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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.