'weeping map intense activity din': Reading Donald Barthelme

Abstract

A tin frying pan; a hollow-core door in birch veneer on black wrought-iron legs; a woven straw wastebasket; a Yugoslavian carved flute, wood, dark brown—items to be found among the components of a barricade in Donald Barthelme's story 'The Indian Uprising.' The specificity of his catalogue discloses rich diversity concealed by the stark, utilitarian designation, 'barricade,' in accordance with Barthelme's understanding of the role of art as enrichment and complication of our perception of the world and of our relation to it. A movement away from generality towards particularity is characteristic of his varied and unpredictable fiction, and direction of our attention to the particular often involves, necessarily, subversion of the reductive artifice of linguistic construction by means of which we order the barrage of experiential data generated in the culture of mass production and mass media. His work counters the radical simplifications of our age, and this entails disruption of the contours of 'realist' fiction and its assumption that language has transparency and innocence. Through the interstices of his literary architecture (which is purposefully ramshackle), we may glimpse the writer in action, selecting materials, locating that quirky emphasis upon which the humour and trenchant irony of his fiction largely depend. The composition of Barthelme's stories is undisguisedly an assemblage in print of words and, on occasion, of pictorial images, forming an addition to the world of things. It does not constitute a frame through which to view the processes of living, nor does it furnish a tool for the analytic detection of meaning, but the perceptibility of its mode of construction stimulates an illuminating reflexivity and may assist in our experience of the specific. It conforms to Victor Shklovsky's dictum that 'Art converts the particularity of things into perceptible form.'