Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Moore Robert
Moore Robert
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
Page
NOTES 318
APPENDIX A 322
WORKS CITED 326
V11
A NOTE ON THE TEXTS
};_ 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
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
41
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
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
beyond that which you, the reader, invest them with in the act of
re-creating them in the act of reading.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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).
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
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
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
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).
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}.
translation from the language and events of the fiction into the objects and
events of his presE!nt reality.
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).
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
(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
"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
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
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.
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
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.
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).
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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)
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
"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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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).
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
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
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
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
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)
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
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
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.
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
culture (or the Other, that which is not the self). The
objects.
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
'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
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.
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
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
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)
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
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
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
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).
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.
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
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
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
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
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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.•
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
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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.
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
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.
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
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.
''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
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
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).
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.
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)
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"(~),
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
AMATEURS
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
Aria
The Emerald
How I Write My Songs
The Farewell
The Emperor
Thailand
Heroes
Bishop
Grandmother's House