Donald Barthelme and the Metafictional Muse Author(s): Larry McCaffery Source: SubStance, Vol. 9, No. 2, Issue 27: Current Trends in American Fiction (1980), pp. 7588 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3683881 . Accessed: 20/02/2011 04:02 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uwisc. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
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Donald Barthelme and the MetafictionalMuse LARRYMcCAFFERY
I Looking back on the literary events of the 1960s, it seems pretty obvious now that many of the truly significant books published during the decade were almost totally ignored by the public and were often misrepresented by critics. The main reason these works were greeted with bewilderment or misrepresentation was that they defied many of the accepted premises of what we had come to expect from fiction. These premises derived primarily from the conventions of the realistic novel and had come to so dominate our view of fiction that it was difficult for many readers and critics to realize that they were conventions rather than unalterable "givens." There were exceptions to this "rule of anonymity," of course. Heller, Vonnegut, and Brautigan began picking up large followings as the '60s moved forward; and although generally ignored by the popular audience, the works of such non-traditional talents as Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Jerzy Kosinski, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass were warmly received by many reviewers and critics. But the majority of significant innovative talents-writers such as Ronald Sukenick, Harry Mathews, Gilbert Sorrentino, Steve Katz, Joseph McElroy, Robert Coover, and Stanley Elkin-were either treated as literary eccentrics or, more frequently, totally ignored. What has become evident from our perspective in the 1970s is that these non-traditional works have a great deal more in common than they appeared to at first. In particular, many of t]hem share a sense of playfulness and selfconsciousness, and are further unified by their willful artificiality and their preoccupation with metafictional strategies. Although specific development naturally differs from work to work, a remarkable number of these books are even based on the same general plot: a main character creates a fictional system to provide order, meaning, or diversion in a world which seems chaotic, destructive, or banal.' The fictions devised by these characters are sometimes obviously artificial in nature (such as literary texts, games, sports, or various private systems based on paranoia) and at other times are more Sub-StanceN? 27, 1980
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subtly subjective (as with myth, religious systems, historical and political perspectives, and so on). The big danger faced by many of these characters is a tendency to ignore their own role as creators of these fictional systems; once they begin to lose sight of this, they tend to become controlled by their creations rather than being able to use them as useful or even necessary metaphors. In addition to focusing on the fiction-making process from the standpoint of plot and theme, this new fiction was quick to take advantage of the formal possibilities of fiction to help reinforce its point about the subjective nature of all systems. As a result, they tended to present themselves self-consciously as invented entities and insisted on the fact that all forms of art are merely another of man's subjective creations. No pattern of interpretation, whether it be provided by the novel, science, history, or psychology, can hope to "mirror reality" or "tell the truth" because "reality" and "truth" are themselves fictional abstractions whose validity has become increasingly suspect as this century has proceeded. Thus works by writers like Coover, Barthelme, Pynchon, Barth, and Vonnegut usually develop a self-reflexive irony which mocks the realistic claims of artistic significance and truth while playfully inviting the reader to consider the dynamics of their creation. These works therefore tend to become metafictional inquiries into the nature of our fictional systems and the impulses behind their creations; such systems are examined primarily as meaning systemsor semiotic codes through which our culture creates a sense of order and stability. By examining the ways in which these codes or meaning systems function, especially the means through which these systems are produced by language, the metafictionist hopes to deliver his readers from outmoded or unduly restrictive modes of thought. What all these related developments suggest is that many of the best contemporary writers found themselves unable to produce the kinds of social or psychological studies that dominated fictional tastes in America during the 1930s, '40s and '50s. As author and critic Ronald Sukenick has suggested in an often quoted passage from his metafictional story, "The Death of the Novel," the contemporary writer can no longer rely on epistemological certainties to justify a realistic approach to literature: I will begin by consideringhow the world looks in what I thinkwe may now begin to call the contemporary post-realistic novel. Realistic fiction presupposed chronological time as the medium of a plotted narrative,an irreducibleindividual psyche as the subject of its characterization,and, above all, the ultimate concrete reality of things as the object and rationaleof its description.... The contemporarywriter-the writerwho is acutelyin touch with the life of whichhe is part-is forced to start from scratch:Realitydoesn't exist, time doesn't exist, personality doesn't exist. God was the omniscientauthor, but he died; now no one knows the plot, and since our realitylacksthe sanctionof a creator,there'sno guarantee as to the authenticityof the received version.2 Needless to say, writers who had grown skeptical about the existence of a coherent, meaningful world are forced to re-examine such literary conventions as plot, character development, and "progression" in the old sense.
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Unable to feel any longer that they could accurately depict the "true status" of affairs in the world, postmodern metafictionists decided to turn inward, to focus not on reality but on the imagination's response to reality-a response which was judged to be the only aspect of "reality" (now always appearing within quotation marks) which could be analyzed or discussed. Thus, a sort of bleak, absurdist epistemological stance is implied in much postmodern fiction; but, at the same time, their playful manipulations of language and literary conventions invite the reader to similarly demystify or deconstruct his own systems (these systems can be moral, aesthetic, social, political, or whatever). This latter point is extremely important in understanding the ultimate significance of the metafictional impulse, for in the best metafictional worksNabokov's Lolita or Pale Fire, Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, Federman's Take It or Leave It, Gass' "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country"-the focus on the artistic construction becomes an analogue of the way we all manipulate the world of symbols into the system we call "Reality." In order to illustrate the kinds of metafictional tendencies that were developing in America during the mid-1960s, the remainder of this essay will examine some of the early fictions of an influential, representative metafictionist, Donald Barthelme.
II Although ComeBack, Dr. Caligari (1964) was the first collection of fiction by Barthelme to appear, it immediately established most of the major issues that he would deal with during the next fifteen years of his career. Like nearly all of his later work, the stories in Caligari examine such things as failed personal relationships, the role of the artist, the gap which exists between the phenomenal world and the system of signs we have devised to help us cope with a disjointed, unfathomable universe. Frequently, as in "Florence Green is 81," "The Big Broadcast of 1938," "Me and Miss Mandible" and "For I'm the Boy Whose Only Joy is Loving You," these themes are subtly intertwined, with the main characters' related personal and epistemological difficulties suggesting some of the problems that Barthelme is having in presenting a series of meaningfully connected events. While Barthelme's metafictional concern with the deterioration of language and with the inadequacies of conventional literary forms is often direct and self-conscious (as, for example, in "Florence Green" and "For I'm the Boy"), these interests are also exhibited indirectly in less obviously metafictional stories in the way that his characters obsessively question the nature of words, symbols and the communication process-and the way that they usually feel betrayed by them. In his more stylistically experimental stories-"The Joker's Greatest Triumph," "The Piano Player," "The Viennese Opera Ball," "To London and Rome," "Up Aloft in the Air"Barthelme's choice of certain non-traditional conventions (the pop art recycling of cliches in "The Viennes Opera Ball," "Florence Green" and "The Joker's Greatest Triumph," the collage approach and surreal features of most
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of the stories, the marginal commentary in "To London and Rome," and so on) speaks to us directly about the bankruptcy of previous literary forms, and thereby calls our attention to his own choice of arrangements and to the status of these stories as fictional constructions. The title of one of Barthelme's best short stories, "Critique de la Vie Quotidienne," offers a good summary of the principal focus of Caligari-and of most of his later fiction as well: a critique of the attractions and frustrations offered by modern, ordinary life. As Alan Wilde suggests in a perceptive examination of Barthelme's fiction, it is this scaled down range of interests which may be what is most distinctive about his work: "the articulation [is] not of the larger, more dramatic emotions to which modernist fiction is keyed but of an extraordinary range of minor, banal dissatisfactions.... not anomie or accidie or dread but a muted series of irritations, frustrations, and bafflements."3 Nearly all of Barthelme's work to date has been permeated by an overwhelming sense that "la vie quotidienne" is not nearly as satisfying as we had hoped it to be (as a character in "A Shower of Gold" comments, "Like Pascal said, 'The natural misfortune of our mortal and feeble condition is so wretched that when we consider it closely, nothing can console us'"4). This lack of satisfaction on the part of Barthelme's characters is produced by a series of closely connected personal anxieties which are neatly balanced by Barthelme's own evident artistic anxieties, together with the probable anxieties and dissatisfactions experienced by Barthelme's readers. Indeed, there is a significant relationship in Barthelme's fiction between his characters'struggle to stay alive, make sense of their lives and establish meaningful connections with others and Barthelme'sown struggle with the disintegration of fictional forms and the deterioration of language. Often Barthelme's self-conscious, metafictional approach allows these struggles to operate concurrently within the stories (many of his main chiaracters are even developed as surrogate artist figures), the two serving to reinforce or symbolize each other. Meanwhile, we ourselves provide a third aspect of this relationship, with our own efforts to grapple with the elements, to organize and make sense of them, providing an additional sort of analogue or reflection of this struggle with disintegration. The relationship between these personal and metafictional concerns can be seen more clearly in the following schematic listing: PERSONAL Ennui with life's familiarities (both people and objects); ongoing personal fight against the "caccon of habitua-
tion which covers everything if we let
METAFICTIONAL Anticipation of the reader's sense of boredom; need to invent new revitalized literary forms.
it" (S, p. 179).
Sense of personal, political, and social fragmentation.
Impulse to collage, verbal fragmentation, free association, and other methods of juxtaposition to break down familiar patterns of order.
Metafictional Muse Inability to sustain relationships with others (especiallywomen)
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Inabilityto rely on literaryconventions (linear plots, notions of cause-andeffect, realisticcharacterdevelopment, etc.) which tie things together.
Sexual frustration and anxiety; sense Artisticfrustrationand anxiety;belief of personal impotence and powerless- that art is useless and can never affect ness in comparisonwith others. significantchange. Inability to know; impulse to certainty Refusal to explain or clarify; denial blocked-and mocked-by lies, dis- of hidden or "deep meanings" with guises, simplisticformulas, and the ir- tendency to "stayon the surface." reducible mystery of life. Inability to communicate with others; frustrating sense that language blocks or betrays the feelings one wishes to express.
Suspicion that language has become "dreck"so full of "stuffing"and cliches that meaningful communicationwith an audience is impossible.
Inabilityto create change in one's condition, a condition made more difficult by one's self-consciousness,which serves to paralyze one from spontaneous, possibly liberatingactivities.
Sense that one must accept language's limits and its trashy condition; hence the "recyclingtendency,"with cliches and verbal dreck being transformed into new objects; self-consciousness makingthe tellingof traditionalstories impossible.
In Barthelme's fiction, then, the sources of dissatisfaction as well as the means of coping with it are intimately connected for both the artist and the ordinary man. Although the specific manifestations are varied, these parallel struggles often have to do with the attempt to maintain a fresh, vital relationship with either words or women-an obsessional struggle between logos and eros which is evident in t]hewords of many other metafictionists, as well (think of Gass, Federman, Sukenick, Barth, Katz, and Coover). Moreover, Barthelme's characters are typically shown not only to be painfully aware of their own personal and sexual inadequacies, but, more generally, to be disgruntled or bored with the systems they rely on to deal with their fragmented, meaningless lives. Simply stated, their fundamental problem is twofold: on the one hand, they are bored with their humdrum lives and humdrum relationships with others and are therefore constantly seeking means of overcoming their rigidly patterned but ultimately inconsequential lives; on the other hand, Barthelme's characters fear any loss of security and are unable to fully open themselves to experience because they find it so confusing and unstable-and because they don't trust the systems at their disposal for coping with it. Paradoxically, then, their very awareness of the dismal realities around them makes it all the more difficult for them to face up to the frightening moment when they must go forth and confront "the new."
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In the first story of Caligari, "Florence Green is 81," we find a perfect example of the way Barthelme joins together his metafictional and personal themes. As with "The Viennese Opera Ball," the story initially seems to demonstrate Barthelme's "collage method," with various bits of verbal garbage being collected by "trashmaster" Barthelme to create a vivid sense of the absurdities and banalities of contemporary thought. The setting is a dinner party being given by Florence Green, who opens the story with a mysterious remark ("I want to go to some other country," p. 3) and then falls asleep.5 Meanwhile, the narrator, a Protean would-be writer who creates a series of disguises with which to hide his true identity, offers us a miscellaneous assortment of descriptions of the other guests at the party, conflicting versions of his past life, speculations about our reactions to his story, plus tidbits of seemingly unrelated factual data. Because much of the informational content of the story is presented in an apparently jumbled, unstructured way ("I am free associating, brilliantly, brilliantly, to put you into the problem," is the way the narrator, Baskerville, puts it), the reader may initially experience some difficulties in deciding what the story is about or how the narrative fragments relate to one another. But ithis associational "collage" method, used by Barthelme in many of his best fictions, actually helps to reinforce one of his central points: that for the artist as well as for the ordinary man, an openness to process at the expense of finished product should lie at the center of our experience; that the permanence and final answers we hoped to discover (in art, in the science, in our personal relationships) were naive pipedreams. By breaking up the syntax and the usual associations that most readers are familiar with, Barthelme, in Tony Tanner's words, "Seeks to simulate the strange confluence of words and things which is our actual experience, so that the commonest objects from kitchen, bathroom or street are mixed up with the commonest cliches of intellectual talk."6 Of the problems that the reader is likely to be having in trying to respond to the story, the narrator is well aware; in fact, Baskerville constantly offers us self-conscious asides about what he is doing, his motives and literary strategies, and above all, his fear that he will be unable to fulfill his role as author, that he will boreus. For example, near the opening of the story he tells us that he is "a young man but very brilliant, very ingratiating, I adopt this ingratiating tone because I can't help myself (for fear of boring you)" (p. 4). A bit later, he suggests that his relationship to us as readers is that of a patient to a doctor: "Reader... we have roles to play, thou and I: you are the doctor (washing your hands between hours) and I, I am, I think, the nervous, dreary patient"7 (p. 4). Apprehensive about his ability to keep us interested-we are, no doubt, sophisticated, suspicious, and impatient with tired literary archetypes and conventions-Baskerville repeatedly seeks ways of livening things up, of colorfully explaining away complications or ambiguities; because of his worries that he is not pleasing us, not saying the right words, he often pauses in his narrative to question his motives, anticipate our reactions, analyze his performance so far. "Did I explain that?" he asks us, after re-introducing some autobiographical material, "And you accepted my explanation?"-a
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mocking gesture that undermines all that he has told us about himself. Despite such occasional bravado, however, Baskerville is obviously extremely insecure about his role as a writer. Admitting that he is a "simple preliterate" (p. 11) and that he doesn't even like his only novel, Baskerville also acknowledges midway through his narrative that, despite his frantic efforts, "I am boring you, I sense it" (p. 12). He is, in short, an early representative of many of Barthelme's self-conscious artist figures (as in "The Dolt," "See the Moon," "Daumier" and many others) who are laboring to find viable ways of organizing the jagged elements of their experience into a pleasing, artistic whole. Baskerville's artistic problems, however, reflect more fundamental insecurities in his personal life: "Where are my mother and father now? answer me that," he demands unexpectedly while discussing his education (p. 10); and his various anxieties about money, the Army, and his drinking all help contribute to our suspicion that this is a deeply disturbed individual indeed. Baskerville is also strongly attracted to women but apparently, at least until now, he has been unable to maintain any sort of meaningful relationship with them. His confession that he is "the father of one abortion and four miscarriages... and no wife" (p. 5) may perhaps be a literal lie, but it undoubtedly reveals a personal emptiness, a sexual hunger, and a dissatisfaction with the results of previous relationships that so often plague Barthelme's characters. Significantly, the woman that Baskerville lovingly thinks of throughout the dinner party doesn't seem to notice his attempts to interest her; in the end, she flatly rejects his advances. Part of his difficulties in communicating to us (and to the girl) the precise nature of his plight and desires is that he himself often doesn't seem to understand what is happening and thus feels adrift among remarks and events that he can't convincingly categorize or adequately explain. Certainly as a writer Baskerville is well aware of the arbitrary way in which we assign all meaning to phenomena through language; after calling Mrs. Green a "vastly rich vastly egocentric old woman nut," Baskerville explains his description by saying that "Six modifiers modify her into something one can think of as a nut" (p. 14). But he quickly goes on to quote Husserl ("But you have not grasped the living reality, the essence!") and then sadly notes, "Nor will I, ever"-a remark which shows the limits he places on himself as a writer and as a man. "Florence Green," then, offers an excellent introduction to the way Barthelme blends his metafictional approach with his other major thematic concerns. Baskerville is merely the first in a long line of Barthelme characters who is being slowly overwhelmed by a tedious, mundane existence and who is shown trying to put the pieces of his life into some sort of personal and artistic whole. Like a great majority of postmodern characters, Baskerville is haunted by his inability to know, to make sense of things, and he seems well aware of the tenuous validity of any systematic claims to truth. Although he yearns for sexual fulfillment, for meaningful relationships, for communication on any level, Baskerville is so self-conscious about his inadequacies that, in the end, he is powerless to do anything about his situation. The question for most
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Barthelme characters is, in fact, rarely how they can change the nature of the mess they find themselves in. Lacking confidence in their artistic or personal ability to affect any significant change in the world, Barthelme's characters tend to fall back onto a position of reluctant acceptance8 (thus Ramona at the end of "City Life" says of her life's "invitation down many muddy roads" that "I accepted. What was the alternative?" p. 180). In the meantime, they continue to produce a fictitious discourse which they hope will keep them going, animate the reader, and possibly produce some beauty or elegance in the process. "And eloquence," says Henry Mackie in "Marie, Marie, Hold on Tight," "Is really all any of us can hope for" (CB, p. 122). Barthelme's metafictional strategies are further developed in one of his most engaging and entertaining stories, "Me and Miss Mandible." Told in diary form, this Kafkaesque tale involves a 35-year-old man named Joseph who is placed into an absurd situation (after years as an insurance claims adjustor, he is put back into the fourth grade for re-education) which he accepts without question and which is then developed logically in the rest of the story. Joseph's problems are the stock Barthelme afflictions: a lack of confidence in society's values, sexual frustrations (after a ruined marriage, he now continually lusts after his teacher, Miss Mandible), a more general sense of isolation and alienation (exaggerated here because his "peers" are only 11year-olds), and an overly-developed degree of self-consciousness which denies him the ability to respond with any enthusiasm to the junky, rigid realities of everyday living. Joseph's experiences in the "real world" have already created in him a healthy sense of life's absurdities ("much of what we were doing was absolutely pointless, to no purpose," he comments at one point) and of its potentially destructive effect on the individual. For instance, his negative remarks about his insurance job are characteristic of the attitude shared by nearly all of Barthelme's people: "My former life-role... compelled me to spend my time amid the debris of our civilization: rumbled fenders, roofless sheds, gutted warehouses, smashed arms and legs. After ten years of this one has a tendency to see, the world as a vast junkyard, looking at man and seeing only his potentially mangled parts: entering a house only to trace the path of the inevitable fire" (p. 99). Joseph has grown to distrust authority's efforts to dictate solutions to life's puzzling absurdities. Of his first trip through school, he says that "I was too much under the impression that what the authorities (who decides?) had ordained for me was right and proper," and that he subsequently made a crucial mistake: "I confused authority with life itself' (p. 102). Appropriately, he likens his earlier life to a "paper chase" as he eagerly attempted to hunt down the "clues" to successful living-clues which were themselves mere insubstantial symbols: diplomas, membership cards, campaign buttons, insurance forms, and so on. If the narrator has adjusted well to his new life in most respects, there is one important area-sex-that he has considerable difficulty in coping with. "Nowhere," he tells us, "have ][ encountered an atmosphere as charged with aborted sexuality as this"-these remarks from someone who has already mentioned that "It is only in the matter of sex that I feel my own true age; this
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is apparently something that, once learned, can never be forgotten" (pp. 107, 103). As Barthelme frequently reminds us, sexual contact, like every other form of human contact, is denied and perverted by a society which both titillates its members and then establishes all sorts of restrictive norms for them. Like the works of the brilliant South American novelist, Manuel Puig,9 Barthelme's fiction constantly demonstrates the enormous power that the media, especially popular movies and books, has in establishing a culture's sexual roles, stereotypes, sublimations, and even its language. Barthelme is also aware of the feelings of frustration and anxiety that are generated when the reality of sexual contact cannot meet the expectations created by these cultural stereotypes. "Me and Miss Mandible" vividly shows how society's members become "educated" into this whole destructive sexual process. As Joseph pages through a popular, lurid magazine entitled Movie-TV Secrets,he begins to realize that his pre-pubescent classmates are undoubtedly using these sensationalized fantasies as models of what excitements adult life holds in store for them. "Who are these people, Debbie, Eddie, Liz, and how did they get themselves into such a terrible predicament?" Joseph wonders after he is through with the magazine (he is reading, of course, about the misadventures of Debbie Reynolds, Eddie Fisher, and Elizabeth Taylor), and then adds that "Sue Ann knows, I am sure; it is obvious that she is studying their history as a guide to what she may expect when she is suddenly freed from this drab, flat classroom" (p. 106). More sensitive than his classmates about the disparity between mediaproduced promises and their fulfillment, Joseph also understands that the sexual anxieties produced in our culture are symptomatic of the larger pattern of dissatisfaction generated by the American Dream (this dream is itself, of course, a media slogan). "Everything is promised my classmates and I, most of the time," he writes in his journal, and then he bitterly admits that "We accept the outrageous assurances without blinking" (p. 107). With society creating such assurances and with a public eager to accept them, it is no wonder that Barthelme's main characters are typically so depressed over the failure of life to meet their expectations. As with Burlingame's retreat into movie theaters in "Man in Hiding," the public's obsessive attention to movie magazines and scandal sheets is another example of its desire to experience life only vicariously through an elaborate system of signs and symbols. The most important way in which Barthelme exposes our uncritical acceptance of this phoney symbology is through his unrelenting critique of the most itself, which he feels is important sign-systems in our culture-language tied to our of isolation and to the failure of most of our society's sense directly In "Me and Miss Mandible" Barthelme scorns these linguistic key systems. extensions of our systems by having Joseph frequently refer to his classmates' jargon, to popular magazine headlines, and to institutional mottos-all of which are made to seem silly or irrelevant. Thus after years of mistaking his insurance company's motto ("Here to Help in Time of Need") as an actual description of his duties, Joseph now at last realizes that he has been "drastically mislocating the company's deepest concerns" (p. 109). And just as
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Baskerville in "Florence Green" had understood that assigning arbitrary symbols to an object through language does not really get us any closer to the "living essence" of its being, so too does Joseph suggest that the American public is too willing to accept "signs as promises": I believed that because I had obtained a wife who was made up of wife-signs (beauty, charm, softness, perfume, cookery) I had found love. Brenda, reading the same signs that have now misled Miss Mandibleand Sue Ann Brownly,felt she had been promised that she would never be bored again. All of us, Miss Mandible, Sue Ann, myself, Brenda, Mr. Goodykind, still believe that the American flag betokens a kind of general righteousness.(p. 109) These musings lead to the great discovery of Joseph's re-education program, a discovery which underlies the sense of betrayal-by words, by women, by society at large-that exists in all of Barthelme's works: "But I say, looking around me in this incubator of future citizens, that signs are signs, and that some of them are lies"'0 (p. 109). Two other related stories in ComeBack, Dr. Caligari, "The Big Broadcast of 1938" and "For I'm the Boy Whose Only Joy is Loving You," will provide final examples of the interconnections in Barthelme's stories between fictional strategy, personal anxiety, and the deterioration of language. Both stories involve a character named "Bloomsbury" (the Joycean reference is ironic) whose obsession with the properties and limits of language place him in awkward situations with his companions. In "The Big Broadcast" Bloomsbury is a radio broadcaster who occasionally singles out for special notice a particular word, which he then repeats in a monotonous voice for as much as fifteen minutes. The description of what occurs when this word is presented in this fashion (the procedure seems to parody some of Gertrude Stein's methods) is also revealing about Barthelme's own approach to uncovering the nature of modern-day language: "After this exposure to the glare of public inspection the word would frequently disclose new properties, unsuspected qualities, although that was far from Bloomsbury's intention. His intention, insofar as he may be said to have had one, was simply to get something on the air" (pp. 68-69). Bloomsbury has a second, equally significant type of radio broadcast-"commercial announcements" which are actually direct appeals to his ex-wife (another ruined marriage), public demonstrations in words about his past life with her. 1 As usual, this Barthelme character is preoccupied with a sense of his own sexual inadequacies (he tells us that the subject of one of his typical quarrels with his wife was "Smallness in the Human Male") and with the conviction that his efforts to do something about his loss are useless: he admits that "he felt, although he managed to conceal it from himself for a space, somewhat futile. For there had been no response from her" (p. 70). One of Bloomsbury's chief problems in dealing with his ex-wife is that his efforts to communicate with her are usually defeated by the banality and cliched nature of his language. This problem is compounded by the fact that Bloomsbury is obsessively aware of this barrier of words he is erecting. As a
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result, he is constantly calling attention to his language and apologizing for its predictable or inappropriate qualities: On that remarkableday, that day unlike any other, that day, if you will pardon me, of days, on that day from the old days when we were, as they say, young, we walked if you will forgive the extravagancehandin handinto a theater where there was a film playing... (p. 70) Oh! how you boggled at that word perhaps.... Your chest heaved, if I may say so... (p. 75) "Coo!"she said. "It doesn't sound very Americanto me." "Coo,"he said. "Whatkind of expression is that?"(p. 76) When Bloomsbury and his "fan" (the reader does not realize at first that this "fan" is actually Bloomsbury's wife12) talk to one another, their words only serve to reinforce their separateness, their isolation, for, as in Beckett's plays, it is only theform of language here, not its content, which seems to carry the conversations forward: "You'relooking at me!" she said. "Oh, yes," he said. "Right.I certainlyam." "Why?" "It'ssomething I do," he said. "It'smy might say metier." "Milieu," she said.
"Metier,"Bloomsburysaid. "If you don't mind." (p. 72) If Bloomsbury's hassles with language metafictionally reflect Barthelme's own difficulties as a writer, so too do his difficulties at understanding anything suggest the perils facing the contemporary writer, who cannot offer any opinions without qualifying them.. The epistemological skepticism is often built right into the narrative structure of many of Barthelme's stories. Here, for instance, when Bloomsbury begins to feel "disturbed," Barthelme first of all cautiously lists the probable causes for this condition ("This was attributable perhaps to the effect, on him, of his radio talks, and also perhaps to the presence of the 'fan,' or listener, in the room"); but he then quickly qualifies this explanation by admitting that "possibly it was something else entirely" (p. 77). Like the children in "Miss Mandible," Bloomsbury's response mechanism has been deadened by a media bombardment that destroys any possibility of spontaneity. When his wife enters a bedroom with a man and locks herself inside, Bloomsbury can only run for his copy of "IdealMarriage by Th.H. Van De Velde, M.D." in order "to determine whether this situation was treated therein" (p. 78). Even when Bloomsbury finally decides to ravish the seductive "fan," his actions-and Barthelme's description of them-are ludicrously self-conscious: "With a single stride, such as he had often seen practiced in the films, Bloomsbury was 'at her side"' (p. 79). When the story concludes, Bloomsbury has again lost his love, and even his radio station power has been disconnected. But Barthelme does not allow our natural feelings of sadness and empathy to fully emerge here; rather than provide the usual fictional illusion that we are close to the situation via language, he
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distances us by reminding us that his own powers of description are already infected with triteness: He then resumed broadcasting,with perhaps a tremor but no slackeningin his resolve not to flog, as the expression runs, a dead horse. However, the electric company, which had not been paid from the first to the last, refused at length to supply further current for the radio, in consequence of which the broadcasts, both words and music, ceased. That was the end of this period in Bloomsbury's, as they say, life. (p. 81) In the other Bloomsbury story the dramatic situation is once again supplied by a broken marriage: Bloomsbury and his two insensitive friends, Huber and Whittle, are riding back from a ceremony in which Bloomsbury's ex-wife, Martha, flew away in an airplane with another man. As the story progresses, Huber and Whittle begin to demand to know more and more about the circumstances surrounding the breakup, especially the emotional details. When Bloomsbury refuses to tell them, they beat him on the head with a bottle and a tire iron until they get what they want. By now we should be able to recognize Bloomsbury's situation here as being almost archetypal in Barthelme's work: abandoned by his wife and betrayed by language, he is surrounded by imperceptive brutes who are themselves able to experience "feeling" only voyeuristically. Partially as an escape, Bloomsbury seems to have created a fantasy world populated by a lusty Irishwoman, Pelly, whose musical voice he listens to as a passionate counterpoint to his current desperate circumstances. Instead of a cold, sexually unresponsive wife, whom he imagines replying to his invitation to go to bed with, "Hump off blatherer I've no yet read me Mallarm . . . I've dreadful bored wit' yer silly old tool" (p. 57), Bloomsbury's Pelly accepts his offers of love and sex gratefully, with constant reassurances of his virility (she even refers to him as "yer mightiness"). When Whittle and Huber demand from Bloomsbury "the feeling" of what it is like to be separated from his wife, the metafictional impulses of the story directly emerge. Bloomsbury resembles many recent philosophers and writers in being acutely aware of the limited ability of language to accurately depict such things as feelings or emotions, and he is therefore reluctant to provide for his greedy listeners descriptions of things of which language cannot speak. Instead, he paraphrases Wittgenstein by suggesting that he can discuss "the meaning" of what has happened to him "but not the feeling" (p. 62). Huber and Whittle, anxious for fictional enchantments which can bring zest to their own empty, inane lives, grow increasingly irritated at Bloomsbury's refusal to give them the story they want. "Emotion!" complains Whittle, "when was the last time we had any?" Huber's response-"the war"-gives a clear indication of the vacuum that Barthelme posits as currently lying at the center of most peoples' emotional lives. Using some American ingenuity, Whittle offers Bloomsbury "a hundred dollars for the feeling." When Huber complains that Bloomsbury has just been using them, Barthelme carefully places his own adverbial qualifier in quotation marks--"Huber said 'bitterly'"-to emphasize the difficulty he, the author, is having in fixing significant emotions with word
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tags. The story ends with a frightening juxtaposition: Bloomsbury recalls that once in a movie he felt comforted by Tuesday Weld turning to him and saying, "You are a good man. You are good, good, good" (p. 63). These remarks caused him to leave the theater happily, "gratification singing in his heart." This memory, which is really only another prop created by our media to produce the illusion of feeling, does not protect Bloomsbury in his current plight, for Huber and Whittle are determined to obtain from him the substitute emotions that they feel it is the duty of art to provide. The callous violence which they use to extract from Bloomsbury the type of story they wish to hear serves as a shocking reminder of how voracious is the public's appetite for art which will satisfy their desires: And that memory [of Tuesday Weld] memorableas it was did not prevent the friends of the family from stopping the car under a tree, and beating Bloomsbury in the face first with the brandybottle, then with the tire iron, until at length the hidden feeling emerged, in the form of salt from his eyes and black blood from his ears, and from his mouth, all sorts of words. (p. 63) As this discussion hopes to have shown, even in these early stories in Come Back, Dr. Caligari we can find most of the important aspects of Barthelme's later work already fully evident: his examination of the themes of alienation and sexual frustration, his pervasive metafictional tendencies, and his related critique of sign-systems in general and of language in particular. Convinced that language no longer communicates effectively, that words have lost their power to move or amuse us, and that telling traditional stories is a dead end or a cop-out, Barthelme uses his art to explore the status of contemporary fiction and language in much the same fashion as various other recent metafictionists. If there is a sense of optimism in his work, it derives not from the familiar modernist belief that art offers the possibility of escape from the disorders of contemporary society or that art can change existing conditions in the world. Barthelme overtly mocks these beliefs, along with most other modern credos. Instead, Barthelme posits a less lofty function for art with his suggestion that it is valuable simply because it gives man a chance to create a space in which the deadening effects of ordinary living can be momentarily defied. San Diego State University
NOTES 1. In this regard, think of works such as Nabokov's Pale Fire, Coover's The Origin of theBrunists and The Universal Baseball Association,Pynchon's V. and The Cryingof Lot 49, Barth's Chimera(and his earlier End of the Road), Vonnegut's SlaughterhouseFive, Ronald Sukenick's Up, Raymond Federman's Double or Nothing and Take It or Leave It, and William Gass' "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country." 2. Ronald Sukenick, "The Death of the Novel," The Death of the Novel and OtherStories (New York: The Dial Press, 1969), p. 41.
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3. Alan Wilde, "Barthelme Unfair to Kierkegaard: Some Thoughts on Modern and Postmodern Irony, boundary2, 5 (Fall 1976), 51. 4. Donald Barthelme, Come Back, Dr. Caligari (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1964), p. 177. Other editions of Barthelme's works to be cited in this essay will include: Sadness (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972) and City Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970). For the sake of convenience these latter two works will be designated within the text by the abbreviations S and CL, respectively. 5. Tony Tanner in his study, City of Words(New York: Harper and Row, 1971), suggests that these opening words imply a "strong feeling of being distinctly not at home in the trash age" (p. 404). He also adds that "although the idea is mocked, like every other idea offered as idea in Barthelme, this note of yearning for an unknown somewhere else sounds throughout his work" (p. 404). Alan Wilde suggests, however, that Barthelme is "less seriously attracted by an escape into the realm of total otherness than by the temptation to find withinthe ordinary possibilities of a more dynamic response," P. 59. 6. Tanner, p. 403. 7. Betty Flowers uses this doctor-patient analogy as the starting point for her discussion of Snow White in "Barthelme's Snow White: The Reader-Patient Relationship," Critique, 16 (1975), 33-43. 8. Wilde discusses this attitude of acceptance in further detail, pp. 48-50. 9. In his translated works, BetrayedBy Rita Hayworth,HeartbreakTango, and The Buenos Aires Affair. 10. Henry Mackie, in "Marie, Marie, Hold on Tight," is another Barthelme character who understands the way we are deceived in our role as ordinary citizens. In speaking of the way that most people are unable to stand back and look at their situation for what it is, he says, "It's a paradigmatic situation exemplifying the distance between the potential knowers holding a commonsense view of the world and what is to be known, which escapes them as they pursue their mundane existences" (pp. 119-120). 11. These "commercial messages" seem remarkably similar to the balloon which the narrator of "The Balloon" sends aloft as "a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure, having to do with the unease I felt at your absence, and with sexual deprivation," UnspeakablePractices, Unnatural Acts (1968; rpt. New York: Bantam, 1969), p. 21. I strongly suspect that many of Barthelme's stories may be obscure, often painful "messages" of this private sort which the reader can never hope to decipher. 12. The motif of disguise appears throughout Dr. Caligari (in addition to "Florence Green" and "The Big Broadcast of 1938," it also figures prominently in "Hiding Man"), possibly to reinforce the basic "uncertainty principle" that Barthelme wishes to develop.
