at that time principally Nedda Ann Bush who lived
two doors down the street from us and was handsomely developed.
Under whose windows I crouched on many long nights awaiting
revelations of beauty, the light being just right between the
bureau and the window. Being rewarded on several occasions,
namely 3 May 1942 with a glimpse of famous bust, 18 October 1943,
particular chill evening, transfer of pants from person to clothes
hamper, coupled with three minutes exposure in state of nature.
Before she thought to turn out the light.' (32)
Several things are worth noting about this passage. First of all,
Burligame's interest in "beauty" in this memory resembles that of the puppet
people: their sexual interest was directed to parts of women (breast and
thigh), whereas Burligame's interest in Nedda Ann Bush (a suggestive name,
as in "need a bush") is similarly couched in terms of her "parts," the
"famous" bust and the "bush" of the pudenda implied by her name. Just as
the puppets are inflamed by glimpses of the nurse's flesh as seen through
her torn uniform, young Burligame is inflamed by "glimpses" of Nedda Ann
Bush. This former tendency to view the people in parts, especially women,
is also expressed in Burligame's current mode of voyeurism: the screen on
which his favourite genre plays is "torn from top to bottom, a large rent,
 183

faces and parts of gestures fall off into the void 11 (26).
The puppet people expressed their sexual desire in obvious fashion and
were devoured for it. Burligame, while he obviously shares an interest in
the parts of women, adopts an attitude that is anything but obvious: the
sexual outlet he found in youth beneath Nedda Ann Bush's window, he
recreates in the darkness, privacy, and isolation of the movie theatre, a
11
position which guarantees him the options of flight and concealment: I
entrust myself to these places advisedly, there are risks but ••• Flight is
always available, concealment is always possible 11 (26-27). The difference
between Burligame and the puppet people is that Burligame fled the situation
that threatened to compromise him, and learned to conceal and defend his
consciousness against the irruption of sexual interest. Under the influence
of Burligame's defenses, the 11 tasty thigh 11 and 11 lovely breast 11 the puppet
people saw, and were inflamed by, have been transformed. The ambivalence
11
with which Burligame now views the beauty 11 of women is suggested in his use
of terms like 11 handsomely developed 11 and 11 famous bust 11 : the modifiers and
the nouns themselves protect the parts from private and sensual
identification by insulating them, in the latter case with an abstract
association, and in the former case, with an adverb associated with
maleness, which thereby marks the parts of her body with the father's stamp
of prohibition.
Indeed, the language Burligame uses to describe this entire episode is
the language of detached and objective analysis, as in phrases like,
11
i nvolvi ng at that time pri nci pally 11 and 11 transfer of pants from person to
clothes hamper, coupled with three minutes exposure in state of nature ... He
begins this recollection with a reference to "particularly detailed and
 184

graphic .. thoughts of impurity, yet his descriptions of the impure events are
utterly lacking in prurience. The only graphic or particularly detailed
information he does recall concerns the precise dates on which these events
occured, easily the most neutral details in the entire episode. Also worth
noting is that the way the entire episode is recalled connotes as much a
saint's or acolyte's prayer vigil as it does an act of voyeurism; a devout
Catholic might crouch and debase himself thus for 11 many long nights awaiting
revelations .. of 11
beauty 11 in 11 the light ...
The progression of events in the Nedda Ann Bush episode is also
suggestive. Burligame is first 11
rewarded 11 with a glimpse of her breasts.
After a significant passage of time, some six months later, he sees her
11
pudenda. This happens on what he calls a particularly chill evening... The
noun or verb 11 chill 11 is grammatically inappropriate in this sentence--the
sentence should read, 11
a particularly chilly evening... There is a brief
three-minute exposure, and the lights go out. What this progression of
events parallels is the progression of involvements the child has with the
mother. It begins with the warmth (May) and security (reward) of the
relationship limited to the breast, but later is complicated by more complex
desires, desires which involve the sex of the mother. This interest in the
mother, as it were, with her pants off, if not properly resolved, results in
the psychic 11 Chill 11 of the threatened and soon-to-be displaced son.
Father Blau, to whom this episode was originally confessed, gave
Burligame 11 0nly steadfast refusal to understand these preoccupations, wholly
natural and good interest in female parts however illicitly pursued, as
under window.. (33). Clearly the terms in which this sexual episode is
confessed (it is told to the church's agent) express both the desire for sex
 185

and the father-centred prohibitive agency denying that desire. The films he
now watches in the dark celebrate a ritual disfigurement of the 11
beauty" of
women {the word 11 beauty 11 is used in both the definition of the genre and to
describe Nedda Ann Bush). Note that in the definition of the genre, the
sadist attacking the woman uses pliers, pliers which could only be used to
tear beauty into parts (the unusual detail of the pliers also picks up
associatively on the jaws of the mutant termites that devour the puppet
people). Clearly Burligame's current affinity for the genre has its genesis
in the fear of women as the object of compromising desires, desires that
placed him in conflict with the Catholic Fathers.
Let us turn to the climactic confrontation between the revealed
11
Father 11 Bane-Hipkiss and the renegade 11
Son. 11 In this confrontation, the
father-figure is overcome when Burligame thrusts into his neck a syringe
charged with mutating serum. This is a particularly suggestive gesture in
terms of both intrinsic and extrinsic associations. For instance, with
regard to intrinsic associations, we recall that the puppet people were
turned back by scientists who used "mutant termites... Burligame, a puppet
person in his own right, now uses a similar kind of science to mutate the
father-figure, to literally turn him into an animal. As usual, the way the
event is described is crucial: "I ••• join needle to deadly body of
instrument ••• Bane-Hipkiss advances, eyes clamped shut in mystical ecstasy, I
grasp him by the throat, plunge needle into neck, his eyes bulge, his face
collapses, he subsides quivering into a lump among the seats, in a moment he
will begin barking like a dog" (37). The needle joined to the "deadly body"
is phallic in design and effect, and its use here denotes the son's wish to
celebrate phallic power at the expense of the father. The price that
 186

Bane-Hipkiss must pay as the son asserts himself is to be forced to assume

the feminine position, subservient to the son's powerful magic penis. The
father's 11 mystical ecstasy 11 is described in terms that suggest orgasm: his
eyes bulge, his face collapses, he subsides into a quivering lump. The
father is subsequently transformed into an animal: Burligame has thus
managed to destroy a significant portion of the identity of this father by
awakening in him the same fierce and dangerous desires that the father had
denied in the son.
The final paragraph provides us with the final clues as to the
significance of this unusual attack:
Most people haven't the wit to be afraid, most view televison,
smoke cigars, fondle wives, have children, vote, plant gladiolus,
iris, phlox, never confront Screaming Skull, Teenage Werewolf,
Beast With a Thousand Eyes, no conception of what lies behind the
surface, no faith in any manifestation not certified by hierarchy.
Who is safe with Teenage Werewolf abroad, with streets under sway
of Beast With a Thousand Eyes? People think these things are
jokes, but they are wrong, it is dangerous to ignore a vision,
consider Bane-Hipkiss, he has begun to bark. (37)
These ''peopl e 11 who 11 haven •t the wit to be afrai d11 of a teenage werewolf are
not people in general, they are fathers: who else would smoke cigars,
fondle wives, have children, but fathers, complacently ruling the house?
The vision that is dangerous to ignore, the thing which isn't a joke, is the
beastly desire of the son (recall that the story of the puppet people was
mistakenly treated as a 11 joke 11 ) . The concluding events of this story, which
reads like a scenario for a horror film, is a warning to the father that the
thing which 11 lies beneath the surface 11 of his domestic situation is a
violent, even murderous son: 11
Who is safe? 11 asks Burligame, with the
screaming, teenage beast abroad.
While it is evident that the significance of the vision that closes the
 187

story is that the son has potentially murderous phallic appetites, why does
it happen that the father-figure is transformed into the barking dog that so
much resembles the wolfish son? What is important to appreciate about this
concluding transformation of the father is that it also represents a queer
kind of reconciliation between father and son. The father is, after all,
put in essentially the same position as Burligame by Burligame's attack.
The ambivalence Burligame expresses by the particular form this attack
takes can be accounted for if we keep in mind that fathers are not merely
castrating rivals whose rule must be challenged or overcome. Fathers also
represent crucial objects of identification: the son must tread a fine
line, needing to identify with the parent-rival, seeking his approval and
the advice of his example, even while wishing, at some level, to take what
is his or to remove him altogether. The ambivalent view of the father
accounts for the presence in the story of two Fathers, Father Blau and
Bane-Hipkiss. It also accounts for the splitting of Bane-Hipkiss into two
separate identities (it is worth pointing out at this juncture that Bane and
Blau are versions of the name Burligame: the names begin with "B" and,
excepting the "n" in Bane, Bane and Blau are formed from the letters in
Burl i game) .2
Bane-Hipkiss' Negro disguise is a version of his true identity as
priest. The two aspects have several things in common. As a Negro, for
instance, he is a black man, a colour Burligame specifically associates with
priests: '"No longer loved God, cringed at words 'My son,' fled blackrobes
wherever they appeared'" (33). His association with the blackness of the
priests is supported by the name he first uses, Adrian. The name "Adrian"
comes from Latin and means "dark one." The Negro and the priest also share
 188

a particular view of manhood, one that involves the loss of the phallus. At
one point as Adrian, he makes the following overture to Burligame: 11
'l'm a
dealer in notions,' friend volunteers. 'Dancing dolls, learn handwriting
analysis by mail, secrets of eternal life, coins and stamps, amaze your
friends, pagan rites, abandoned, thrilling, fully illustrated worldwide
selection of rare daggers, gurkhas, stilletos, hunting, throwing' 11 (28).
This listing of comic book symbols of mystic power amounts to a kind of
inverted version of Catholic mysticism. The offer is one calculated to
appeal to a man-child who is still predisposed to view the world in terms of
Catholic rituals. When he removes his disguise, Adrian says, 11
'lt was
necessary to use this (holds up falseface guiltily) to get close to you, it
was for the health of your soul' 11 {36). Adrian obviously knows his quarry
well enough to know that the repeated offer of the phallic knife is bound to
have a special effect on him. The offer of the knives, however, proves
false and Burligame takes his revenge in the subsequent attack on him with
the deadly needle.
Like Bane-Hipkiss, Father Blau made Burligame a false offer of male
power. Burligame recalls how Blau approached him, the tallest and most
mature of the boys in his charge, to play on the basketball team. Father
Blau, like a kind of tyrannos, has his eye 11 0n the All-City title 11 (32) and
needs Burligame who had 11 Secreted sufficient hormones 11 (31). Burligame
refuses to play. Although he does not explain his refusal, it is suggested
that the reason he refused to play basketball is that he is preoccupied with
another pursuit, the 11 Wholly natural and good interest in female parts ..
(33). Father Blau punishes him for refusing to use his hormones in this
proscribed fashion. What the celibate priest Father Blau is insisting upon,
 189

in other words, is that Burligame make the transition from boy to man ( 11 'He
wanted me to grow"' [32]), but without the use of the phallus; like Adrian's
false promise of the knives, Father Blau's version of growth and power has
no sex attached to it. Fathers Bane-Hipkiss and Blau both want to be
11
friends 11 with Burligame but that bond is contingent on the loss of
Burligame's sexual identity. The Fathers want Burligame to join with them
but they are men whose sexuality has been lost to the Catholic church,
represented here by the female Our Lady of the Sorrows.
The act of plunging the needle into the neck of the father represents
the son's assumption of the magically powerful penis, the use of which has
been denied him by this same father-figure. But the act does not mean that
the son has defeated the father or that the son has regained the use of the
instrument hitherto denied him. Rather, the peculiar terms in which this
act is expressed indicate that the attack is not a resolution to Burligame
's identity problem. Careful analysis of the associative implications of
the attack suggest that Burligame 's lack of identity--the 11 burly game 11 of
his manhood and his selfhood--is likely to continue. The assumption of the
magical syringe with its transmuting serum suggests that Burligame now
controls the penis. Both the scientific instrument he uses, and the power
of mutation as it occurs within the context of the story, serve to identify
Burligame with the scientists in the Attack of the Puppet People who used
science to mutate the devouring termites. The choice of the syringe, in
other words, aligns Burligame with the paternal scientists whose conscious
powers of logic and reason defeated the emotionally obvious puppets. In the
attack on Bane-Hipkiss, the conscious power of science is joined to the
libidinous appetite ( 11 I ••• join needle to deadly body of instrument 11 ) . The
 190

result appears to be a victory over the 11 mystical 11 power of the castrated

Fathers in the service of Our Lady of the Sorrows. Note, however, that the
priest-Father is not destroyed but is, rather, transformed into a beast, a
representation of animal desire. That this is an appropriate punishment for
the man who denied the beast in Burligame is obvious. What is not so
obvious, perhaps, is that there is something decidedly domestic about this
variety of "werewolf": it "barks." The father is thus invested with an
exaggerated but qualified dose of animal desire to compensate for his
11
Steadfast" rejection of same in his son. The animal desire that entirely
usurps the Father•s former identity does not render him powerful or
threatening, but rather serves to humiliate and degrade him, much in the way
that Burligame has been degraded for his interest in female parts. The
transformation of Bane-Hipkiss to dog is, in fact, a dramatic version of an
earlier attack on Blau in the confessional: 11
Leaving Father Blau,
unregenerate, with the sorry residue of our weekly encounter: impure
thoughts, anger, dirty words, disobedience" {32). With this transformation
of the Father, the way is now open for the son to become .. friends" with the
father-figure {the term "friend" is used repeatedly by Burligame to describe
Bane-Hipkiss): both will now be possessed, quite literally, by animal
desire for female parts. This desire will not, however, be so powerful as
to render either father or son 11 Wolfish 11 , as the barking indicates.
The attack also serves to place the father in a feminine position, an
object that collapses into a quivering, faceless lump at the touch of the
magic penis. What is significant about the particular form this attack
takes is that it is a version of the attack with the pliers on the female
"beauty" which is the central vision, ritual, and celebration in Burligame•s
 191

private theatre of fantasy; on one level Barthelme thus associates

Burligame•s disfiguring attack on the father with the fantasized disfiguring
attack on a woman•s beauty. The key, then, to this entire episode lies in
Burligame•s anger toward, not the father with whom he seeks identification,
but the immanent and shared figure of Our Lady of Our Sorrows, the lady who
has managed to undermine the 11
burliness 11 --the sexual identity--of the
Fathers and now lurks behind the conspiracy that wants Burligame.

III
11
The Big Broadcast of 1938 11 invites us to share Bloomsbury•s radio
station, a private place subject to very few distractions. As the journal
serves Joseph in 11 Mandible 11 and the films serve Burligame in 11 Hiding Man 11 ,
this private, these one-man radio broadcasts serve Bloomsbury as the seat of
private rituals and celebrations. The unusual radio broadcasts consist
almost exclusively of recollections cum confessions calculated to serve as
bait in a literal "broad-cast .. for the woman who deserted Bloomsbury some
years before. In his broadcasts Bloomsbury is trying to recall, in both
senses of the word, the estranged spouse he addresses as either the 11 girl"
or 11 Woman ... This equivocation over terms, and the turn of mind is
represents, are known to us already in Joseph•s conflation of his two
seductresses, Sue Ann Brownly and Miss Mandible (and will be seen again in
Baskerville•s tendency to refer to Florence Green as the 11 0ld girl 11 ) .
Nowhere, however, in the synoptic tales is this tendency to confuse the ages
of women more pronounced or insisted upon than it is in 11 Broadcast 11 : our
attention is repeatedly drawn to Bloomsbury•s inability to decide whether or
 192

not his former wife (and present companion) is a girl or a woman. The
aetiology of this confusion constitutes the principal subject of
Bloomsbury's broadcasts, the principal subject of the story itself.
As mentioned above, the action of "Broadcast" is set in a radio
station. Several times the point is made that the radio station which
provides for the seat of the present action was secured in exchange for the
house that Bloomsbury and the old girl shared when they lived together:
Having acquired in exchange for an old house that had been
theirs, his and hers, a radio or more properly radio
station •••• (67)
••• she with whom he had lived in the house that was gone (traded
for the radio). (68)
For there had been no response from her (she who had figured, as
both subject and object, in the commercial announcements, before
it had been traded for the radio, lived in the house •••• )(70)
In a way reminiscent of "Hiding Man" in which the movie theatre of
Burligame's present and the church of his past are conflated, in "Broadcast"
there is a remarkable degree of correspondence between the events that took
place in that old house and the events now taking place in the radio
station, a correspondence that is gradually developed by Bloomsbury's radio
talks. These talks are divided into what he calls "the first kind and the
second kind" (67). The first kind "consisted of singling out, for special
notice, from among all the others, some particular word in the English
language, and repeating it in a monotonous voice for as much as fifteen
minutes, or a quarter hour" (67). Among his favourite words in these talks
are "assimilate, alleviate, authenticate, ameliorate" (67), words which all
point to the potentially therapeutic possibilities of expression. These
tautological announcements of the first kind provide for an appropriate
 193

complement to the talks of the second kind which are attempts to resolve (to
come to terms with) trauma in his past life. The ironic fact is that the
chronic repetition, the lack of development in these talks aimed at healing
and self-actualization accurately reflects the lack of health and
development Bloomsbury receives from this talks of the second kind.
The talk of the second kind, composed of the so-called 11 commercia1
announcements .. (68), is devoted to describing his disturbing past relations
with the wife of his former days. There are four announcements altogether,
and they are of special interest in that they provide a kind of
comprehensive history of that failed, but still active, relationship. As we
shall endeavour to show, the fantasies and screen memories expressed by
these announcements contain the roots of Bloomsbury's current psychological
malaise.
In the first of the four announcements, a series of incidents (in his
memory, they happen over the course of a single day) reveal that his life
with the 11 0ld skin 11 (69) was hardly a model of domestic bliss. The refrain,
11
Man and wife!, .. repeated twice, each time following an account of a
connubial, emotional debacle for Bloomsbury, is redolent with bitter irony.
The phrase excerpted from the marriage vow serves to underline the complete
absence of a secure, reciprocal, sustaining relationship between Martha and
Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury's status in this marriage was not that of a partner,
but more akin to that of a child or a dog. Actually, his marriage
denigrated him to a status even more abject than that of a dog inasmuch as
his love, as this announcement indicates, was never sought or cherished, but
was, rather, a thing to be endured.
In this first announcement, Martha's authority and Bloomsbury's
 194

abjection are measured in terms of control over the sources of nourishment.

Bloomsbury remembers having 11 Crawled 11 before her as she walked, sweeping
chestnuts from her path with his hands. For his pains, he is 11 treated ••• to
a raspberry i ce 11 which she places ••dai ntily 11 at her feet. Later, as a
special treat, he is allowed to put his 11
Stained ••• muzzle 11 into her gloved
hand. As a result of this unusual embrace, her 11 little glove came away pink
and sticky, sticky and pink 11 (68). Later they argue over the subject of her
choice which she announces will be 11 Smallness in the Human Mal~.··

Bloomsbury, acknowledging his 11

Smallness,t' attributes it (unsuccessfully) to
.. a lack of nourishment during my younger years .. (68). The victorious Martha
then arbitrarily denies him four meals as he vigorously protests his love
for her.
It doesn•t demand any great psychoanalytic insight to see in their
relationship a version of the primitive relationship between the powerless,
dependent child, and the all-powerful, nourishing mother. Every protest of
love Bloomsbury sounds in this announcement echoes the absoluteness of the
identification the child seeks with the mother, especially before the child
is weaned. The breast is the first erotic object and withdrawal of the
breast ends an idyll of innocence (from the child 1 S point of view, the self
and the breast are one and the same thing). Bloomsbury seems to be
suffering a shock similar to that of the weaned child: 11
And I said, but we
were everything to each other once 11 (69).
The relationship is characterized in this announcement by Bloomsbury•s
determination to overvalue Martha, much as a child would value its mother.
Even though he looks 11 absurd 11 to Martha, he insists on 11 Crawling 11 abjectly
before her like a preambulatory child. The curious and erotic ••treat 11
 195

involving the stained pink glove is indicative of a confusion over two modes
of approach. It•s as if the oral and the regressive part of him, and the
phallic adult part of him, have hit upon an act that serves to satisfy the
drives of each. Apparently stuck at the oral stage of development, he
conceives of love in terms of nourishment. Bloomsbury cannot distinguish in
fantasy between his mouth and his penis as the appropriate source of
pleasure, and so he has hit upon an act that reconciles the two: into the
vaginal glove {11 pink and sticky, sticky and pink 11 ) he inserts a compromise
object, a mouth shaped like a phallus, a 11 muzzle. 11 What this shows is that
the adult pleasure derived from penetration is viewed in terms of the oral
pleasure derived from feeding. For Bloomsbury, however, this act can be
accomplished only at great cost to his self-esteem.
The introduction of the phallic component, suggested by the sticky
emissions released in the glove, only serve to annoy Martha: 11
1 had, you
said, ruined a good glove with my ardor, and a decent pair of trousers
[emphasis added] 11 {69). Bloomsbury•s view of his sexuality as dirty and
animalistic is perfectly expressed by this failed overture which only serves
to stain a 11 good 11 glove and his own 11 decent 11 trousers. His punishment for
this expression of what would be called 11 obvious sexual interest 11 in 11 Hiding
Man 11 is to have his food withheld, precisely the form of punishment an
orally fixated man-child would most appreciate.
Bloomsbury•s determinaton to treat his wife as he would have treated
his nourishing mother results in what Joseph in ••Mandible.. so aptly termed
as 11 disaster. 11 Martha•s insistence on discussing 11 Smallness in the Human
Male 11 points to her crucial part in the process which has resulted in
Bloomsbury•s 11 Smallness, 11 a word that could refer to his lack of
 196

self-esteem, his lack of phallic strength, or the fact that, as an

fully-grown adult, he carries within him a small child. Bloomsbury's
smallness is disastrous to the extent that it could entertain all three
connotations of the word.
The second announcement provides a commentary on the first
announcement, this time positing essentially the same relationship in a
different situation. The sex that takes place in this episode {all of the
announcements develop around a sexual episode) is, on the surface, that of
the adolescent. This memory of an "old day, from the old days" {70) is set
amid the "pushing and pawing, pawing and pushing" {71) of a movie theatre
balcony. The tautology of the pawing and pushing serves to recall a similar
construction, also involving the Bloomsbury-as-dog motif, the sticky and
pink tautology of the muzzle in the glove. We see a Martha here similar to
the Martha of the first announcement: she is sexually aggressive, impatient
with Bloomsbury's inexperience or reserve in matters sexual. Martha
obviously wants the encounter in the balcony to develop beyond the
preliminaries of the pushing and pawing of adolescent petting, but
Bloomsbury, distracted by the "picture," is not inclined to continue:
The first thing I knew I was inside your shirt with my hand and I
found there something very lovely and, as they say, desirable. It
belonged to you. I did not know, then, what to do with it,
therefore I simply {simply!) held it in my hand, it was, as the
saying goes, soft and warm. If you can believe it. Meanwhile
down below in the pit events were taking place, whether these were
such as the people in the pit had paid for, I did not and do not
know. {71)
This description of 11 the first thing" Bloomsbury knew is a marvelously
accurate description in psychoanalytic terms of the child's feeling about
the breast. He clings to the breast {which, not named, maintains its
primitive, pre-nominative aspect), but it is no longer his breast. His
 197

ironic repetiton of the word "simply" is especially suggestive: he finds

himself clinging to the soft and warm breast in a very complex position; he
has reached a kind of impasse, unable to return to the breast as his breast,
and unwilling to proceed to a more mature sexual advance.
The image of the "pit" that seizes his attention is overdetermined in
that it might represent any of the following: the pit as theatre pit; the
pit of the stomach; the pit of Hell; or finally, the pit or cavity of the
vagina to which Martha is evidently urging him to proceed: "'You then said
into my ear, get on with it, can't you?'" {71). The events taking place in
any of these pits all point to Bloomsbury's anxiety over the shift from the
infantile attachment to the breast to the awareness that Martha as love
object has sexual dimensions that are complex and dangerous from the point
of view of someone who would prefer the breast.
Bloomsbury is punished in this announcement as he was punished in the
first. In this reconstruction of the old days, Martha is again cast in the
role of sexual aggressor, demanding adult consummation from the childlike
Bloomsbury. In the first announcement, meals were withheld; in this
announcement, the actual breast is taken away from Bloomsbury: '"At this
speech of mine [he explains that he's watching the picture] you were moved
to withdraw it, I understood, it was a punishment'" {71). Martha's role
here conforms to that of the mother who pulls her breast away from the child
signalling a new phase of that child's development and a dramatic change in
their relationship. What is an inevitable step in the breakdown of the
absolute intimacy shared between mother and child is interpreted as a
"punishment" by the child. Later in the story, Bloomsbury tells Martha:
"You veiled yourself from me, there were parts I could have and parts I
 198

couldn 1 t 11 (78). Given the opportunity to take some part other than the
breast, he hesitates, and is left with nothing:
Having withdrawn it you began, for lack of anything better, to
watch the picture also. We watched the picture together, and this
was a kind of intimacy, the other kind had been lost.
Nevertheless, it had been there once, I consoled myself with
that ••• And to that row of the balcony we, you and I, never
returned. (71)
The 11 picture .. which they watch together provides for the basis of a new kind
of intimacy, but from Bloomsbury•s point of view, it is poor substitute. It
is this ••picture 11 going on down in the pit that preoccupied Bloomsbury while
he clung to the breast. This picture is important in that the narrative
also makes it clear that its effect on both Bloomsbury and Martha is
profound, so profound that it provides for the destruction of the old
intimacy and for the terms of a new relationship. As far as the events of
the picture itself are concerned, no details whatsoever are provided, which
is odd given the importance Bloomsbury attaches to it. In a wonderful
demonstration of how displacement occurs in fiction as it does in dream, in
the very next episode in the frame tale the significance of the picture is
hinted at. It is at this juncture in the frame tale that Martha enters the
story, as it were, in the flesh.
Bloomsbury is 11 weeping quietly in the control room [emphasis addedr
(71) when the 11 girl or woman of indeterminate age .. suddenly appears. 11
Tell
me about your early life, .. says Bloomsbury. Significantly, in light of the
events at the movie theatre and the 11 missing 11 picture, the central feature
of her history is that she was once 11 the president of the Conrad Veidt fan
club 11 (72). In fact, she still carries the picture of this motion picture
star in her purse, 11
Where it had apparently remained for some time 11 ( 73).
She proceeds to describe her attachment to Conrad Veidt in very strong terms
 199

(Conrad Veidt was the star of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the film that was
the inspiration for the title of this collection of stories). The Conrad
Veidt Martha sees in the picture, if he does represent part of the missing
picture, would provide the necessary incentive to a person with Bloomsbury's
psychological predispositions not to press a sexual claim on the
mother-figure. This is Martha's description of her idol: "His magnetism
and personality got me. His voice and gestures fascinated me. I hated him,
feared him, loved him" (73). Curiously, this figure who "got" Martha
conforms in every crucial aspect to the child's view of the father who is so
attractively powerful and powerfully threatening. It might be argued that
this is Martha speaking of her feelings, and not Bloomsbury speaking of his.
The narrative, however, then proceeds to provide a final piece in this
puzzle. Bloomsbury is shown the picture. His reaction echoes Martha's
sense of ambivalence: "It bore a photograph of Conrad Veidt who looked at
one and the same instant handsome and sinister" (73). Thus, through a
series of displacements, the nature of the picture that signalled the end of
the old intimacy between Martha and Bloomsbury is expressed. The picture is
of the father who, to the oedipal child, is someone who can be hated, feared
and loved at one and the same time.
So strong is the influence of the "silver screen" on both Martha and
Bloomsbury that, in their subsequent sexual relations, they find themselves
conforming to a cinematic model. For instance, Martha approaches Bloomsbury
in the frame tale comparing herself to the film star Carmen Lambrosa.
Bloomsbury, who we already know would prefer to crawl, initiates an embrace
by taking "a single stride, such as he had often seen practised in film"
(79). This pseudo-cinematic embrace ends as an unsuccessful attempt to
 200

emulate the romance of the pictures. In terms of the picture metaphor

already alluded to, this approach to their relationship must fail:
Bloomsbury's attempts to affect the stride of the movie star is an attempt
to usurp the role of the handsome and sinister figure with a prior claim on
Martha.
The third announcement, which concerns an argument over ice cubes and
the process of refrigeration, highlights other features of the state of mind
which has its origins in Bloomsbury's relationship to Martha. Bloomsbury,
by cheating, manages to challenge the "immaculate" and "magisterial"
authority of the "old girl," by winning an argument involving the counting
of ice cubes. He then presses this momentary advantage, and for the first
time in this case history, takes an active role in a sexual encounter:
'What a defeat for you! What a victory for me! It was my first
victory, I fear I went quite out of my head. I dragged you to the
floor, among the ice cubes ••• and forced you, with results that I
considered then, and consider now, to have been first rate.'
(75-76)

Bloomsbury is evidently able to perform sexually if authority is "defeated."

The act of love, as it is described here, is an attack, akin to an act of
rape. Bloomsbury goes out of his head, drags her to the floor, and forces
her to make love. In other words, Bloomsbury's "victory"--his potency--is
tied directly to the infliction of humiliation on the object in the absence
of the rule of justice.
The subject of "Refrigeration" that provides for the basis of this
quarrel is important to our understanding of what this announcement
signifies. It is important to take careful note of the particular terms in
which the process of refrigeration is described:
•• that among its attributes was the attribute of conceiving
containing and at the moment of need whelping any number of ice
 201

cubes so that no matter how grave the demand, how vast the
occasion, how indifferent or even hostile the climate, how inept
or even trecherous the operator, how brief or even nonexistant the
lapse between genesis and parturition, between the wish and the
fact, ice cubes in multiples of sufficient would present
themselves. (74)
The associations attached to the subject of refrigeration develop the fridge
into a complex symbol that has significance on several levels. On an
intrinsic level, refrigeration picks up on the raspberry ice of the first
announcement. The fridge is where the food is kept and the principles by
which it functions make it an appropriate source of contention for this
couple.

The fridge, placed in their kitchen by Martha, is developed into a

metaphor for a woman who conceives, contains, and whelps ice cubes on
demand. On one level the imagery surrounding this "machine" suggests the
Virgin who, "without doubt and on immaculate authority" (74), is capable of
"genesis" virtually without regard to the participation of the "operator."
The association of the fridge with the Virgin, a figure embued with the
strongest and most fundamental prohibitions against being veiwed as a sexual
object, is the immaculate mother who cannot be touched.
The message of the immaculately conceiving fridge image is that
pregnancy can result without intercourse taking place. As an object capable
of impregnation, pregnancy, and delivery in unlimited quantities, this
fridge argues for the autonomous power of the mother. It must be kept in
mind that the "immaculate authority" of Martha will not permit this
characterization of the fridge's function to be challenged. As a depiction
of the family, it is, as it were, a chilling view. The mother is absorbed
in insular processes designed to sustain self-love, processes not open to
 202

interference from the operator. The superfluous male operator is

characterized as either "inept" or "trecherous." The "climate," the world
into which the ice cubes are delivered, is "indifferent" or "hostile."
Finally, there is the matter of the "whelps" produced by this fridge under
these conditions ("whelping" represents another feature in the
Bloomsbury-as-dog motif): the fact that the children that result from this
sort of family are ice cubes tells us much Bloomsbury's view of the origins
of his own frigidity.
By attacking the immaculate authority of Martha's version of
refrigeration Bloomsbury hopes to prove, as he puts it with emphasis, "that
there is no justice!" (75}. Proving that there is no justice allows
Bloomsbury to attack and rape Martha. The concept of justice typically
originates in the view of the father who threatens the son who desires the
mother with castration. In what proves to be only the momentary
circumvention of justice, and the threat of punishment, Bloomsbury finds the
means to vent what amounts to anger at the powerful and seductive
mother-figure. The irony here, of course, is that "victorious" Bloomsbury
has already been punished by this point with castration in the form of
psychic impotence (or frigidity). Bloomsbury, throughout the story and the
history of his life as we know it, is psychologically, a figure of ice, or,
as his name suggests, a "buried-bloom." There is, then, more than a little
irony in Martha's final words to Bloomsbury: "'Balls,' she said. 'I know
you and your 1etchy ways'" ( 81). The irony is that his 1etchy ways have, in
effect, cost him his balls.
The fourth announcement basically serves to describe in different terms
again what we have already seen depicted in the three preceding
 203

announcements. This announcement is developed around two family triangles,

two triangles which, as I hope to demonstrate, amount to versions of the
same triangle. The first triangle is formed when the heretofore unmentioned
child of Bloomsbury and Martha is mentioned (no doubt this child is in part
an allusion to a similar imaginary child in Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?}. The first triangle, then, consists of Martha, Bloomsbury, and a
child whose gender is concealed behind the indefinite pronoun "it." The
second triangle is formed with the intrusion of Jack, Martha's lover. This
second triangle moves Bloomsbury from the position of father to one more
familiar, that of the displaced son. What is fascinating about these two
triangles is the way in which the predicament of the child in the first
triangle serves as commentary on the predicament of Bloomsbury in the second
triangle: Bloomsbury's child and the childish Bloomsbury are both rejected
by Martha in a realization of the refrigeration argument she promulgated in
the third announcement. The child and Bloomsbury are relegated to a queer
kind of oblivion by Martha: the child is simply "gone ••• away," and the
adult Bloomsbury is simply "gone" as a person, lost in a morbid and moribund
way of life, still rehearsing unresolved infantile fantasies.
This is Bloomsbury's description of the first triangle:
Well, I said, and the child? Up the child, you said, 'twasn•t
what I wanted anyway. What then did you want? I asked, and the
child cried, its worst forebodings confirmed. Pish, you said,
nothing you could supply. Maybe, I said. Not bloody likely, you
said. And where is it (the child} now? Gone, I don't doubt,
away. ( 77)
In this first triangle, Bloomsbury is rejected along with the child of his
"supply." In the story this is Martha's only manifest act as mother, but it
is utterly consistent with the view of her as mother we have been obliquely
offered in the previous announcements, especially the third announcement.
 204

In the third announcement, Martha•s refrigeration argument provides a gloss

on her maternal attitude as it is demonstrated here. The selfishness and
self-absorption nascent in the fridge image is manifested in the callous
rejection of the child because it is not what she wanted.
The second triangle is a more developed version of the first, this time
with Bloomsbury the husband put in the position of a child who has his
11
Worst forebodings confirmed... Bloomsbury is betrayed by Martha when she
takes a man named Jack into her bedroom. This has the effect of placing
Bloomsbury in exactly the same position as a child in the primal scene,
stationed outside the bedroom door listening to the imperfectly understood
and disturbing sounds of adult intercourse:
A man came, in a hat ••• Jack, this is my husband, you said. And
took him into the bedroom, and turned the key in the lock, you and
he together on the inside, me alone on the outside. Go away and
mind your own silly business, you said, from behind the door.
Yes, Jack said (from behind the door), go away and don•t be
bothering people with things on their minds ••• ! watched at the
door until nightfall, but could only hear no more words, only
sounds of a curious nature, such as grunts and moans and sighs.
(78)

Bloomsbury•s tendency to confuse girl with woman is further

demonstrated by the events which follow this reconstruction of the primal
scene. Earlier, Bloomsbury states that their marriage bed, now occupied by
the copulating Jack and Martha, has a significant history: 11
The bed, your
mother•s bed, brought to our union with your mother in it, she lay like a
sword between us 11 (77). After Jack has made love to Bloomsbury•s wife
behind the locked bedroom door, the door is opened. It is not Martha who
emerges, however, it is Martha •s mother: .. At 1ength the door opened, your
mother emerged, looking as they say •put out'. But she had always taken
your part as opposed to my part, therefore she said only that I was a common
 205

sneak" (78). This switch from Martha to Martha•s mother is a displacement.

The displacement is signalled in part by the use of the ambiguous term "put
out": Martha's mother may look put out, but it is Martha who has just "put
out" sexually for Jack. This displacement perfectly expresses Bloomsbury's
critical inability to distinguish wife from mother.
Bloomsbury accuses this mother of always taking the wife's part. The
meaning of this complaint turns on the word "part.•• On the most superficial
level, it means that the mother always sides with the daughter against him.
On another, still literal level, it means that, in Bloomsbury•s mind, a
mother has always taken his wife•s part or role, an accusation which
supports what we have contended to this point. Furthermore, this is the
same mother who lay "like a sword" between Bloomsbury and his wife. The
sword here represents the phallic threat attached to the seduction of
mothers {from what we know of Bloomsbury, it is far more likely that it is
he who brought the sword-bearing mother-figure to bed with him).
There is another motif in the story that complements Bloomsbury•s of
Martha as a figure who carries a sword. The first details in this pattern
occur in the details of Martha•s clothes as they are described in her first
appearance in the frame tale. She is described as "a girl or woman of
indeterminate age in a long bright red linen duster ••• [she] removed her
duster, underneath she was wearing black toreador pants, and orange sweater,
and harlequin glasses" (71-72). There would seem to be two Martha•s here,
one dressed as a domestic in a red duster, and a second Martha dressed in a
garrish, even an aggressively garrish, costume. The fact that she is
wearing harlequin glasses points to the fact that she is wearing a dramatic
disguise, in other words, that she is portraying something or someone. The
 206

black toreador pants are referred to again in another context which serves
to develop their significance. This time, however, they are called
"bullfighter pants" (80) and they have a particular effect on Bloomsbury
(Martha has just wept which has tempted Bloomsbury): "'As a matter of fact,
you were most appealing. Tempting, even. I was fooled for whole moments at
a time. You look well in bullfighter pants 11' (80). Evidently Martha
literally and figuratively "wears the pants" in Bloomsbury's family.
Bloomsbury's own pants, we recall from the first announcement, were "ruined"
1ong ago.
The fact that Martha insists on her resemblance to Carmen Lambrosa, a
Latin film star, and the fact that she, in effect, brought a sword to the
marriage bed also figure in this bullfighter pattern. Each of these
details--the red duster, the toreador bullfighter pants, her resemblance to
Carmen Lambrosa, the possession of the sword--are part and parcel of a
pattern that indicates that, in Bloomsbury's mind, making love to Martha
puts him in a position analogous to that of the bull who faces a matador in
the corrida. Evidently Bloomsbury (who adopts the attitude of a
domesticated animal, the dog, around Martha) feels that behind the cape of
the red duster, a bullfighting Martha waits, sword in hand, to threaten the
animal in him (the bull serves as a symbol of potent and rampant maleness).
The curious juxtaposition of mother and wife in the fourth announcement
is consistent with Bloomsbury's pronounced determination to refer to Martha,
either as she exists in the present, or as she was in the past, as the "girl
or woman." It is, it should be noted, a description that is not justified
by the text; that is, there is nothing in her appearance as we have it from
Bloomsbury to warrant this refusal to opt for one of the two terms. The
 207

justification, rather, lies in the latent content of the story, in

Bloomsbury's unwillingness or inability to separate his mother from his
wife, or put another way, his refusal to give up his fantasy "marriage" to
the mother he knew as a child. This tendency to identify Martha as both
girl and woman, as young and old, is a projection of his own desire to play
boy and man to her. The label "old girl," then, while it is not at all
descriptive of Martha, is entirely descriptive of Bloomsbury's own divided
status as both child and man. It is clearly not Martha who is confused over
her role (she's a woman with a woman's appetites), it is Bloomsbury, the man
who continues to nourish the buried bloom of a boy's desires. To the end
Bloomsbury refuses to accept that it is he, and not Martha, who will not let
go of the past: "'Martha,• he said, 'old skin, why can't you let the old
days die? That were the days of anger, passion, and dignity, but are now,
in the light of present standards, practices, and attitudes, days that are
gone?'" (80). But this Martha he is addressing does not exist; in fact, no
woman of that name independent of his memory could be said to exist at all
in this story.
Martha of "the old days" answers the call and returns to his isolated
radio station. It is soon made clear, however, that the terms of their
relationship have not changed to any significant degree since her last
incarnation. Bloomsbury discovers that he is finally unable to
"authenticate, ameliorate, assimilate, or alleviate." It is significant,
too, that this man who cannot find the means to go forward into health and
validity finds himself preoccupied with the word "matriculate" in one of his
announcements of the first kind, for "a period longer than normal" (79).
The story ends essentially where it began, with nothing resolved: '"Then we
 208

are, as they say, through?' she asked. 'There is no hope for us?' 'None,•
I said. 'That I know of"' {80). In terms of the latent content, Bloomsbury
finds that he cannot return with Martha to the pre-phallic, pre-oedipal
idyll he knew at Martha's breast, the time before he knew the interpolating
threat of the picture, Jack, and the castrating sword. There can be little
question that these are the impossible terms of the reconciliation he waits
for: "Could not we two skins, you and me, climb and cling for all the days
that were left? Which were not, after all, so many days? Without the
interpolation of such as Jack? And no doubt, others yet to come?" {78).

For Bloomsbury, the result of this relationship to Martha is the

psychic impotence and impasse common to all of the characters in the
synoptic tales. Bloomsbury, who repeatedly qualifies observations he makes
with "as they say," is patently incapable of feeling any emotions except
grief, regret, and anger. This limited spectrum of emotion is completely
tied to the one person who utterly dominates his psychic life, Martha.
There is a sentence in the story that expresses his incapacity to feel, and
it points to the fact that this lack of confidence in his feelings is a
function of his inability to guage her feelings toward him: "But I felt, I
felt, I felt {I think) that you were, as they say, angry" {71). So profound
is Bloomsbury's commitment to his past life with Martha that when the
meeting between them in the present finally develops into a seduction, the
scene is rendered in terms that utterly drain it of any sense of life or
immediacy. Bloomsbury's steadfast conscious denial of the basis of his
attraction to Martha precludes his "making up his mind" about Martha:
'Do I impress you?'
'In what way?'
 209

'As a possible sex partner? Sexually I mean?'

'I haven't considered it,' he said, 'heretofore.'
'They say I'm sexy,' she noted.
'I don't doubt it,' he said. 'I mean it's plausible.'
'I am yours,' she said, 'if you want me.'
'Yes,' he said, 'there's the difficulty, making up my mind.'
{79)

Incarnated once again by the incantations of Bloomsbury's announcements,

Martha is thus reaffirmed in the present as the ambivalent maternal figure
about whom Bloomsbury was unable to make up his mind in the past. The
expression of obvious sexual interest in Martha still represents a risk that
Bloomsbury is not prepared to take. Just as certainly, covert sexual
interest in Martha is a desire he is not yet prepared to abandon. It is
approprite that the first and last times that Bloomsbury sees Martha in the
frame tale, it is "in the glass" {71) of the control room: Martha in the
present is no more than a reflection of the lost object he carries within
him, a thing fashioned entirely out of the unresolved wishes of the old days
he cannot stop reliving. Because he cannot come to terms with the only
woman in his life, his fate is certain: he will not escape the hermetic and
closed booth of his obsessions. Every announcement he makes, every
"performance" he undertakes, is an exercise in failure. Like the stories of
Joseph, Baskerville, and Burligame, this story ends with the protagonist
trapped inside the stultifying monotony of his fantasies. The last sentence
of this story closes the circle the story has drawn: "That was the end of
this period of Bloomsbury's, as they say, life" {81).
 210

IV
"Florence Green is 81" traces the course of a dinner party at Florence
Green's. The story begins somewhere in the middle of that evening, follows
the dinner party to its conclusion, and ends with Baskerville, whose point
of view we share, having left the party, turning circles in the street in
his car. The figure that dominates the perspective we share with
Baskerville is Florence Green, an old woman who lapses in and out of
consciousness and thus is given to what Baskerville refers to as a "Form of
Address••:
"Dinner with Florence Green. The old babe is on a kick tonight:
I want to go to some other country, she announces. Everyone
wonders what this can mean. But Florence says nothing more: no
explanation, no elaboration, after a satisfied look around the
table bang! she is asleep again. The girl at Florence's right is
new here and does not understand" (3).
Florence Green•s rather delphic form of address is very much like the form
of address the fiction itself adopts; the narrative, like Florence•s
idiosyncratic ramblings (and like the route Baskerville will eventually
follow as he sings his Kyrie at close of the story), describes a series of
uniquely determined concentric circles.
Baskerville, the would-be novelist, currently "a sophomore at the
Famous Writers• School in Westport" (3), edits a magazine entitled The
Journal of Tension Reduction. Baskerville•s trade is to sponsor through his
magazine, as he puts it, "portages through the whirlpool country of the
mind" (6). This is a key image in the sense that the story we are reading
is a form of precisely this kind of portage. Baskerville provides the point
of view through which we view the events of this story. There are,
therefore, strictly speaking, no events per se in this story: only
 211

reactions to events. The portage thus consists of a series of impressions

linked by association into configurations that resemble, as much as
anything, whirlpools. Everything that 11 happens 11 in this story is expressive
of, and contained by, the 11 Whirlpool country .. of Baskerville's complex
subjectivity.
As readers, our inevitable confusion as to the subject of 11 Florence 11
(the difficulty we have maintaining our equilibrium as we portage through
the text) is correlevant to the new girl's confusion over the highly
eccentric, solipsistic form of address she hears at Florence's table. It is
not long, however, before we begin to see that, though this country may be
dominated by whirlpools, there is a stabilizing pattern in the text in the
form of repeated, developing motifs. Unlike, say, the rapids of pure
discursiveness, whirlpool country is marked by definite patterns.
In 11 The Big Broadcast of 1938 11 Bloomsbury speaks of 11
both the subject
and object 11 of his narrative excursions as being one and the same creature
(70). In the nature of, and the relationships among, the associative
patterns in 11 Florence, 11 the real subject and object of the portage described
in this story is contained; the patterning of a limited number of motifs
whose significance is uniquely determined by their relationships to one
another serves to reveal both the subject and the object of
11
Florence 11 --Baskerville's state of mind.

Any listing of these motifs, however exhaustive, would fail to provide

an adequate sense of their significance, for these motifs signify as much in
terms of their relationship to one another as they do independently. The
method of 11 Florence 11 thus serves to demonstrate the efficacy of Barthelme's
 212

maxim that the how of a work of art is more important than the what.3
Consider, for example, the following passage: "'The aim of literature,•
Baskerville replied grandly, 'is the creation of a strange object covered
with fur which breaks your heart.• Joan says: 'I have two children.• 'Why
did you do that? • I ask. • I don •t know• , she says" (15). The statement
Baskerville makes regarding the aim of literature means something strictly
in and of itself as a unit of meaning (in fact, it is often quoted by
critics out of context). It is contiguous to a sentence with which it would
seem to have little in common. As in Florence's form of address, we shift
with "no explanation, no elaboration" from an observation about literature
to the personal disclosure by the woman Baskerville is currently seducing.
In relation to each other, and in way independent of the significance of
each, these two sentences serve to describe in a uniquely active way what
can be described passively to lesser effect: the way Baskerville's mind
works. The real subject of this exchange, therefore, is the agency
directing the flow of association from literary objects covered with fur to
this woman's children. This particular associative fragment also signifies
within the larger context of the whole associative field of the text,
telling us even more about the way Baskerville's mind works. For instance,
we already know by this point that Baskerville is unable to father children.
We also know that a novel has been gestating in his mind for twelve years.
We know that he is attracted to what is maternal in women ••• and so on. If
we add this single scrap quoted above to the accruing, reflexive heap of
associations contained by the entire narrative, what begins to emerge from
the complex matrix of significances that is formed is the otherwise
concealed substance of Baskerville's state of mind.
 213

The style of "Florence 11 is a version of the modernist style Joyce

developed in Ulysses, 11
a continual kaleidoscopic interweaving of interior
monologue, style indirect libre, direct speech, indirect speech, first
person and authorial narrative .. (Iser 78, 209). The form is meant to
approximate consciousness which is characterized by an ever-shifting
viewpoint constantly adding new material to a history of impressions. The
choice and placement of material is determined by both conscious and
unconscious factors. The unconscious element is critical to our sense of
how this particular history of impressions develops, our sense of how
Baskerville's mind works. Donald Barthelme, commenting on the
conceptualization of his stories, once said, 11
All of the magic comes from
the unconscious. If there is any magic. 11 4 The role the unconscious plays
in this story is made the manifest subject of the story as the reader is
asked to consider what is somewhat ironically identified as 11
the
psychoanalytic issue 11 (9).
Early in the narrative, the reader is encouraged to see his role as
analogous to that of a psychoanalyst observing Baskerville in the text
playing "the nervous, dreary patient•• who is trying, by various means, "to
put you into the problem" (4). The reader's status as detached doctor is
ironically acknowledged. Barthelme's intent here is not so much to awaken a
sense of the limits of fiction as illusion as it is to turn the act of
reading into a kind of game of hide-and-seek: "Reader ••• we have roles to
play, thou and I: you are the doctor (washing his hands between hours), and
I, I am, I think, the nervous, dreary patient. I am free associating,
brilliantly, brilliantly, to put you into the problem. Or for fear of
boring you: which? 11 (4). With this sly admission, the game is on. The
 214

object of the game is to find the patient, or more specifically, find the
psychoanalytic issues purported to lie concealed somewhere in the fabric of
the narrative (the name "Baskerville, .. which comes from Arthur Conan Doyle
and a mystery involving the famous detective Sherlock Holmes, adds to the
sense that this story is some kind of mystery to be solved).
The text presents itself as a series of brilliant free associations
that will, if properly attended to by the reader-psychoanalyst, put him or
her into a problem. The problem, we cannot fail but to conclude, is a
problem that a pyschoanalyst is advantaged to appreciate; in other words,
the text declares that it contains a problem that is likely to be
unconscious in nature. The text then proceeds, however, to cast the whole
issue into doubt by declaring that the associations we see in the text may
not be free at all: they may simply be Baskerville•s way of titillating the
reader-psychoanalyst with ersatz symptoms, and, by implication, altogether
bogus psychoanalytic issues: 11
0ne source of concern in the classic
encounter between patient and psychoanalyst is the patient•s fear of boring
the doctor •••• In such cases the patient sees the doctor as a highly
sophisticated consumer of outre material, a connoisseur of exotic behavior.
Therefore he tends to propose himself as more colorful, more eccentric (or
more ill) than he really is: or he is witty, or he fantasticates 11 (5-6).
At one point in the story, after repeating an introduction of himself
for the third time-- 11 I am a young man but very brilliant, very ingratiating 11
(8)--the credibility of the narrative voice is deliberately undermined:
..... did I explain that? And you accepted my explanation? .. (8). The point
is timely: by virtue of the fallibility of Baskerville as reliable
narrator, we find that we have indeed been 11
put into the problem, .. a problem
 215

which centres on the identity of the narrative voice. Baskerville is aware,

and wants the reader to be aware (and wants the reader to be aware that he's
aware, etc. ) , that the prose you're reading may be 11
a tactic for evading the
psychoanalytic i ssue 11 (8-9). The effect of the irony here is to make the
search for the pschoanalytic issue all but irresistible, even as it renders
the inclination to view the text in this manner highly suspect.
The question as to whether or not the text of 11 Florence 11 contains a
legitimate psychoanalytic issue, or whether it contains only 11 bri 11 i antly 11
ironic openings for the reader to posit his own desires remains. The reader
has no choice but to behave as he or she has been encouraged to behave, that
is, to try to determine whether of not the text contains legitimate
psychoanalytic issues crucial to an understanding of the story.
The most important relationship in the story is that which is developed
between Baskerville and Florence Green. Baskerville's relationship with the
new girl (he first calls her 11
Kathleen, 11 but later admits her name is "Joan
Graham"), which begins and ends the evening, is a mere dalliance compared to
the degree of preoccupation and the intensity of emotion Baskerville directs
at Florence Green. The complex associative matrix of the story, which leaps
backward and forward into time, everywhere serves to implicate Baskerville's
history with that of the dowager Florence Green. Primarily this implication
is accomplished through the splicing together of fragments of their
respective histories; as the narrative develops, certain episodes from
Florence's past serve as oblique commentary on episodes from Baskerville's
past. The story thus provides essentially three spheres of subject matter:
Baskerville's current evening with occasional and cryptic commentary from
Florence; Baskerville's recollections of Florence's personal history; and
 216

finally, Baskerville's account of his own personal history. All three

spheres are active at once and the boundaries between each sphere are
deliberately blurred. The result is the creation of a single, highly
complex and resonant space, a space occupied by Baskerville's subjectivity.
One of the purposes of this structure is to place the histories of
Florence and Baskerville in a dialectical relationship: contrast and
comparison between the two histories is inevitable. It soon becomes
apparent that there are fundamental differences between the two characters.
The fabulous variety and scope of Florence's experience in the world serves
to underscore the stultifying narrowness of Baskerville's life and times.
Florence has led something of a charmed life. She has travelled, she has
been loved, she has been involved in exotic adventures, and even though she
has fallen into a queer kind of decay, she still commands a considerable
audience and exercises power far in excess of anything Baskerville could
hope to achieve. Baskerville, on the other hand, hasn't developed in any
theatre of accomplishment much beyond levels he achieved as a child, and not
a particularly promising child at that. Baskerville is, like Joseph in
"Mandible," an adult in a qualified sense only: he is still waging and
losing wars he fought as a child. He is still nursing ancient wounds to the
exclusion of almost all else:
Despite his slowness already remarked upon ••• Baskerville never
failed to be 'promoted,' but on the contrary was always
'promoted,' the reason for this being perhaps that his seat was
needed for another child (Baskerville then being classified, in
spite of his marked growth and gorgeous potential, as a child).
(9-10).
Throughout the story, Baskerville juxtaposes his current adult
experience against a developing case history which is meant to account for
his present pyschological condition. The case history, of course, is one of
 217

the requisites of classic psychoanalysis and Baskerville, dutifully playing

his role of patient, is careful to provide one. According to him, he was
anything but an exceptional child. Indeed, his most vivid recollections
concern repeated failures to impress adults in authority with his prospects:
"Baskervi 11 e' s difficulty ••• in every part of the world is that he is slow.
'That's a slow boy, that one,' his first teacher said. 'That boy is what we
call real slow,' his second teacher said. 'That's a slow son of a bitch,'
his third teacher said" (5).
A child of little promise, he found himself attracted to a number of
male role models who held out the promise of a means to power and selfhood.
First among these was Joe Weider, "Trainer of Terror Fighters," whose ads
every boy knows from comic books advertisements. Under Joe Weider's
guidance, Baskerville turns himself into an adult with "trim midsection
sporting chiseled abdominals ••• superior shoulders and brilliantly developed
pectoral-latissimus tie-in" (5). To complement his brilliantly developed
form he turns to another juvenile source of status and achievement, the
Famous Writer's School in Westport. He now presents himself to women as "a
weightlifter and a poet," or as he puts it in another context, "a man
stronger and more eloquent than other men" (8). Having achieved in
extravagant fashion more than anyone evidently expected of him as a child,
Baskerville nevertheless patently suffers from a profound lack of
self-esteem, living literally and figuratively inside the hollow
achievements of adulthood. The capacity to inspire terror, promised by Joe
Weider, remains an impossible goal. The identity that now inhabits
Baskerville's brilliant adult form is still "young Baskerville ••• shrinking
along the beach" (16). Beneath the impressive surface of chiseled
 218

abdominals is a "stomach like a clenched fist," a fist that can only be

unclenched "by introducing quarts of Fleischmann's Gin [flesh-man's gin]"
(4-5).

Along with Joe Weider and the Famous Writer's School, Baskerville's
mind is also drawn to another of the figures who would have appeared in a
typical boy's pantheon of role models of the period, Mandrake the Magician.
Mandrake is perhaps the most important of these models {his name is a
tautology emphasizing masculinity). In the narrative, Baskerville keeps
returning to the figure of this crime fighter-magician, in particular to an
episode involving Florence Green. Florence Green once saw Mandrake lift a
piano in the air as a demonstration of his hypnotic power. What fascinates
Baskerville about the incident is that Mandrake, "the great pianist ••• could
not be persuaded to play" (7). The fact that he is able to control the
piano (he moves it and makes it sway "from side to side"[9]), without
actually having to touch it, in particular fascinates Baskerville: "What if
Mandrake had played, though, what if he had seated himself before the
instrument, raised his hands, and ••• what? (8). Significantly, the only
other reference to music in the story occurs in the last two sentences: "In
my rain-blue Volkwagon I proceed down the rain-black streets thinking, for
some reason, of Verdi's Requiem. I begin to drive my tiny car in idiot
circles in the street, I begin to sing the first great Kyrie" {16).
What Mandrake represents with his power to move the piano but his
refusal to play is yet another version of the bogus Weider myth of male
identity: Mandrake's show of strength is an illusion, and as an index of
power, hypnosis is little more than another in the series of empty shows of
 219

male adult ''development 11 that have left Baskerville in the position he now
occupies. As the last sentences of the story indicate, Baskerville does
11
play 11 music, but it is a requiem, sung while turning redundant circles in
the street. For the nervous, insecure and alcoholic Baskerville, these role
models, which favour form over substance, fail to amount to a viable model
of a mature, autonomous male identity.
With a case history populated by disappointed teachers and hollow
paragons, it is little wonder that the adult Baskerville turns in his
bitterness to the writing of a magnum opus entitled, 11
The Children's Army ...
The book is about an army of children rising up and wreaking murder on an
adult world. For Baskerville, this fantasy of revenge represents something
of life's work: it has been 11 incubating 11 in him since his Joe Weider days
(
11
it will be twelve years old Tuesday 11 [10]).
Success with women, an integral part of the Weider myth, still eludes
him. Florence Green, the matriarch to whom he looks now for financial
support, and at whose table he is currently constrained to curry favour, is
a version of the adult authority he seems to have suffered under all his
life. His demeaning position at her table, jockeying for position with
several rivals, underlines the fact that the adult Baskerville is no better
off than he was a child. The product of an abortive childhood and a
miscarried attempt to reach maturity, Baskerville's lack of sexul maturity
is reflected in a dismal history of consummations: 11
1 am also ••• the father
of one abortion and four miscarriages; who among you has such a record and
no wife? 11 (5). We observe Baskerville throughout the story posturing before
Joan Graham. The terms of his view of this woman he hopes to seduce are
worth noting in light of his terror fighter fantasy for there are definite
 220

hostile undertones involved. Responding to her question, "Are you a native

of Dallas?," Baskerville says, ''No Joan baby I am a native of Bengazi sent
here by the UN to screw your beautiful ass into the ground, that is not what
I said but what I should have said, it would have been brilliant" (8). When
he finally consummates his seduction of the "new girl," for some reason it
amounts only to an act as sterile and as compromised as his other masculine
accomplishments. It is also a consummation more than vaguely reminiscent of
the cloakroom consummation Joseph had with Miss Mandible: "In the dim foyer
I slip my hands through the neck of Joan's yellow dress. It is dangerous
but a way of finding out everything at once" (16).
Although Baskerville's ambivalent sexual interest is manifestly
directed at the new girl, he actually evinces far more interest generally in
the "old girl" Florence Green, more interest than can be justified by his
need to toady funds for his magazine. While this fascination is never
expressed in explicitly sexual terms, in the urgency with which Florence's
attention is sought, his solicitations take on much of the character of a
lover's suit. What follows are three expressions of this ardour excerpted
from various junctures in the story:

Rock pools deep in the earth [Florence Green's money comes from
oil], I salute the shrewdness of whoever filled you with Texaco!
Texaco breaks my heart, Texaco is particularly poignant. (6)
The Principal Seas are wonderful, the Important Lakes of the World
are wonderful, the Metric System is wonderful, let us measure
something together Florence Green baby. (7)
It is well known that Florence Green adores doctors, why didn't I
announce myself, in the beginning, from the very first, as doctor?
( 11)

Baskerville's feelings for Florence Green are ambivalent in the sense

 221

that he is obviously attracted to her power--it breaks his heart, it is

"particularly poignant"--but he also fears her. The heartbreaking poignancy
of this ambivalence is that he is at once attracted and repelled by the same
thing, her power. Consider, for example, the image he presents of Florence
Green's Club: "Florence has a Club ••• The Club is a group of men who gather,
on these occasions, to recite and hear poems in praise of Florence Green.
Before you can be admitted you must compose a poem ••• Florence carries the
poems about with her in her purse, stapled together in an immense, filthy
wad" (14). This Club must represent a disturbing image for Baskerville who
considers himself a poet, and sees himself in competition with other poets
for this powerful woman. Florence takes poems in which declarations of love
are contained and stores these "filthy" offerings in her purse as if they
were merely another form of currency. In Baskerville's mind, the manifest
souce of her power may come from oil and money, but on a deeper level, he
sees her power as the ability to catch, keep, and degrade the love of men.
Florence is thus related to a figure like Circe, a female who debased and
trivialized the men who fell under her spell.
The word "Club" has another connotation, a connotation over which
Baskerville reveals some concern: a club is also a weapon. This
connotative possibility is awakened when we learn that Florence not only
collects poems, she also collects canes: "••• here I will insert a
description of Florence's canes. Florence's canes line a special room, the
room in which her cane collection is kept. There are hundreds of
them ••• resting in notched compartments that resemble arms racks in an
armory. Everywhere Florence goes, she purchases one or more canes. Some
she has made herself, stripping the bark from the green unseasoned wood,
 222

drying them carefully, applying layer after layer of a special varnish, then
polishing them endlessly ••• " (12). In Baskerville's mind, these canes would
be highly suggestive. First of all, they are treated very much like the
love poems which Florence also collects and stores in a special place.
Second, there is something vaguely unpleasant about the description
Baskerville provides of Florence preparing her canes. The process sounds
like the malign process of maturation Baskerville has endured: his green
and unseasoned self was roughly 11 Stripped" of something integral; he was
turned into an adult to take his place in "this vast, dry, and misunderstood
country" (6}; and like the canes, the dissembling, elusive Baskerville's
true surface lies hidden under "layer and layer of a special varnish.''
Finally, there is the association of the canes as weapons in an armory.
Baskerville, we recall, has been preoccupied for years with a book-fantasy
he calls 11 The Children's Army." There is an incident with a cane which
Baskerville recounts that is important in this context. Florence has just
learned about the holocaust, years after it has taken place. In her anger,
she rushes out and attacks the nearest German she can find: "She 1if ted her
cane, the cane of 1927 Yellowstone, and cracked [the German Policeman's]
head with it. He fell into a heap in the middle of the street. Then
Florence Green rushed awkwardly into the plaza with her cane, beating the
people there, men and women, indiscriminately, until she was subdued 11 (12).
One of the ironies of this incident is that in Baskerville's "violent and
necessary 11 book, "The Children's Army," a similar scene of mayhem takes
place: "One day the Army appears in the city, in a park, and takes up
positions. Then it begins killing the people 11 (10). Florence Green's
behaviour in the caning incident is excessive, wilfull, and selfish, but
 223

most of all, it is overt. Baskerville, who imagines a similar attack in his

book, refuses to act on this or any of his aggressive impulses in an overt
fashion. Florence's attack on the German people may be misguided, but it is
done out of a sense of moral outrage, a sense of justice. Baskerville's
fantasy of revenge is motivated, on the other hand, by merely personal
emotions. At some level, what this pattern of association suggests is that
Florence Green, in the use of her cane as a weapon (or as a "club"), has
usurped Baskerville's identity: her behaviour mocks the hostile but
impotent terror-fighter Baskerville. Unlike Florence's attack on the
Germans, Baskerville is unable to focus on a real object: in his novel, his
army kills no one in particular, it just intends to kill 11
people." The last
of the General Orders he lists for his 11 immaculate Army" reads, "What the
general wants to do now is, find and destroy the enemy,. (15).
There is another element in the pattern surrounding the cane episode
that tends to confirm that Florence Green represents to Baskerville a
superior version of his own identity:
It was the first issue [of Life magazine] containing the first
pictures from Buchenwald, she could not look away, she read the
text, or a little of the text, then she vomitted. When she
recovered she read the article again, but without understanding
it. What did exterminated mean? It meant nothing, an eyewitness
account mentioned a little girl with one leg thrown alive on top
of a truckload of corpses to be burned. (10)
Why is this particular image of the girl with one leg mentioned by
Baskerville? What, if any, relationship does this image bear to other
patterns in the text? We know that Baskerville is especially concerned
about children, with crimes against his own childhood self and with crimes
against innocence ( 11 immaculateness 11 ) in general. He clearly considers
himself a victim of murder, psychological murder, and he dreams of ways of
 224

avenging himself on the world. Why, though, is it a girl who is about to be

burned alive, and why a girl with one leg? If we keep in mind that Florence
Green represents someone who has effectively usurped Baskerville's identity,
behaving as he'd like to behave if he had the courage or the means, the fact
that it is a girl about to be burned alive can be explained. If the child
to be burned were a boy, it would indicate that Florence was prepared to act
on behalf of a version of Baskerville. As it stands, however, this "old
girl," this 11 old babe, 11 avenges an outrage committed against a version of
herself, a girl. Baskerville, on the other hand, who carries within him the
stricken but still living form of the boy he once was, can do almost nothing
in the way of seeking justice or atonement. The fact that the girl has one
leg has extra-textual significance (the lameness-castration motif we noted
in "Mandible"} but it also has inter-textual significance if we recall that
Florence Green, in that she is especially taken with canes, likely has some
sort of problem walking. The fact that the girl has one leg thus serves to
support the suggestion that Florence's attack on the Germans represents
retribution for an attack against a version of her self. For Baskerville
who recalls the episode, the episode represents a displaced version of his
wish to kill the enemy that burned and crippled him as a child.
We noted above that Baskerville felt ambivalence toward the powerful
Florence Green. We noted his hostile fantasy which involved screwing Joan
Graham's ass into the ground. There is a third woman in the story who may
help us to focus on the object of Baskerville's repressed anger.
Baskerville attaches important clue to his explanation of the novel he calls
the "work of a lifetime": "What could be more glamorous or necessary than
The Children's Army, 'An army of youth bearing the standard of truth,' as we
 225

used to sing in my fourth-grade classroom of Our Lady of the Sorrows under

the unforgiving eye of Sister Scholastica who knew how many angels could
dance on the head of a pin ••• " (13). The novel is thus associated with a
figure with whom Baskerville was embroiled in the fourth grade. It is a
figure with whom he is arguably still embroiled: the unforgiving eye of
Sister Scholastica has been replaced in adulthood by the undifferentiating
eye of Florence Green, his current Lady of Sorrows. She is no less powerful,
no less senior, and no less sexually ambiguous that the original.
Baskerville's position at Florence Green's here-and-now table is a version
of a position he must have been forced to assume "under" Sister Scholastica.
Certainly his current attitude toward women is consistent with the attitude
a boy would bring to a relationship with a maternal figure of enormous but
vaguely malign power (the allusion to the angels dancing on the head of a
pin is a typical flourish of Barthelme ambiguity: the expression perfectly
captures the absurdity of arbitrary authority, but it also conjures up the
image of children--the little angels in Baskerville's "immaculate
army''--being tortured, forced to dance on the end of the pin the unforgiving
Sister Scholastica wields. The pin is also a version of the cane Florence
Green uses). In his behaviour toward Florence and Joan we see much evidence
of the fact that Baskerville continues to see in women a powerful but
inimical object that, like Sister Scholastica, he both desires to please and
fears.
The most obvious indication we have of Baskerville's ambivalence toward
Florence Green is his tendency to refer to her as "the old girl, 11 11 the old
babe, 11 or simply as 11
gir1. 11 It's as if he sees in her both the prohibited
maternal old woman and the more sexually appropriate object of a girl.
 226

There is one image in particular that perfectly captures this sense of

ambiguity Baskerville attaches to the old girl:
On a circular afternoon in June 1945--it was ra1n1ng, Florence
says, hard enough to fill the Brazen Sea--she was sitting untidily
on a chaise in the north bedroom (on the wall of the north bedroom
there are twenty identical framed photographs of Florence from
eighteen to eighty-one, she was a beauty at eighteen) reading a
copy of Life. (10)
The above describes an especially condensed image. Probably the most
significant detail in the image is the unusual collection of photographs.
The pictures are, as the title of the magazine she is reading indicates, a
chronicle of her adult "Life." There are two things of especial interest
about these autobiographical photographs: first, they are identically
framed; second, the ages at either end of the span of life depicted, if they
are reversed, are identical in a sense: "18" is the reverse of 11
81 11 • The
message of these 11 circular 11 photographs (which is, by the way, the third
important circular image we've noted in the text) is that, in Baskerville's
mind, Florence is both an eighteen-year old girl and an eighty-one-year old
woman sitting "untidily 11 but permanently in his imagination.
Baskerville sees in Florence a woman who has usurped his identity, who
at the very least acts the way he wishes he could act. This leads us to
consider another significance to this image of the photographs: it is a
depiction of Baskerville's own psychological status. We must keep in mind
as we consider this possibility that the Florence we view in the narrative
is Florence as she exists in Baskerville's mind. Notice that the pictures
do not so much depict the changes in a lifetime as the lack of change: the
frames are identical, and the ages are versions of the same age. In the
story, Florence's arrested development is literal; that is, she is senile.
Nevertheless, there is every indication that she has led a full and
 227

developed life. Baskerville, on the other hand, in that he is still

shrinking along the beaches he haunted as a child, is the true case of
arrested development. Further, it should be noted that the image of someone
sitting in their bedroom on a circular afternoon surrounded by pictures of
themself so designed as to suggest circular development represents a
remarkably accurate depiction of narcissism, a psychological attitude to
which the "brilliant'' and "glamorous" Baskerville is also clearly given (we
might also note that in "Mandible", Joseph's original tragic mistake
involved a lesson in self-love with the elderly Mrs. Anton Bichek).
If the old girl Florence does represent a mother-figure to the childish
Baskerville, he would have cause to displace any sexual longings he had for
her. One way of displacing those feelings, of course, is to imagine her as
a "beauty at eighteen." Another way would be to displace those feelings
onto a seemingly more appropriate object. Baskerville does this with Joan,
the new girl at the old girl's table. All of Baskerville's manifest sexual
interest is directed at Joan. There is much evidence in the text, however,
that Joan is a version of Florence, and is therefore viewed with the same
ambivalence. In that Baskerville is predisposed to see the mother-figure
Florence in Joan, the romance follows a distinctive pattern.
Despite the vigour of Baskerville's fantasy assault on Joan, we see
little of the "native" abandon of the fantasy actually expressed in the
relationship. In fact, Baskerville's interest in Joan is peculiarly limited
in intensity. He may want to screw her ass into the ground {does he want to
bury her?) but his descriptions of her all tend to concentrate on her
breasts. This, for example, is his first reference to her: "The new girl's
boobies are like my secretary's knees, very prominent and irritating" {3).
 228

This is an unusual way of describing a woman's breasts. Why are they

irritating, and why do they seem like, of all things, knees? A clue to the
significance of both the irritation factor and the resemblance to his
secretary's knees may lie in the fact that Florence is described only once,
and that description focusses on her legs: "Florence Green is a small fat
girl eighty-one years old with blue legs and very rich" (6). Joan and her
"boobies" (a childish term) may therefore remind Baskerville of Florence.
The fact that it is his secretary's knees works in the displacement in that
he is related by subservience to Florence as his secretary would be related
to him. In the second of three descriptions of Joan, her breasts are again
featured, this time explicitly associated with food: "The new girl is a
thin sketchy girl with a big chest looming over the gazpacho and black holes
around her eyes that are very promising" ( 5). The new girl's figure as
Baskerville views it is akin to a caricature--big and looming breasts on a
sketchy figure. There is also something vaguely ominous about the
introduction of this image, in the "looming" breasts and the black holes
around the eyes. What "promise" could black holes around eyes offer? Is
Baskerville imagining her face as a skull?
In the third and final description of her, the breast fixation is tied
to the fear and loathing motif we saw expressed in his view of Florence (her
wad of filthy poems and her menacing canes): "Joan is like one of those
marvelous Vogue girls, a tease in a half-slip on Mykonos, bare from the
belly up on the rocks" (9). In context, this is highly suggestive image.
To begin, the association with the Vogue magazine picks up on a magazine
motif running through the story. Baskerville edits a magazine and he
associates Florence with Life and Joan with Vogue. With this image, the two
 229

women also share the "rock pool" motif (Joan perches on a rock in a pool and
Florence's money and power comes from Texaco's rock pools deep in the
earth). What is also clear from this image is that, in Baskerville's mind,
Joan shares with Florence the mythological siren's power to attract and
destroy men. In the image of the bare-breasted Joan beckoning from the
rocks of a Greek island, the malignancy of this power to "tease" men to
their destruction is rendered more explicit than it is in the imagery that
surrounds Florence, but it amounts to the same thing. What we also have to
bear in mind is that the thin, sketchy new girl makes a perfect displacement
for the short, fat old girl (who, Baskerville tells us in passing, "was not
always a small fat girl" [6]). The "promise" of Joan's "looming" and
"irritating" breasts, and the skull-like eyes, is that falling under the
spell of these women (or, rather, woman) results in a kind of death-in-life.
Asked at one point why the children in his novel kill everybody, Baskerville
says, "Because everybody has already been killed. Everybody is absolutely
dead" (14). In Baskerville's mind, in other words, to leave childhood under
the terms he left it, is to die.
Not surprisingly, the relationship between Joan and Baskerville is
brought to a rather unsatisfactory end: "In the dim foyer I slip my hand
through the neck of Joan's yellow dress. It is dangerous but it is a way of
finding out everything at once" (16). What does he mean by "everything"?
Does he mean that he'll find out whether of not she's willing to go further?
If so, why is the matter suddenly dropped without comment? Baskerville
leaves alone and no further references are made to Joan. The unusual grope
through the neck of Joan's dress confirms that her breasts are of primary
interest (they certainly have been to this point). Having touched her
 230

breasts, he seems to exhaust 11 everything" in the way of sexual possibilities

with this woman whose appeal begins, and ends, in her dimensions as a
potential source of nurture. The "danger" lies not in the threat of
rejection or even so much in the threat of discovery, but in the very real
danger, psychologically, of his continued attachment to the old girl this
new girl stands for in his mind. As in the denouement of Joseph's seduction
of Miss Mandible, the thing you find out "all at once" in dim cloakroom
assignations with women of this type is that a man in the arms of a woman he
should have given up in childhood is, in a sense, a dead man.
The story concludes with an image of Baskerville turning circles on the
rain-black street in his rain-blue Volkswagen, singing a requiem. Several
associative threads running through the story meet in this final image. The
rain recalls the image of Florence on that circular rainy afternoon in her
bedroom, surrounded by images of herself. The "tiny" rain-blue Vol kswagon
(a German car) affords its occupant very little space, a fitting enclosure
given the obsessivley limited psychological space Baskerville's mind
inhabits. The rain-blue car takes its colour from two sources in the story,
both of them associated with Florence: the blue of her legs and the
knowledge of the blue bodies of water Baskerville suggests to, and imagines
sharing with, Florence. The 11
Slow idiot circles" he describes in his car is
a chilling metaphor in its own right for neurosis, but it also reminds us
that Baskerville, "that simple preliterate," is still the "slow" child his
teachers punished and humiliated, trapped in a whirlpool of obsession. The
requiem he sings is for himself, and the reason he sings it is anything but
"some simple reason": the choice of music is entirely appropriate for
character (and a state of mind) held so firmly in the grip of mourning and
 231

melancholia that he cannot break the pattern of "psychoanalytic issues" that

keeps him driving through life in slow, redundant circles.

Let us now endeavour to summarize the common features of these stories.

In terms of content, one of the most immediately apparent similarities among
the stories is the fact that all four of the protagonists in the synoptic
tales are preoccupied with their past lives. Specifically, they are
absorbed in reconstructing their past lives, and searching it for clues as
to the meaning of their present predicaments. Their current lives are
disasters, but disasters of a very specific kind. All four of these
characters are unsuited to the role of adult male. They prefer (or are
compelled) to spend their time running or hiding from whimsical paternal
authorities even as they pursue maternal figures in the vain hope of
reestablishing a relationship based upon a relationship known in their
former lives. None of them is in a position to let the old days die. The
moment in their past lives which most seems to interest them is the moment
when their sexuality became an issue. None of the four seems to have
matured sexually or psychically beyond the stage when sex became an issue in
their lives. With the possible exception of Burligame, the protagonists
have attached themselves to older or maternal women in a relationship
modelled on the relationship to the mother. What this situation suggests,
of course, is that these boy-men remain boys because they continue to
wr
 232

wrestle with unresolved sexual feelings originally harboured for the mother.
In terms of style, all of these stories have in common the "whirlpool
technique 11 displayed in ''Florence Green ... The technique basically involves
a form of montage, the superimposition of episodes and fragments from the
past and present lives of a given protagonist. The features or motifs which
emerge from this procedure are repeated in various contexts to form
developing patterns, patterns in which the significance of individual
features is managed by means of association.
Just as all four protagonists imagine that their lives contain
mysteries they need to solve, in all four stories, to varying degrees of
explicitness, the fictions present themselves as puzzles, mysteries, or
games that the reader is invited to solve. As the protagonists sift through
the clues provided by memory and desire in their lives, the reader follows a
parallel course, sifting clues provided by the remote and mysterious voice
of the author, Barthelme. The stories are extremely compressed and this
compression results in a unique resonance--at first, the fictions do seem to
be about too many things. Comparison of the motifs and images that reoccur
as a result of the concentric (whirlpool) development of the prose reveals,
however, that all of the material is traceable to, and coheres around, a
central subject.

The most convenient method of summarizing the terms of the central

fantasy as it is manifested in the synoptic tales is by means of the
following list. Elaboration of individual features of the central fantasy
is unnecessary here given that all of the features included here have been
 233

discussed at length in the context of the analysis of the stories.

1) Protagonist as man-child. Inured in the unsuccessful attempt to break

free from, or to solve, the issues and crises of their past lives, these men
are adult males in a special sense only.

2) The splitting of the female figure. In all three stories involving

relationships with women, the protagonists find themselves dealing with two
women, one of whom is either literally a mother (as in "Broadcast") or is
functioning maternally, and the other a more appropriate love-object.
Typically, the features of one have a great deal in common with the features
of the other. In all cases, the possibility of sex with one of these women
is an issue. The sex that happens between the protagonists and these women
results in a major disaster to the self of the protagonist, and serves to
deepen the terms of his confinement to old patterns of behaviour.
The four protagonists all incline to express their interest in women in
oral terms, an interest which is manifested in the issue of food and a
special interest in the breast.

3) Women as powerful (immaculate authority). In the view of the four

protagonists of the synoptic tales, women are more mobile, aggressive,
threatening, powerful, and generally superior in strength and sense of
identity to men.

4) Hostility toward women. All four stories contain acts of violence,

either real or imagined, toward women. The Barthelme protagonist, who
 234

basically fears women, desires to 11

ruin 11 the powerful women who dominate and
diminish their lives.

5) The love triangle. This is the most dominant form of relationship in

Barthelme and its importance is augured in the synoptic tales. The love
triangle as it occurs in Barthelme seems to be a rehearsal of the 11 tragic 11
love triangle of the family romance.

6) Absence of self-esteem. Attending the profound lack of self-esteem

exhibited by these characters is the humiliation that results from
involvement in sexual relationships. This humiliation takes the specific
form in three of the stories of being reduced to the status of a dog
11 11
( Mandible, 11 Hiding," and Broadcast 11 ) . In all four of the synoptic tales,
the literal or figurative reduction to the diminished status of a child is
interpreted by the protagonists as a kind of punishment for their lack of
worth.
Accompanying this profound lack of self-esteem is an equally
exaggerated tendency toward grandiosity. The type is seen throughout
Barthelme and is his most representative character. A good example of the
type is the Phantom in 11 The Phantom of the Opera's Friend 11 (9:). The
Phantom's 11 Simple and terrible" character alternates between 11 fits of
grandiosity" and "the deepest despair" (104). It's as if these characters,
in failing to find love in the world outside of self, have turned the need
to find an object to love upon themselves. Manifested in a tendency to
think of themselves, as Baskerville puts it, as stronger and smarter than
other men, the self-love these characters practise, in that their narcissism
 235

is fundamentally 11 Circular 11 (as depicted in 11 Florence Green 11 ) , does not

solve their need for love or serve to compensate for their basic lack of
self-esteem. 5
The protagonists are all passive underground men who play 11 roles 11 or
wear masks as opposed to inhabiting constant identities. This passivity is
manifested in particular by a tendency toward voyeurism, the tendency to
seek to gain control over situations, and women, by looking.

7) In three stories, the motif of burning, or of the burning child, is

present. The burning points to the presence in the child or childish man or
11
burning 11 passions. In 11 Broadcast, 11 the opposite of burning, ice and
refrigeration, is featured. The fire of passion is the mode of the past and
the ice of impotence is the mode of the present (depicted in 11 Mandible 11 in
the 11 historical 11 image of Napoleon caught in the snow but still wanting to
burn Moscow--see discussion of Ice and History motifs in Chapter Five of
this thesis).

8) In all four stories, but especially 11 Hiding Man,'• the father is viewed
ambi val ently as both competitor-rival and as potential 11
fri end. •• The
relationship to the father in these stories, while highly determined, seems
to develop under the auspices of the far more volatile and compelling
relationship to the mother. The symbol which expresses this ambivalence in
the synoptic tales, and throughout Barthelme, is the dog {for a fuller
discussion of the role of the father in Barthelme see the Dog motif and the
Authority motif in Chapter Five).
CHAPTER SIX: A CONCLUSION
 In Barthelme, art represents the forum in which the

self seeks to represent itself. As it was for Burligame

in "Hiding Man," art is the ~orum in which the self

posits its own private visions and rituals as a hedge

against the competing visions and rituals of one's

culture (or the Other, that which is not the self). The

visions and rituals of the artist-self in Barthelme are

like dreams of the self, highly compacted and condensed

configurations that are deeply informed by secrets about

~kd+
the self, secrets~are difficult to discover and

"dangerous to plumb." What must be recognized about

Barthelme's view of art as it is depicted in his stories

is that the artist's visions are not at all progressive

in the sense that they represent an escape from the

case-historical events that have determin~and limioJthe

self as Barthelme conceives it. Art as depicted by

Barthelme is regressive, a nexus of situations,

conflicts, and emotions from the past which critically

limit and determine behaviours and attitudes in the

present. Rehearsals of these preterite causes is only

nominally heuristic (in the sense that they provided for

a "distraction" of the self trapped in the past), and

really only amount to tracing the path of a spiral

inward (and backward) toward a fixed centre. It should

be noted that nowhere in all of Barthelme is there an

artist (or a non-artist) who manages to create something

that allows him or her to escape the deeply entrenched

definition of the self as it is defined by case-history.

In "A Picture History of the War"(..ll.f.U.A), the

protagonist Kellerman runs around with his naked father

under his arm. At one point in the narrative, the

father says the following to his son: "'O sin ••• in

which fear and guilt encrandulate (or are encrandulated

by) each other to mess up the real world of objects with

a film of nastiness and dirt, how well I understand you!

Standing there! How well I unperstand your fundamental

motifs! How ill I understand my fundamental motifs!

Why are objects preferable to parables?" (142). This

father's predisposition to view his situation in terms

of "fundamental motifs" is refected in the construction

of the story itself, a story made from a series of

repeating motifs (we have, of course, already seen the

tendency to think in terms of these fundamental motifs

in Barthelme in our analysis of the synoptic tales,

particularly in "Florence Green" and particularly in the

image of the circular, repeating progress of the

whirlpool). "Picture History" is an organic

manifestation of the father's preference for objects as

opposed to parables. The story is full of objects that

obviously have deep meaning within the limited context

of the story. Unlike parables, however, which

presumably contain morals that serve to connect the self

to the world, the objects in this story are valued for

their private significances only. In the "picture

history" of this story (a useful image: all of

Barthelme's stories are very much picture histories),

the "film" that covers the world the father sees

contains objects, objects that have been arranged so as

to form fundamental motifs. As it happens, essentially

the same film covers the world described in all of

Barthelme's stories. What is the same is not merely the

notion of a film of private objects, the objects

themselves are the same from story to story; Barthelme's

world is a world of objects limited in number and

meaning by fundamental motifs, motifs_that can be

described, quantified, and ascribed meaning.

Barthelme's descriptions of the physical world tend

to be very simple. As a writer, as a realist, he

exhibits little if any interest in detailed description

of the surfaces of things, or indeed, in physical detail

of any kind. His canvasses are painted, as it were,

with bold and primary colours, almost like cartoons.

What he tends to do in his fictions is to concentrate on

the dynamics of a subjectivity at work within a given

environment; the result is the creation of what is

certainly a sensual world, but as·in dream, it is a

world of surfaces only, a two-diaensional world

virtually without aass. There is no depth or play of

light in Barthelae; it is a world of shape and outline.

As a result, the limited number of physical details that

are introduced into the psychological framework of his

prose tend to take on a considerable symbolic valence.

Not only do the physical details in any given story tend

to be overdetermined, a careful reading of the body of

his fictions shows that the details out of which

Barthelme's fictions are formed--their flora and fauna,

if you will--are drawn from a curiously limited fund of

objects.

As we noted in an earlier chapter, critics of

Barthelme tend to complain that his fictions are about

too many things. A related criticism is that his

stories are full of trivial concerns, or simply full of

trivia, trivia that may have been lovingly collected,

but which has not been made subordinate to a worthwhile

subject. This view of the prose as all surface or an

 241

admixture of fragments, depending on the critic, is either taken to be a

fault (a failure of subject), or a reflection of legitimate postmodern
refusal (or inability) to opt for artificially meaningful subject matter
that would only serve to impose arbitrary limits on what amounts to a
healthy lack of closure. The fact is, however, as this thesis has hopefully
suggested to this point in its analysis of individual fictions, that
Barthelme's fictions do have a subject (albeit a "missing" subject), and
that subject is meaningful, and that meaning is reflected in the way
Barthelme organizes his fragmented world into coherent and consistent
patterns.
Traced through associations found in displacements, etc., these
patterns of meaning are evident in the closed frame of individual fictions.
What I now propose to show is that the subjectivity behind the associative
valuation of objects within the closed frame of individual fictions is also
exercised in the larger field of association in the entire corpus of
Barthelme's short fiction. As a means of demonstrating this, I propose to
list the major motifs running through the corpus, together with some
explanation as to their significance in terms of the central fantasy. The
following objects and fundamental motifs will be considered:
The Animal Totem (dog)
Food (the breast)
Alcohol
Lameness (and blindness)
History
Size Reversal
Colour
Authority
Children
Rebellion
Water
Ice
 242

Swords
Windows
Combinations
Animal Totems (or the furry object). In "Florence Green• the would-be
novelist Baskerville characterizes the aim of literature as the creation of
a strange object covered with fur that breaks your heart. The implications
of this statement are realized in a literal way in the overwhelming majority
of Barthelme•s fictions in the symbolic use he makes of animals as totems.
We saw this use of the animal image in all four synoptic tales: in
"Mandible,u Joseph realizes that he has become the "Teacher's Pet•; in
"Hiding Man,• Bane-Hipkiss is transformed into what appears to ~a dog; in
uBroadcast,• Bloomsbury is treated, and behaves like, a dog when in his
former life he sticks his •muzzle• into Martha's sticky glove for food; in
11
Florence Green,u Baskerville's name suggests his status as a (literary)
·dog. So important is this feature of Barthelme•s method as prefigured in
the synoptic tales, that in virtually every story Barthelme has written
since, a totemic animal figure will appear in some form or another.
The animals used in this manner range from the strange and poisonous
green fly that makes three appearances in "Cortes and Montezuma"(~ to the
nine-banded armidillo in •Lighting•(oTMDC). While the appearance of birds
and reptiles is common, the animal that is by far the most frequently used
is the dog. It is the dog that we will consider in this examination of the
furry animal_because, as I hope to demonstrate, the dog stands for the
persona who stands at the heart of the central fantasy in Barthelme.
The scope of the dog metaphor can range from its use a central image or
conceit as in uThe Falling Dog" in City Life to a minor allusion stitched
into the complex weave of a given story (as in the underfed Doberman
 243

pictured on the door of the Pasha's building in "The Abduction from the
Seraglio" [GD]). In each case, however, regardless of the scope of the
image, dog imagery serves to identify the protagonist with a dog. But why
of all possible animals has Barthelme hit upon the dog? One reason might be
the dog's special status in our culture, an animal that is domesticated to
the point that it is almost taken for human. The dog, then, is a member of
the family but a member whose status is part-human and part-animal, a sort
of child manque like Butch in "Bought." Given what we already have learned
about the complex dynamic of the family as it is represented in Barthelme,
it is probable that this hybrid status is the key to the animal's appeal as
totem.
For a more concrete estimation of the dog's function as totem let us
concentrate the discussion for the moment on the story that makes te most
developed use of the dog totem in Barthelme, "The Falling Dog"(CL). In
"Falling," the hapless artist-narrator, a Mr. XXXXXXX, finds himself in that
"unhappiest of all states, between images" (45). One day a dog jumps out of
a window knocking him to the pavement. He looks at the dog, the dog looks
at him. "Well," says the narrator, "it was a standoff" (42). The narrator
then decides to make up a scenario to explain everything. In the story he
invents, the dog takes him to where the dog lives. At this place, a woman
named Sophie explains that "The dog is only admitted if he brings someone"
(42). Evidently, when someone enters, a beam is broken which summons a man.
The narrator, obviously taken with Sophie, offers to do for her whatever it
is that that man does. No, she says, "You are for breaking the beam and
taking the dog back to his place" (43). The Swiss man Sophie has been
waiting for then enters. He is described as "a real brute, muscled, lots of
 244

fur 11 (43). The man then refuses to let either the dog or the narrator stay,
giving them the 11 Threatening look, gestures, etc ... (43). The narrative
reaches a crisis with this confrontation between the two rivals and then, as
in similar confrontations depicted in 11 And Then 11 and 11 The Dolt, .. is abruptly
abandoned.
The artist-narrator in 11 Falling 11 is between images. His old image, the
Yawning Man (an image suggestive, not only of boredom or ennui, but also of
a decidely oral but passive attitude) no longer interests him. Inflamed by
Sophie, he now feels the need to move from an exhausted identity to a
promising other: 11
I wanted the dog•s face. Whereas my old image, the
Yawning Man, had been faceless (except for the a gap where the mouth was,
the yawn itself), I wanted the dog•s face. I wanted his expression,
falling. I thought of the alternatives: screaming, smiling. And things in
between 11 (45-46). Note the ambivalence of the image he wants, the screaming
coupled with the smiling. This is thoroughly reminiscent of the ambivalence
other narrators have felt toward the image of the father. What the scenario
this artist-narrator invents involving the displaced dog and the furry Swiss
father-figure indicates is that he views the assumption of the dog identity
as a means of sharing Sophie 1 s favours, favours currently monopolized by the
brutish Swiss stranger. What is interesting about this love triangle which
features a rivalry between the narrator who identifies himself with the dog
and the powerful Swiss man who is covered with fur, is that the dog image in
11
Falling, 11 like the image of the dog in 11 Hiding Man, .. serves as a point of
connection for both the father-figure and the son-figure. It is in the
image of the dog, therefore, that the complex and ambivalent relationship
between the son and the father is localized.
 245

The story ends with the artist-narrator attempting to assimilate the

dog•s face and so rescue himself from that unhappy state of being between
images, but there is no indication in the story that this artist-narrator
will be any more successful than any of the others we have seen in passing
out of the arrested state he currently finds himself exploring. (One clue
indicating this lies in the pattern of food associations that runs through
the story. As we shall observe below in our consideration of food imagery
in Barthelme, a preoccupation with food suggests a wish to return to the
nurturing, all-giving mother. In this story, the food associations begin
with the "Crumbs of concrete driven into [the narrator•s] chin" [41]. Food
associations are picked up again when we learn that the dog that has brought
the narrator to Sophie stays with her because, as Sophie says, 11
His food is
here 11 [42]. Next, the chin with crumbs driven into it is identified by the
Swiss man as the part of narrator he wants removed from Sophie•s room:
111
What do I care about your flaming chin ••• There•s no reason in the world
why we should stand here and listen to a lot of flaming nonsense about your
flaming etc. etc ...... [43]. Finally, on his way to assimilate the dog•s
face, the grip he assumes on the dog-- 11 I wrapped my arms around his belly
and together we rushed to the studio"[48]--indicates that his interest in
the dog is, psychologically speaking, more regressive and oral than it is
progressive and phallic).
The dog image repesents the son caught between two images of himself.
This interpretation of the dog image would help explain the emblem of the
underfed Doberman that appears on the Pasha 1 s door in 11 Abduction.•• It helps
explain why the father-figure of "Phantom 11 (CL) would say, "Our behavior is
mocked by the behavior of dogs" (102). It also helps explain why the
 2%

identity-threatening narrator of •what To Do Next•(A)

. ­ tells the reader -of
the instructions the following: •ves, the dog is dead, I admit it. Im
1

sorry. I admit also that putting eight-foot-square paintings of him in

every room of the house has not consoled you. But, studying each painting,
you will notice after a time that in each painting the artist has included,
in the background, or up in the left-hand corner ••• other dogs [as Barthelme
has done in •rhe Falling Dog•] •• Thus the whole concept of •other dog•
suddenly thrusts itself into your consciousness ••• you understand that one of
them, might just possibly become the •new dog•--the •new dog• of which you
have been, until now, afraid to think. For life must go on, after all, and
that you have been able to think new dog is already a victory, of a kind,
for the instructions• (82). In the frames of fiction after fiction by
Barthelme we see this •new dog" depicted in some form or another. But the
meaning of these dogs is always the same which makes the dog a particularly
compelling piece of evidence that Sarthelme•s fictions are critically
determined by the same state of mind.

Food. There is perhaps no more consistent feature of Barthelme•s stories

than the fact that food will appear in his stories in some form or another.
Food can appear in his stories in the most unlikely places as in the
characterization of the suitor•s forehead in •rhe Apology•(GD) as looking
like banana paste, or the artist in •rhe Abduction from the Seraglio•(§Q)
who devotes himself exclusively to the manufacture of steel artichokes. So
ubiquitous, in fact, are food images and situations involving food in
Barthelme that citation of examples illustrating the importance of food to
Barthelme is almost unnecessary.
 247

What does this preoccupation with food in the stories denote? I

believe it points to the Barthelme protagonist's primitive psychological
attachment to the mother as source of nourishment: food for Barthelme's
characters represents a reasonable facsimile for love. Indeed, as with
love-struck Andy with the banana-paste forehead or the underfed Doberman on
the Pasha's door, food is the currency of love. One thinks, for instance,
of the zombie-lovers in 11 Zombies 11 {GD) who come looking for daughters to buy
and marry: they tempt them with detailed promises of the breakfasts they
can expect.

Closely related to this tendency to equate nourishment with love is a

fixation exhibited in Barthelme with that part of a woman most closely
associated with nourishment, the breasts. We have already noted this form
of attention to the breasts in the synoptic stories {the most important, if
somewhat disguised, instance of breast fixation in the stories we have
analyzed to this point is, of course, 11
The Balloon 11 ) .
There is a version of this breast fixation that occurs with some
frequency in Barthelme in episodes which, while they do not specifically
equate the breasts with food, do equate the offer of sex with the display of
the breasts. What is unusual about this pattern is the consistency of the
terms in which it is couched. In every instance it involves a woman
removing or opening a shirt or blouse to show her breasts to men who never
do anything more than look:
Yes yes, I said. I'm going to fall.
Jump down here, she said, and I'll show you the secrets of
what's under my shirt.
Yeah yeah, I said, I've heard that before.
Jump little honey baby, she said, you won't regret it. {11 The
Sergeant 8, 76)
 248

'Just the breasts then,• she said, 'they're wondrous pretty,• and
before I could protest further, she'd whipped off her pretty
mannikin's tiny shirt. I buttoned her up again meantime bestowing
buckets of extravagant praise. 'Yes,• she said in agreement,
'that's how I am all over, wonderful.' ( 11 The Palace at Four A.M.
OTMDC, 158)
The mistress of the torero puts down the camera and removes her
shirt •••• The beautiful breasts of the torero's mistress are
appreciated by the aficionado, who is also an aficionado of
breasts. ( 11 The Wound 11 ~' 14)
What a beautiful girl Julie is! Her lustrous sexuality has the
vandals agog. Follow her around trying to touch the tip of her
glove, or the flounce of her gown. She shows her breasts to
anyone who asks. 'Amazing grace!' the vandals say. ( 11 A Film 11 ~'
77)

The two novels Barthelme has written are replete with versions of this
breast display. The Dead Father in particular, which features the split
mother-lover figures Julie and Emma, is punctuated with regular incidents in
which the women open their shirts to give the men either a look or a 11 Suck. 11
One of the most developed uses of the motif of breast exposure occurs
in two related stories in City Life, "The Explanation" and "Kierkegaard
Unfair to Schlegel.'' What is interesting in both these particularly
metafictional stories is the special status accorded a very specific,
developed, and essentially identical version of the breast exposure fantasy.
In "The Explanation," a story about the processes of translating mind into
the machinery of fiction, the answering voice in what amounts to an interior
monologue keeps returning to the image of a girl removing her blouse (she
isn't removing her blouse in each reference but the blouse and what lies
behind it is clearly the key to the hold this image's has on the voice's
imagination). In "Kiekegaard Unfair To Schlegel," written in the same
question-and-answer form as "The Explanation," the discussion between the
two interior voices centres on the relationship between fantasy and irony.
 249

The answering voice recognizes the vicissitudes of both forms of contact

with the world (irony and fantasy each have the effect of alienating the
self from a vital connection with the world}. In this intensely ironical
story, an identical version of the girl from "The Explanation" serves as the
exclusive object of fantasy. In both stories the girl looked at is
described as "self-absorbed"--that is, turned away from the narrator in a
narcissistic attitude--and in both cases the blouse is blue. We have seen
this attitude of "self-love" before in Barthelme, particularly in our
analysis of the synoptic tales. As in the synoptic tales, the narcissism of
the fantasized girl in "The Explanation" and "Kierkegaard" mirrors the
sterile narcissism of the observers. The blue blouse, if our analysis below
of the significance of blue is correct, denotes the intrusive threat of the
father (the same thing is accomplished without using the colour blue in the
looking fantasy of "Hiding Man" with the characterization of Nedda Ann
Bush•s famous bust as "handsome," or in Attack of the Puppet People with the
tasty~ surrounded by threatening versions of male authority).
The breast in these looking fantasies is the focus of arrested desire,
the desire to return to the archaic, lost, uncomplicated breast of the
all-giving, nourishing mother. The sexual contact embodied in these
fantasies is not only regressive, it is voyeuristic. The appeal of
voyeurism, as it is so aptly described in "The Sandman"(S}, is that it
maintains the distance between voyeur and object: "The tension between the
desire to draw near the object and the necessity to maintain the distance
becomes a libidinous energy nondischarge" (92}. This "nondischarge" of
energy accounts for virtually all of the sex that occurs in Barthelme; sex
as it occurs in Barthelme is restricted in two ways: its emphasis is on
 250

looking (voyeurism} and the most typical object of that need to look is the
breast. With regard to the former aspect, notice that the man in his
fantasy never makes any attempt to get any closer to the girl. With regard
to the later aspect of the fantasy, the preoccupation with the breasts, note
that in "Kierkegaard" the girl takes off her pants but the voice's attention
never strays from the blouse. This preoccupation with breasts leads us to
consider a surprising fact about Barthelme's fiction in general: in the
larger arena of Barthelme's fiction there is a virtual absence of interest
in genital intercourse.
It is worth noting with regard to this absence of interest in genital
sex that the golden fleece, the object of the quest that provides for the
narrative movement in Barthelme's most developed fiction to date, The Dead
Father, turns out to be Julie's pudenda. On the very last page of the
novel, just as the dead-but-still-living-father is about to be buried, after
repeated searches under Emma's and Julie's blouses for the breast, Thomas
touches the object of the quest for the very first time: "Thomas placed his
hand on the Fleece, outside the skirt" (176}. With the father almost out of
the way Thomas can almost bring himself to touch it. We note, however, that
the Dead Father is climbing into a hole (suggesting the threat of continued
life). Knowing what we know of the Dead Father from this novel and about
fathers in Barthelme in general (in The Emerald"[Sx], for instance, the
malign father-figure's crime is that he wants to kill the son so that he can
live twice), the father will never be truly out of the son's way. We notice
that the novel ends once the fleece is touched and touched only in the most
preliminary and tentative way. The truth of this quest is that the quest
for possession of this particular fleece is likely to continue; Thomas gives
 251

every indication that, owing to the persistant life of his father, he will
continue to travel the psycholgical treadmill of a morbid and regressive
fascination for the archaic breast of the nurturing mother.

Alcohol. Barthelme•s characters can be relied upon to do two things with

astonishing regularity--eat and drink. The drinking is done in an attempt
to escape a depressing and oppressive reality; gratification is the object
of the obsession with food but the little oblivion of alcohol-induced
mislocation would seem to be the object of the persistant drinking.
Barthelme•s drinkers are not drunks; that is, he never describes them as
drunks and never describes drunken behaviours.

lameness. As indicated in our reading of the synoptic stories, lameness, or

attacks on the feet or legs, is a characteristic problem of the typical
Barthelme protagonist. The lameness motif often occurs in tandem with a
blindness motif. Rarely is the lameness or the blindness literal; rather,
it tends to be manifested in various and oblique forms. lameness, for
instance, can be obliquely registered as it is in °Mandible" in the
suspicion that Joseph feels that he is being regard as having metal-wrapped
legs or as it is in 11 The Emerald 11 (Sx) in the fact that the relic foot of
Magdalene is used to defeat the father-figure, Vandermaster. On the other
hand, the lameness of the protagonist can be made literal as it is in the
wound in the foot that brings down the torero in "The Wound 11 (A) or in the
accusation made in 11 What To Do Next 11 (.8.) that the instructions have been
designed for 11
a wimp and a lame" (86). As far as the meaning of the
 252

lameness is concerned, it is likely that the foot or leg serves as a

displacement for the phallus and thus symbolizes castration (see comments on
same above in discussion of 11 Mandible 11 ) .
In much the same fashion as the lameness motif, what I am calling the
blindness in a blindness motif rarely if ever occurs in Barthelme as actual
blindness. Rather, it tends to occur as a pain in the eyes or in the sense
that one's capacity to see has in some way been compromised (as i n11 At The
Museum [~L]
11
Tolstoy in the reference to the 11
Several hazes 11 which passed
over the eyes of the narrator when looking at the portraits of Tolstoy,
portraits which remind him of his father). Leaving aside for the moment the
classical psychoanaltyic meaning of blindness as is suggested by Freud in
his interpretation of Oedipus Rex {blindness represents castration),l
Barthelme's work provides for the meaning of these references to the loss of
sight in his obsession with looking. As we have already noted, the
protagonist in Barthelme uses looking, or voyeurism, as his primary means of
establishing contact with the world, and with women in particular. With
regard to women, he typically imagines looking at them, and he imagines them
looking at him {see especially 11 The Explanation .. and 11 Kierkegaard Unfair To
Schlegel''}. Looking is also a feature of his relationship with the father.
He fears discovery by the father who looks at him and sees that he is guilty
Palace [~]
11
{as in 11 Flight of the Pigeons from the and 11 At The Tolstoy
Museum 11 and 11 Engineer-Private Paul Klee [~]).
11

Removal of the capacity to see, therefore, represents to the typical

Barthelme protagonist a complex symbolization of meanings that cohere around
the subject of castration: in the blindness motif, the eyes that greedily
search out the forbidden object {the mother) are cut off from the object
 253

thus making one safe from the eyes of the father that look for your crime.
Looking is also the mode of the narcissist (which accounts for the
frequency of mirrors in the work), the narcissism that is integral to the
state of mind Barthelme's psychological realism describes. The implications
of blindness as a symbol for the narcissist are even more complex. On the
one hand, blindness represents a suspension of the tendency to look at
oneself (in the most extreme instances, blindess is a version of suicide,
the loss of the self as it is known to the narcissist). But blindness also
represents a perpetuation of the narcissistic mode in that, with the world
darkened, one is driven back in upon oneself. The blindness the Barthelme
narcissist imagines, therefore, in that it is informed by two contradictory
wishes, is a representation of a kind of psychological stalemate, which
probably accounts for the appeal of the motif to Barthelme whose stories all
end in stalemate.

Hi story. In "Down the Line with the Annual"(~, the narrator speaks of his
education as time spent "seeking answers to the mystery of personality and
the riddle of history" (4). The association of those two concepts--personal
history and world history--is important. One of Barthelme's favourite
motifs lies in the use he makes of this notion of history as the source of
meaning for the personality. As we have seen over and over again in our
analysis of Barthelme's stories, his characters are deeply connected to
their history. Indeed, given their tendency to repeat their own history, it
would not be too much to say that the typical Barthelme character is his
history; as the leader of the group taking the students on the tour in "The
 254

Educational Experience"(A) says, "The world is everything that was formerly

the case ••• " (128). In other words, the only present (and, by implication,
future) that these students have is couched absolutely in their past. This
function of history serves to explain why the outsider-genius in "The
Genius"(S), when asked about the source of his genius, delivers this cryptic
answer: "Historical forces" (27).
This preoccupation with history can take several forms. It can
involve, as it does in "Mandible," "Broadcast" and "The Sergeant"(~}, a
literal replaying of past situations. Most often it takes the form it takes
in "Florence Green" and "Hiding Man," that is, the development of present
situations strictly in terms of past situations.
The use of this historical motif is closely related to the image of the
father as he is embodied in the several guises he takes in Barthelme as
preterite authority figure. It is, therefore, not surprising that this
historical motif, which conflates subjective case-history with objective
world history, is peopled with authority figures from various spheres,
figures from political, art, religious, mythological, philosophical, and the
popular cultural history of the United States.
Given the atmosphere of hostility, aggression, and danger involved in
the past as it is recalled by Barthelme's characters, it is also not
surprising that the military past is of special interest to Barthelme (we
first observed this bias for historical military situations in °Mandible" in
Joseph's interest in Napoleon frozen in the middle of his campaign to
conquer Russia. The military historical motif is also evident in
Baskerville's novel The Children's Army and in Burligame's fascination with
the old film Attack of the Puppet People). Military figures of various rank
 255

and origin are sprinkled throughout the body of Barthelme's work. In

stories like "The Sea of Hesitation"(OTMDC) and "The Indian Uprising"(UPUA),
for instance, historical military figures appear in the background of
stories about failing relationships.

Size Reversal. As in the case of the lameness and corollarative blindness

motifs discussed above, size reversal in Barthelme is extremely common and
it can be manifested in either literal or figurative terms. Again, as it
the case in other motifs, this motif can take the form of a fairly developed
and central feature of a story--Snow White surrounded by her dwarfs and the
massive Dead Father are two examples which come most immediately to
mind--but it is also common to find this tendency to distort size manifested
in the background of a story. The offhanded reference to the tiny girls in
black followed by the large girls in white who parade past the distraught
Edward in "A Few Moments of Waking and Sleeping"(UPUA, 97) and the incident
of the growth of the movie star Frot Newling in "A Film"{~) that leaves the
other actors "peering into his ankles" {70) are just two examples of the way
in which size reversal can figure as a minor feature of a story (this latter
example, by the way, might also be offered as an example of the oblique and
apparently offhand way in which the lameness motif can find its way into a
story).
At one point I had thought of calling this motif "the Amazing Colossal
Man motif" after Burligame's wish to surrender to same, but that would have
implied that size reversals were restricted to father-figures which is not
the case. Mother-figures, too, tend to be subjected to this same process of
displacement. But whether or not it is a female or a male figure that is
 256

enlarged, the key to the occurence of size reversals lies in the difference
in size between a child and an adult; what these radical size differentials
point to the persistance in the state of mind Barthelme depicts of childhood
attitudes and relationships. In other words, the Barthelme protagonist
finds himself or herself oscillating between the role of child and adult in
his or her dealings with parent-figures of either sex. Joseph from
11
Mandible 11 is a good example of how this tendency can be expressed: while
on the one hand, Joseph sees himself as the same size and age as Miss
Mandible and as a relative giant to his other love interest, the eleven-year
old child Sue Ann Brownly, on the other hand, he allows everyone else to
view him as the eleven-year old he suspects he is on some level. He is,
therefore, the same 11
size 11 as Sue Ann Brownly .M,g Miss Mandible, but at the
same time, he plays the 11
giant 11 parent to Sue Ann and the dwarfed child to
the adult Miss Mandible. The size differentials here point, as they always
do in Barthelme, to the tendency on the part of fully grown adults to turn
the people around them into parents and themselves into children so as to
play out again themes and conflicts they failed to resolve in childhood.
The appearance of this motif can take varied, subtle, and not always
apparent forms. A story we have already examined above, 11
I Bought A Little
City, .. demonstrates how disguised the use of size reversal can be in any
given story. As our analysis has shown, however, the giantic beautiful face
of the Mona Lisa is a displacement for the small and beautiful face of the
oriental woman the narrator covets. In 11 The Catechist''(i) the older
priest-father carries a tiny, postage-stamp Old Testament, a detail in his
costume which suggests that at some level the other priest in the story
views him as a version of the amazing colossal man (124). In "An Hesitation
 257

On the Banks"{GP), the home of George Washington {"The Father of our

country ••• " [82]) is attacked by boys who throw giant crayfish at its
windows, a complex image which serves to suggest, even on the surface, that
there is some dynamic working beneath the surface of this story creating
size distortions.
"The President," a story in the aptly titled collection, Unspeakable
Practises, Unnatural Acts, makes considerable, if discrete, use of size
reversals. What makes the motif of size reversal which occurs in "The
President" worth looking at is that it occurs in two different fashions in
the same story. In the first instance, the problem determining the size and
relative disposition of the parent-figure breaks through, as it were, into
the manifest surface of the prose. The mother of the President {a man the
narrator has already characterized as looking "in his black limousine with
the plastic top ••• [like] a little boy who has blown an enormous soap bubble
which has trapped him 11 [151-152]) is a lady about whom 11 little is known 11
{154) and who "presented herself in various guises" {153). These guises--or
more to the point, disguises--involve combinations, not only of the size
reversal motif, but the dog motif {see discussion above) and the phallic
cane {see discussion below):
A 1i ttl e 1ady, 5' 2", with a cane.
A big 1ady, 7' 1", with a dog.
A wonderful old lady, 4'3", with an indomitable spirit.
A noxious old sack, 6'8", excaudate [having no tail], because of
an operation. {154)
Little wonder, given what we have already established with regard to the
psychoanaltyic issues behind each of the motifs used here in combination
that the narrator observes the following about what is known about this
mother: "We are assured, however, that the same damnable involvements that
 258

obsess us obsess her too. Copulation. Strangeness. Applause" (154).

What is most interesting about this story which foregrounds a size
reversal involving the mother is that a size reversal involving the father
is placed in the background. It happens that the sight of the President has
made a woman faint on the street. The narrator who dutifully runs to help
her is "shocked to discover that she wore only a garter belt under her
dress." Having made this accidental and entirely innocent perusal of her
private parts, he carries her into a store and is there assisted by a
strange figure: a "Salvation Army major--a very tall man with an orange
hairpiece." The major is preoccupied with certain suspicions he has about
the President, but he never finishes his dire and enigmatic pronouncements:
111
! think he•s got something up his sleeve nobody knows about. I think he•s
keeping it under wraps. One of these days •••• r•m not saying that the
problems he faces aren•t tremendous, staggering. The awesome burden of the
Presidency. But if anybody--any one man •••• " (152-153). Later in the story
the narrator•s secretary faints in the same manner as the young woman on the
street. Not only does her fainting recall the first woman, her name, Miss
Kagle, serves to recall the shock the narrator claims he felt at seeing the
vulva of the "young girl": it•s difficult to believe that it•s merely a
coincidence that a kegle is an exercise involving contractions of the vagina
which women--that is to say, expectant mothers--perform to strengthen the
muscles of the vagina prior to childbirth. Following the path of these
fainting episodes through the text we are led, finally, to the mysterious
figure who stands behind the President just as she stands behind these
displacements: "I gave [Miss Kagle] water with a little brandy in it. I
speculated about the President•s mother. Little is known about her. She
 259

presented herself in various guises •••• " (153).

Like most of Barthelme's fiction, this story trades on a welter of
displacements. The "very tall" Salvation Army major who helps the narrator
with the young girl is a displacement for the father. Not only does his
size and his dual role as church and military authority figure argue for
this interpretation, the fact that he wears the false hair--a kind of
disguise--also suggests that he is not what he seems to be on the surface.
Two other bits of evidence argue for this interpretation. First, he and the
narrator are related by the young girl. The young girl and Miss Kagle are
displacements for the mother of the President, the woman about whom little
is known. Second, the major claims to know about the thing the President
has up his sleeve, the thing he is keeping under wraps. His warnings about
this mysterious and dangerous something are vague and incomplete but can
clearly be read as a warning to the President not to reveal the thing he
keeps hidden, that is, his phallic interest in the thing he saw under the
woman's dress.
While on the manifest level this story can be read as an indictment of
the American political system that makes celebrities out of politicians, it
really offers little in the way of original thought on the subject. The
bizarre portrait of the President and of the narrator himself simply
occupies too much of the foreground of the narrative to justify any reading
of this story that does not deal with the precise nature and terms of the
personality this fiction works to describe. Of himself the narrator offers
us only one concrete detail: looking at Miss Kagle he regards her, he tells
us, "with my warm kind eyes" (154). His protestations of warmth and
kindness aside, the President with the dark secret and the damnable
 260

involvements is in all likelihood a displacement for the narrator himself

who, like the President the major warns him about, is keeping a great deal
under wraps with regard to his real intent in the telling of this story.

There is a variation of this size reversal motif in Barthelme which

deserves separate consideration. As we noted in three of the four synoptic
tales (excepting "Hiding Man"), Barthelme's stories tend to feature
combinations of older and younger females, females between whom a narrator
or protagonist is having some trouble choosing. As we have had occasion to
observe in the analysis of several stories, this occurence usually points to
the presence in the story of a displacement for the mother-figure.
Sometimes, as in the case of Florence Green and Joan Graham, the two women
are distinguished by age. Or it might happen, as it does in "Mandible" with
Miss Mandible and Sue Ann Brownly, that size is also a factor. It might
also occur, as it does in "Broadcast," that the two women involved are
simply identified as mother and daughter. Several stories feature pairs of
women, stories 1ike "The Party"(~ in which everyone watches two sisters
taking a bath, or "A Picture History of the War"(UPUA) in which a pair of
mothers, one wearing red and the other wearing blue, always appear together.
In whatever form these pairings occur, however, they always occur as the
result of a narrator's or a protagonist's suppressed wish to involve himself
with a mother-figure, involvement that he associates with a threat to his
self. By splitting the figure in two on the manifest level while
simultaneously relating the two figures together on the latent level, he
manages through fantasy to both express and deny his sexual interest in the
maternal.
 261

A good example of how this splitting can occur happens in "The New
Music"(GD). In this story, the two voices of what appear to be brothers
discuss their mother, a powerful and malign figure who completely dominates
their view of things. Throughout the story, as they rehearse their
relationship to their Momma, they variously associate her, either with a
"Dark Virgin ••• black, as is the Child" (25) or with any of several Greek or
pagan divinities, including Athene (21), Demeter (31), and Persephone (34).
What this represents is an inability to contain the mother-figure, with her
"variously colored moods" (29)--she is both the Dark Virgin, the sacrosanct
mother and bride of God who "makes you want to cry" (23), and the more
earthy, pagan version of virgin and mother. Notice, however, that even
within the more positive images of the Greek divinities are included a
mother and daughter combination. The presence of both Demeter and
Persephone in the associative matrix surrounding Momma points to a confusion
the speakers feel about their own dual status as both sons and lovers. This
Demeter-Persephone split, while suggestive in its own right, is supported by
an episode that is recalled right at the outset of this story.
--Ah well. I was talking to a girl, talking to her mother
actually but the daughter was very much present, on the street.
The daughter was absolutely someone you•d like to take to bed and
hug and kiss, if you weren•t too old. If she weren•t too young.
She was a wonderful-looking young woman and she was looking at me
quite seductively, very seductively, smoldering a bit, and I was
thinking quite well of myself, very well indeed, thinking myself
quite the--Until I realized she was just practising.
--Yes. I still think of myself as a young man.
--Yes.
--A slightly old young man.
--A slightly old young man still advertising in the trees and
rivers for a mate.
--Yes. (22)

In this episode, the confusion surrounding the relation to women is

 262

represented in several ways. First, there is the confusion over who is

really being addressed on the street, mother or daughter. Second, there is
confusion over whether the daughter may in fact be too young to hug and kiss
(note, also, that this hugging and kissing is a somewhat childish version of
what adults do in bed). Third, there is some confusion about whether the
offer of sex is really being made. And finally, the confusion surrounding
the mother-daughter affair is related to the voice•s own confusion about his
dual status as slightly young and old man. This status as slightly old
young man could describe the typical Barthelme protagonist. What is
important to note here is that in this episode (which is really a
distillation of themes developed in different terms in the larger arena of
the entire story) the source of this arrested development is clearly
identified as the failure to resolve ancient feelings of sexual interest
directed at the mother-figure. The value of this particular version of the
issue is that it shows us that the tendency to split the female into mother
and daughter figures is traceable to the persistance in the son of a failure
to find his way out of an incestuous wish to play both child-son and
adult-lover to a simultaneously dangerous and seductive mother-figure.
There are no pairings of males in all of Barthelme that happen in the
way they do with the mother-daughter, two female lovers, or the twin mother
pairings. The configuration simply does not occur. Even in those stories
in which a female character figures prominently or in those stories written
from a woman•s point of view, male pairings do not occur. However, male
pairings of a different kind do occur. In fact, the tendency to pair men or
male voices together probably accounts for the most common configurations of
character in Barthelme. The difference lies in the fact that the male
 263

pairings happen to the central characters whereas female pairings happen to

secondary characters; to put it in different terms, narrators and
protagonists whose point of view we share tend to split into two male voices
whereas female splitting occurs among the women whose point of view is not
shared: male pairings look whereas female pairings are looked at. The
reason it occurs this way is that the state of mind Barthelme describes in
his stories is a peculiarly male point of view; the terms of the central
fantasy in all of these stories are peculiarly male. Pairings that happen
close to the point of view in the fictions, therefore, all tend to involve
ambivalent relationships between father-figures and son-figures.
It is important to distinguish here between the father-son pairings
involving delineated characters and the pairing of anonymous voices such as
we see in 11 The New Music 11 or 11 The Leap 11 (GD) or in any of the variations of a
form of narrative in which Barthelme specializes, a form which began with
the use of Q and A (question and answer) in stories like 11 The Explanation ..
and 11
Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel ... These stories are only marginal
dialogues between voices who, while they may seek to place a different
emphasis on shared experiences, nevertheless share the same point of view.
This form of dialogue is really a form of dialectic, a form of dramatic
monologue and should not be confused with pairings involving relatively
discrete characters.

Colours. Perhaps more than any of the associative motifs in Barthelme, the
use of colour to designate objects with consistent latent value is unique to
Barthelme, and, as a motif, potentially the most revealing in terms of
showing the universality of fundamental motifs in his work. In a manner
 264

approaching the allegorical, key colours in Barthelme point to the exercise

of the subjectivity of the founding subject who is behind all of the
fictions. As we shall see, however, what keeps colour from allegorical
designations of meaning is the presence in any given context of competing
and mitigating associative factors that must be taken into account.
The use of colour in Barthelme is revealing, but demonstrating how it
functions and what specific colours mean in the broad arena of all the
fictions is difficult. The range of colours Barthelme uses is not
particularly great (nine colours), but each colour has distinctly different
in meaning in Barthelme, and limitations of space preclude our examining all
nine (green, blue, red, black, white, yellow, brown, silver, gold). Further
complicating the issue is the fact that colours are basically modifiers
which means that they usually appear attached to a wide variety of objects,
objects whose various meanings in Barthelme also have to be taken into
account. Despite these complications, it is nevertheless possible, if even
in a limited and somewhat modified way, to show that in the universe
Barthelme's fictions describe the colour of objects serves as an important
clue as to the latent meaning of those objects. As a means of demonstrating
how colour functions in Barthelme, we will consider two representative
colours, blue and green, perhaps the two most important colours in
Barthelme. Let us begin with the colour green.
Barthelme consistently associates the colour green with the feminine.
He uses the colour green to identify the feminine in basically two ways:
either he simply describes an object associated with a woman as green, or,
more obliquely, he uses plant or flower associations, as for instance the
naming of female characters after flowers (as we have had occasion to note
 265

above, the names Barthelme chooses for his characters are important; names
commonly serve to denote some critical aspect of character). But why does
this pattern of association of the colour green and flowers or plants with
women occur? The best way to answer that question is to consider some
examples of its use.
It might be appropriate to concentrate on a story we have already
examined in some detail, 11
Florence Green ... The story makes considerable use
out of the green motif, beginning with the repetition of greenness in
Florence (flora) Green's name. Green images are found throughout the story:
when Florence Green takes sick after seeing the pictures of the pictures of
the holocaust she goes to Greenbrier, West Virginia (10); at one point she
is described as 11
Smiling through her emeralds 11 (8); describing the canes
Florence made herself, Baskerville speaks of her 11 Stripping the bark from
the green unseasoned wood 11 (12). Other references in this story which
probably figure in the green motif are Baskerville's remark, 11
Before the
flowers of friendship faded friendship faded Gertrude Stein 11 (9), and the
fact that the children's army in his book take up positions in a park to
begin their murderous assault on the adult world (the green space of the
park is equivalent to the space out of which Baskerville operates, the
green-dominated space of Florence Green's table).
Crucial to an estimation of the significance of the patterns formed by
the colour green in this story is the recognition that, like most women in
Barthelme, Florence Green is viewed ambivalently. It would be nice to say
that green represents the feminine and let it go at that but that kind of
simplification would represent a gross underestimation of the complexity of
the state of mind Barthelme's stories describe (not to say the complexity of
 266

mind itself, particularly with regard to its capacity to invest

contradictory and ambivalent feelings in the same image). To Baskerville
Florence Green represents a superior and more dramatic variation of his own
identity. Florence Green•s dinner party, especially her place as
idiosyncratic hostess at the head of her own table--a role that determines,
and to a great extent subsumes the roles of her guests--is a dramatization
of Baskerville•s role as the voice relating the story we are reading. In
other words, Florence Green is what Baskerville wishes he now could be--an
enormously powerful and magnetic figure with a rich and varied former life.
She commands attention and, unlike Baskerville, doesn•t care whether she•s
boring or not. Like the addled and self-obsessed hostess Florence Green who
controls the desultory flow of conversation at her table, as host of the
story we•re reading, Baskerville leads the reader on a journey into the
whirlpool country of his mind. Baskerville•s act of turning his life into
fiction can also be viewed as the ironic realization of Florence•s 11 Simple,
perfect idea 11 (15) of wanting to turn her back on her present and 11
go
.--..

somewhere where everything is different•• (15).

As we can see in his relationship to Florence Green, Baskerville is
decidely ambivalent about the colour green. On the one hand, green
identifies a compelling maternal identity that exerts a powerful attraction.
The need to identify with this aspect of feminine is extremely pronounced in
Baskerville. Just as pronounced, however, as we can see in the image of
Florence Green stripping the bark off the green branches she later turns
into one of her collected canes, is the fear of loss of identity if one gets
too close to a woman of her kind. It should also be noted that the
manifest basis for the would-be writer and the would-be powerful
 267

Baskerville•s identification with Florence centres on her money. And her

money (a thing typically associated with the colour green), as we have
already seen in the image of the filthy wad of love poems she keeps in her
purse, is a displacement for the literature in which Baskerville couches his
identity.

If green is the colour associated with women in Barthelme, blue is the

colour associated with men. Blue, for instance, is the colour of the
jumpsuit God is wearing in the basement in 11 At The End of the Mechanical
Age 11 (8. 176). The king in 11 The Palace 11 {GP) shows up wearing a blue hardhat
{75). In what is probably its most important designation, blue is the
colour police wear in their many appearances in Barthelme•s stories. It is
the colour that the powerful engineers in 11 Report 11 (UPUA) decide is the
11
most popular colour worldwide .. {59). It is the colour of Captain Blood•s
velvet jacket in 11 Captain Blood 11 {OTMDC 60). In 11 The Sergeant 11 {N, the man
the Joseph-like narrator is asked to shoot, and the general that he ends up
serving, are both wearing blue (76-77).
This is not to say that women don•t appear in the stories wearing, or
associated with, the colour blue. However, those females that are
associated with blue are thus marked as aggressive and always represent a
special threat to the men who share their stories. Examples of 11 blue .. women
include the little girl in 11 This Newspaper Here 11 (UPUA) wearing a 11 blue Death
of Beethoven printed dress .. who stabs the thigh of the narrating old man
with a 11 Steel-blue knitting needle 11 (32), the 11
Blue-cross-Blue Shield 11 that
Perpetua receives from her husband when she leaves him in 11 Perpetua 11 (~ 37),
and the female loadmaster in "Departures (~)
11
in the 11 blue cloth coat 11 who
 268

loads the children on the school buses in 11 0epartures" (101) (other examples
of 11 blue" women are discussed below when we consider blue when it is used in
combination with green).

What is interesting about the two colours is the fact that they are
often used together. When used together, these two colours signify a
situation in which a debilitating balance of forces obtain. A good example
of this use of blue and green in the same pattern of associations occurs in
"Brain Damage"(CL). In the second prose vignette in "Brain Damage" a
curious flower--blue petals and a green stalk--is described. The narrative
voice in this vignette is trying to decide whether or not to plug the flower
in like an appliance, to make it, in other words, a working fixture in the
home. Significantly, in light of what we have suggested to this point about
the female associations of green and the male associations of blue,
Barthelme carefully exploits the sexual implications suggested in the image
of electricity applied to a blue-and-green flower. The narrator refers to
certain ingenuous characters who want to see "the flowers light up, or
co11 apse, or do whatever they were going to do, when they were p1 ugged in."
They are, however, wary of using Direct Current because "in the early days
of electricity, many people were killed by it," which implies that they are
afraid of an archaic if more vital form of connection: "We were sort of
afraid to plug them in, though--afraid of all that electricity pushing its
way up the green stalks of the flowers, flooding the leaves, and finally
touching the petals, the blue part, where the blueness of the flowers
resided, along with white, and a little yellow" (136). The narrator then
says something which further develops the notion that the flowers represent
 269

people, specifically children: he alludes to the "humanist position" on

flowers which states that flowers should be let alone, comparing that
position with "the new electric awareness" that demands that they be plugged
in right away (136).
What this vignette represents is a depiction of the psychic stasis that
results from failure to resolve an elemental conflict. As is the case in
all of Barthelme, the conflict centres on the contrary claims made by the
uncertain prospect of commitment to a fierce and physical connection (one
either lights up or collapses) and the contrary appeal of an inert,
solipsistic, but somehow appropriate isolation (it is unnatural, after all,
to turn flowers into appliances). The many-layered symbol of the
blue-and-green electric flower also manages to represent that conflict in
terms of a tension between an innocent but potentially lethal regressive
mode (the old direct current killed many people} and a new alternating
awareness that will, if applied, completely undermine the flower-as-flower
by making it into something it is not, that is, a machine. Not
surprisingly, in light of what we have seen to this point about the "idiot
circles'' Barthelme's characters end up describing, the voice behind this
particular fiction ends up unable to resolve or to abandon the conflict
embodied in the symbol of the blue-and-green flower: "My own idea about
whether or not to plug in the flowers is somewhere between these ideas, in
that gray area where nothing is done, really, but you vacillate for a while,
thinking about it. The blue of the flowers is extremely handsome against
the gray of that area" (136).
Another story which demonstrates the psychoanalytic terms of the
conflict embodied in the combination of things blue and things green in
 270

Barthelme is "The Indian Uprising"(~). The same psychoanalytic issues

embodied in the symbol of the blue-and-green flower in "Brain Damage" are
embodied in this story in the image of a blue-and-green city under seige, a
city which is developed in the course of the story into a representation of
the narrator's state of mind.
If we follow the use of the blue and green imagery as it occurs in the
story we note that both colours are associated with women, but nevertheless
signify different feminine values. Women wearing blue, for instance, belong
to a world other than that which the narrator occupies. Blue women in
"Uprising" are the source of a particular kind of threat. For example, Miss
R., the malignly powerful teacher to whom the narrator is referred, wears a
"blue dress containing a red figure" (14}. Later, the narrator tells us
that, "The girls of my quarter wore long blue mufflers that reached to their
knees. Sometimes the girls hid Comanches in their rooms, the blue mufflers
together in a room creating a great blue fog" (14). The image of the blue
dress containing a red figure is supported by the image of blue muffled
women hiding red men in their rooms. Keeping in mind that the story later
identifies the red Indians killed in the attack as children (see also the
Children •s army motif in "Florence Green" and "Hiding Man"), the former
image especially serves to suggest that blue women "contain" red men, an
image which connotes pregnancy; the combination of red and blue in this case
indicates that the false women in the narrator's part of the city are
mothers (an interpretation that is supported by Miss R's habit of referring
to the narrator as a child}. Occupying the narrator's section of the city
are mothers whose real sympathies lie with the red warriors attacking the
city (this pattern of red and blue is reinforced in the listing of objects
 271

in the useless barricades the narrator hides behind: "••• a blanket,

red-orange with faint blue stripes; a red pillow and a blue pillow ••• "[12];
significantly, both of these objects come from a bed, which, as is noted
below, is the true field on which this uprising takes place).
The meaning of the uprising that is threatening the narrator's city is
suggested in the image of the map the narrator shows to his lover, Sylvia:
"Our parts were blue and their parts were green. I showed the
blue-and-green map to Sylvia. 'Your parts are green,' I said" (13). Though
he pictures Sylvia as green in this instance, he later views her in
different colours: "She wore a yellow ribbon [an allusion, no doubt, to the
western film of the same name], under a long blue muffler. 'Which side are
you on,' I cried, 'after all'" (15-16). The long blue muffler, of course,
identifies her with the blue "mothers" from his part of the city, mothers
whose real sympathies lie, in the mind of the narrator, with the Indians.
Sylvia (whose name means "from the forest"), the "green" lover the
narrator is losing in the psychological upheaval of this uprising, is the
locus of a conflict between things green and things blue. The question the
narrator asks her, "Which side are you on?," points to the real issue behind
this complex story and helps show that the basis of the conflict in this
story is fundamentally romantic and psychological. Alternating between
descriptions of the current course of the uprising and reminiscences about
his failed relationship with Sylvia, "Uprising" shows itself to be about the
inability of the narrator to establish a penmanent and meaningful
relationship with Sylvia; their relationship is in a state of crisis, and
this crisis originates in the narrator. For some reason, Sylvia seems to
represent a serious threat to his identity. What criticism of this story to
 272

this point has utterly failed to realize is that the uprising this story
describes, while it certainly has wider implications, is essentially a
private and internal matter--the story is a depiction of an essentially
internal upheaval precipitated by the narrator's inability to come to terms
with a sexual object. That this uprising is really a private and especially
a sexual matter is confirmed in a line late in the story: 11
The sickness of
the quarrel lay thick on the bed" (19). Furthermore, the hidden sources of
that "quarrel" can be traced only by careful observation of motifs like the
green and blue pattern of associations, patterns that, it should be pointed
out, simply have no meaning or purpose otherwise. The blue-and-green
conflict in "Uprising," like the blue-and-green flower threatened by
electricity in "Brain Damage, .. is a representation of a state of mind, the
state of mind of a man struggling to keep the two colours and what they
represent balanced in his mind: "In Skinny Wainwright Square the forces of
green and blue swayed and struggled" {15) (for a further discussion of the
meaning of this dense and complex fiction see discussion of 11 Uprising 11 under
the analysis of the Indian motif).

There are several other instances in the corpus of Barthelme's work in

Film (~)
11
which blue and green are used together. For instance, Julie in "A
leaves a trail of blue and green hankerchiefs to the camp of the vandals
that have abducted her. In "Edward and Pia"(UPUA}, a story set in
Scandinavia in which the Pia is repeatedly sickened by the would-be lover
Edward, Edward observes late in the story that Scandinavian money is
"green-and-blue" (90). In "The President"{UPUA), Sylvia, the girlfriend of
the narrator, is wearing a "blue-and-green gypsy costume 11 when she says to
 273

the President, "I love you" (155). In every case, the colour combination is
associated with a failed romantic situation, a failure that can be traced to
the past and unresolved romantic conflicts involving parent-figures.

In Barthelme, the colour red identifies sexual passion. The Indians in

"Uprising", explicitly identified as "Red men" {11), represent the intrusion
into the world of the narrator of sexual passion. The blue women in the
same story who contained the red figures therefore represent, not only
mothers, but women marked by sexual passion. This use of red is utterly
consistent with Barthelme's use of the colour in all of his stories.
Whenever the colour red occurs it consistently points to the always
unsettling and disruptive display of sexual passion.
Colour is often assigned to objects that would seem to have little to
do with sexual passion, that would seem, in fact, to represent opposite
values. However, if careful attention is paid to the associative context in
which the designation of colour is made, one finds that in almost all
instances, certain colours denote certain latent content. Let me
demonstrate this phenomenon with an another example of the manner red is
used in "Uprising." Consider the following passage: "[Miss R. says], 'The
ardor aroused in men by the beauty of women can only be satisfied by God.
That is very good (it is Valery) but it is not what I wanted to teach you,
goat, muck, filth, heart of my heart.' I showed the table to Nancy. 'See
the table?' She stuck out her tongue red as a cardinal's hat (15). Miss
R.'s lesson is that the narrator must displace his filthy, goatish ardor for
beautiful women onto God. The door the narrator alludes to here is the
 274

hollow-core door-tables he repeatedly uses as displacements for women. He

is drawn to the inanimate doors because he can control them, because they
conform to instructions. The woman Nancy, when asked to acknowledge the
reality of the door, sticks out her tongue--a derisive and suggestive
gesture. To the narrator, who wants to control the red uprising that
threatens to overwhelm him by displacing his ardor for women to God,
associates the woman's tongue with a cardinal •s hat thus forming a
condensation; that is, he forms an image that is informed by more than one,
and in this case, contradictory meanings. The red in this apparently
anti-sexual red object in this case, therefore, actually does contain and
express sexual ardor--the red cardinal's hat is a symbol of the fear and
hatred of the sexual self as it is derived from the church.

Authority. Barthelme's protagonists often find themselves in conflict with

male authority figures. These authority figures are always representatives
of culturally validated systems of order, systems which are viewed as
inimical to the growth of the self as an independent and valid entity. This
is what Wayne Stengel says about the role of authority in Barthelme:
Frequently ••• Barthelme demonstrates that the self is defined in
its conflicts with an authority figure--a priest, a father, a
boss, a teacher, or even the president of the United States. Such
encounters are among the most crucial in the stories. In each of
these conflicts, the self discovers that it must stop worshipping
such icons; in fact, it must destroy the respect it holds for
these figures so that it can gain its own vision of reality, one
not derived from superiors. The only belief worth holding is that
which originates in the self.(l4)
Barthelme's protagonists do tend to define themselves in opposition to
authority figures, but Stengle misses the absolutely crucial point in these
conflicts that Barthelme's attitude toward authority (as manifested by his
 275

characters) is always ambivalent. Barthelme's characters may be uniformly

convinced of the inherent weakness and limitations of authority in whatever
guise it appears, but in no story is that lack of regard for the caprice or
"whimsy.. of authority ever present without an accompanying, and equally
intense, need on the part of the character to seek some kind of
identification with the same authority it villifies. The result of this
ambivalence is the perpetuation from story to story of essentially the same
crisis.
In Barthelme, the male authority figure can take on any of several
shapes, but most typically it takes on one of the following eight forms:
the priest-father, the doctor, the engineer, the policeman, the great
artist, the soldier, the politician, and the king.

1. Priest-Father.
Clerics of all rank make frequent appearances in Barthelme (who was
raised as a Catholic) Closely associated with the colour black, these
figures--literal and figurative fathers--are particularly compelling, and so
are particularly dangerous to the self. As in the case of Burligame in
"Hiding Man," there is marked tendency on the part of protagonists to view
the relationship with this figure in terms of a competition for selfhood.
The relationship to this figure is ambivalent in the sense that it is marked
by the wish to confess to, and join the father, and the contrary wish to
flee from or to renounce the father. To deliver oneself into the hands of
the priest-father may result in temporary relief, but the fear of the
ultimate annihilation of the self which knows itself in terms of its sins
(or irruptions of self) prevents this. Contrarily, the attention of these
 276

father-priests represents a form of love which nourishes the self and so

identification with them cannot be completely suspended. The result is a
perpetuation of the chase we see depicted in "Hiding Man ...

2. The Doctor.
Stories in which a protagonist either competes with a doctor for the
affections of a woman or is defeated and delivered into the hands of a
doctor are common. The overwhelming majority of these doctors are
psychiatrists. There are also several stories in which no doctor appears
but in which psychology or psychoanalytic theory is cited, either obliquely
as it in 11 The Balloon" or explicitly as in ''A Few Moments of Sleeping and
Waking"(UPUA). In every case, as it happens in 11 Florence Green," the
protagonist sets himself up against psychology and what he construes as its
procrustean tendency to limit the possibilities of the self. As in the case
of the priest-father, there is a tendency to identify with the doctor (and
the principles of psychology he represents) even in the act of attacking him
and disparaging the limiting view of personality he is seen as advocating.

3. Engineer (Architect/Scientist).
All three of these manifestations of paternal authority have in common
a belief in reason or objective order, systems of thought which are
fundamentally inimical to the view of the self as irruptive or liquid. For
instance, when the balloon presents itself to New York it offers release in
the form of randomness and mislocation in contradistinction to the "grid of
precise, rectangular pathways under our feet" (28). What the Barthelme
protagonist longs for is escape from the rigid and predetermined systems in
 277

which he finds himself trapped. This explains why Sylvia introduces a

liquid rebellion into the city of objects in "The Indian Uprising'': "The
situation is liquid," says one character (14) as "Red men in waves" (11)
overrun the city and the streets fill with muck. The Barthelme protagonist
is drawn to the principles of disunity such as the Marivaudian moment of the
pastless-futureless man of pure present as described in "Robert Kennedy
Saved From Drowning"(UPUA) or the notion of an irruptive self as it is
defined in "What To Do Next"(~), the self that cannot be contained.
The tension between the ordered, formal and rational world of the
engineer-type can be seen in all of Barthelme's illustrated fictions. In
every one of these stories, there will be a collage dominated by
mathematical lines of perspective. Inside that grid of precise and
geometric pathways, Barthelme will place in counterpoint an animate figure
who resembles, more than anything else, a creature caught and held in some
kind of net or web.

4. Policeman.
Another favourite figure of Barthelme's is the policeman. The presence
of a policeman not only represents the authority of the law and the
implication that a crime has been committed. Police represent a form of
punishment for that crime. The police in Barthelme, unlike the doctors or
priests, are never very subtle. What the police tend to represent in
Barthelme is unrestricted ego, the need to dominate and control the world by
force. One thinks of the Secret Police in "Engineer-Private Paul Klee"(S)
who desire "the three-sided waltz" of omniscience, omnipresence, and
omnipotence (66) or of Horace in "The Policeman's Ball" (CL) who approaches
 278

the seduction of his girlfriend, Margot, in the much the same crude way as
he approaches the dismemberment of a Game Hen with a pair of pliers.

5. Great Artist.
This category of paternal authority figure, like the Phantom in "The
Phantom of the Opera•s Friend"(CL) or like Edward Lear in "The Death of
Edward Lear"(§Q_), is a tragic figure, but he is also a vain, jealous and
oppressive figure. The best and most developed example of the type is found
in "At The Tolstoy Museum"(CL).
"At The Tolstoy Museum," like any of the illustrated stories Barthelme
has published, is composed of prose blended with a series of antique
engravings or prints. This story develops around several portraits of the
great nineteenth-century Russian writer, Tolstoy (a writer generally
acknowledged as one of the greatest, if not the greatest writer, who ever
lived). One picture in particular is repeated several times in this story:
a portrait of Tolstoy•s scowling, disapproving face. The second picture in
the series of portraits is a slightly smaller but identical version of the
first. In the picture the dwarfed figure of Napoleon stands looking up at
the giant head. In the third picture, a collage, Tolstoy•s enormous coat is
on display. The overwhelming largeness of Tolstoy•s image, in fact, is the
principal mode and theme of this museum.
The story makes both metafictional and psychoanaltyic use out of the
figure of Tolstoy. The story works to make the Tolstoy whose
accomplishments in fiction dwarf those of other writers a father-figure, the
father whose enormous presence diminishes and impoverishes the identity of
the son. Not surprisingly, depression is the watchword at the Tolstoy
 279

museum. The opening sentence reads: 11

At the Tolstoy museum we sat down and
wept 11 (49). Later we are told that 11 Sadness grasped 11 (59) the visitors to
the Museum. In the following passage, the source of this persistant weeping
is all but identified in the resemblance the great writer bears to a
father-figure: 11
More than any other Museum, the Tolstoy Museum induces
weeping. Even the bare title of a Tolstoy work, with its burden of love,
can induce weeping--for example, the article titled 1 Who Should Teach Whom
to Write, We the Peasant Children or the Peasant Children Us? 111 (54). This
passage shows that Tolstoy•s work brings with it, as does the relationship
with the father, a 11 burden of love... The reference to the article which
questions whether the children or Tolstoy (by implication, the father)
should be in control of writing associates the issue of writing with the
challenge the child poses to paternal authority in the act of becoming a
self, an idependent voice. That this challenge to the authority of
Tolstoy-as-artist is equivalent to the challenge to Tosltoy-as-father-figure
is also suggested by an allusion made earlier in the story to the figure of
Napoleon, the young man who made unsuccessful war on Russia (we noted a
version of this Napoleon-as-son also appears in 11 Mandible 11 ) . The
association of Tolstoy with the father is also strongly suggested in the
sense of guilt the narrator observes is felt when standing before the
portrait of the master: standing before one of the portraits the feeling is
like you•ve committed 11 a small crime and having your father, who stands in
four doorways, catch you at it 11 (55). This sense that the narrator is
implicated in some sort of crime, and a crime specifically against the
artist-father, is also suggested in image of Tolstoy as the threatening and
unpredictable bastion of moral authority: 11
The entire building, viewed from
 280

the street, suggests that it is about to fall on you. This the architects
relate to Tolstoy's moral authority .. (53-54).
The story obviously works on several levels at once. On one level the
story represents a writer's acknowledgement of Tolstoy's genius, the
pre-eminent potency, if you will, of his reputation in fiction--the very
field of endeavour in which 11
At The Tolstoy Museum .. now seeks to
participate. What must be acknowledged is that on this level Barthelme's
story represents a direct and aggressive challenge to, and an implicit
refutation of, the form of fiction in which Tolstoy made his reputation. As
an artist, Barthelme's narrator can thus be viewed as ambivalent, caught
between an attack on, and an embrace of, the pre-eminent figure of the
artist, Leo Tolstoy. We can see this ambivalence at work throughout the
story. Take, for instance, his reference to the story Tolstoy wrote about
the three hermits. His loyalty to the master, if you will, is evident in
his acknowledgement that he finds the story beautiful, but the story is so
beautiful that the narrator is left 11 incredibly depressed by reading this
story .. (56). What is perhaps less obvious about this retelling of Tolstoy's
story is that, even while acknowledging the beauty of this story, the
narrator, in effect, destroys the story by quite literally rewriting it and
making it, in effect, his own.
Tolstoy is represented in this story as a figure who, with his 11 moral
authority" (54) and his literally overwhelming presence, is a representation
of the god-like "Amazing Colossal Man" Burligame longed to surrender to in
the dark. But, as we have noted, one gets the distinct impression in this
story that Tolstoy also represents an oppressive force that the narrator
longs to overthrow. Like the two pictures that open and close this
 281

story--the first a massive portrait and the last featuring a "disaster• with
an arrow purporting to identify the miniscule figure of Tolstoy {it is
obviously not Tolstoy or anyone that could be identified for that
matter)--the story develops around a paradox, a paradox rife with
ambivalence directed at the artist-as-father-figure. The
artist-as-father-figure is an authority whose example must be challenged and
ultimately overcome if the artist-self ever hopes to realize his own voice
as an artist. As in •The King Of Jazz"{GD), another story which depicts a
challenge directed at a declining paternal artistic power, art is a medium
of self-expression, self-actualization, a medium in which fathers and sons
inevitably vie for ascendency: "He's sensational,• says the elder musician
of the challenger he calls son, •Maybe I ought to kill him• {57). Hideo,
the young challenger, plays with his head discretely placed between his
knees in keeping with the manner of sons like the narrator of •At The
~
Tolstoy Museum" who find it necessary(disguise their real intentions, from
the objects of their love and rage, and from themselves. •At The Tolstoy
Museum• ends with yet another of Barthelme's looks forward into an empty
future: •1 haven't made up my mind. Standing here in the 'Summer in the
Country' Roam, several hazes passed over my eyes. Still, I think I will
march on to 'A Landlord's Morning.' Perhaps something vivifying will happen
to me there• {60). "The King of Jazz• closes with a similar veiled and
ironic assertion of the sadness and fundamental sterility that always
attends the role·of the artist in Barthelme: the story closes just as the
King of Jazz is about to render a number entitled "Flats.•

Barthelme's prose, as we have noted above, is clotted with allusions

 282

to other works of art. This allusiveness amounts to a kind of

oppressiveness in Barthelme's world. One thinks, for instance, of the
Captured Woman in 11 The Captured Woman 11 (~) jamming her hapless artist-captor
in the stomach with a copy of The Portable Milton (95). Allusiveness can
take several forms in Barthelme. It is not uncommon, as we have seen, for
Barthelme to use actual figures from the history of art in his stories,
figure like Tolstoy, Goethe in 11 Conversations with Goethe 11 (0TMDC), Ezra
Pound in 11 A Film 11
(~, Daumier and Dumas in 11 Daumier 11 (S}, or the Fisher King
in 11 The Educational Experience"(A). In one story, 11
The Question Party"(@,
this allusiveness takes on Borgesian proportions (in Borges' story, 11
Pierre
Menard, Author of the Quixote, 11 is about a man who rewrites an exact but
somehow infinitely richer version of Cervante's Quixote). 11
The Question
Party 11 is an exact duplicate except for "some three dozen lines 11 (71) of a
story originally published in Godey's Lady's Book in 1850.

6. Soldier.
Again, we have already alluded to the significance of this figure above
in our discussion of History. The key to this figure's appeal lies in his
place in the history of conflicts. The soldier is also an expression of
phallic power which is suggested in the number of appearances soldiers make
brandishing a sword (see also Sword motif below).

7. Politician.
The politician as a figure of authority is usually the object of broad
political satire in Barthelme. The most typical appearance politicians make
in the fiction is in the form of the always unnamed President. The
 283

President as he is depicted in several stories in the parodic Guilty

Pleasures especially is patently a sham identity, all image as opposed to
substance. 11
An Hesitation on the Bank of the Delaware .. is an instance when,
in the figure of an egotistical George Washington, the politician and the
soldier are conflated in the same figure.
As is the case with all of these authority figures, the policitian can
in rare instances be cast as an extremely sympathetic figure, a figure with
whom the narrator feels a compelling need to identify. 11
Robert Kennedy
Saved From Drowning.. is probably the best example of a sympathetic portrayal
of a politician. The basis for this sympathy lies in the fact that, despite
the high public relief of these personalities, no one can really know the
truth about these men.

8. King.
The appearance of royal figures is common in Barthelme and, unlike
other categories of authority figures, is not restricted to males. In
Barthelme the kings and queens (and the gods and goddesses) are
representations of the parents as viewed through the eyes of a child.
Peterson's claim in 11 A Shower of Gold 11 (CBDC} that, 11
My mother was a royal
virgin ••• and my father was a shower of gold 11 (183} is an expression of the
altogether natural and infantile wish to see oneself as the child of special
parents. In Barthelme, this traffic in royality is a function of a
persistant and archaic sense of grandiosity, a sense a character has of
himself as being a person holding special power and privilege. It is a
sense always accompanied by the equally strong conviction of worthlessness.
One need only consider Peterson's claim to be the child of royal or divine
 284

parents from ancient mythology: Peterson has almost no sense of worth and
views every relationship as a form of punishment, proof of his lack of
worth. uThe Palace at Four A.M."(OTMDC) features a version of Peterson, a
character who is a writer and a king. This royal artist, however, is,
nevertheless, the only man in the kingdom who thinks of himself as a donkey.

Children. The role that children play in Barthelme in general is akin to

that played by the children in the classroom in uMe and Miss Mandible• or in
the remembered childhoods of the three other protagonists in the synoptic
tales; that is, children are victims, psychological victims of a universe
which alternates between hostility and indifference. Joseph's discovery
that all of the problems which plague him as an adult had their origins in
childhood is a discovery all of Barthelme's protagonists share in one way or
another. His typical character may be an adult physically, but this
character remains psychologically committed to issues and· relationships that
he knew and failed to resolve as a child. The commitment to the issues of
his preterite life turns him back upon himself and out of the world.
It is not surprising that when children do app.ear in Barthelme, they
hardly seem children at all. Rather, they seem as much hybrids of childish
and adult identities as are the adults around them (hence the popularity of
dwarfs and giants in Barthelme's universe). In the most extreme cases, the
threat to the psychological well-being of children is translated into a
palpable threat and the children are openly persecuted, or in the more
·extreme cases, tortured or killed. In •rraumereiu(~), for instance, the
son, Daniel, is told by his parents that, •we did not realize that your
 285

option had been picked up, you will be the comfort of our old age ••• if you
live'' (21). The man-child Daniel's essential powerlessness, his abject
enthralment to the whim and appetite of his parents, is common to most
children as they are depicted in Barthelrne.
The most common mode of threat to children is psychological, and the
most common source of that threat has its origins in the family. In The
Dead Father, Thomas offers this evaluation of the family: "The family
produces zombies, psychotics, and warps ••• In excess of what is needed" (78).
Barthelme consistently represents the family as a hothouse of threat,
seduction and betrayal on every side.
"Will You Tell Me?" (fBDC) is typical of one of Barthel me's family
stories, that is, stories which explore the relationships which are prone to
develop within the context of the family. The story is fraught with the
rivalries, vanities, hostilities, and general perversities of familial love
that are so common in Barthelme. A friend of the family, Hubert, has an
affair with Irene, the wife of Charles. Hubert gives the couple a child.
This son, Paul, makes bombs out of empty beer cans to throw at, and frighten
his father. His father, Charles, lusts after the girl, Hilda, the girl who
loves Paul. Howard also loves Hilda. Paul also loves Inge. Ann also loves
Paul. And so on. Indeed, part of what makes the story worth considering in
the context of this discussion is the unique way in which Barthelrne
entangles together in a unique way the histories and identities of this
extended family.
As the story develops and more characters are introduced, aligning
themselves with other characters along various axes, a peculiar phenomenon
occurs: unless the reader has been keeping careful track, he begins to lose
 286

grip on who is with who and for what reason. This is the schema of the
family as developed by "Will You Tell Me?":

HUBERT

ERIC (Hubert's
HOWARD
son)~
CHARLES IRENE

BILVUL (Hubert's & Irene's son)

ROSEMAIIE (Paul's half-sister)

IlfGE GIOTE
ANN

Fig. 3. Romantic triangles in "Will You Tell Me?"

In the absence of fidelity the structure of this family totally breaks down;
after a page or two this family doesn't register as a group of discrete
identities at all, but more like a undifferentiated mass of partial
identities. These characters, linked by common obsessions and despair, do
not seem like characters at all, but rather seem like the various
manifestations of a discrete, but very complex, pattern of obsession. What
this story in particular shows us is that the whirlpool as a structural
image is equally applicable to a consideration of content: the family as it
viewed in "Will You Tell Me? 11 is a configuration distinguished by limited
movement around, and into, a centre which inexorably draws all things into
 287

it. At the heart of Barthelme is the family, and the disruptive and
deforming mechanism that sits at the heart of the family as it is viewed by
Barthelme is desire.

Rebellion. As a consequence of the ubiquity of oppressive authority figures

in Barthelme, coupled with Barthelme's view of society as a complex of traps
in which to lose the self, a significant percentage of his stories describe
some form of rebellion. Forms of rebellion can range from the personal
rebellion of a character like Perpetua in "Perpetua"(~) who leaves her
husband and her marriage to join a revolutionary cell of musicians, to
general rebellions such as those described in stories like "City Life"(QJ,
"The Crisis"(GD), or "A Nation of Wheels"(GP). The scope of the general
rebellions, however, is only nominally general. The actual scope of the
rebellion in these stories is very restricted, restricted in the sense that
the focus of the rebellion is not so much political or sociological as it is
private and psychological. In fact, as a motif, the Rebellion motif

functions in essentially the same manner as the History motif: the putative
objective and extrapersonal scope of the drama only serves as a gloss on the
personal and the psychological.
"The Indian Uprising," for instance, is manifestly a story about a
general rebellion. A careful reading of the story reveal that the actual
site of the quarrel, as we noted above in our analysis of the story, is the
bed shared by the two lovers, the narrator and Sylvia. In fact, it is
probably more accurate to say that the real setting of this rebellion is
internal: it takes place inside the mind of the narrator.
In Barthelme, rebellion represents a radical attempt to redefine the
 288

self. Love is the most common mode of rebellion in the sense that the offer
of love is viewed by the state of mind Barthelme's fictions describe as a
challenge to the self. The prospect of love holds out the promise of escape
from the self. For reasons we have outlined above the prospect of love in
the present is turned aside by the reactionary Barthelme protagonist who
cannot escape a self locked in "history.••
Crucial to an appreciation of how the rebel functions in Barthelme is
the concept of containment as it is articulated in "What to Do Next"(A). In
the story the listener is offered the choice between the passive option of
being "contained" by his culture, or the active option of "containing" the
world as realized through the celebration of that which makes him different.
The seat of those differences are symbolized in this story by the highly
suggestive image of the "banged thumb, swelling and reddening and otherwise
irrupting all over [the matrix of this culture's] smooth, eventless surface"
(86). The problem with either role--the role of the "uncritical sop" (85)
or the role of what amounts to the narcissist or solipsist--is that neither
option is sufficient to make you happy. "What to Do Next" ends at the dead
end at which Barthelme's protagonists all eventually arrive; faced with the
choice of containing or being contained, they opt for the active option of
containing, of following the paths dictated by their irruptions. As the
ending of the story indicates, the self is not so much restored by this
option as it is kept from oblivion; an unhappy balance of forces still
maintains: "Your life is saved. Congratulations. I'm sorry" {86).
"Marie, Marie, Hold on Tight"(CBDC) is a story about rebellion that
equates rebellion with the promethean act of artistic expression. The story
shows, however, that the real subject and object of the rebellion lies not
 289

in the world but in the self. The three protesters in the story ask on
their painted signs, "Why does it have to be that way?" (117). These men
attempt to raise in existential fashion "the question of man helpless in the
grip of a definition of himself that he had not drawn, that could not be
altered by any human action, and that was in fundamental conflict with every
human notion of what should obtain" (121). They eventually discover, like
all of Barthelme's rebels discover, a fundamental paradox: the source of
~
that limiting definition of the self lies not so muchAthe world as it does
in the self. The key to the story of the rebels in "Marie, Marie• is not
the merit of their straightforward existential protest or the fact that they
alone have seen through the hypocrisy of the church, that they know about
the death of God; the key to the failure of these rebels is only secondarily
an absurd or basically hostile universe. Rather, it is clear from their
behaviour in the story that they've solved the problem of the world to their
general satisfaction. The real key to their helplessness lies in their
relationship to the mysterious Marie who lurks behind their protest. Who is
this Marie, this woman they serve? Why does she stand so far from the
manifest centre of this story, removed from the action but somehow enclosing
it all? It is Marie, after all, who painted the signs in the first place.
As the title of this story--"Marie, Marie, Hold on Tight•--ironically
suggests, the more problematic source of the •tight hold• on the respective
identities of these rebels, appears to lie in the undisclosed terms of the
relationship they hold in common with the mysterious Marie.
The appeal of the notion of rebellion is that it seems to promise a way
out of participation in systems of containment. Artistic self-expression
would appear to offer in principle the prospect of a way out of the
 290

labyrinthine trap of the self (this is Stengel's and Couturier's and

Durand's position). Artistic thought is original thought, after all, a way
of re-making the world. The trap that Barthelme's artist-narrators fall
into, however, is that, in spite of themselves, they commit themselves to
the circular, inverted path dictated to them by their deeply private
irruptions. And so it happens that rebellions always fail in Barthelme;
rebellions fail because they begin and end in the self which, as the story
"Daumier"(S) explains, simply "cannot be escaped" (183).

Water. In "Florence Green" Baskerville associates the two women who

interest him in terms of bodies of water--the Principal seas and rock pools
deep in the earth for Florence, and islands set in the sea for Joan Graham.
As our reading of the story in an earlier chapter indicated, Baskerville
appears to associate Florence Green with a kind of immersion, a return to a
preterite and elemental condition that will relieve him of the anguish which
comes from having an impoverished sense of self. The whirlpool country of
"Florence Green" features a pattern comprised of several water images:
Florence Green's preoccupation with the leaking bathroom; Baskerville's
preoccupation with coastal cities, foreign rivers and Principal Seas;
Baskerville's image of himself as a a perennial weakling still haunting the
beach of his youth; Baskervi 11 e' s second novel wi 11 be entitled "Hydrogen
After Lakehurst" ( 7); Mandrake's piano is compared to "Gibraltar in the sea"
(8); Joan Graham's breasts are viewed as she leans over soup. He ends the
story driving around in circles in the rain, rain which not only suggests
sadness, but within the associative framework of the story, the rain is a
form of water. The final tableau represents a kind of marginal immersion:
 291

enclosed in the dry, confined space of the Volkswagon, Baskerville ends the
story trapped on a kind of island--still drawn to, and surrounded by, water,
but still unable to risk total immersion.

Among the stories which make developed use of water or liquid

associations for the feminine are "The Indian Uprising"(UPUA},
"Paraguay"(CL}, "The New Music"(GD}, "Will You Tell Me?"(CBDC), "You Are as
Brave as Vincent Van Gogh"(.8), "At the End of the Mechanical Age"(~,

''Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning" (UPUA), "Sentence" ( CL}, "The Phantom of
the Opera's Friend"(CL), "The Mothball Fleet"(OTMDC}, "Captain
Blood"(OTMDC), and "Brain Damage"(CL). There are many other stories which
draw the same correspondences between liquidity and the feminine but in the
stories listed above the water-as-feminine association is central.
Water is always used used in Barthelme to symbolize either one of two
forms of threat to the identity: in its first use, it represents a source
of isolation, and in its more radical forms, a source of oblivion. "The New
Music" posits a body of water with precisely the same associative values as
the water in "Florence Green," but it couches the water metaphor in slightly
different terms. In the story, the two voices, utterly dominated by the
presence of their mother, speak of returning to "Pool," which is described
as the "city of new life" and the "city of hope" (24}. "That lonesome road.
It ends in Pool, .. (24) says one of the voices. The characterization of the
Pool as new, however, turns out to be bitterly ironic.
The surreal and horrific city of the future, Pool, is actually the city
of the past. This Pool owes something allusively to Bath, a favourite city
in eighteenth-century literature, but Barthelme's Pool is an altogether
 292

private city. It is a version of the cities described in all of Barthelme•s

fictions. We are told, for instance, that the houses in Pool are occupied
by 11 Elegant widowed women living alone ••• ". Inside the houses there is a
familiar occupant: "a grown child ••• or an almost grown one ...... But what
is most disturbing and familiar about these dangerous homes {"medals are
awarded to those who have made it through the day") is the pall of guilt and
the weight of the past: "The dead are shown in art galleries, framed. Or
sometimes, put on pedestals. Not much different from the actual practice
except that in Pool they display the actual ••• Person ••• Shocked white faces
talking ••• Killed a few flowers and put them in pots under the faces,
everybody does that ••• " {26).
As disturbing as this vision of Pool is--"I saw the streets of Pool, a
few curs broiling on spits"--the two voices cannot escape from it:
"Something keeps drawing you back like a magnet ••• "(27). In this private
city the grown-but-not-grown child waits alone in the dangerous house with
the widow. He is alone, except of course for the dead-but-not-dead of the
past who continue to be 11
Shocked" by some crime that is never described
directly.
This same pool is investigated, albeit in different terms, in "You Are
as Brave as Vincent Van Gogh." In this story, a male narrator addresses his
young lover. Set beside a swimming pool, this story chronicles the attempt
of the narrator to come to terms with this woman. The central event in the
story is the woman driving a road-mending machine ( a hopper) into the pool
toward narrator who sees himself as a drowning signalman. As is the case in
all of Barthelme•s most representative fiction, the story is written is such
a way as to surround this central event with a welter of associations,
 293

associations which invest it with meanings no summary can account for here
except in the most general fashion. However, the moment of the attack on
the narrator is suggestive enough in its own right to warrant inclusion in
this consideration of the Water motif: "And the giant piece of yellow
road-mending equipment enters the pool, silently, you are in the cab,
manipulating the gears, shove this one forward and the machine swims. Swims
toward the man in the Day-Glo orange vest who is waving his Day-Glo orange
flags in the air, this way, this way, here!" (168-169). The key to this
water image is that the man signalling in various ways is threatened with
drowning by a woman who has usurped a male role (she drives the giant
hopper). The male protagonist, on the point of being immersed by a
threatening female figure, continues to signal desperately. The
confrontations that occur in and around these pools are never completed, are
never really resolved because water represents the source of a persistant
and ambivalent threat and appeal of immersion in the past in the course of
which you're likely to confront a mother-figure who'll threaten you with the
loss of your selfhood.
This significance for water helps explain the meaning of an important
story in Barthelme, "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning." In "Drowning,"
the narrator saves the enigmatic and contradictory figure of Robert Kennedy
from drowning (in Kafkaesque fashion, Kennedy is referred to throughout the
story simply as "K."). The story is marbled with many of the motifs we have
identified in this chapter. and all of them point to Robert Kennedy's status
as father-figure. The story, in fact. makes only nominal use of Robert
Kennedy as actual historical figure. The Robert Kennedy of "Drowning" is
purely a Barthelme creation; like the Paul Klee of "Engineer-Private" or the
 294

Tolstoy of •At The Tolstoy Museum," the name of the famous authority figure
serves to provide Barthelme with an outline, a nominal identity he then
fills with the stuff of his own manufacture.
K. is a figure who is both loved and hated, a strangely remote and
unhappy figure who resembles, as much as any character in Barthelme, the
missing father in "Views of My Father Weeping"(CL). •orowning,• in fact, is

portrait of ambivalence.
-
written in much the same form as "Views,• a series of views that add up to a
In •views• the point of the investigation is to
re-view the son's relationship with the father by getting at the facts
surrounding his death; in •orowning• the aim of the narrative is similarly
to understand who this literal and figurative father is, and this time, to
literally rescue him. from death in •the green depths" (53).
Why K. has entered the dangerous water in the first place, leaving
behind what appears to be a Zorro costume, is never explained. In the view
of K. immediately preceding the view of him in the water, however, the
Marivaudian moment is described, and described in such a way that it
resembles a version of drowning: •The Marivaudian being ••• cannot predict
his own reactions to events. A condition of breathlessness and dazzlement
c:
surrounds him. In consequence he exists in a certain freshness whi\h seems,
if I may say so, very desirable• (52). What K.'s suicidal swim represents
in context, therefore, is an attempt to approximate the sense of
.. breathlessness and dazzlement• that would attend living as a "pastless
futureless man, born anew at every instant" (52). The desperate swim is one
of those distractions that Barthelme's characters are forced to undertake
because they know, as "Daumiern says, that the self (the self rooted in the
past) cannot be escaped. The terrible irony of the swim, of course, is
 295

that, on a manifest level--an attempt at a suicide-death--it offers only a

nominal approximation of a pastless and futureless life. The swim presents
K. with two possible resolutions: death or rescue. Unfortunately, each of
these resolutions fails to resolve the problem. The latter only serves to
perpetuate the problem.

On a latent level, the immersion in the regressive and maternal "green

depths" and the subsequent rescue is more complex: it represents a failure
to escape the morbidity determined by a commitment to the past, the failure
to escape into the vital Marivaudian life of the present. The narrator-son
is drawn to the water's edge where he sees his own past and future depicted
in the form of the father-figure with whom he has been seeking to identify
struggling in the green, maternal depths. What the rescue represents is an
expression of the son's attempt to identify with the father (the
identification is phallic, too: he is connected to the father's sword arm
by a rope around his waist). The father-figure is rescued but what is
really solved or answered or redressed? The story ends when K. says simply,
"Thank you," which is no more than the minimum expression of gratitude or
acknowlegement one could expect. Notwithstanding the perfunctoriness of the
remark, it is highly suggestive in context. It is, after all, the first
direct contact between narrator and the elusive, problematic K.; it
represents a kind of mutual recognition. Nevertheless, the story and their
relationship ends here; that is, it ends here because it has to--there is
absolutely nothing in the story to suggest that there are any grounds for
this relationship to proceed. K. remains at the close of the story as
enigmatic a figure as he was at the start: "He is neither abrupt with nor
 296

excessively kind to associates. Or he is both abrupt and kind" (40).

Ice. "Skiing along on the soft surface of brain damage, never to sink,
because we don't understand the danger--" (149): this last, unfinished
sentence of "Brain Damage"(CL) associates the damaged brain with coldness.
Given the fact that Barthelme's characters to tend to find themselves
frozen, as it were, in positions of sterile isolation, it is not surprising
that ice and snow metaphors consistently figure in his stories. Ice, as the
refrigerator episode of "Broadcast" implies, is also the medium in which
things are preserved--it suspends growth and animation. Ice is also the
opposite of fire and Barthelme's characters are manifestly wary of the heat
of passion (figured in the prose by the colour red and all sorts of fire
imagery). The Ice motif shows up in images as diverse as the reference at
the close of "You Are as Brave as Vincent Van Gogh"{8) to the child the
woman 1eft out in the hail storm (171), to the "icy peaks" ( 67)metaphor for a
bachelor one guest offers at "The Question Party"(GD). The Ice motif is
sometimes combined with the colour motif as in the red snow in
"Paraguay"(CL) connoting aborted passion or the green snow of Montreal in
"Will You Tell Me?"(CBDC).

Swords (clubs, canes, revolvers). Barthelme's characters often find

themselves involved in violent situations. More often than not the violence
is suppressed and psychological as opposed to overt and physical; it tends
to appear as the threat or fear of violence rather than as naked, actual
expression. For instance, in a story like "110 West Sixty-first Street''(~),

a story about a particularly bitter failed marriage, there is plenty of

 297

psychological and implied violence, but it never breaks through to the

surface of this unhappy relationship. The violence is all displaced. For
example, the story begins: 11
Paul gave Eugenie a very large swordfish steak
for her birthday. It was wrapped in red and white paper. The paper was
soaked with swordfish juices in places but Eugenie was grateful nonetheless ..
(21). The swordfish steak, Paul's 11 tasteless 11 joke (22}, is then associated
by his wife, Eugenie, with her dead son, Claude, whose body was given to the
hospital for medical experimentation. As the story develops and the full
scope of the hostility and sense of betrayal mutually felt in Paul's and
Eugenie's relatonship is known, the true meaning of the swordfish steak joke
emerges (the swordfish steak is a condensation which contains four of
Barthelme's favourite motifs: Food, Water, Animal, and Sword}: the joke,
like the majority of Barthelme's jokes (the jokes described in 11 Hiding Man..
as 11 dangerous to plumb 11 } , is a symbol of the violent and complex feelings
that have utterly compromised this marriage. The violent emotion contained
just under the surface in this relationship, as it happens in almost all
cases in Barthelme, is never expressed openly. Rather, it finds oblique
expression in various images and associations which, like the leaking
swordfish steak, surround and serve to define the terms of the central
relationship.
Canes, clubs, pliers, revolvers, or any of a host of sundry other
weapons are common in Barthelme's stories. Barthelme's favourite among
them, though, is the sword. Part of the appeal of the sword no doubt lies
in the fact that it is an antique; that is, the sword is an 11 historical 11
artifact: the sword is part of the paraphenalia of the history and miliary
motifs that figure so prominently in Barthelme. In 11 The Dolt 11 (UPUA}, for
 298

instance, Edgar, the author who writes historical romance, uses his
knowledge of four archaic names for the sword in a vain attempt to
demonstrate that he still has some control over his wife and over his art.
The psychoanalytic phallic implications of the sword are obvious and
need not be elaborated here at any great length. Let it suffice to say that
in Barthelme's stories, which typically feature male characters lacking
phallic strength, control of the sword or club or revolver is inevitably an
issue.
So common is the occurence of swords in Barthelme that it gives rise to
a distinct category within the Sword motif, what might be called the
D'Artagnan leitmotif. Stories in which literary swordsmen appear are
common. Literary swordsmen are figures out of romantic literature, figures
like musketeers, pirates, outlaws like Zorro--the dashing or romantic
stereotype. These figures have a special fascination for Barthelme, a
fascination underlined by the fact that they tend to turn up in the most
unlikely places. One thinks, for instance, of the black hat and cape and
the sword left behind by the drowning K. that anachronistically appear on
the shore in the 1ast episode of ''Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning" (UPUA).
In "The Abduction from the Seraglio"(GD) the following index of how stupid a
woman can be is offered: "She's not so dumb as a lady I once knew who
thought that the Mark of Zorro was anN ••• " (93). In "Perpetua"(~,

Perpetua leaves her husband for her new life wearing, of all things, a
"D'Artagnan cape" (40). In "Nothing: A Preliminary Acccount"(GP) the
absence of the three musketeers is suddenly lamented: "I am sorry to say
that it is not Athos, Porthos, or Aramis, or anything that ever happened to
them or anything that may yet ever happen to them if, for example, an Exxon
 299

tank truck runs over a gila monster which is then reincarnated as Dumas
pere" (163). The most developed use of the D'Artagnan leitmotif occurs in
"Daumier"(S), a story in which Dumas a~d D'Artagnan himself play featured
roles. What this figure represents in Barthelme's universe of discourse is
a hero, an ego ideal that contains literary, Historical (in the sense
described in the discussion of the History motif), romantic, and phallic
significances.

The allusion in "Perpetua" to Perpetua's assumption of the D'Artagnan

cape leads us to a consideration of another motif in Barthelme which should
be considered in the context of the Sword motif. This motif represents a
reversal of the Sword motif and involves the assumption by women of the
paraphenalia one would most tend to associate with men, that is, the
instruments or paraphenalia of war. In several stories, women appear who
have assumed the role of the phallic male and thus represent, as does the
Indian Sylvia to the narrator in "Uprising,• threatening phallic women. We
saw this assumption of the phallic threat manifested in the synoptic tales
in Miss Mandible's name, Florence Green's canes and Martha's bullfighter
pants in "Broadcast.• Two of the more colourful examples of this phenomenon
in Barthelme in general are the Pin Lady, the archenemy of the Balloon Man
in "The Great Hug"(~), and the malevolent little girl who stabs the thigh of
the old man in •This Newspaper Here"(UPUA).
Captain Blood in "Captain Blood"(OTMOC), who is part of the D'Artagnan
leitmotif discussed above (a literary, historical, romantic, sword-carrying
hero), confronts the phallic woman as part of his routine. The
swashbuckling outlaw pirate Blood (who becqme a pirate "after some
 300

monstrously unjust thing was done to him 11 [62]) describes what he calls the
11
Wonderful moment 11 of pirating as follows. What Blood describes is a highly
suggestive moment in the context of our discussion of phallic women:
Preparing to board. Pistol in one hand, naked cutless in the
other. Dropping lightly to the deck of the engrappled vessel,
backed by one's grinning, leering, disorderly, rapacious crew who
are nevertheless under the strictest buccaneer discipline. There
to confront the little band of fear-crazed victims shrinking from
the entirely possible carnage. Among them, several beautiful
women, but one really spectacularly beautiful woman who stands a
bit apart form her sisters, clutching a machete with which she
intends, against all reason, to--(62)
Captain Blood, the disciplined head of a libidinous crew, closes in on what
is clearly, for him, the very object of pirating itself only to find that
the beautiful woman he seeks, 11
against all reason, .. has armed herself with a
menacing sword (and a particularly thick sword, at that). Barthelme's
description of the incident aborts at this point, lapses into silence. The
rape and murder attached to the role of pirate may be 11 entirely possible ..
and may, indeed, be the point of being a pirate in the first place, but
faced with the beautiful machete-weilding woman, Blood is unable to proceed.
By weilding the machete the woman has managed--against all reason--to
essentially abort this fantasy of murder and rape. We aren't told what
happens to the woman (early in the story Blood considers throwing women into
the sea to slow down his enemies but decides against it) but what we do know
is more important: the hapless but altogether typical Barthelme protagonist
Blood will end up dancing the redundant, 11
grave and haunting sardana 11 and
wondering why he ended up 11 With a spider monkey for a wife. And what does
his mother think of him? 11 (65)

Women or girls who appear as soldiers are common in Barthelme because

 301

the military connotes the phallic father (see Authority motif above).
Examples of women thus identified and so rendered dangerous to their lovers
include the following: Perpetua (whose abandoned, voyeur husband has
already been given her Blue Shield and Blue Cross); Sunny Marge, also from
"Perpetua", a displacement for Perpetua, who has a tattoo of Marshal Foch on
her back; the woman patient at the centre of "Sentence"(9:), "an immensely
popular soldier" (115) who dresses up as a tree and eats the enemy•s lunch
(see Green and Food motifs); the narrator in "Views of My Father
Weeping"(CL) who wonders why he isn•t "out in the street feeling up
eleven-year old girls in their soldier drag, there are thousands, as alike
as pennies ••• " (16); the woman in "Up, Aloft in the Air"(CBDC) who wears a
medal from the First World War between her breasts (125); Alexandra, the
lesbian in Henrietta and Alexandra"(GD) who is a member of the Knights of
St. Dympha (patroness of the insane); the woman in "Terminus"(OTMDC) who
served three years in the army (114). There are other stories in which the
association is present but more obscure. For instance, the knight in pink
armor who falls from the Glass Mountain in "The Glass Mountain"(CL) may very
well be a manifestation of the type, as might Hilda who in "On the Steps of
the Conservatory"(GD) is ambiguously described as "a veteran 11 (135). Women
can also assume other typically masculine guises. Examples of this would
include the wife wearing the shoulder pads in 11 The Piano Player"(CBDC), the
captured woman who plays with the football in 11 The Captured Woman"(~),

Phillipas in a Royal Canadian Mounted Police Hat in 11

"Departures (~), and the
Dyrad carrying the axe and standing at the head of an army of dryads, also
in 11 Departures. 11
What the phallic woman represents is the maternal marked by the
 302

castrating power of the father; a woman who appears wielding a sword or

wearing part of a soldier's uniform is a figure at once beautiful but
deadly, a figure of monstrous appeal and threat. Because one cannot take
her except at great risk (and, as Captain Blood so aptly puts it, against
all reason), her presence virtually obliges the regressive type who acts as
Barthelme's prototypical protagonist to opt for castration (to back down and
away), to opt instead for the fantasy of pre-oedipal, oceanic involvement
with the mother.
As might be expected, given the distribution of symbols as it occurs in
the girl-as-soldier motif, men or fathers who behave like women appear with
some frequency. Examples of men or fathers acting roles associated with
women include the narrator. of the Captured Woman in •rhe Captured Woman•(A)
­
who ends up doing dishes, the father in •views of My Father Weeping•(CL) who
plays with dolls and wea~a straw hat with flowers in it, or the father in
•see The Moon"(UPUA) who was a seamstress and a cheerleader. One of the
best examples of this tendency to confuse gender roles as represented by
costume confusion occurs in •rhe Agreement•(~). The narrator here is
haunted by repeated visitations of figures who appear at his door wearing a
red dress and who spit blood on their dress. The first figure is an old
woman. The second is his lover's lover, but the narrator isn't sure whether
it is a man or a woman. Finally, the narrator imagines himself spitting red
blood on his blue shirt.

Windows. The incidence of windows that appear in Barthelme's stories is one

of those minor details that might escape notice were it not for the fact
that they occur with such remarkable regularity. It is not difficult to
 303

account for the preoccupation with windows in the world Barthelme•s fictions
describe if we keep in mind that windows provide the viewer with a framed
view of the world. A man looking through a window, to use the
container/contained imagery from 11
What To Do Next 11 (b), contains the world,
limiting and controlling it in a proscibed, subjectively determined view. A
window offers a safe vantage from which the private man may look at the
world without having to risk contact with the world. The voyeuristic
element of the state of mind Barthelme•s fiction describes would obviously
relate to the world in terms of windows: windows allow a form of contact
but maintain distance, thus perpetuating the 11
libidinous energy
Sandman (~
11
nondischarge 11 alluded to in "The 92).
Windows would be suggestive in Barthelme because, not only does a
window serve to contain the world and keep it at a distance, a window also
contains the viewer. The windowed enclosure, such as the glass booth to
which Bloomsbury has retreated in 11 Broadcast, 11 is therefore common in
Barthel me.

Combinations. Almost as important as the interpretative principle which

recognizes that Barthelme•s individual fictions are held together by motifs
common to all of his fictions is the recognition that these motifs most
often occur in combinations. What to the casual reader might seem a
colourful or merely unlikely image often represents a highly meaningful
image or symbol invested with several layers of significance. The unlikely
giant dog and the small dog which subsequently appears with the father in
11
Views of My Father Weeping, .. for instance, are features that can be shown
to be signifying as part of a fixed pattern of motifs that runs right
 304

through Barthelme; these dogs are compounded out of a limited reservoir of

meaningful motifs.
It is partially through the combination of these motifs that Barthelme
creates the many-layered symbol the climber sought in 11 The Glass Mountain ...
An understanding of the dynamics of these many-layered symbols (which are
really motifs in combination) is critical to an appreciation of Barthelme•s
art.
 306

At the end of 11 Me and Miss Mandible•• Joseph is delivered into the care
of doctors who no doubt will attempt to determine whether this delinquent
adult can be recovered and returned to his community. There is nothing in
the story, however, to suggest that there is anything that can be done for
Joseph. Thus, as the journal ends, Joseph's situation has effectively come
full circle: it is apparent that his time in the classroom of his past has
not succeed in reworking him to any significant degree. Not only has his
situation not been resolved, his character not reworked, we leave him if
anything more deeply entrenched in a situation that seems to admit of no
solution. Joseph's basic problem is that he is caught in what comes down to
a conflict between two life roles: the absurd life role laid out for him by
the authorities, and the private role dictated to a large extent by wishes
and desires he denies that he feels. Rejecting the world offered him by the
authorities--a system utterly compromised by failed signs and meaningless
processes--Joseph opts almost by default for desire and what amounts to the
treadmill of obsession. Having made such a choice (though Joseph as author
of this journal is a skilled adjustor--another 11 forger of manifests 11 --and is
determined to suppress any indication that he has made any choices at all),
Joseph commits himself to a course that can only end in the repetition of
some version of events which took place in the classroom of his past.
Part of what urges Joseph in the direction of obsession is a
fundamental lack of confidence in any system or meanings outside of self.
 307

The discovery that some signs of what conventionally obtains in the world
are lies is a discovery from which Joseph cannot recover. Lacking the
"faith 11 to participate in such failed systems, and lacking a viable
alternative to that system, Joseph is drawn down a path whose direction has
been predetermined for him by his own history. And so he ends the story
like Napoleon in the history lesson that fascinates him, frozen forever in
the middle of a doomed campaign.
In our analysis of the synoptic tales we saw how the basic pattern of
"Mandible" (the first story Barthelme published) was repeated in those
stories with no significant changes to the pattern. The narrators in all
three subseqent stories, having followed roughly parallel routes out of a
corrupt world of exhausted meanings, are drawn deeply into the inverted,
entirely personal and ultimately moribund world of the solipsist, a world
that admits of no avenues of escape. The image of Baskerville turning idiot
circles while singing Verdi's Requiem is probably the most vivid and telling
of the conclusions of the synoptic tales, but all four stories end in the
same place, and in terms of latent content, for the same reasons.
This study has suggested that the analogy of "Mandible 11 and the
synoptic tales can be enlarged to include the body of Barthelme's work; that
is, Barthelme's stories describe a series of unsuccessful attempts to
resolve the same latent conflict depicted in 11 Mandible. 11 We also noted that
a reading of the synoptic tales reveals that the self at the centre of
"Mandible" trying to find a way out of its isolation and its melancholy, and
to some sense of validity, is for all intents and purposes the same self at
the centre of the struggle in the subsequent three stories. A careful and
comparative reading of the fundamental motifs that occur in the next one
 308

hundred and thirty odd stories shows that the self at the centre of the
conflict in the corpus of Barthelme•s fictions remains the same; despite the
fact that the manifest terms of the conflict change with every story, the
same particular psychoanalytic or unconscious issues remain at stake
throughout.
Why is the question of the consistency of the character of the founding
subject central in the interpretation of Barthelme•s prose? As we noted at
the outset of this study, the issue of intentionality and authorial design
is at the centre of criticism of all postmodern art, Barthelme•s included.
It is generally asserted that Barthelme is a representative voice--if not a
leading voice--among postmodern writers, writers who are credited with
restructuring fiction and the fictional experience in a radical way by
rendering the question of intentionality--and the corollarative issue of
meaning--all but irrelevant; criticism credits Barthelme, if not with the
creation, then certainly the considerable sophistication of a form of
utterance that in didactic fashion devalues prose as a source of meaning.
So apparently successful is Barthelme at this devaluation of any
11
philosophical, historical, or metaphysical given 11 (Molesworth 83) that some
critics go so far as to rest Barthelme•s importance as a writer on the fact
that he has managed to create a form of prose that doesn•t validate
anything.
I would argue, however, that while Barthelme may not be prepared to
invest confidence in anything which transcends the self, he does believe in
the self. As manifested in his prose, Barthelme•s view of the self,
especially in relation to its case history, is incompatible with
postmodernism•s notion of the ideal utterance which would serve to delimit
 309

the self of the author. This study's analysis of Barthelme's prose may not
undermine the plausibility of such an ideal utterance per se, but it does
show that Barthelme is not postmodern in the sense that we have defined that
set of aesthetic principles (if anything, Barthelme is a Romantic writer in
the tradition of Poe [Stengel 283, Graff 1982]}. The question of the claims
made on Barthelme by postmodernism aside, the demonstrated presence of a
consistent founding subject behind the prose (as opposed to the ghost-like
virtuoso successfully mocking the reader's search for authorial design} begs
a profound reassessment of the meaning of Barthelme's discourse.
Certainly it does no particular credit to Barthelme's considerable
range as a stylist to reduce his work to a series of disguised versions of
what amounts to essentially the same story, but this study did not set out
to consider the impressive number of ways Barthelme has found to keep on
talking. What this study has intended to show, rather, is that the standard
reading of Barthelme which presents him as a seminal postmodern anarchist,
and his stories as the polyphonic utterance of the self in a dynamic state
of flux, completely misreads what Barthelme is saying in his stories,
individually and in toto, about the self, and the self in relation to the
world it inhabits and the art it creates. What Barthelme's fictions in fact
represent are dramatizations of a contest between a self as it knows itself
in the flawed and disposable terms insisted upon by the world (the Other},
and that same self as it longs to experience and know itself free from the
constrictive patterns imposed by memory and desire. Probably the purest
expression of this alternative mode of the self is found in "Robert Kennedy
Saved From Drowning"(UPUA}. The story posits Poulet•s Marivaudian being as
the best approximation of a being that has somehow managed to slip the bonds
 310

of time:
.
The Marivaudian being is ••• a pastless futureless man, born anew at
every instant. The instants are points which organize themselves
into a line, but what is important is the instant, not the line.
The Marivaudian being has in a sense no history. Nothing follows
from what has gone before. He is constantly surprised. He cannot
predict his own reaction to events. He is constantly being
overtaken by events. A condition of breathlessness and dazzlement
surrounds him. (52)
The Marivaudian being is the most radical alternative open to a subjectivity
isolated inside what Sartre calls in Being and Nothingness an "already
meaningful world.. : "I, by whom all meanings come to things, I find myself
engaged in an already meaningful world which reflects to me meanings I have
not put into it" {510). According to Sartre, the •t• confronting an already
meaningful world (replete with meanings that he sees as false) finds that he
cannot exist as a factuum, but only 11 in situation• (521). The tension
between an already constituted and •valued" world, and a self trying to
constitute itself out of the contaminated materials available to it
(language and the moral values upon which language depends) lies at the
heart of Barthelme•s fiction; what Barthelme•s fictions amount to is a
series of linguistic •situations• in which the •1• of the founding subject
in Barthelme attempts and fails to realize a sense of Marivaudian
breathlessness.
The story "What To Do Next•(8) frames this existential predicament in
terms of containment: one either contains, or is contained. According to
this story, an individual is faced with the choice of either giving in to
the culture that surrounds him and thereby losing his self, or by ignoring
that culture, cutting the self off from any hope of definition: "Th~

culture that we share, such as it is, makes us all either machines for
assimililating and judging that culture, or uncritical sops who simply sop
 311

it up, become it 11 (85) (the 11

YOU
11
this piece is addressed to is, like all of
Barthelme•s protagonists, 11
a rather poor specimen.. with 11 leaning
personality.. lamentably lacking in 11 definition 11 [84]). According to the
ironic 11 instructions 11 this story provides, the only way for the self to
remain intact and to retain control is by cultivating solipsism: if you
hope to survive, you have no choice but to become, like many famous teachers
who teach 11
a course in themselves, .. a deliberate and determined solipsist,
to become, in effect, an 11 anthology of yourself 11 (86). What is crucial in
the procedure as it described in 11 What To Do Next 11 is that the source of the
material entered in that anthology is that which is generated out of
irruptions of private concern which define you in contradistinction to your
11
cul ture 11 : 11
Because you stick out from the matrix of this culture 1ike a
banged thumb, swelling and reddening and otherwise irrupting all over its
smooth, eventless surface, our effort must be to contain you, as would, for
example, a lead glove 11 (86). Faced with a culture which works to subvert
individuality, Barthelrne•s characters consistently opt for concentration on
the irruptive self as 11 What To Do Next 11 defines it. Identity thus depends
in a critical sense on the irruptive events which took place in the past.
As we observed especially in the synoptic tales, the procedure basically
involves withdrawal from the world at large and into the world of the self,
a withdrawal exacerbated by the celebration of private rituals modelled on
episodes from the irruptive past. The procedure results in survival of the
self, but unfortunately the procedure doesn•t solve the problem by
recreating a valid or authentic self. Celebrating private rituals--rituals
whose content is predetermined by case-history--Barthelme•s characters avoid
the psychic death of being 11 Contained 11 by their 11 eventless 11 culture, but
 312

they also risk the equally certain psychic death that attends the role of
the solipsistic "container" of all that he sees (86). The end result for
the Barthelme protagonist who refuses to be contained, and yet longs for
release from the death-in-life of solipsistic containment which forces him
back upon his own case history as a context for the self, is that he
inhabits a kind of psychic limbo. The idea of "the pastless futureless man"
fails to penetrate "the cocoon of habituation" (S 179) that insulates the
self and keeps it from any hope of what "The Balloon" calls mi sl ocati on, a
sufficient margin of new situation in which to recreate aspects of the self.
Patently unable to participate in an absurd universe of already
constituted but failed meanings, and apparently unable to rework the self so
as to allow it to participate in anything approaching the dazzling
Marivaudian present, Barthelme's characters find themselves drawn to the
only selves ever known in health and validity, the self of childhood. What
each story amounts to, therefore, is a complex procedure to distract a
case-historical self that cannot be escaped. We know that this self cannot
be escaped because, as this study has endeavoured to demonstrate, this
"self" stubbornly reappears in story after story. This failure to resolve
the problem of the self amounts to the closing of the circle of obsession.
Living inside the circle the self is saved, but at great cost: "Your life
is saved," conclude the instructions in "What To Do Next."
"Congratulations. I'm sorry" (86).
In "See The Moon?"(CL)
--. the artist-narrator seeks to justify his private
preoccupations as no more than the arbitrary result of a search for
something distinctive upon which to base his sense of himself: "I set out
to study cardinals, about whom science knows nothing. It seemed to me that
 313

cardinals could be known in the same way we know fishes or roses, by

classification and enumeration. A perverse project, perhaps, but who else
has embraced this point of view? Difficult nowadays to find a point of view
kinky enough to call one's own, with Sade himself being carried through the
streets on the shoulders of sociologists, cheers and shouting, ticker tape
unwinding from the windows ..... (169). The narrator of 11 See The Moon? 11
adopts a practice that the many artists in Barthelme appear to practice;
that is, the pursuit of the arbitrarily perverse or kinky as a means of
registering against what 11 What To Do Next 11 characterizes as the smooth,
eventless surface of their culture. As was noted in the introduction to
this study, the cultivation of arbitrary or gratuitous perversities is a
practice often imputed to Barthelme. The imputation is understandable in
light of the fact that, like his narrator in 11 See The Moon?, 11 Barthelme is
inclined to suggest that the objects that appear in his stories are
arbitrarily chosen: they make no claim to embody permanent meaning, nor do
they claim to leave any residue. According to the logic of 11 See The Moon? 11
and other fictions, cardinals or giant balloons or cities designed like Mona
Lisa puzzles are not chosen because they contain meaning in their own right.
Such objects are chosen, rather, not on the basis of content but on the
basis of principle, because they represent 11 events 11 that can be seen against
the eventless norm. The narrator in 11 The Indian Uprising .. who looks at his
barricade and declares that he knows nothing thus performs a typical gesture
in Barthelme.
Notwithstanding these manifest assertions as to the lack of meaning
attached to the objects in Barthelme, a more careful and comparative reading
11
of Barthelme reveals that objects and perversions 11 are not chosen
 314

arbitrarily. In fact, quite the opposite is true. In "The Balloon" and

"Bought," as we have seen, despite the fact that attention is carefully
diverted from the private character of the balloon and puzzle respectively,
the balloon and puzzle are profoundly meaningful on a personal level. As
this study of the fundamental motifs in Barthelme shows, the objects that
find their way into Barthelme's compressed and highly determined universe
are selected and arranged into various configurations because they mean
something to the subjectivity behind the fiction.

A number of critics have commented that Barthelme's work, in terms of

innovation or growth, reached something of a plateau in the mid-70's. Larry
McCaffery suggests that Barthelme•s work since Come Back, Dr. Caligari has
evolved in only "relatively unimportant ways," and that his work "seems to
be suffering from too much ••• sameness 11 (1982, 100). Wayne Stengel, looking
through Barthelme•s latest collection of stories, Overnight To Many Distant
Cities, notes the same of lack of "growth" in Barthelme: "Yet I detect that
this volume, and perhaps the last two or three, have elicited fewer shocks
of recognition and squeals of delight from reviewers, critics, and even the
writer's most ardent fans than did his earliest fiction. Perhaps Barthelme
achieved his greatest career growth and development during ••• the late
sixties and early seventies ••• "(212). Like McCaffery, Molesworth sees
little substantive development in Barthelme after the startling innovations
of Come Back, Dr. Caligari: "Some of the stories in his first collection,
especially 'Me and Miss Mandible' and 'Florence Green is 81,' are as
skillful as any of the others he published in the subsequent twenty years.
Barthelme's skill has never been doubted, and it developed very early, as is
 315

sometimes the case with certain forms of mimicry. So the question of growth
becomes cloudy in his case, and his techniques of collage and parody have
rather expanded in their application than deepened in their profundity ..
(80). Without question, a reading of Barthelme's latest fictions published
in The New Yorker, and those included in his latest collections, does show a
certain lack of innovation and vitality. Indeed, several of the best
stories in Overnight To Many Distant Cities were originally written or
published a decade before. How do we account for this levelling off of the
growth of Barthelme as a writer? t4olesworth's suggestion that the worth of
11
Mandible 11 has not been surpassed to any significant degree by subsequent
fictions is true certainly in terms of the scope of technical virtuosity
demonstrated in that first story, but his comment is also true vis a vis
this thesis; that is, the redundancy noted in Barthelme's work is at least
partially attributable to the fact that, from the outset, the subject at the
centre of Barthelme has been the chronic identity problems of a very
particular self. The very first story Barthelme published describes the
closing of a circle of obsession around an identity which lacks the means to
escape the definition of its self. What is apparent from a reading of the
corpus of Barthelme•s work to this point is that he shares with his
characters an inability to escape this self. Throughout the subsequent
twenty years of writing neither the conditions informing the crisis
confronting that self nor the state of mind of the self at the centre of the
conflict have changed as is indicated by the fact that the fundamental
motifs introduced in those early stories run through his work to his most
recent fictions virtually unchanged.
 316

Perhaps more than any of his places of the self, the Paraguay of
"Paraguay"(CL) could serve as a metaphor for the state of mind Barthelme has
charted in so many fictions. Like the movie theatre in "Hiding Man" or the
Galveston of "I Bought a Little City" or the city under seige in "The Indian
Uprising" or the Mexico of "Cortes and Montezuma" or any of scores such
places mapped in his stories, Paraguay is one of Barthelme•s places of the
self, environments uniquely determined in all respects by the politics of
one man•s experience. I want to close this study with a look at this story
from City Life.
What the story characterizes as "an ongoing low-grade mystery" (39) is
really a search on the part of the story•s familiar narrative voice for a
way out of the self as it is determined and limited by memory and desire.
As in Barthelme as a whole in which one senses the presence of a speaking
voice concealing itself behind a new vocabulary or behind a new set of
objects it will soon discard, in Paraguay shed skins accumulate and become a
problem. Adding to the impression that Paraguay is populated by really only
one character is the fact that everyone in Paraguay has the same
fingerprints. But perhaps most telling of all in light of Barthelme•s
demonstrated inability to develop his art much beyond his earliest work in
terms of both form and content is the fact that Paraguay•s borders are
closed, and "Everything physical in Paraguay is getting smaller and smaller"
(38). Finally, and in a manner so characteristic of Barthelme, the last
sentence of "Paraguay" serves as much as an overture to the next story as it
does as a conclusion to the story before us. The closing sentence tells us
in effect that the next story will chart essentially the same ontological
terrain "Paraguay" has just taken us through: 11
We began the descent (into?
 317

out of?) Paraguay .. (40).

 318

NOTES
CHAPTER ONE
1 O'Hara, J. D. Interview in The Paris Review,
June 1978, pp. 201-202.
2 For a full listing of stories see Appendix A.
3 In terms of its structure, particularly the way it develops meaning through
patterns of association, Barthelme's prose has much in common with dream. This
thesis will argue that critical patterns in Barthelme's prose are determined by
unconscious wishes which result in prose whose surface elements are like those
of dream; that is, they are discursive, illogical, even hallucinatory: "Dreams
are disconnected, they accept the most violent contradictions without the least
objection, they admit impossibilities, they disregard knowledge which carries
great weight with us in daytime, they reveal us as ethical and moral imbeciles"
(Freud Dreams, 119-20}. Barthelme's condensed prose ("condensed'' in both the
lay and the psychoanalytic sense} also has in common with dream the capability
to suggest meaning on several levels at once (see discussion of "The Phantom of
the Opera" in Chapter Three}. The reader, therefore, is virtually required to
read these stories on several levels.
Freud's analysis of what he called the "Dream of July 23rd-24th, 1895"
(sometimes referred to by subsequent commentators as the "Irma Dream"} is one
of the first and one of the most developed of the dreams Freud analyzed in The
Interpretation of Dreams. As an example of the method Freud developed, the--­
analysis of this dream--both in terms of its form and the approach Freud took
to its interpretation--serves as useful background for the approach this thesis
will take in examining Barthelme's short stories. In the analysis of this
dream Freud demonstrates how effectively unconscious wishes are at once
expressed and concealed by dream. In particular, Freud shows how the processes
of condensation and displacement especiall~ serve to distort the dream-thought
into dream-content acceptable to the consc1ous mind. Freud's method is to
examine by means of association every detail the dream (in the case of the Irma
dream, it is his own dream}. Using associations suggested by the dreamer, he
discovered that apparently inexplicable or nonsensical features of the
dream-content could, in fact, be traced to concealed dream-thought. Freud
called the dream-content as recalled by the dreamer manifest content, and the
dream-thought as revealed by analysis he called latent content. The
translations of the latent to manifest content, because it 1nvolves the
expression of unconscious wishes intolerable to the conscious mind, results in
considerable distortion.
According to Freud, "Dream-displacement and dream-condensation are the two
governing factors to whose activity we may in essence ascribe the form assumed
by dreams [Freud's italics]" (417}. Because of their importance in dream
analysis, and this analysis of Barthelme's prose, it might be useful at the
outset to briefly define what Freud meant by condensation and displacement.
Condensation is "The construction of collective and composite figures"
(400} which admit of multiple determinations. In a dream of his uncle, for
instance, the figure of Dr. R is offered by Freud as an example of a
condensation. The creation of this Dr. R who contains elements of two discrete
figures, Freud likens to a process by which "two images [are projected] on to a
single plate, so that certain features of common to both are emphasized, while
 319

those which fail to fit in with one another cancel each other out and are
indistinct in the picture 11 (400). Freud also notes that condensation is seen
at its clearest in dreams in the handling of names (403), a point of especial
relevance in our analysis of Barthelme who invents names for his characters
which appear to have considerable psychoanalytic significance (e.g. Burligame,
Bloomsbury, Miss Mandible).
The second of the defense mechanisms of dream we'll consider, called
displacement, is basically 11 a transference ••• or psychical intensities 11 (417)
from one image in a dream to another. It is the process by which in dream one
image can symbolize another.
It might bear mentioning at this juncture that in Erikson's subseqent
analysis of the Irma dream, and his analysis of Freud's analysis, Erikson notes
a considerable number of displacements in the dream either unnoticed or
unacknowledged by Freud in his original analysis of his own dream (197-204). A
comparison of Erikson's analysis of the Irma dream with Freud's original is
useful for a number of reasons. First, it ironically demonstrates the
consistency of Freud's method inasmuch as Erikson's reading of the dream is not
so much a refutation of Freud's analysis as a deepening of that original
reading; what Erikson uncovers is not so much contradictory evidence, but
further evidence of what Freud himself asserted in The Interpretation of
Dreams--that dreams are enormously dense and layered:
As a rule one underestimates the amount of compression that has taken
place, since one is inclined to regard the dream-thoughts that have been
brought to light as the complete material, whereas if the work of
interpretation is carried further it may reveal still more thoughts
concealed behind the dream. I have already had occasion to point out
that it is in fact never possible to be sure that a dream has been
completely interpreted. Even if the solution seems satisfactory and
without gaps, the possibility always remains that the dream may have yet
another meaning. Strictly speaking, then, it is impossible to determine
the amount of condensation. (383)

11
It should be noted that the construction we place on the term
author-principle 11 is not consistent with Foucault's for whom the term has no
descriptive significance.

CHAPTER TWO
1 Metafiction is probably the most appealing alternative to the term postmodern.
Among the critics currently using the term metafiction for the new fiction are
Robert Alter in Partial Magic, Patricia Waugh in Metafiction, and Inger
Christensen in The Meaning of Metafiction. As John Gardner says of the
experimental fiction written after modernism, it is chiefly distinguished by
its preoccupation with the processes of its own manufacture; the most
appropriate term is therefore 11 metafiction 11 because 11 both in style and theme ..
the
11
fiction 11 "investigates fiction 11 (81). Raymond Federman argues for the term
Surfiction in a collection of essays entitled Surfiction but his reasons for
using the term are essentially the same as those who argue for the term
metafiction. Michael Boyd calls this type of fiction 11 reflexive 11 but again, he
defines the literature in terms similiar to those who choose to call it
metafiction.
Certainly the term metafiction points to a crucial aspect of the
prose--its unusual degree of auto-referentiality {of course no one familiar
 320

with the history of the novel would argue that current metafiction is unique in
principle or even in matters of practise)--but this emphasis on the narcissism
of the fiction tends to obscure what I would take to be a far more interesting
matter of content, that is, experience. Inger Christensen in her book on
metafiction says that "metafiction is regarded as fiction whose primary concern
is to express the novelist's vision of experience by exploring the process of
its own making" (11). It is what Christensen alludes to as the writer's
"message" that inclines me away from the use of the proscriptive term
metafiction: postmodern may be somewhat vague as a term of general reference
but at least it allows for greater emphasis on the possibility that a message
is embodied in the prose, a message which transcends to some degree the
metafictional, and sometimes the overly self-conscious tendencies of the prose.
~The term postmodern is not entirely workable as a chronological distinction.
If it were, the work of any writer published after, say, 1930 would have to be
considered potentially post-modern and books like Tristram Shandx and Don
Quixote (to name only two of the more celebrated examples of early novels whose
preoccupations are surpringly modern) would have to be excluded. The fiction
generally regarded as being postmodern was, however, published for the most
part during and after the 1960's.
3 This sense that any system is likely to prove inimical or malign once it
ossifies into a pattern of perceived causalities has its origins in the
modernist sensibility. One need only consider the work of Proust and the work
of Kafka. Both of these writers explored the problem of the individual
consciousness, the problem of identity, the struggle between form and
formlessness, between memory and intuition. In Kafka we encounter again and
again visions which portray man as a shadowy, uprooted creature cruelly
subordinated to anonymous and arbitrary authority. Kafka, more than any
modernist writer, explored the dark side of the failure of Absolutes. He
illustrated how devastating can be the disintegration of the self and the loss
of a sense of what is real that accompanies the process of questioning one's
existence.
Proust was fascinated by a different kind of dislocation of self. As
Beckett says of Proust in his study of the author, for Proust (and the same
could easily be said of the emerging modernist sensibility in general) reality
came to be viewed as no more than a ••retrospective hypothesis" (Beckett 1970,
11). Proust's fiction demonstrates what Leo Bersani calls the "chimerical
formula" behind much of modernism: "Desire is no longer responsible to
memory" (1976, 251). As a result, modernist confidence in consciousness and
the art that embod1es that consciousness gives way to postmodern skepticism
about the meaningfulness of either consciousness or art. Postmodern fiction
does not work merely to draw the reader into a frame of reference but rather
works through various metafictional strategies to push the reader back on
himself.
~ Postmodern fiction is therefore populated by characters, like those in
Beckett's fictions, who have manufactured their own systems of
meaning-through-consciousness as a check against chaos only to find themselves
lost within, and victims of, the very systems they erected to protect them.
As McCaffery says of postmodern characters in general, we observe them
"continually seeking answers and assurances, creating their own systems, and
then becoming imprisoned within them, finally claiming that they can't go on in
such a world and then going on anyway" (1982, 14).
 321

~ 11 Robbe-Grillet•s writing has no alibi, no density and no depth: it remains on

the surface of the object and inspects it impartially, without favouring any
particular quality: it is the exact opposite of poetic writing. Here the word
does not explode, nor explore; its function is not to confront the object in
oreder to pluck out the heart of its substance an ambiguous, summarizing name:
language here is not the rape of an abyss, but the rapture of a surface; it is
meant to •paint• the object, in other words to caress it, to deposit little by
little in the circuit of its space an entire chain of gradual names, none of
which will exhaust it ••• The object is no longer a center of correspondences, a
welter of sensations and symbols: it is merely an optical resistance ...
(Barthes 11 0bjective Literature, .. 1985, 14)
'Modernism began (or, if one takes the modernistic tendencies of the eighteenth
century novelist into account, accelerated) in the nineteenth century with a
general rejection on several fronts (philosophical, scientific, psychological,
religious, sociological) of received authority. What this meant for the novel,
at least the novel as it was developing under Flaubert and Balzac, was a shift
away from a focus on subject and a concommitant interest in pure style.
Flaubert•s famous letter to Louise Colet in 1852 anticipates what will become,
if not a modernist, then certainly a postmodernist rejection of the notion of
subject or idea in fiction:
What I consider fine, what I should like to do, is a book about
nothing,a book without external attachments of any sort, which
would hold of itself, through the inner strength of its style, as
the earth sustains itself with no support in air, a book with
almost no subject. Or at least an almost invisible subject, if
possible.(quoted by Michelson, 51-52)
Flaubert•s interest in a book about nothing has its origins in a rejection of
illusionism (an hostility to ilusion which has its origins in
seventeenth-century philosophy) and a developing aesthetic interest in what
Michelson calls 11 the constitution of a more purely pictorial, sculptural, or
literary fact 11 (51). Flaubert•s interest in the purification of the medium and
a return to pure style (an absolute kind of fiction Flaubert never wrote) is
the theoretical progenitor of what Jonathan Culler and others have posited as a
writing machine: 11 The [writing] machine produces a structure [without human
intentionality] but significance is the product of the reader 11 (260). As
imagined by Culler and postmodern writers in general, literature thus stripped
of human intentionality becomes its own definition. Its meaning is 11 everything
it contains or implies. Meaning is produced by the total context to which a
statement belongs and which it evokes 11 (Wetherill 87).

CHAPTER THREE

~~n~i~t~~,~~~v1~~~t~r~~~ 1 ~h1~igm~~i~~nc~~!f~vf~y(~~~-~~yc~~~~lfy;~~e~~~u~~~~!~¥.
1
examines in some detail what most readers would take to be the obvious
significance of the balloon as breast in 11 The Balloon ... As far as his analysis
touches on our analysis of the story, one point he makes is especially worth
noting. Dervin points out that Barthelme•s description of the balloon--its
shape, its fantastic size, and particularly its muted brown and grey
colouring--is utterly consistent with the most archaic memory of the breast, as
 322

recalled in dream (note that the balloon does appear at night while 11 people
were sleeping 11 ) : 11 The frequently overwhelming, thick, gigantic, visual
component may be in its most primitive aspect an endless wall, which one may be
both inside and against, while later memory traces add form. i.e., curvature,
and collects details ..... (109).
2 Fire is an important and recurring symbol in Barthelme. Not surprisingly,
Freud•s reading of fire, especially in 11 The Acquisition and Control of Fire 11
(SE, XXII 187-193), suggests that fire represents 11 the passion of love ••• a
symbol of the libido.. (190).
CHAPTER FOUR
1 A version of this smell is mentioned in 11 Mandible 11 in Joseph 1 s list of 11 Wife
signs .. which would further lead one to suspect that flowers in this story stand
for the all but absent feminine component.
~There is an unusual degree of similarity between the names of three of these
four early Barthelme protagonists. In particular, the names begin with the
letter 11 B11 and are between nine and eleven letters in length:
BARTHELME
BURLIGAME
BLOOMSBURY
BASKERVILLE.
3 11 The change of emphasis from the what to the how seems to me to be the major
impulse in art since Flaubert, and it•s not merely formalism, it•s not at all
superficial, it•s an attempt to reach truth, and a very vigorous one 11 (0 1 Hara
278).
4 o•Hara, p. 182.
5 The term "narcissism,•• which is often used in this thesis, requires some
explanation. Narcissism, 11 or self-love, is a term first used and explained by
Freud in his 1914 paper, 0n Narcissism: an Introduction." The term has since
fallen into general use, a use which all too often grossly distorts its
original clinical meaning. Narcissism as Freud defined it is a consequence of
object loss, the removal of the nurturing figure in whom the person had
invested. Faced with such a loss, the person substitutes self-regard as a
means of sustaining ego-strength. In healthy development, attachment to the
inner object choice is eventually given up once a satisfactory relationship
with another has formed. If no such relationship is possible, one is drawn
into involuntary self-preoccupation in an attempt to balance (or, as is the
case with attachment to secondary objects, recoyer) the lost object. The
radical swings between feelings of grandiosity and self-loathing are typical of
the narcissist. Boundless suppressed rage and unsatisfied oral cravings also
figure in the porfile of the narcissist.
Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism, a study of the cultural
effects of what is termed 11 Secondary narcissism," offers (after Freud) the
following profile of the narcissist, a profile which is highly suggestive in
light of the character of the 11 founding subject" this study infers to be behind
Barthelme•s prose:
These patients ••• tend to cultivate a protective shallowness in emotional
relations. They lack the capacity to mourn, because the intensity of their
 323

rage against object lost love objects, particularly their parents, prevents
their living happy experiences or treasuring them in memory. Sexually
promiscuous rather than repressed, they nevertheless find it difficult to
'elaborate the sexual impulse' or to approach sex in the spirit of play.
They avoid close attachments, which might release intense feelings of rage.
Their personalities consist largely of defenses against this rage and
against feelings of oral deprivation that originate in the pre-Oedipal stage
of psychic development. (37)
 APPENDIX A

COME BACK, DR. CALIGARI

Me and Miss Mandible

The Hiding Man
The Big Broadcast of 1938
The Viennese Opera Ball
Florence Green is 81
The Piano Player
Margins
For I'm The Boy Whose Only Joy Is Loving You
To London And Rome
Marie, Marie, Hold on Tight
A Shower of Gold
Will You Tell Me?
The Joker's Greatest Triumph
Up, Aloft in the Air

UNSPEAKABLE PRACTICES. UNNATURAL ACTS

The Indian Uprising

Game
Can We Talk?
Edward and Pia
This Newspaper Here
See The Moon?
The Balloon
Report
A Few Moments of Sleeping and Waking
The Dolt
Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning
Alice
A Picture History of the War
The President
The Police Band

CITY LIFE

City Life
At The Tolstoy Museum
On Angels
Paraguay
Views of My Father Weeping
The Phantom of the Opera's Friend
Brain Damage
Sentence
The Glass Mountain
The Falling Dog
The Policeman's Ball
The Explanation
Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel
Bone Bubbles
GUILTY PLEASURES

Down the Line with the Annual

Letters to the Editore [sic]
That Cosmopolitan Girl
Eugenie Grandet
Snap Snap
The Angry Young Man
The Expedition
Bunny Image, Loss of: The Case of Bitsy S.
The Young Visitirs [sic]
L'Lapse
The Teachings of Don B.
Swallowing
The Palace
The Dragon
An Hesitation on the Banks of the Delaware
The Royal Treatment
Mr. Foolfarm's Journal
Heliotrope
And Now Let's Hear It for the Ed Sullivan Show
Games are the Enemies of Truth, etc.
A Nation of Wheels
Two Hours to Curtain
The Photographs
Nothing: A Preliminary Account

AMATEURS

Our Work and Why We Do It

The Wound
110 West sixty-first Street
Some of us had been Threatening Our Friend Colby
What To Do Next
The Sergeant
The School
The Great Hug
I Bought A Little City
The Agreement
The Captured Woman
And Then
Porcupines at the University
The Discovery
Rebecca
The Reference
The New Member
You Are As Brave as Vincent Van Gogh
At the End of the Mechanical Age
SADNESS

Critique de la Vie Quotidienne

Traumerei
The Genius
Perpetua
A City of Churches
Engineer-Private Paul Klee
A Film
The Sandman
Departures
Subpoena
The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace
The Rise of Capitalism
The Temptation of St. Anthony
Daumier

GREAT DAYS

The Crisis
The Apology
The New Music
Cortes and Montezuma
The King of Jazz
The Question Party
Belief
Tales of the Swedish Army
The Abduction from the Seraglio
The Death of Edward Lear
Concerning the Bodyguard
The Zombies
Morning
On the Steps of the Conservatory
The Leap
Great Days

SIXTY STORIES (only previously uncollected stories are

listed here)

Aria
The Emerald
How I Write My Songs
The Farewell
The Emperor
Thailand
Heroes
Bishop
Grandmother's House

OVERNIGHT TO MANY DISTANT CITIES

(the short italicized fragments between stories are not
listed here)
Visitors
Affection
Lightning
Captain Blood
Conversations with Goethe
Henrietta and Alexandra
The Sea of Hesitation
Terminus
The Mothball Fleet
Wrack
The Palace at Four A.M.
Overnight to Many Distant Cities
 Works Cited

Abbas, M.A., and Tak-Wai Wong, eds. Literary Theory

Today. Hong Kong: Hong Kong U P, 1981.
Alter, Robert. The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1975
Antin, David. "Is There a Postmodernism?" Ed. Harry R.
Garvin. Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism.
Cranburg: Associated U Presses, Inc., 1980
Axthelm, Peter M. The Modern Confessional Novel. New
Haven: Yale U Press, 1967.
Barth, John. "The Literature of Replenishment:
Postmodernist Fiction." Atlantic, Vol.
245 no. 1 (January 1980): 65-71.
Barthelme, Donald. Come Back, Dr. Caligari. Boston:
Little, Brown and Co., 1964
---, Sadness. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1972
---, "A Sympos i urn on Fiction." Shenandoah 27
(1974): 3-31.
---, Guilty Pleasures. New York: Dell Publishing,
1974.
---, Amateurs. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1975.
---, The Dead Father. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1975.
 City Life. New York: Simon & Shuster, 1976.
---, Snow White. New York: Atheneum, 1977.
, Great Days. New York: Simon & Shuster, 1978.
---, Unspeakable Practises, Unnatural Acts. New York:
Simon & Shuster, 1978.
---, Sixty Stories. Toronto: Academic Press Ltd.,
1981.
---, Overnight To Many Distant
Cities. New York: Viking Penguin Inc.,
1985.
Barthes, Roland. Foreword. Morrisette 3-15.
---, Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London:
Pa 1 adi n, 1982.
---, Critical Essays. Trans. Richard Howard.
Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1985.
Bassett, Sharon. "The Practice of Psychoanalytic
Criticism." Literature and Psychology,
Vol. xxvii, no. 1, 77: 43-48.
Beckett, Samuel. Proust. New York: Grove Press Inc.,
1970.

Bellamy, Joe David. The New Fiction: Interviews With

Innovative American Writers. Chicago: U of
Illinois P, 197 4
Bersani, Leo. A Future for Astynax: Character and
Desire in Literature. Boston: Little, Brown
 and Co., 1976.
---, Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in
French Fiction. New York: Oxford U Press, 1970
Blaise, Clark. Lunar Attractions. Toronto: McGraw-Hill
Ryerson, Ltd., 1977.
Bleich, David. Readings and Feelings: An Introduction
to Subjective Criticism. Urbana: National Council
of Teachers of English, 1975.
Bocock, Maclin. "'The Indian Uprising' or
Donald Barthelme's Strange Object Covered
with Fur." Fiction International,
no. 4/5 (1975): 134-146.
Bory, Jean-Francois. "Notes." Federman, Surfiction
287-293.
Boyd, Michael. The Reflexive Novel: Fiction as
Critique. Mississsauga: Associated U Presses,
1983.
Brink, Andrew. Loss and Symbolic Repair.
Hamilton: The Cromlech Press, 1977.
Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. ,Understanding
Fiction. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc.,
1959.
Calvino, Italo. "Myth in the Narrative." Federman,
~urfiction 71-79.
Chaitlin, Gilbert D... Psychoanalysis
and literary Interpretation.'' literature and
 Psychology, Vol. xxvii, no. 4, 77: 174-182.
Christensen, Inger. The Meaning of Metafiction. New
York: Columbia U Press, 1981.
Cohen, Sarah Blacher, ed. Comic Relief: Humour
in Contemporary American Fiction. Chicago:
U of Illinois P, 1979.
f
Bathelme.
Couturier, Maurice, and Regis Durand.
London: Methuen, 1982.
Crews, Frederick C. Psychoanalysis and Literary
Process. Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop, 1970.
---, Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and
Critical Method. New York: Oxford U Press, 1975.
Culler, Jonathan. "Towards Theory of Non-Genre
Literature." Federman, Surfiction 252-262.
Davis, Robert Con, and Ronald Schleifer, eds. Rhetoric
and Form: Deconstruction at Yale. Norman: U of
Oklahoma P, 1985.
---, The Fictional Father. Amherst: U of
Massachusettes P, 1981.
Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans.
Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.
Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York:
Putnum, 1968.
Dickstein, Morris. "Fiction Hot and Kool: Dilemmas
of the Experimental Writer." TriQuarterly no. 33
(Spring 1975): 257-272.
Dillard, Annie. Living By Fiction. New York: Harper,
1982.
Di tsky, John M. 11
With Ingenuity and Hard Work,
Distracted ... Style 9 (SuiTUller 1975): 388-400.
Docherty, Thomas. Reading (Absent) Character: Towards a
Theory of Characterization in Fiction. Oxford:
Clarendon P, 1983.
Doxey, W.S. 11
Donald Barthelme's 'Views of My
Father Weeping•: A Modern View of Oedipus ...
Notes on Contemporary Literature 3 (no.
2, 1973): 14-15.
Edel, Leon. Stuff of Sleep and Dreams. New York:
Avon, 1982.
Erhmann, Jacque. "The Death of Literature... Federman,
Surfiction 245-256.
Erikson, Erik H. Identity, Youth, and Crisis. New
York: W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1968.
Federman, Raymond. Surfiction: Fiction Now••• and
Tomorrow. Chicago: The Swallow Press, Inc., 1975.
,
11
Surfiction: A Position ... Partisan Review 40, no. 3
(1975): 427-432.
Fletcher, John. Alain Robbe-Grillet. New York:
Methuen, 1983.
Fletcher, John and John Calder. The Nouveau Roman
Reader. New York: Riverrun Press, 1986.
Flowers, Betty. 11
Barthelme's 'Snow White': The
 Reader-Patient Relationship." Critique 16, no. 3
(1975): 33-44.
Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.
translated by James Strachey, Anna Freud,
and Alan Tyson, 24 volumes. London: Hogarth
Press, 1953-.
---, A General Selection from The Works of Sigmund
Freud. John Rickman, ed. Garden City:
Doubleday Anchor, 1937.
---, New Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis. New York: Penguin, 1974.
---, The Interpretation of Dreams. New York:
Penguin, 1977.
Fry, Edward F., ed. and Foreword. On The Future of Art.
New York: The Viking P, 1970.
Fuchs, Elinor. "The Death of Character."
Theatre Communications, vol. 5, no. 3 (March
1983): 1-6.
Fuller, Peter. Art and Psychoanalysis. London: Writers
and Readers Pub. Cooperative Ltd., 1980.
Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction. New York, Vintage,
1985.
---, On Moral Fiction. New York: Basic Books, 1978.
Garvin, Harry R., ed. Romanticism, Modernism,
Postmodernism. Cranburg: Associated U Presses,
 Inc., 1980.
Gass, William. Fiction and the Figures of Life.
New York: Vintage Books, 1972.
---,
11
Donald Barthelme. 11 Esquire (August 1986): 46.
Gerz, Jochen. 11
Towards a Language of Doing ...
Federman, Surfiction 276-282.
Gillen, Francis. "Donald Barthelme's City: A Guide ...
Twentieth Century Literature 18 (January 1972):
37-44.
Gilman, Richard. 11
Fiction: Donald Barthelme. 11 The New
Republic 156 (June 3, 1967): 23-25.
Glicksberg, Charles I. Modern Literary Perspectivism.
Dallas: S. Methodist U P, 1970.
Gordon, Lois. Robert Coover: The Universal
Fictionmaking Process. Carbondale: s.
Ill i noi s U P, 1983.
Graff, Gerald. 11
The Myth of the Postmoderni st
Breakthrough ... TriQuarterly no. 26 {Spring 1975):
383-417.
Greenberg, Alvin David. The Novel of Disintegration:
A Study of The World View of Contemporary Fiction.
Seattle: U of Washington, 1964.
Guerard, Albert J. 11
Notes on the Rhetoric of
Anti-Realistic Fiction... TriQuarterly no. 30
(Spring 1974): 3-50.
Hallissy, Margaret. "Barthelme's 'Views of My
 Father Weeping' and Dostoevsky's Crime
and Punishment... Studies in Short Fiction,
vol. 18 (Winter 1981): 77-79.
Harris, Charles B. Passionate Virtuosity: The
Fiction of John Barth. Urbana: U of
Illinois P, 1983,
---, Contemporary American Novelists
of the Absurd. New Haven: College and
University P, 1971.
Hassan, Ihab. 11
The Question of Postmodernism. 11 Garvin
67-83.
---, Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Times.
Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1975.
Harvey, W.J. Character and the Novel. New
York: Ithica, 1965.
Hendin, Josephine. 11
Angries: S-M as a Literary
Style ... Harper's 248 (February 1974):
87-93.
Hicks, Jack. In The Singer's Temple. Chapel Hill:
U of N. California P, 1981.
Hirsch, E.D., Jr. The Aims of Interpretation.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1967.
---, Validity in Interpretation. New Haven:
Yale U P, 1967.
Hochman, Baruch. The Test of Character. East
Brunswick, N.J.: Associated U Presses, Inc., 1983.
Hoffmans Frederick J. Freudianism and the
Literary Mind. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
U Ps 1957.
Hollands Norman. The Dynamics of Literary Response.
New York: Oxford U P, 1968.
---s 5 Readers Reading. New Haven: Yale U Ps 1975.
---s Howes Irving. The Decline of the New. New York:
Harcourts Brace and Worlds Inc.s 1970.
Humphrey, Robert. Stream of Consciousness in the Modern
Novel. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1972.
Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative. Waterloo:
Wilfred Laurier P, 1980.
---, Formalism and the Freudian Aesthetic. New York:
Cambridge U P, 1984.
---, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of
Twentieth-Century Art Forms. London: Metheun,
1985.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins P, 1974.
---, The Act of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P,
1978.
---, "The Reading Process:
A Phenomenological Approach." Reader-Response
Criticism. Ed. Jane P. Tompkins. Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins U P, 1980.
Jefferson, Ann. The Nouveau Roman and the Poetics of
 Fiction. New York: Cambridge U P, 1980.
Johnson, R.E. "•Bees Barking in the Night•: The End and
Beginning of Donald Barthelme•s Narrative."
Boundary 25 (Fall 1976): 71-92.
Kaplan, Morton, and Robert Kloss. The Unspoken Motive.
New York: The Free Press, 1973.
Klinkowitz, Jerome, and Asa Pieratt, and Robert Murray
Davis. Donald Barthelme: A Comprehensive
Bibliography and Annotated Checklist. New York:
Hamden, 1974.
---, "Donald Barthelme•s SuperFiction."
Critique 16, no. 3 (1975): 5-18.
---, The Practice of Fiction in America. Ames: The
Iowa State U P, 1980.
---, Literary Disruptions: The Making of a
Post-contemporary American Fiction. Chicago:
U of Illinois P, 1980.
Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A
Semiotic Approach to Literature
and Art. New York: Columbia U P, 1980.
Kuspit, Donald. The Critic as Artist: The
Intentionality of Art. Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press, 1984.
Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism. New York:
W.W. Norton & Co. Ltd., 1978.
Leland, John. "Remarks Re-marked: What Curious
 of Signs!" Boundary 2, V (Spring 1977):
796-811.
Lesser, Simon 0. Fiction and the Unconscious.
Boston: Beacon, 1957.
---, "Hawthorne and Anderson: Conscious and
Unconscious Perception." Psychoanalysis and
American Fiction. Ed. Irving Malin. New
York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1965: 173-212.
Lippard, Lucy. Changing: Essays in Art Criticism.
New York: E.P. Dutton and Co. Inc., 1971.
Longleigh, Peter L., Jr. "Donald Barthelme•s
Snow White." Critique 11, no. 3 (1967}: 30-34.
Lucie-Smith, Edward. Late Modern: The Visual
Arts since 1945. New York: Praeger
Publishers, 1975.
Markovic, Vida E. The Changing Face:
Disintegration of Personality in the
Jwentieth-Century British Novel 2 1900­
1950. Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P,
1970.
McCaffery, Larry. 11
Barthelme•s SW: The
Aesthetics of Trash ... Critique 16, no. 3
(1975)' 19-32.
---, The Metafictional Muse. Pittsburgh: u of
Pittsburgh P, 1982.
Michelson, Annette. 11
Art and the Structuralist
 Perspective ... Fry, 56-78.
Molesworth, Charles. Donald Barthelme's Fiction: The
Ironist Saved From Drowning. Columbia: U of
Missouri P, 1982.
Morrisette, Bruce. The Novels of Robbe-Grillet.
Ithica: Cornell U P, 1975.
Nagera, Humberto. Basic Psychoanaltyic
Concepts of the Theory of Instincts.
London: George Allen & Unwen Ltd., 1970.
Natoli, Joseph, ed. Psychological Perspectives
on Literature: Freudian Dissidents and
Non-Freudians: A Casebook. Hamden, Conn.:
Archon, 1984.
Nin, Anais. Anais Nin Reader. ed. Philip K. Jason.
New York: Avon, 1973.
Oates, Joyce Carol. 11
Whose Side Are You On? 11
New York Times Book Review (June 4, 1972):
63.
Olderman, Raymond M. Beyond the Waste Land:
The American Novel in the 1960's. New
Haven: Yale U P, 1972.
O'Hara, J.D. Interview with Donald Barthelme, The
Paris Review, (June 1978), 196-203.
Ortega y Gasset, Jose. The Dehumanization of Art and
Other Essays on Art, Culture and Literature.
Princeton: Princeton U P, 1968.
Pearce, Richard. 11
Enter The Frame... Federman,
Surfiction 46-51.
Price, Martin. Forms of Life: Character and Moral
Imagination in the Novel. New Haven: Yale UP,
1983.
Putz, Manfred, and Peter Freeze. Postmodernism in
American Literture. Darmstadt: Thesen
Verlag, 1984.
Rahv, Philip. Literature and the Sixth Sense.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1970.
Ricardou, Jean. 11
Tel Quel ... Federman,
Surfiction 128-132.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary
Poetics. London: Methuen, 1983.
Robbe-Grillet, Alain. 11
A Future for the Novel ... Modern
Culture and The Arts, James B. Hall, and Barry
Ulanov, eds. New York: McGraw Hill Book Co., 1967:
272-280.
Rolland, Alan. . . Imagery and Symbolic
Expression in Dreams and Art. 11 International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis 53 (1972): 531-539.
Rosenheim, Edward W. What Happens in Literature.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974.
Rother, James. 11
Parafiction: The Adjacent
Universes of Barth, Barthelme, Pynchon, and
Nabokov.•• Boundary 25 (Fall 1976): 21-44.
Rycroft, Charles. A Critical Dictionary of
Psychoanalysis. New York: Penguin, 1977.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness:
An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology.

trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York:

Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956.
Saurraute, Nathalie. The Age of Suspicion. trans.
Maria Jolas. New York: George Braziller, 1963.
Schickel, Richard. "Freaked Out on Barthelme."
New York Times Magazine (August 16, 1970):
14-15, 42.
Scholes, Robert, and Robert Kellog. The Nature of
Narrative. London: Oxford U P, 1978.
---, 11
Metafiction. 11 Iowa Review, 1 (Fall
1970): 100-115.
Scott, Wilbur, ed. Five Approaches to Literary
Criticism. New York: Collier, 1962.
Shorer, Mark. 11
Techni que as Discovery."
20th Century Criticism. New York: Handy &
Westbrook, 1974.
Shorris, Earl. "Donald Barthelme's Illustrated
Wordy-Gurdy." Harper's 246 (January 1973):
92-94, 96.
Skura, Meredith Anne. The Literary Use of the
Psychoanaltyic Process. New Haven: Yale
u p' 1981.
Sontag, Susan. Styles of Radical Will. New York:
Dell , 1969.
---, A Susan Sontag Reader. New York: Farrar/Straus/
Gi raux, 1982.
Stevick, Philip. 11
Prolegomena to the Study of Fictional
'Dreck' ... TriQuarterly 31 (Sull111er 1974): 78-93.
---,
11
Scheherazade runs out of plots, goes on talking;
the king, puzzled, listens: an Essay of the New
Fiction." Triquarterly 26 (Winter 1973}: 332-362.
Stoltzfus, Ben F. Alain Robbe-Grillet and The New
French Novel. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP,
1964.
Stott, William. 11
Donald Barthelme and the Death of
Fiction ... Prospects no. 1 (1975}: 369-386.
Strelka, Joseph P., ed. Literary Criticism
and Psychology. University Park: The
Pennsylvania U P, 1976.
Strindberg, August. A Dream Play. New York:
Avon, 1974.
Sukenick, Ronald. 11
Surfiction. 11 Federman, Surfiction
152-163.
Szanto, George H. Narrative Consciousness: Structure
and Perception in the Fiction of Kafka, Beckett,
and Robbe-Grillet. Austin: U of Texas P, 1972.
Tanner, Tony. City of Words: American
Fiction 1950-1970. New York: Harper & Row,
 1971.
Tennenhouse, Leonard. The Practise of Psychoanalytic
Criticism. Detroit: Wayne State U P, 1976.
Tompkins, Jane P. Reader Response Criticism: From
Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins U P, 1980.
Valdes, Mario, and Owen J. Miller. eds. Interpre­
tation of Narrative. Toronto: U of Toronto P,
1976.
Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice
of Self-conscious Fiction. New York: Methuen,
1984.
Weiner, Egan. Art and Human Emotions. Springfield:
Charles C. Thomas, 1975.
Weiss, Daniel. The Critic Agonistes: Psychology, Myth,
and the Art of Fiction. Seattle: U of
Washington P, 1985.
Wellek, Rene, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature.
New. Revised Ed. 3rd Ed. New York: Harcourt Brace
Javonovich, 1977.
Wetherill, P.M. The literary Text: An Examination of
Critical Methods. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974.
Whalen, Tom. 11
Wonderful Elegance: Donald
Barthelme's 'The Party' ... Critique 16,
no. 3 (1975): 45-48.
Wilde, Alan. 11
Barthelme Unfair to Kierkegaard: Some
Thoughts on Modern and Postmodern Irony. 11

Boundary 25 (Fall 1976): 45-70.