Introduction
The early reviews of Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father
(1975), the author's second novel featuring a dead father's colossal body
hauled across an unspecified landscape by his twenty-odd children towards
his grave, typically present the way in which the novel has been acclaimed
by some as a representative of a new trend of fiction informed with a totally
new sensibility, while at the same time they show how this same novel has
been slighted by others as another fashionably innovative recycle of the
same old avant-gardism. On the one hand, Michael Mason, a critic representative
of the latter group, focusing on the novel's experimentalism, says that
Barthelme's career makes him doubt whether "experimental fiction work[s]
as a literary category," that compared to the long "tradition
of unorthodox fiction in which paternity is a central interest," a
tradition made up of such masterpieces as Tristram Shandy, Ulysses,
and Molloy, it cannot be said that The Dead Father is "advancing
experimental fiction one jot . . ." (721). Another critic in line with
criticizing Barthelme's experimentalism is Maureen Howard, who writes: "This
cold short narrative is written at an extreme distance from life, out of
literary models and the author's idea of a defunct avant-garde . . ."
(408).
On the other hand, Richard Todd, one of the former group of critics
which welcomes this controversial novel, counts its symbolism worthy of
close examination. "Actually, The Dead Father becomes," he writes
in his Atlantic Monthly review, "a symbol of some plasticity.
He is God first of all. God as a father. And father as God. After all he's
what you will: The Novel, Western Culture, Truth, Duty, Honor, Country."
Not only can he be understood as "the order that we seek" but
also as "the control we seek to escape," for after all he is,
as Todd concludes, a "symbol with multiple possibilities" (45).
The "critical" history of The Dead Father, not that
of its "reviews," is a history of critical sincerity, a sincerity
which is equal to trying not to slight a particular literary work just because
it seems only a fashionable remake of the same old avant-gardism, on the
basis of literary linear progress which unexceptionally dismisses as worthless
a work of fiction which appears to be a mere repetition, a "recycle,"
of its great modernist ancestors, without ever rethinking why this particular
novel should be this way at this particular moment of literary history,
why this novel should seem something already read. One of the ways of critically
approaching the novel is to concentrate on its central theme, the relationship
between fathers and sons. Richard Walsh, on this line, proposes in Novel
Arguments that in discussing the novel the "emphasis . . . [remain]
upon essentially filial subjectivity" (46). "It is not allegorical
parallelism," he argues, "that should be the centre of critical
attention, then, but the framework upon which the novel itself constructs
its argument, the question of fatherhood" (47). This highlighting of
the novel's thematic framework results from his ambition to correct its
critical misrepresentation which has long considered that its aesthetic
achievement lies exclusively in its formal innovation. His notion of "argument"
of a novel, which may be defined as "the formal articulation of
its substance, the substance articulated in its form" (x), attempts
to counterbalance this misrepresentation, to show that the substance and
the form of a novel are its complementary aspects and therefore inseparable,
and to demonstrate that what he calls "innovative fictions" are
not autonomous but involved in the world, that their chief merit is their
"capacity to extend the possibilities of fictional engagement beyond
mimesis" (2). The emphasis on father-son relationship as the novel's
thematic framework, which contrasts with Todd's way of taking the Dead Father
as a symbol or allegory of some plasticity, is also what Régis Durand
draws on in his discussion on the way in which The Dead Father belongs
to a new tradition of fiction, is different from its modernist antecedents
in its treatment of the problem of fatherhood. What is different is that
A Manual for Sons, a book-within-the-book embedded within Barthelme's
text proper, "makes for an acceptance of, a compromise with, the unshakeable
facts of fatherhood. Instead of the old Oedipal strategies of conflict or
parricide, it suggests avoidance, playing down ('turning down') the whole
question. . . ." Durand sees in The Dead Father the "old
guilty conscience of tradition up to modernism" make room for a "postmodernist
fantasy of reconciliation," a transition which leads him to conclude
that "Barthelme's [stories] may be the first of a new generation whose
stories owe little to the old subject, the old secrets" (163).
Lois Gordon, though her discussion, like the two critics just mentioned
above, also centers on the novel's thematic framework of fatherhood, finds
in The Dead Father a father-son relationship which is to be understood
in terms not so much of "reconciliation," as Durand concludes,
as of "ambivalence." "The son," says Gordon,
born out of his [the father's] body and struggling for autonomy,
mimes (or parodies) his father's words, actions, and morality. Yet in his
rebelliousness and need for freedom, also like the father, the son is ambivalent
in this most basic "relationship." The son is torn between rejecting
and relying upon the givens of his world (moral and linguistic). (163)
The ambivalence which the son feels toward the father is also what he feels
when he is confronted with "linguistic" realities, another "given,"
besides morality, of his world which is represented by the father; another
"basic relationship" which the son is bound to. For, as Gordon
points out, "[u]ltimately . . . human experience is a matter of linguistic
survival and identity . . ." (164), and in consequence what she conceives
of as one of Barthelme's most distinguished characteristics is his ability
to manipulate, to "dislocate," these binding realities, both moral
and linguistic (23). Robert Con Davis, in his metapsychological interpretation
of the novel, also underlines the importance of the relationship between
the father and language. "The father's authority" portrayed in
the novel, according to his Lacanian variation of this relationship, "is
not a social force . . . but a function within the structure of the mind
that can be depicted only symbolically." Thus he concludes that the
novel presents the Dead Father "simultaneously as a character in a
fiction and as a symbolic function" (192).
What Alan Wilde notices in Barthelme's work, in respect of how his
characters respond to these binding realities, whether paternal or linguistic,
is the fact that they tend not to "reconcile" themselves with
or to remain keeping an "ambivalent" feeling toward them but rather
to positively "assent" to them. "[I]f escape is unacceptable,"
he rhetorically asks himself, "and if acceptance . . . is not enough,
what then? The fact is that increasingly in Barthelme's work . . . acceptance
is modified by a more positive, more affirmative attitude of assent"
(117). This self-consciously positive "assent" to what one is
bound to inevitably partakes of irony, and this irony as an "autonomous
vision," not just as a "satiric technique," is what he sees
as one of the dominant attitudes to life of Barthelme's characters who hold
a vision of "life itself as inherently fractured and discordant"
(100-01). When a work of art which is situated within the real world and
is therefore involved in particular historical situations reflects this
ironical vision which Barthelme's characters retain, it inescapably underscores,
in consequence of being conscious of the circumstances it is embedded within,
its own "surface," the "horizons of the flesh" (120).
Charles Molesworth also stresses Barthelme's ironical attitude, yet with
a slight modification of point of emphasis. "Barthelme is saved from
drowning," he says, "in a world of fragments by his ironic manipulation
of them" (89). It is a recognition that life is fragmentary, like Wilde's
ironical vision of life as "inherently fractured and discordant,"
that Molesworth finds has been reached by Barthelme in his experience of
the fragmentary realities he is involved in, but Molesworth points out that
Barthelme's originality lies not in giving his assent to them but in ironically
manipulating them. Putting this in another way, to take Barthelme as an
"ironist," as Molesworth does, is to take him as an artist, whose
primary means of engaging with the world is, as he and many other critics
indicate, "collage," by means of which the "welter of cultural
bits is assembled, stuck together in the hope that it will be an 'itself'
. . ." (60).
Thomas M. Leitch, in line with Molesworth's insight into Barthelme
as an artist, also discusses that his work should be thought of as an "itself."
But this is not because his aesthetic technique of collage, as Molesworth
tries to show, permits him to create an autonomous work of art but because
his "fictive situations characteristically fail to imply any telos
in the sense of coherent plot development," so that "Barthelme's
stories are organized around situations (or suppositions or hypotheses)
that commit him to no particular line of narrative development, or indeed
to the very conception of development" (87). "A narrative situation,"
he continues, "normally implies not only a plot and rationale . . .
but myriad possibilities for spectacles, situations, or effects to be enjoyed
for their own sake, on their own terms, purely as display," and he
finally contends that a number of Barthelme's stories, which "instead
of developing its situation in terms of a given telos, [choose] to
display the situation as such," apply this formulation to make themselves
"an itself" (90). Because of this autotelic situational
display, "[e]ven The Dead Father is characterized by this sort
of disengagement with its presumed subjects" such as "love, death,
fatherhood," which are in Barthelme's novel "always ideas . .
. never experiences which engage emotional commitment" (85-86). What
Ronald Sukenick calls the "Bossa Nova," a name which he gives
to what he considers a "new tradition in fiction," of which Barthelme
in his opinion is a typical representative, has much in common with Leitch's
alinear narrative display which does not commit itself to any telos.
"Needless to say," he explains this new trend in fiction, "the
Bossa Nova has no plot, no story, no character, no chronological sequence,
no verisimilitude, no imitation, no allegory, no symbolism, no subject matter,
no 'meaning'" (43). Hence its status as an autonomous work of art:
"The Bossa Nova is non-representational -- it represents itself"
(44). The analysis of Maurice Couturier and Regis Durand reaches a similar
conclusion that Barthelme's work should be considered an "itself,"
and yet what they draw on in their argument is, unlike Leitch and Sukenick,
a relatively new insight into the status of language. "We must discipline
ourselves," they insist, "into considering literary works as basically
non-discursive" because "language has life of its own . . ."
(23). Barthelme's aesthetics, in its use of such techniques as collage and
pastiche which make for constructing a new literary object by assembling
bits of linguistic materials, testifies to this linguistic insight, and
Couturier and Durand demand that the problem of the author, of the self
of the artist himself, not even be raised, for a literary work is, after
all, essentially not to be considered, as they maintain, a discursive utterance.
Jerome Klinkowitz's argument further advances the notion of a literary
text as an autonomous object. A "manipulator of its [language's] hard
and fast materiality," Barthelme writes The Dead Father in such
a way that, because of his effective use of "'dash-dialogue' style,"
there is in the body of the text "no narration, no description, no
externally present action," that "the presence of the author is
not at all evident" (Donald Barthelme 9, Literary Disruptions
206). He further explains how Barthelme creates a non-discursive literary
objet d'art "by removing himself completely from the story,
leaving no trace of the author/creator," to "focus attention on
the linguistic and even musical properties of his fiction . . ." (Literary
Disruptions 211). As a result, the words themselves, especially when
they are in a sentence without an active verb "simply laid on the page
as a material surface inert for the reader's examination," become aesthetic
objects Barthelme offers to view (Donald Barthelme 88). He once attempted
to embrace all these varieties of Barthelme's aesthetic technique in a single
term, as Molesworth did, "collage":
[Barthelme's] collages of words, ideas, and graphic representations
are not intellectual comments or moral judgments, but rather are made
objects. . . . His aim has been to create a new work, which exists
as an object in space, not a discursive commentary on the linear elements
which form it. (Practice 107)
And yet he later replaces this artistic technique which is widely acknowledged
as Barthelme's principal literary method with another technique which Barthelme
adopted from the younger emerging artists of the 1960s, "silkscreen,"
which, rather than collage, as he concludes, is "the informing principle
of The Dead Father" (Donald Barthelme 8). Stanley Trachtenberg,
like Klinkowitz, also points out the "static quality of the narrative
style in The Dead Father" which is characterized by "the
use of noun phrases and nonfinite verbs" and by "the elimination
of predicates," in other words, by those "elliptical technique[s]"
which amount to "objectification without representation" (198).
As to Barthelme as an artist, Tony Tanner argues that Barthelme's literary
object should be considered not just a piece of collage but a "kind
of free-form artistic product, flexible, plastic and ephemeral . . ."
(405).
Jack Hicks also discusses Barthelme's work in terms of literary text
as a made object. His interest, however, lies not so much in relating Barthelme's
literary technique to artistic methodology, whether silkscreen or collage,
as in locating its uniqueness in a context which is specifically literary.
The reason why much of Barthelme's stories are considered an artifice, a
linguistic construct, is that they are, according to Hicks, a fine specimen
of what is broadly called "metafiction":
We should note that metafiction is utterly, perhaps maddeningly,
self-conscious, both in its awareness of a place in literary history and
its self-acknowledged presence as a linguistic structure, an artifice, an
object of words. . . . Metafiction is also self-conscious in that the text
itself is a consciousness aware of itself, insisting upon its own fictive
nature. (23)
Hicks counts The Dead Father as an "excellent instance of metafiction"
with its "prevalent self-consciousness of the form" of the novel,
a form which, for all its generally acknowledged status as something committed
almost exclusively to mimesis, Barthelme self-consciously resorts to in
order that he might be able to make use of "materials traditionally
associated with the unconscious -- myth and archetype in particular,"
that he might be able to employ "the father in his many mythic, psychological,
historical, and literary guises" and then to recycle him (74). Barbara
L. Roe translates these "techniques for contemporizing myth" into
"parody," a way of "engaging the reader's familiarity with
heroic tales and figures," and so lays stress on the significance of
Barthelme's "double vision of parody and myth" (xiv).
Larry McCaffery, one of the many critics who have given a theoretical
formulation of metafiction, also approaches Barthelme's work from the viewpoint
of that problematic concept. Here is his definition of metafiction:
For our purposes, I will be using the term "metafiction"
to refer to two related fictional forms: first, that type of fiction which
either directly examines its own construction as it proceeds or which comments
or speculates about the forms and language of previous fictions. . . . A
second, more general category refers to books which seek to examine how
all fictional systems operate, their methodology, the sources of
their appeal, and the dangers of their being dogmatized. (16-17)
What is no less important in his discussion of Barthelme, however, than
this intelligent formulation of metafiction is his insight into the fact
that there is in Barthelme's fiction a "significant relationship"
among three layers or threads of individual importance, each of which belongs
respectively to the author, to his characters, and to the reader, and each
of which interrelates or intertwines with each other at an intersection
or a node which is a particular text (101).
Most of the critical commentaries recapitulated thus far -- Gordon
referring to Barthelme's use of dislocation, Molesworth to collage, Couturier
and Durand to non-discursiveness, Klinkowitz to silkscreen, and Hicks and
McCaffery to metafiction -- all regard Barthelme's work as a purely linguistic
structure and therefore concentrate more or less on the texture of his verbal
artifact. Paul Maltby, on the other hand, dismisses this "tendency
to fetishize the text, to abstract the word from the world" as "neo-formalist"
(20-21) and as an alternative presents a view that Barthelme's fiction belongs
to a "dissident" tendency of postmodernist fiction, a view which
intends to read Barthelme's work as inextricably involved in the political:
This study seeks to mark out and explore a dissident tendency
within that body of fiction known only generally as "postmodernist."
The conception of a dissident postmodernist fiction raises questions about
what, in the postmodern culture of late capitalism, constitutes the political
and what constitutes an oppositional mode of writing. . . . I shall read
the texts selected for the case studies as pursuing the political implications
of language. . . . And I shall read the reflexivity of these texts and their
disruptions of linguistic and narrative norms not just as a probing and
demonstration of the textual production of meaning. . . . Rather, they will
be grasped as . . . the tactics of writing which exposes and struggles against
the ideologies and conceptual limits of language in its postmodern modes.
(1-2)
His intention to read into Barthelme's aesthetics "critical functions,"
to "show how Barthelme's texts operate as a mode of political discourse"
(46), i. e., to explore the self-reflexive texture of his artifact in terms
of textuality which incorporates not only literary texts but also other
signifying practices such as the political, the cultural, and the historical,
relocates his verbal art object in a worldly context which has long been
unknown to most critics of Barthelme except Walsh, who insists on innovative
fictions' engagement with the world.
My primary concern in discussing Barthelme's The Dead Father
in a way parallels both Walsh's argument for its engagement with reality
and Maltby's interest in how his verbal object, which is above all to be
grasped for all its political intention in terms of aesthetics, criticizes
and exposes in an oppositional way the ideological implications of language
in its late-capitalist modes. My interest, however, is more specifically
aesthetic or, better still, "artistic," though my discussion nevertheless
is still open to political application. The criticisms and reviews of The
Dead Father so far, as have been enumerated above -- Durand's approaches
centered on the novel's thematic framework of father-son relationship, Gordon's
and Davis's on the analogy between the father and language, Leitch's, Couturier's,
and Durand's contention that The Dead Father is an "itself,"
Klinkowitz's notion of silkscreen, Hicks's of metafiction, Todd's symbolism,
and finally Mason's and Howard's complete dismissal of the novel as obsolete
avant-gardism -- have all neglected, as Maltby criticizes, setting The
Dead Father in a particular context, whether political or not. My specifically
artistic approach to the novel, while respecting the critical tradition
which has long considered Barthelme's fiction an autonomous art object isolated
from the world, at the same time attempts to situate it in a particular
context. Not that this objet d'art, as Maltby contends that it does,
necessarily combats or "opposes" the context in which it is embedded;
rather, this art object, as I hope this study will have made clear by the
time the reader finishes it, tries to manipulate or take full advantage
of the context itself like a parasite feeding on its host, by means of a
particular artistic strategy which I am to introduce later in my discussion.
Both to facilitate and to make more persuasive this shift in critical attention
from the novel's status as an autonomous verbal construct to how it relates
itself to its context, I shall start this study with a preliminary fact
which has been so taken for granted by those critics of Barthelme who are
familiar, sometimes more than is necessary, with his surrealistic fantasy
that they have hardly commented on it: that the Dead Father is a dead body
that speaks. This formulation of the Dead Father as a body that speaks,
foregrounding not only his bodily aspect but also his status as one who
relates himself with language, makes it possible to examine what kind of
both bodily and linguistic practice this gigantic body performs in a particular
context, in what way it manipulates its own body and language to take advantage
of the context itself, and then what kind of effect it produces while situated
in that particular context, in such a way as to open up a way to consider
the bodily aspect of language itself, which the text of The Dead Father,
a verbal artifact which is highly self-conscious, cultivates more than any
other contemporary fiction.
Takayoshi Ishiwari / kp7t-iswr@asahi-net.or.jp