DONALD BARTHELME

Born: April 7, 1931

Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Died: July 23, 1989

Place of death: Houston, Texas

Other literary forms

In addition to his 150 or so short stories, Donald Barthelme (BAR-thehl-mee) published four novels, a children’s volume that won a National Book Award, a number of film reviews and unsigned “Comment” pieces for The New Yorker, a small but interesting body of art criticism, and a handful of book reviews and literary essays, two of which deserve special notice: “After Joyce” and “Not Knowing.”

Achievements

For nearly three decades, Donald Barthelme served as American literature’s most imitated and imitative yet inimitable writer. One of a small but influential group of innovative American fictionists that included maximalists John Barth, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon, Barthelme evidenced an even greater affinity to the international minimalists Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges. What distinguishes Barthelme’s fiction is not only his unique “zero degree” writing style but also, thanks to his long association with the mass-circulation magazine The New Yorker, his reaching a larger and more diversified audience than most of the experimentalists, whose readership has chiefly been limited to the ranks of college professors and their students. The oddity of a fiction based largely upon “the odd linguistic trip, stutter, and fall” (Snow White, 1967) has led some critics to compare Barthelme’s work with that of Anthony Trollope. Although antirealistic in form, Barthelme’s fictions are in fact densely packed time capsules—not the “slices of life” of nineteenth century realists such as Émile Zola but “the thin edge of the wedge” of postmodernism’s version of Charles Dickens’s hard times and Charles Chaplin’s modern ones. Despite their seeming sameness, his stories cover a remarkable range of styles, subjects, linguistic idioms, and historical periods (often in the same work, sometimes in the same sentence). Despite their referential density, Barthelme’s stories do not attempt to reproduce mimetically external reality but instead offer a playful meditation on it (or alternately the materials for such a meditation). Such an art makes Barthelme in many respects the most representative American writer of the 1960’s and of the two decades that followed: postmodern, postmodernist, post-Freudian, poststructuralist, postindustrial, even (to borrow Jerome Klinkowitz’s apt term) postcontemporary.

Biography

Often praised and sometimes disparaged as one of The New Yorker writers, a narrative innovator, and a moral relativist whose only advice (John Gardner claimed) is that it is better to be disillusioned than deluded, Donald Barthelme was born in Philadelphia on April 7, 1931, and moved to Houston two years later. He grew up in Texas, attended Catholic diocesan schools, and began his writing career as a journalist in Ernest Hemingway’s footsteps. His father, an architect who favored the modernist style of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, taught at the University of Houston and designed the family’s house, which became as much an object of surprise and wonder on the flat Texas landscape as his son’s oddly shaped fictions were to become on the equally flat narrative landscape of postwar American fiction. While majoring in journalism, Barthelme wrote for the university newspaper as well as the Houston Post. He was drafted in 1953 and arrived in Korea on the day the truce was signed—the kind of coincidence one comes to expect in Barthelme’s stories of strange juxtapositions and incongruous couplings.

After his military service, during which he also edited an army newspaper, Barthelme returned to Houston, where he worked in the university’s public relations department (“writing poppycock for the President,” as he put it in one story), and where he founded Forum, a literary and intellectual quarterly that published early works by Walker Percy, William H. Gass, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Leslie Fiedler, and others. He published his first story in 1961, the same year that he became director of the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston. The following year, Thomas Hess and Harold Rosenberg offered him the position of managing editor of their new arts journal, Location. The journal was short-lived (only two issues ever appeared), but Barthelme’s move to New York was not. Taking up residence in Greenwich Village, he published his first story in The New Yorker in 1963, his first collection of stories, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, in 1964, and his first novel, Snow White (among other things an updating of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale and the Walt Disney feature-length animated cartoon), in 1967.

Although he left occasionally for brief periods abroad or to teach writing at Buffalo, Houston, and elsewhere, Barthelme spent the rest of his life chiefly in Greenwich Village, with his fourth wife, Marion Knox. He lived as a writer, registering and remaking the “exquisite mysterious muck” of contemporary urban American existence, as witnessed from his corner of the global (Greenwich) village.

Analysis

Donald Barthelme’s fiction exhausts and ultimately defeats conventional approaches (including character, plot, setting, theme— “the enemies of the novel” as fellow writer John Hawkes once called them) and defeats too all attempts at generic classification. His stories are not conventional, nor are they Borgesian ficciones or Beckettian “texts for nothing.” Thematic studies of his writing have proved utterly inadequate, yet purely formalist critiques have seemed almost as unsatisfying. To approach a Barthelme story, the reader must proceed circuitously via various, indeed at times simultaneous, extraliterary forms: collage, caricature, Calder mobile, action painting, jazz, atonality, the chance music of John Cage, architecture, information theory, magazine editing and layout, ventriloquism, even Legos (with all their permutational possibilities, in contrast with the High Moderns’ love of cubist jigsaw puzzles). In Barthelme’s case, comparisons with twentieth century painters and sculptors seem especially apropos: comical like Jean Dubuffet, whimsical and sad like Amedeo Modigliani, chaste like Piet Mondrian, attenuated like Alberto Giacometti, composite like Kurt Schwitters, improvisational like Jackson Pollock, and whimsical like Marc Chagall and Paul Klee. Like theirs, his is an art of surfaces, dense rather than deep, textured rather than symbolic, an intersection of forces rather than a rendered meaning. Adjusting to the shift in perspective that reading Barthelme entails—and adjusting as well to Barthelme’s (like the poet John Ashbery’s) unwillingness to distinguish between foreground and background, message and noise—is difficult, sometimes impossible, and perhaps always fruitless.

However attenuated and elliptical the stories may be, they commit a kind of “sensory assault” on a frequently distracted reader, who experiences immediate gratification in dealing with parts but epistemological frustration in considering the stories as wholes, a frustration which mirrors that of the characters. Not surprisingly, one finds Barthelme’s characters and the fictions themselves engaged in a process of scaling back even as they and their readers yearn for that “more” to which Beckett’s figures despairingly and clownishly give voice. Entering “the complicated city” and singing their “song of great expectations,” they nevertheless—or also—discover that theirs is a world not of romantic possibilities (as in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction) but of postmodern permutations, a world of words and undecidability, where “our Song of Songs is the Uncertainty Principle” and where “double-mindedness makes for mixtures.” These are stories that, like the red snow in Barthelme’s favorite and most Borgesian work, “Paraguay,” invite “contemplation” of a mystery that there is “no point solving—an ongoing low-grade mystery.” Expressed despondently, the answer to the question, “Why do I live this way?”—or why does Barthelme write this way?—is, as the character Bishop says, “Best I can do.” This, however, sums up only one side of Barthelme’s double-mindedness; the other is the pleasure, however fleeting, to be taken “in the sweet of the here and the now.”

“Me and Miss Mandible”

Originally published as “The Darling Duckling at School” in 1961, “Me and Miss Mandible” is one of Barthelme’s earliest stories and one of his best. Written in the form of twenty-six journal entries (dated September 13 to December 9), the story evidences Barthelme’s genius for rendering even the most fantastic, dreamlike events in the most matter-of-fact manner possible. The thirty-five-year-old narrator, Joseph, finds himself sitting in a too-small desk in Miss Mandible’s classroom, having been declared “officially a child of eleven,” either by mistake or, more likely, as punishment for having himself made a mistake in his former life as claims adjuster (a mistake for justice but against his company’s interests). Having spent ten years “amid the debris of our civilization,” he has come “to see the world as a vast junkyard” that includes the failure of his marriage and the absurdity of his military duty. At once a biblical Joseph in a foreign land and a Swiftian Gulliver among the Lilliputians, he will spend his time observing others and especially observing the widening gap between word and world, signifier and signified, the ideals expressed in teachers’ manuals and the passions of a class of prepubescents fueled by film magazine stories about the Eddie Fisher/Debbie Reynolds/Elizabeth Taylor love triangle. Unlike his biblical namesake, Joseph will fail at reeducation as he has failed at marriage and other forms of social adjustment, caught by a jealous classmate making love to the freakishly named Miss Mandible.

“A Shower of Gold”

The coming together of unlike possibilities and the seeming affirmation of failure (maladjustment) takes a slightly different and more varied form in “A Shower of Gold.” The former claims adjuster, Joseph, becomes the impoverished artist, Peterson, who specializes in large junk sculptures that no one buys and that even his dealer will not display. Desperate for money, he volunteers to appear on Who Am I?, the odd offspring of the game show craze on American television and of existentialism transformed into pop culture commodity. (There is also a barber who doubles as an analyst and triples as the author of four books all titled The Decision to Be.) Peterson convinces the show’s Miss Arbor that he is both interesting enough and sufficiently de trop to appear on Who Am I?, only to feel guilty about selling out for two hundred dollars. Watching the other panelists be subjected to a humiliating barrage of questions designed to expose their bad faith, Peterson, accepting his position as a minor artist, short-circuits the host’s existential script by out-absurding the absurd (his mother, he says, was a royal virgin and his father, a shower of gold). Peterson’s situation parallels Barthelme’s, or indeed any American writing at a time when, as Philip Roth pointed out in 1961, American reality had begun to outstrip the writer’s imagination, offering a steady diet of actual people and events far more fantastic than any that the writer could hope to offer. What, Roth wondered, was left for the writer to do? “A Shower of Gold” offers one possibility.

“The Indian Uprising”

“The Indian Uprising” and “The Balloon” represent another possibility, in which in two quite different ways Barthelme directs the reader away from story and toward the act of interpretation itself (interpretation as story). As Brian McHale and Ron Moshe have demonstrated, “The Indian Uprising” comprises three overlapping yet divergent and even internally inconsistent narratives: an attack by Comanche on an unidentified but clearly modern American city; the narrator’s (one of the city’s defenders) unsatisfying love life; and the conflict between modern and postmodern sensibilities manifesting itself in a variety of allusions to modernist texts, including T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Near the end of his poem, Eliot writes, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” “The Indian Uprising” presents a very different approach, transforming Eliot’s shoring up of high culture into a “barricade” that recycles Eliot and Thomas Mann, along with ashtrays, doors, bottles of Fad #6 sherry, “and other items.” Behind Eliot’s poem lies the possibility of psychic, spiritual, and sociocultural wholeness implied by Eliot’s use of the “mythic method.” Behind Barthelme’s story one finds recycling rather than redemption and instead of the mythic method what Ronald Sukenick has called “the Mosaic Law,” or “the law of mosaics, a way of dealing with parts in the absence of wholes.” Short but beyond summary, filled with non sequiturs, ill-logic, self-doubts, and anti-explanations, “The Indian Uprising” rises against readers in their efforts to know it by reducing the story to some manageable whole. At once inviting and frustrating the reader’s interpretive maneuvers, “The Indian Uprising” follows the “plan” outlined in “Paraguay” insofar as it proves “a way of allowing a very wide range of tendencies to interact.”

Attacking and defending are two operant principles at play here, but just who is attacking and what is being defended are never made clear. Sides change, shapes shift in a story in which American Westerns, the Civil Rights movement, and American involvement in Vietnam all seem to have their parts to play, but never to the point where any one can be said to dominate the others. Small but indomitable, the story resists the linearity of an interpretive domino theory in favor of a semiotic quagmire (more evidence of Barthelme’s interest in current affairs—Vietnam, in this case—and “mysterious muck”). In “The Indian Uprising,” there is no final authority to come like the cavalry to the rescue and so no release from the anxiety evident in this and so many other Barthelme stories. While there may be no permanent release, however, there is some temporary relief to be had in the “aesthetic excitement” of “the hard, brown, nutlike word” and in the fact that “Strings of language extend in every direction to bind the world into a rushing ribald whole.”

“The Balloon”

“The Balloon” is a more compact exploration and a more relentless exploitation of interpretation as a semiotic process rather than a narrowly coded act. Covering only a few pages (or alternately an area forty-five city blocks long by up to six blocks wide), “The Balloon” is Barthelme’s American tall-tale version of the short French film The Red Balloon and an hommage to Frederick Law Olmsted (who designed New York’s Central Park) and environmental artist Christo (one of his huge sculptural wrappings). Analogies such as these help readers situate themselves in relation to the inexplicable but unavoidable oddity of “The Balloon” in much the same way that the viewers in the story attempt to situate themselves in relation to the sudden appearance of a balloon which, even if it cannot be understood (“We had learned not to insist on meanings”), can at least be used (for graffiti, for example) and appreciated despite, or perhaps because, of its apparent uselessness. Ultimately the narrator will explain the balloon, thus adding his interpretive graffiti to its blank surface. The balloon, he says, was “a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure” occasioned by his lover’s departure; when, after twenty-two days, she returns, he deflates the balloon, folds it, and ships it to West Virginia to be stored for future use. His explanation is doubly deflating, for while the balloon’s “apparent purposelessness” may be vexing, in a world of “complex machinery,” “specialized training,” and pseudoscientific theories that make people marginal and passive, the balloon has come to exist as the “prototype” or “rough draft” of the kind of solution to which people will increasingly turn, to what the Balloon Man calls his best balloon, the Balloon of Perhaps. Until the narrator’s closing comments, the balloon is not a scripted text but a blank page, not an object but an event, not a ready-made product, a prefab, but a performance that invites response and participation. It is a performance that the narrator’s explanation concludes, assigning both an origin (cause) and a destination (result, function, use, addressee). Even as the explanation brings a measure of relief, it also adds a new level of anxiety insofar as the reader perceives its inadequacy and feels perhaps a twinge of guilty pleasure over having made so much of so little. In a way, however, the balloon was always doomed to extinction, for it exists in a consumer culture in which even the most remarkable objects (including “The Balloon”) quickly become all too familiar, and it exists too in a therapeutic society in thrall to the illusion of authoritative explanations.

“Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning”

Appearing only two months before the real Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning” explores epistemological uncertainty by exploiting the contemporary media and its audience’s claims to know public figures, whether politicians or celebrities (a distinction that began to blur during the eponymous Kennedy years). The story exists at the intersection of two narrative styles. One is journalistic: twenty-four sections of what appear to be notes, each with its own subject heading and for the most part arranged in random order (the last section being a conspicuous exception) and presumably to be used in the writing of a profile or essay “about” Kennedy. The other is Kafkaesque fantasy and is evoked solely by means of the reporter’s use of journalistic shorthand, the initial “K,” which “refers” to Kennedy but alludes to the main characters of the enigmatic novels Der Prozess (1925; The Trial, 1937) and Das Schloss (1926; The Castle, 1930) and ultimately to their equally enigmatic author, Franz Kafka himself. The narrator of “See the Moon?” claims that fragments are the only forms he trusts; in “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning,” fragments are the only forms the reader gets. The conflicting mass of seemingly raw material—quotes, impressions, even fragments of orders to waiters—saves Kennedy from drowning in a media-produced narcissistic image that turns even the most inane remarks into orphic sayings. Kennedy cannot drown; he can only float on the postmodern surface. Instead of the Kennedy image, Barthelme turns Kennedy into a series of images, the last being the most ludicrous and yet also the most revealing: Kennedy as Zorro, masked and floundering in the sea, his hat, cape, and sword safely on the beach. Saved from drowning (by the narrator), Kennedy is unmasked as a masked image, a free-floating signifier, a chameleon in superhero’s clothing who proves most revealing when most chameleon-like, offering a summary of Georges Poulet’s analysis of the eighteenth century writer Pierre Marivaux. Only here, at this third or even fourth remove, will many readers feel that they have gotten close to the “real” Kennedy:

The Marivaudian being is, according to Poulet, 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. In consequence he exists in a certain freshness which seems, if I may say so, very desirable. This freshness Poulet, quoting Marivaux, describes very well.

“Views of My Father Weeping”

“Views of My Father Weeping” combines epistemological uncertainty with typically postmodern problematizing of the relationship between past and present (hinted at in the above quotation). Several days after his father has died under the wheels of an aristocrat’s carriage, the narrator sets out to investigate whether the death was accidental, as the police reported, or an example of the aristocracy’s (and the police’s) indifference to the poor. Spurred on less by a desire for truth and justice than a vague sense of filial obligation and even more by the slight possibility of financial gain, but fearful that he may be beaten for making inquiries, perhaps (like his father) even killed, the narrator-son proceeds, more hesitant than Hamlet. Hamlet had his father’s ghost appear to remind him of his duty to avenge a murder most foul. Barthelme’s story also has a ghost (of sorts), a weeping father who sits on his son’s bed acting in decidedly untragic fashion like a spoiled, sulky child whose very identity as father the son quietly questions. Complicating matters still further, this father seems to appear in a second story within “Views of My Father Weeping,” which takes place in a more contemporary and clearly, although fantastically, American setting. These important if often blurred differences aside, the two narrators suffer from the same twin diseases that are pandemic in Barthelme’s fiction: abulia (loss of the ability to decide or act) and acedia (spiritual torpor). They certainly would benefit from a reading of a slightly later story, “A Manual for Sons,” a self-contained part of Barthelme’s second novel, The Dead Father (1975), which concludes with this advice:

You must become your father, but a paler, weaker version of him. The enormities go with the job, but close study will allow you to perform the job less well than it previously has been done, thus moving toward a golden age of decency, quiet, and calmed fever. Your contribution will not be a small one, but “small” is one of the concepts that you should shoot for. . . . Fatherhood can be, if not conquered, at least “turned down” in this generation—by the combined efforts of all of us together.

The extreme brevity of his densely allusive and highly elliptical stories suggests that Barthelme sides with the smallness of sons in their comic struggle with their various fathers (biological, historical, cultural). Against the authoritative word of the All Father, Barthelme offers a range of ventriloquized voices. “Here I differ from Kierkegaard,” says one of the characters in “The Leap.” “Purity of heart is not,” as Kierkegaard claimed, to will one thing; it is, rather, “to will several things, and not know which is the better, truer thing, and to worry about this forever.” Barthelme’s own double-mindedness and preference for mixtures and the guilty pleasures of the son’s uncertainty and anxiety of influence become especially apparent in his collages of verbal and visual materials in which he puts the magazine editor’s skills—layout in particular—to the fiction writer’s use in order to achieve for fiction the kind of “immediate impact” generally available only to those working in the visual arts. “At the Tolstoy Museum,” one of the best of these collages, literalizes, chiefly through visual means, the canonization of Leo Tolstoy as a metaphorical giant of literature, a cultural institution, an object of public veneration. Visitors to the “Tolstoy Museum” must gaze at the prescribed distances and times and in the proper attitude of awe and submission. Readers of “At the Tolstoy Museum,” on the other hand, find all the rules broken, temporal and spatial boundaries transgressed, and distances subject to a new and fantastic geometry. Against the museum as a repository of cult(ural) memorabilia, the story serves a narrative riposte in the form of a study in perspective. Barthelme whittles Tolstoy down to manageable size by exaggerating his proportions (much as he does with another dead father in his second novel): the thirty thousand photographs, the 640,086 pages of the Jubilee edition of Tolstoy’s works, the coat that measures at least twenty feet high, the head so large it has a hall of its own (closed Mondays, Barthelme parenthetically adds), even a page-long summary of one of Tolstoy’s shortest stories, “The Three Hermits.” There are also the two huge Soviet-style portraits on facing pages, identical in all but one feature: the tiny figure of Napoleon I (The Little Emperor), from Tolstoy’s Voyna i mir (1865-1869; War and Peace, 1886), playing the part of viewer/reader. Best of all is Barthelme’s rendering of The Anna-Vronsky Pavilion devoted to the adulterous pair from Anna Karenina (1875-1877; English translation, 1886), a cut-out of a nineteenth century man and woman superimposed on an early (and now adulterated) study in perspective dating from 1603. “At the Tolstoy Museum” does more than merely mix and match, cut and paste. It makes hilariously clear the artifice of art and of what the passive consumer of culture may naïvely assume is both natural and eternal.

“Sentence”

“Sentence” makes a similar point, but it does so by exploring the literal in a quite different way. As its title suggests, the story takes the form of a single sentence of approximately twenty-five hundred words and manages to combine the brevity, open-endedness, and formal innovation that together serve as the hallmarks of Barthelme’s idiosyncratic art. The subject of “Sentence” is the sentence itself: its progress and process. Beginning with one of Barthelme’s favorite words, “or” (“etc.” and “amid” are others), it proceeds by means of accretion and ends (if a work without any terminal punctuation can be said to end) as much an “anxious object” as any of those works of modern art to which Harold Rosenberg applied that phrase. Even as it pursues its own meandering, self-regarding, seemingly nonreferential way down the page, “Sentence” remains mindful of its reader, no less susceptible to distraction than the sentence itself and lured on by whatever promise the sentence holds out yet also feeling threatened by the sentence’s failure to play by the rules. As the narrator sums up, “Sentence” is “a human-made object, not the one we wanted of course, but still a construction of man, a structure to be treasured for its weakness, as opposed to the strength of stones.”

Earlier in “Sentence,” Barthelme alludes to the Rosetta Stone that Jean François Champollion used to decipher the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Barthelme’s fiction, although written in a familiar language, proves more resistant to decoding. Barthelme uses the past as he uses the present, but neither offers anything approaching an interpretive touchstone, only the raw material, the bits and bytes out of which he constructs his oddly shaped but nevertheless aesthetically crafted “archaeological slices.” Built upon the cultural ruins of an ancient Norse tale entitled “The Princess and the Glass Hill,” “The Glass Mountain” resembles “Sentence” and “The Balloon” more than it does its nominal source in that it too is largely about one’s reading of it. “I was trying to climb the glass mountain,” the narrator declares in the first of the story’s one hundred numbered sections (most only one sentence long). Like the reader, the narrator is “new to the neighborhood,” persistent, comically methodical, and methodologically absurd; the plumber’s friends he uses to scale the glass mountain at the corner of Thirteenth Street and Eighth Avenue seem no less inappropriate than his by-the-book how-to approach drawn from medieval romance—or the reader’s efforts to climb (surmount, master) Barthelme’s see-through metafiction by means of equally outdated reading strategies. Once atop the glass mountain the narrator finds exactly what he hoped to, “a beautiful enchanted symbol” to disenchant. Once kissed (like the frog of fairy tales), the symbol proves disenchanting in a quite different sense of the word, changed “into only a beautiful princess” whom the narrator (now himself disenchanted) hurls down in disappointment. Having staked his life on the eternal symbol of medieval romance, the narrator finds the temporary and the merely human (princess) disappointing.

Making a postmodern something, however small and self-consuming, out of the existential nothing became Barthelme’s stock-in-trade, most noticeably in “Nothing: A Preliminary Account.” His art of the nearly negligible works itself out comically but almost always against a sympathetic understanding for the permanence for which the climber in “The Glass Mountain” and the characters in so many of his other stories, such as “The New Music,” yearn. A fusion of two stories published earlier the same year, one with the same title, the other entitled “Momma,” “The New Music” takes the dialogue form that Barthelme often used to new and dizzying heights of nearly musical abstraction, akin to what Philip Roth would accomplish more than a decade later in his novel, Deception (1990). The subject here is slight (even for Barthelme), as the story’s two unidentified, no-longer-young speakers go through (or are put through) a number of routines analogous to vaudeville comedy and improvisational jazz. After a few opening bars, one speaker suggests that they go to Pool, “the city of new hope. One of those new towns. Where everyone would be happier.” They then segue into an exchange on, or consideration of, the new music done as a version of the familiar song “Momma Don’ ‘Low.” Among the many things that Momma (now dead) did not allow was the new music. “The new music burns things together, like a welder,” or like the sculptor Peterson from “A Shower of Gold,” or like Barthelme, who along with his two speakers understands what the new music always has been and always will be: ever changing, ever ephemeral, ever new, and forever beyond momma’s prohibitions and the reader’s explanations.

Bibliography

Barthelme, Helen Moore. Donald Barthelme: The Genesis of a Cool Sound. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001. The author, a senior university lecturer, was married to Barthelme for a decade in the 1950’s and 1960’s. She traces his life from his childhood in Houston to his development as a writer.

Couturier, Maurice, and Regis Durand. Donald Barthelme. London: Methuen, 1982. This brief study focuses on the performance aspect of Barthelme’s stories and considers them in relation to the multiplicity of varied responses that they elicit from readers. Readings are few in number but highly suggestive.

Daugherty, Tracy. Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009. Argues that Barthleme was writing in the modernist tradition of Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, and that he used advertisements, sentences from newspaper articles, instruction guides, and popular and commercial elements in order to make literature, not to subvert it.

Gelfant, Blanche H., ed. The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Includes a chapter in which Barthelme’s short stories are analyzed.

Gordon, Lois. Donald Barthelme. Boston: Twayne, 1981. This volume, in Twayne’s United States Authors series, makes up in breadth what it lacks in depth. Although the book has no particular point to make about Barthelme and his work, it does provide useful and accurate summaries of most of his work. A comprehensive introduction for undergraduates unfamiliar with the fiction, as is Stanley Trachtenberg’s Understanding Donald Barthelme(1990).

Hudgens, Michael Thomas. Donald Barthelme, Postmodernist American Writer. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001. Analyzes a cross section of Barthleme’s work, viewing him within the context of upscale New York City, the art circuit, and The New Yorker, where he made his reputation. Describes the influence of painting on his writing.

Klinkowitz, Jerome. “Donald Barthelme.” In A Reader’s Companion to the Short Story in English, edited by Erin Fallon, et al., under the auspices of the Society for the Study of the Short Story. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Klinkowitz, who has written extensively and perceptively on Barthelme, provides a brief biography followed by an analysis of his short fiction.

_______. Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. Klinkowitz is easily the best informed and most judicious scholar and critic of contemporary American fiction in general and Barthelme in particular. Building on his Barthelme chapter in Literary Disruptions, he emphasizes the ways in which Barthelme reinvented narrative in the postmodern age and places Barthelme’s fiction in the larger aesthetic, cultural, and historical contexts. The single most important study of Barthelme.

_______. Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction. 2d ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980. Informed, accurate, and intelligent, Klinkowitz’s book is the necessary starting point for any serious discussion of Barthelme and his work. The emphasis is on Barthelme’s interest in structure, his revitalizing of exhausted forms, his words as objects in space rather than mimetic mirrors, and the imagination as a valid way of knowing the world.

Molesworth, Charles. Donald Barthelme’s Fiction: The Ironist Saved from Drowning. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982. Objecting to those who emphasize the experimental nature of Barthelme’s fiction, Molesworth views Barthelme as essentially a parodist and satirist whose ironic stance saves him from drowning in mere innovation.

Olsen, Lance, ed. Review of Contemporary Fiction 11 (Summer, 1991). In addition to the editor’s excellent bio-critical introduction and Steven Weisenburger’s bibliography of works by and about Barthelme, this special issue on Barthelme reprints an early story and offers seven new essays, including especially noteworthy ones by Jerome Klinkowitz on the uses to which Barthelme put his unsigned “Comment” pieces from The New Yorker and Brian McHale and Ron Moshe on “The Indian Uprising.” Also contains shorter appreciations of and critical commentary on Barthelme from twenty critics and fiction writers.

Patteson, Richard, ed. Critical Essays on Donald Barthelme. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992. A collection of critical essays on Barthelme from book reviews and academic journals. Provides an overview of critical reaction to Barthelme in the introduction. Essays deal with Barthelme’s use of language, his fragmentation of reality, his montage technique, and his place in the postmodernist tradition.

Roe, Barbara L. Donald Barthelme: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992. An introduction to Barthelme’s short stories, with discussion of the major stories arranged in chronological order. Also includes several interviews with Barthelme, as well as previously published essays by other critics.

Stengel, Wayne B. The Shape of Art in the Stories of Donald Barthelme. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. Discusses such themes as play, futility, stasis, affirmation, and education in four types of stories: identity stories, dialogue stories, social fabric stories, and art-object stories. Focuses on Barthelme’s emphasis on art in his self-reflexive stories.

Waxman, Robert. “Apollo and Dionysus: Donald Barthelme’s Dance of Life.” Studies in Short Fiction 33 (Spring, 1996): 229-243. Examines how the interplay between the Apollonian search for order and the Dionysian longing for freedom from convention informs much of Barthelme’s work and is often embodied in the metaphor of music.

Robert A. Morace