Donald Barthelme (BAHRT-uhl-mee) was one of the most imaginative and innovative American authors, and arguably the most imitated short-story writer, of the twentieth century. He was born the oldest of five children; two others also became respected writers. His father was a successful architect. In 1933, the family moved to Houston, which would remain one of Barthelme’s part-time residences. During his two years at the University of Houston, he studied journalism; he then worked as a reporter for the Houston Post. After serving in the U.S. Army (he was drafted in 1953), Barthelme founded a literary magazine, Forum, in 1956 and began working at Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum, where, in 1961, he was appointed director. The next year, he moved to New York and began publishing in The New Yorker magazine, to which he would continue to contribute regularly. The majority of his short stories, and even his first novel, Snow White, first appeared in The New Yorker.
Donald Barthelme
Barthelme’s only child, a daughter, Anne Katharine, was born to his first wife, Birgit, in 1965. Barthelme won a National Book Award in 1972 for the children’s book he wrote for Anne, The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine: Or, The Hithering Thithering Djinn. Barthelme also was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966 and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for the 1981 collection Sixty Stories. Although he lived primarily in New York’s Greenwich Village, he taught for brief periods at Boston University and the State University of New York at Buffalo; he also taught at the College of the City of New York.
Throughout his career, Barthelme rejected the conventional forms of fiction: traditional narrative plot and characterization, the unities of time and space. If the novelist’s task is to reflect and comment upon reality, then the novel must lack structure–since beginnings, middles, and endings are not “real.” Instead, Barthelme wrote fiction that evokes mood; frequently he wrote “metafiction,” fiction that takes as its subject the very act of writing. Verbs and nouns take the place of plot, event, and character (as in The Dead Father). He was also concerned with social themes and with the dilemmas of human interaction and loneliness.
Barthelme’s form is that of the verbal collage, juxtaposing the beginning, middle, or ending of a story–or a sentence–with bits of other beginnings, middles, or endings. Typically, he interrupts a narrative or dialogue with contradictory or self-reflexive material. Often, he re-creates slang or metaphor in new and outrageous terms. All these devices function to jar readers out of their complacent expectations of human response and language. Readers must reconsider language and communication in new, more authentic terms.
Barthelme’s early works are primarily concerned with social issues, depicting a modern, brainwashed society, narcotized by the media. They portray a world of zombies repeating texts and technological references in response to every emotional confrontation, as in Come Back, Dr. Caligari. The volumes City Life and Sadness treat, in addition, the unreliability of irony as a weapon against a spiritually sullied world. Guilty Pleasures, one of his most humorous books, contains numerous literary parodies as it satirizes the tinfoil nature of the contemporary United States.
Barthelme has been widely praised–and imitated–because of his innovative and witty use of language, specifically the dislocations of sentences through transformations of slang, metaphor, and grammar. As Barthelme utilizes a vast array of verbal pyrotechnics–changing parts of speech, creating new words and spellings, and employing puns and at times outrageous wordplay (“Jean-Paul Sartre is a Fartre”)–to draw the reader’s attention to impoverished human communication, he touches on larger existential issues. In a world devoid of ultimate assurances and meanings, the only valid way of asserting one’s identity and authenticity is through the authenticity of the word.
Barthelme has been criticized for not writing a body of longer, more sustained fiction. Yet if the novels Snow White and The Dead Father had been his sole publications, they would ensure him a permanent and honored place in American letters. Snow White details the plight of a legendary mythic figure in the modern world, playing out the script (the fairy-tale role) to which she was born in a world of small men within the sexual, social, and moral expectations of 1960’s America. The Dead Father focuses on the need for, yet repulsiveness of, authority, using the form of a gigantic, dying father figure who represents the aggregate of religious, mythic, historical, literary, and linguistic tradition. A third, less successful novel, Paradise, tells of a fifty-three-year-old New York architect and the three girls who invade his empty apartment.
As the 1980’s approached, Barthelme began, in Great Days, to experiment with a more poetic style that incorporates musical techniques–producing, for example, sonata-like structures (theme A, theme B, theme A) to evoke a certain mood. Great Days also utilizes a new dialogue form in its explorations of the serious issues of time and mortality. Barthelme’s characters here are less abstract, more human. Overnight to Many Distant Cities alternates short stories with dialogue-arias; here again one finds the Barthelme wit and the dislocations of traditional meaning in the service of eliciting an authentic response from the reader. He writes, for example, “Youth, Goethe said, is the silky apple butter on the good brown bread of possibility.”
Beginning in the mid-1960’s, American postmodern writers–including Robert Coover, William H. Gass, John Barth, and Thomas Pynchon (as well as Julio Cortázar, Italo Calvino, Robert Pinget, and Claude Simon outside the United States)–were concerned with language and the difficulty of utilizing it as an emblem of authentic participation in an alien universe. Barthelme’s work illustrates that words ultimately remain the only link with this vast and indifferent world: The creative and honest use of language is the most effective measure against isolation and loneliness.