The possibility of strangeness

SIXTY STORIES

By Donald Barthelme

Penguin Classics, 452 pages

Available at Powerbooks

Our reputation for excellence is unexcelled, in every part of the world. And will be maintained until the destruction of our art by some other art which is just as good but which, I am happy to say, has not yet been invented. — Donald Barthelme, “Our Work and Why We Do It”

Before there was Mc-Sweeney’s, there was Donald Barthelme. Before there was Dave Eggars and his enterprise of marginalia and self-conscious graphic design, there was fictionist Barthelme and his hand-drawn illustrations, stencils and intricate layouts decorating his stories. And before Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace with their lengthy footnotes, there was Barthelme appending citations to his own imaginative curlicues.

You’ve probably read Barthelme, in a certain sense, if you’ve read the above writers — not to mention Jonathan Safran Foer, Mark Leyner, George Saunders and others. Barthelme’s style (best revealed in short bursts in the seminal collection Sixty Stories, which I was delighted to find at Powerbooks) has filtered down into the DNA of Gen X and beyond, leaving an unmistakable trace — an essence, if you will.

Few writers of the 20th century captured the strangeness of life — the rich possibility of its strangeness — like Barthelme. Sixty Stories opens with selections from 1964’s Come Back, Dr. Caligari, and you know from the first absurdist riff (“Margins”) that you’re dealing with an uncommon mind. In it, a white man encounters a black man wearing a sandwich board with a plea for money outside a men’s clothing store; he begins critiquing the sandwich board’s handwriting, its psychological subtext; questions of race relations are explored, and the story ends in a seemingly inevitable burst of violence. (“When Carl returned from the store the two men slapped each other sharply in the face with the back of the hand — that beautiful part of the hand where the knuckles grow.”)

Conjuring satire from the fabric of mid-‘60s Pop America was Barthelme’s early skill, but he really took the reins of metafiction in hand by 1968’s Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts. In it, Barthelme lampoons the nuclear arms race, the American presidency, inner city violence, Vietnam — all in an opaque language that is as hilarious as it is heartbreaking.

The short story “Game” places two men in a nuclear silo, each with a hand poised to press the button, each armed with a .45-caliber pistol in case the other goes mad. One of them plays with a set of jacks and a rubber ball, passing the time. With shades of both Dr. Strangelove and Waiting for Godot, the tense relationship is made poignant by the narrator’s insistence that he is “not well”; by the end the two men are taking turns rocking each other to sleep, singing German lullabies.

In “Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning,” Barthelme weaves the younger Kennedy’s wonky policy statements in between snippets of people’s national fixation on the handsome politician. (Dreaming about the Kennedys was apparently a common pastime in ‘60s America; Mia Farrow did it in Rosemary’s Baby, and Barthelme’s narrator does so at the end of the story, tossing the young Kennedy a lifeline at sea in his dream and averting tragedy; the story came out a few months before RFK was assassinated.)

In “The Balloon,” a vast air-filled mass expands to cover 45 blocks of Downtown Manhattan. Adults fear it, critics probe its bizarre surface, kids play upon it, but only the first-person narrator claims it as his own. The story is thought to be Barthelme’s commentary on his own fiction and its critical reception: playful, sometimes light as a feather, yet suggesting hidden depths.

Barthelme grew up in Texas, the son of a staunchly Modernist architect (think Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead), and his fiction reflects the contradictions between erudition and simple life, order and anarchy. He mimicked common, blue-collar language — the speech of blues clubs and back porches — as easily as he rendered business speak and banal political speech, using the everydayness of modern language to make us question the everydayness of everything. But his novel The Dead Father (from which the excerpt, “A Manual for Sons,” comes) glows with anger at fathers in general, the trouble they can leave in their wake.

What Barthelme seemed to grasp was the implicit freedom contained in James Joyce’s work; the grim absurdity behind the clenched smile in Samuel Beckett’s writing; the stark horror of “The Wasteland”’s humor. Each Barthelme story conjured a new set of rules, rules outlined only once — in the telling of the story. In “Paraguay,” a travel guide is given to an imaginary country — “not the Paraguay that exists on maps,” but a place of microminiaturization, vast spaces between people, forbidden walls and red fields of snow. (“What is the point of this red snow?” “The intention of the red snow, the reason it is isolated behind the wall, yet not forbidden, is its soft glow — as if it were lighted from beneath.” “But what does it do?” “Like any other snow, it invites contemplation and walking about in.”) Barthelme seemed to deflect too much analysis, much as the Wizard of Oz bids us “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

In “See the Moon?” (from Unspeakable Acts…), a man sits on his porch, contemplating the hostile intentions of the lunar surface. (“See the moon? It hates us.”) But beneath the absurdity, the frivolity, is a story of an estranged man, divorced, with a new wife and a new son, to whom the narrator dispenses random scraps of advice. Some Barthelme stories take the form of Q&A dialogue (see: David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men); others footnote musical selections as counterpoint to the events in the story (see: Rick Moody’s The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven and Demonology). “The Glass Mountain” comes to us as a series of numbered sentences — 100 in total — telling of a man’s ascent of the titular peak, which stands “at the corner of Thirteenth Street and Eighth Avenue.”

The seemingly fragmentary outbursts in Barthelme are not meant to confound or irritate; if anything, they point to a playful nature, the freedom that lies in invention. The play is the thing, Barthelme seemed to say. (Again, we can look to McSweeney’s, with its online “Short Imaginary Monologues,” its “Clock Without A Face Treasure Hunt,” its quirky design sense, contests and culture of games.)

Unlike his more “serious” metafictionist contemporaries (a term he hated, preferring “postmodernist,” which sounded to him “the least ugly, most descriptive”), Barthelme eschewed too much ironical distance in his writing. He worked his magic without resorting to the putdown, the tongue-in-cheek tone that would suggest he — we — are above all the strangeness afoot. Like the poetry of e.e. cummings or Wallace Stevens, the best of Barthelme suggests to us how peculiar this condition of life really is, how shocking, how wonderful. Dave Eggars and today’s generation of writers were, no doubt, paying attention, taking notes.