Barthelme analysis
“My nourishment is refined from the ongoing circus of the
mind in motion. Give me the odd linguistic trip, stutter and fall, and I will
be content”
- Donald Barthelme (McCaffery 99).
Don B was concerned with art, with
writing, with art-making, with making art-writing, with writing art, and a
multitude of various other iterations combining the words art and writing
together. He emerged at a time when post-modernist writing was becoming en
vogue and becoming defined. His quick humor and surrealist approach to
narrative quickly placed him in a sixties group of writers that included Kurt
Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, John Hawkes, and William Gass (Holland). This group
would eventually be included in the post-modern cannon of Western literature
(as well as Barthelme himself). Analyzing Barthelme’s essay “Not-Knowing,” can give
one insight into the topsy-turvy world of chaos that impacted post-modern
writing, and at least, shed some light on his interpretation of style and
purpose where writing and art-making were concerned. Don B was concerned with
discovering something new within the drift and disarray of modern lives.
Barthelme was raised with a
reverence for art via his modernist architect father and jazz loving mother.
His work shows a mirthful arrangement towards experimentation and incorporation
of visuals because of this background. Barthelme was concerned with
experimental forms, incorporating illustrations, graphics, collages made of
pictures cut from 19th-century magazines, etc., into his work (McKie). This
experimentation became a hallmark of his style. Though this is not to confuse
his work with a madcap anarchy. He also had a love for the texture and
application of language. At the level of the sentence, there is a sureness of
touch, a precision and elegance, a care for grammar, sense, effect and tone
that make him, in particular, an extraordinary fluent parodist. He is also very
funny (McKie). Here, the connection between joy and humor combines with the
artisanal affectation for craft, producing a writer both flamboyant in his
experimentalism and an effective communicator.
Beyond his penchant for
experimentalism, Don B was also concerned with the functionality of the modern
world. Barthelme's story is thus more accurately understood as an ingrained
dissatisfaction with the world and with the ability of literature to find forms
with which to understand and describe it (McKie). The modernist world –
yielding the emerging literature of the post-modern era – seemed to be
fragmenting. Barthelme was concerned with the response to this. This
concentration became paramount in his fiction: the attractions and frustrations
offered by ordinary modern life (McCaffery 101). The ordinary life of a modern
person attracted Barthelme as well; it seemed a good fit for his experimenting
forms. Barthelme's metafictional concerns are intimately related to his other
thematic interests: the difficulties of expressing a total vision of oneself in
a fragmenting universe, the failure of most of our social and linguistic
systems, the difficulties of making contact or sustaining relationships with
other (McCaffery 100). This then becomes a central concern for Barthelme,
dealing with the modern world via language and writing, how the breakdown of
convention spurs a new creation.
Belonging to the post-modern
cannon, in his essay, Barthelme tries to defend p.m. against critics. "The
criticisms run roughly as follows: that this kind of writing has turned its
back on the world, is in some sense not about the world, but about its own
processes, that it is masturbatory, certainly chilly, that it excludes readers
by design, speaks at all, but instead, like Frost's Secret, sits in the center
of a ring and Knows" (Barthelme 15). But if post-modernism, as per
Barthelme’s take on it, is in fact concerned with the world, then these
accusations the author brings up arise in reaction to a diffracting reality.
The constraint the modern world places on an author in fact became a hallmark
of Barthelme’s style, something he championed. He explains, "Style is not
much a matter of choice. ...Rather it is both a response to constraint and a
seizing of opportunity. Very often a constraint is an opportunity"
(Barthelme 22). If the modern world offered much constraint via its
defragmentation, then Barthelme’s essay, “Not-Knowing,” helps provide the
roadmap towards this post-modern ideal.
Barthelme begins his essay with an indelible
quote: - “It’s appropriate to pause and say that the writer is one who,
embarking upon a task, does not know what to do" (Barthelme 11). Barthelme
is describing the onset of creativity, where an idea begins to form. To explain
himself further, he states, "The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what
permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing,
without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions,
there would be no invention" (Barthelme 12). Here, Barthelme begins to
make the connection between writing and art. It is the very generation of idea,
in this post-modern and scattered reality, that affords one an opportunity to
make art. Again, in the aforementioned constraint (of knowing), Barthelme sees
an opportunity. This opportunity is the new ability of a post-modernist to get
at something new itself: "Art is not difficult because it wishes to be
difficult, but because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to
be, in his work, simple, honest, and straightforward, these virtues are no
longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, and
straightforward, nothing much happens: he speaks the speakable, whereas what we
are looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken" (Barthelme
15). This quote references his belief that the modern world of ordinary lives
has broken down, that there is a new understanding somewhere, and in that
not-knowing, a writer/artist can forge ahead and discover new terrain.
To give an example to his point, Barthelme
uses artist Robert Rauschenberg’s art piece “Monogram,” – a statue of a goat
with a tire around its abdomen. In the essay, Don B remarks: to see both goat
and tire as "unavoidable" choices, in the context of art-making, is
to illuminate just how strange the combinatorial process can be"
(Barthelme 19). Here, Barthelme brings up an idea at the heart of his
not-knowing argument: the combinatorial process. Rauschenberg combines a goat
with a tire and calls it art; Barthelme defends this. He asks of the goat with
the tire, "Am I a masterpiece or simply a pile of junk? ...What precisely
is it in the coming together of goat and tire that is magical? It's not the
surprise of seeing the goat attired, although that's part of it. One might say,
for example, that the tire contests
the goat, contradicts the goat, as a
mode of being, even that the tire reproaches
the goat, in some sense. ...What is magical about the object is that it at once
invites and resists interpretation. Its artistic worth is measurable by the degree
to which it remains, after interpretation, vital - no interpretation or
cardiopulmonary push-pull can exhaust or empty it" (Barthelme 19-20).
This, then, helps the reader understand Barthelme’s intentions. Coupled with
observations on Barthelme’s writing style and choices, the example of
Rauschenberg conveys that this combination of two elements producing a new one
is the reason and perhaps genesis behind art, and for a writer, behind pushing
an idea forward.
What this ultimately means comes
back to a reflection on the world and what a writer/artist’s purpose is in that
realm. Barthelme underlines the argument of his essay by stating, "The
combinatorial agility of words, the exponential generation of meaning once
they're allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself,
makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven't yet encountered"
(Barthelme 21). By combining and exploring – in other words, by experimenting within
the new world of the post-modern – more reality is exposed. It is because of
the breakdown of the modern world that this is achievable. "The prior
history of words is one of the aspects of language the world uses to smuggle
itself into the work. If words can be contaminated by the world, they can also
carry with them into the work trace elements of world which can be used in a positive
sense. We must allow ourselves the advantages of our disadvantages"
(Barthelme 22). Again, Barthelme discusses how a constraint – the prior history
of words – can become an advantage – embellishing traces of the world/reality
into one’s own writing creation by the sheer usage of words. Truly, the
disadvantage becomes an advantage. Barthelme goes on and expands on this point:
"I suggest that art is always a mediation upon external reality rather
than a representation of external reality or a jackleg attempt to
"be" external reality" (Barthelme 23). Here, he proclaims an
important fact of post-modernism: it is not merely just a medium wherein
reality is represented, it is a medium wherein reality – and new reality – is forged.
The main point behind this is summed up by Barthelme at the end of his essay: "The
aim of meditating about the world is finally to change the world"
(Barthelme 24). Change the world via art, via finding new forms, via writing
these new forms, via not-knowing.
Put altogether then, one can see
how Barthelme’s ideas came about in the midst of the founding of the
post-modern cannon. He had a distrust for the modern world, for its
capabilities to get to the heart of matters. No wonder, then, he titled his
essay about art-making and writing “Not-Knowing.” Truly, Barthelme believes
that journeying into a creative task helps one understand the world better. The
world, as it stands in his eyes, is incapable of doing this itself. One must
think about the world, try to ruminate upon it through new ways (experimental forms,
etc.), before one can get to a better definition of everything. “Not-Knowing”
is another way of finding out.
Works Cited
Barthelme, Donald. Not-Knowing:
The Essay and Interviews. Ed. Kim Herzinger. Counterpoint,
Berkeley, CA, 1997.
McCaffery, Larry. The
Metafictional Muse: The works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and
William
H. Cass. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1982.
McKie, Andrew. "Postmodern fogey: hiding man: a
biography of Donald Barthelme by Tracy
Daugherty
maintaining traditionalist ties can be the ultimate countercultural act." The
American
Conservative 8.15 (2009): 33+. Academic
OneFile. Web. 9 Apr. 2012.
