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| Barthelme, drawing by David Levine |
"In a way, Barthelme’s work was all inner life, partially concealed, partially displayed. His stories are a registration of a certain kind of churning mind, cerebral fragments stitched together in the bricolage fashion of beatnik poetry. The muzzled cool, the giddy play, the tossed salad of high and low: everything from cartoon characters to opera gets referenced in a graffitti-like chain of sentences. Conventional narrative ideas of motivation and characterization generally are dispensed with. Language is seen as having its own random and self-generating vital life, a subject he takes on explicitly in the story “Sentence,” which is one long never-ending sentence, full of self-interruptions and searching detours and not quite dead ends (like human DNA itself, with its inert, junk viruses), concluding with the words “a structure to be treasured for its weakness as opposed to the strength of stones.”
If interested, you can read "Sentence," an amazing, crazy text, here.
Meanwhile, to inspire comments, I'm going to lean into something Johnathan Letham says in his introduction to Barthelme in 3x33, Lethem's idea of drifting into "silliness, gloom, parody, restlessness, self-mocking." Without referring to categories mentioned in the introduction or elsewhere (postmodern, minimalist, metafiction, or, as Moore says in her book review, fabulist), please comment on the stories you've read. What do you think about drifting and these results?
Reading these stories felt like diving into someone's train of thought as they were trying to remember a story that they heard someone tell them, then making up some of the details and forgetting the rest. That's not a bad thing, as I found is stories to be highly enjoyable. The concept of drifting is an interesting one, as it sounds like the abandonment of one style of writing in favor of another right in the middle of a piece. Or perhaps its just the idea of not adhering to a simple story structure in order to tell the whole story. Stories like The School and Robert Kennedy do feel like they are drifting. A City of Churches mostly just goes straight into the silliness without much drifting involved, but can still fit into the Barthelme mold.
ReplyDeleteIn Barthleme's stories, the first thing I noticed, specifically in A City of Churches, was the quickness of dialogue. While the rhythm of the dialogue suggests a familiarity of the conversations that happen around us every day, the content of the dialogue itself, revolving almost entirely around churches, seems foreign and dystopian. This feeling came through to me specifically in the line, "'We are like other towns, except that we are perfect'" (183). The man claims her as the towns car rental girl, without allowance for discussion. To me, this felt like a parody of the thought process that many Christians claim to follow. Instead of being open-minded and caring, Mr. Phillips says that there's nothing wrong with churches, and believes that he has the capacity to change Cecelia - she's not religious yet, but will be one day. This is Mr. Phillips version of open-mindedness: he is so involved in his beliefs that if someone disagrees with him, he believes it is his duty to change their mind.
ReplyDeleteThis rhythm of dialogue comes through in The School and Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning as well. In The School, the language, without being in quotations, is told like a colloquial story. This moves the story more into summary, yet we still get the feeling of drifting from lines like "But the lesson plan called for tropical-fish input at that point, there was nothing we could do, it happens every year, you just have to hurry past it" (184). This drifting in summary with dark commentary on death and how we discuss death, particularly in school, is something that readers can relate to. We've all had experiences with loving animals, people, things, and losing them, but what Barthelme does is widdles the feeling of it down into a concise, blunt, dark story discussing how we deal with death, and how we move on. When we're young, death seems to drift right by, it's not openly discussed. And when it is, it's glossed over by another new shiny thing for us to take hold of.
In Barthelme's stories, he does tend to drift around a lot. However, I don't feel 'A City of Churches' drifts like 'The School' and 'Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning'. I thought 'A City of Churches' started out with silliness, but later filled with gloom. This short story started to feel like a parody of how some religions are viewed, especially when Mr. Phillips told Cecelia she's not allowed to leave. Instead of being okay with Cecelia's decision, Mr. Phillips constantly tried to change her mind about working as a car-rental girl. I thought the idea of Christianity becoming like Pop Culture was interesting in this piece.
ReplyDeleteAs for 'The School' and 'Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning', I thought these short stories definitely drifted. In "The School', I thought Barthelme's use of dialogue made the story feel anxious, like the narrator was in trouble. But the next page drifts into a lot of focus around death with dialogue not having quotations, which feels summarized. In 'Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning', I thought the drift had more of a journalistic touch to it. I thought these drifts fit into each story with a train of thought flow.
Donald Barthelme's stories read so quick but they leave such a lasting impression, and it's hard to explain. Before I even have the chance to say, "what in the world am I reading???," it ends. But then I'm left not with questions, but with answers. And that's an incredibly unique reading experience. As others have said, "A City of Churches" stayed pretty well within a lane, but "The School" and "Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning" were falling asleep at the wheel. "The School" is my favorite example out of the two. It starts by talking about trees that die. Then, it talks about snakes that die. Then, it talks about tropical fish that died, then a puppy that died. It's all told in a very conversational, humorous way. Then it talks about people who die, and it gets deep and sad. And then, it goes into the students trying to get the narrator and the teaching assistant to make love in front of the class, then they almost do, and a gerbil walks in and then the children cheer and it ends. It's almost told the way I tell stories to people: all over the place and filled with distractions. And yet, it still always somehow remained about death. I guess not so much the end... I don't quite know what to make of the end. I also don't know what to make of "Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning." That story is expert sudoku of my brain.
ReplyDeleteThe first thing I understood about reading Donald Barthelme's stories was that I could not begin to understand Donald Barthelme's pieces until I read them several times. "A City of Churches" completely embraces the strange town and the implications thereof, while still making a statement about conformity and one's place in the world (at least, the way I read it was). "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning" was like a weird collage of information, like Barthelme was researching the man to find out everything he could about him and still never came to an answer. And I STILL am just utterly baffled (in a surprisingly good way) about "The School."
ReplyDeleteI admit I don't actually agree with the idea that Barthelme "drifts" into any type of genre or mood. Rather, he takes hold of a concept, character, or idea and runs off the pages with them without hesitation. A person can be sad, happy, sexual, angry, confused, and his pieces embody that totality. He accepts the multiplicity of living beings, and lets his stories reject more traditional forms and methods to reflect it.
I haven't read anything like Donald Barthelme's stories before and my initial thought after reading them was, soooo what now? But after more reading and a closer look I was able to see clearer. I agree with Sage that it feels as though I am reading a person's train of thought. Barthelme's technique and word usage continues to surprise in every sentence. In City of Churches, I enjoyed this the most probably because it made the most sense to me. I read it as a place of strict conformity and Cecelia is there to fuck it all up, either for good or for bad. "The School" just felt whack to me. "Robert Kennedy..." was an interesting form to use multiple short-short-short-shorts to tell a person's story. I felt as though, similar to Savanna, that it was an attempted collection to best understand Kennedy but just like the paragraph "A Friend Comments: K's Aloneness" where Kennedy continues to surprise, no matter how many slices of life we get, they will continue to surprise us about who he is.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things that was most surprising about Donald Barthelme's work was how fragmented it was. This leans into Lethem's comment about Barthelme's work being so many different things. The structure of his stories, how it's all these fragments getting woven together, allows one fragment to be gloomy, one to be humorous, one to be self-referential. This fragmentation is not very present in 'A City of Churches' but even so, there's the listing of the various different churches and the different rooms that Cecilia sees that lends itself to that fragmentary nature. "The School" by contrast is fragmented in that the majority of it is a recollection of events, the various people and animals and plants who have died in places surrounding the school, and then that strange transition to Helen and the teacher from a discussion of death to making love, all of these fragments give us this story about the cursed school and the children inhabiting it and Barthelme's pondering of the nature of death and "the mundanity of the everyday" transcending life and death. 'Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning' is so clearly fragmented, with the various scraps of scenes where K. is interacting with others, and how those fragments build a character out of other people's impressions of K. It's much like how Barthelme's work is itself, the inspiration for many boxes that you warned us to avoid discussing in the prompt, and how it defines them, but isn't them because each fragment has scrapes of one or another.
ReplyDeleteI think the drifting is INCREDIBLE. I love this style of writing, the way it belongs only to itself. It doesn't care about interpretations or making sense or even being logical at all. It doesn't care about form or function or ending. All that it does is exist, regardless of how readers decide to decipher it for themselves, and it also perhaps resists this deciphering in a very unique way that I'm incredibly jealous of and now want to emanate. I wasn't as big a fan of the Kennedy story, but I loved the first two. I loved how A City of Churches made sense, narratively, and The School absolutely did not. This style of writing is marvelous, I'm in love with it, I can't praise it enough.
ReplyDeleteDavid Barthelme honestly is so great. There is so much experimenting and meaning all within such small stories. In relation to his drifting, like Lethem said, is very postmodern in his writing. Barthelme experiments with mostly how we tell a story and from where and whom we get the story from. "A City of Churches" experiments with the idea of legends and local history. We hear the history of this town through the words of Mr. Phillips, a realtor. The story is not about Mr. Phillips or Cecelia, it is about the history of the town, but more importantly, the history of Christianity. The City is more like our world and the people, Christians and their denominations. "The School" is a story told in the style of a monologue/ interview like the play "Fire in the Mirror." We are told the story of this guys experience at a school very passively. It is not as if he is telling the story to us the reader and so we need to know every minute detail; instead our main character is talking to someone who is inscribing this interview. This one is by far my favorite. The Robert Kennedy flash fiction pieces were probably the most confusing because we never truly get the story. The story itself is not about Robert Kennedy; it is about how we as the public perceive public figures. These flash fiction pieces show the life of Robert Kennedy through an almost TMZ or Reality TV style of narration in which our opinions are completely influenced by those outlets. The real story and the real Kennedy lies in the last flash piece, "K. Saved from Drowning." We see his character through a non-biased eye, one that paints him as a human, not a celebrity or immortal being.
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