Dead, but still with us

...In his fiction Barthelme prefers fragments rather than linear narratives, collage rather than thematic sequence, irony rather than direct statement...

...They continue to search for redemptive grace, and they do not seem able to abandon this quest, but religious essence appears to remain tantalizingly beyond their grasp...

...Of course, Kazin's critique is not consciously anti-Catholic...

...Pascal's famous assertion that it is man's misfortune not to be able to sit in a single room all his life is oddly mirrored in the geographically-constricted world of Barthelme's stories, where, one feels, some of the characters may have taken Pascal's advice to heart...

...There are, in fact, many interesting links between Pascal and Barthelme...

...And though Sexton is dead and cannot be harmed from the breach of confidentiality, her name and reputation may be...

...Yet this parody does not constitute a didactic satire upon religious belief...

...it is the same "new principle" for which the characters in Snow White seek...

...Simon keeps his money in a book entitled On Adam's House, as if to emphasize how his version of bliss diverges sharply from that of the "American Adam" in its more traditional pastoral paradigms...

...It is true, then, that Simon's paradisiacal idyll is a vulgar concept--"uneamed," as he himself recognized--but in its very lack of pretentiousness it parodies those millennial apocalypses all too characteristic of American literature and culture...

...Orne's release of Anne Sexton's records to her biographer is a dramatic departure from ethical norms and the exceptions permitted by the law and professional practice...

...Nevertheless, it is these glimpses of an ideal order which induce Barthelme's texts to reject Ronald Sukenick's model of an opaque, self-sufficient, and "purely aesthetic surface," and to strive instead for something intangible and unverifiable...

...Barthelme's version of a fragmented "city life" is in fact not altogether dissimilar from Farrell's: In both cases we f'md fictional "heroes" marginalized by a corporate and ritualistic culture which becomes the dominating presence within the text and which frustrates the attempts of any individual to manipulate or even understand it...

...It is certainly not a divine resting-place, nor is it the kind of terrestrial utopia which Emerson or Thoreau would have favored...

...Certainly his decision to release virtually the entire history of Sexton's eight-year treatment, in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of his clinical methods, does not constitute a serious or urgent reason...

...For Barthelme, religion itself may not be an answer, but it disallows the validity of any other possible explanation of the world...

...If there is any word I detest in the language, this would be it, but the fact that it exists, the word ineffable, is suspicious in that it suggests that there might be something that is ineffable...

...i DEAD, BUT STILL WITH US BARTHELME'S FADING CATHOLIC INTUITIONS PAUL GILES " ' ~ espite being brought up Roman Catholic and attending parochial schools, Donald Barthelme clearly cannot be thought of as a religious writer in any orthodox sense...

...All of these examples come from Barthelme's 1972 collection Sadness, and the sadness in question here betokens a world of loss, a world where metaphysical presence has been promised but then denied...

...God was the omniscient author, but he died," Ronald Sukenick famously claimed in his story "The Death of the Novel": Authors can no longer manipulate their characters in imitation of a divine will, since divine will has absconded, leaving the earthlings grappling with metaphysical and textual confusion...

...Throughout his career, though, Barthelme made various statements about his work which subvert the familiar image of him as simply a ludic and lexical prankster...

...So Barthelme sentences us to the complicity with the system that he suffers from more than anyone...

...In "On the Steps of the Conservatory," from Great Days (1979), one student asks another: "When are you going to change yourself, change yourself into a loaf or a fish...

...Barthelme's lists, like the Vatican's, are always straining toward completeness and finitude, but because his texts simultaneously deny that possibility of closure the lists also come to evoke a "terror of failure, loss, and disintegration," as the critic Regis Durand put it...

...Quite the reverse in spirit from the minimalism and skepticism with which Barthelme is too often charged, this speculative tendency seeks some glimmer of "truth"--the "ineffable," as Barthelme himself put it--which might manifest itself when more obtuse worldly matters wither away...

...Sister Scholastica would presumably know the answer...

...Indeed, Alfred Kazin relegated Barthelme to the status of a minor "antinovelist": "the almighty state is always in view," Kazin has written...

...Catherine of Siena bent upon Pope Gregory whilst reproaching him for the luxury of Avignon...

...The idea that what these people have is "not enough" echoes around both these texts, though of course the quest for epistemological meaning itself is spoofed, no less than the literalist fallacies of the Dictionary of Angels and the Walt Disney legends...

...s in Walker Percy's novels, we see a movement in Barthelme toward immanence rather than transcendence: for a Catholic sensibility, vulgar materialism can be philosophically more satisfactory than the self-deceptions of human heroism or romantic idealism, what the Jesuit critic William E Lynch referred to disparagingly as univocalism or "angelism...

...The early story "Florence Green Is 81" recalls the fourthgrade classroom at Our Lady of the Sorrows, where Sister Scholastica "knew how many angels could dance on the head of a pin...

...both suggested instead that the "ineffable" was a question of hints, guesses, and wagers...

...And I believe that's the place artists are trying to get to, and I further believe that when they are successful, they reach it...

...Quite clearly, Dr...

...He closed by fiat a great amusement park, there...

...In February 1989, a few months before they both died, Barthelme acknowledged Beckett to be an oedipal "problem" for him because of what he called the "enormous strength of his style, his tone...

...Make enquiries," the narrator of"The New Music" tells himself...

...In the story "Margins," Carl asks Edward: "Have you read The Mystery of Being, by Gabriel Marcel...

...Nothing gives me more pleasure than speaking about that which I do not know...

...Instead of attempting to flee into a nostalgic realm of symbolic order or romantic escapism, contended Wilde, Barthelme seeks to work through the ironies and contingencies of city life to reveal, in a "sacramental" way, "the extraordinary...amidst the quotidian...

...F~ 640: Commonweal...

...One of the clearest examples of such incongruity is the monk in "Lightning" who feels that deprivation of rock music is the big drawback to a monastic career...

...His is a world of"epistemological skepticism," as the critic Larry McCaffrey put it, where authority in all its forms--fathers, priests, psychoanalysts--has been overturned, with the result that the authority of the text itself is also necessarily thrown into disarray...

...He told one interviewer that he especially respected Mallarm6 because the French poet "shakes words loose from their attachments and bestows new meanings upon them, meanings which point not toward the external world, but toward the Absolute, acts of poetic intuition...

...In the story "See the Moon," Barthelme uses the figure of a Catholic cardinal to highlight this perception that earthly accident no longer necessarily incorporates spiritual essence: "If there is any value that has value, then it must lie outside the sphere of what happens and is the case, for all that happens and is the case is accidental...

...Independently these three common points are not sufficient grounds for breaking confidentialy...

...Barthelme's texts manifest a"not-at-homeness," as critic Tony Tanner put it, partly because they are adrift in the gap between transcendence and immanence...

...These are familiar arguments, and in their own way they are true enough...

...But while Barthelme can be interpreted synchronically, in terms of the postmoderuist culture of his time, he can also be interpreted historically through the perspective of a Catholic cultural tradition of radical antihu8 November 1991:637 manism going back through Percy, Flannery O'Connor, even as far as James T. Farrell...

...Just as the figures in this 1975 novel make their confessions to the Dead Father despite the old man's defunct state, so Barthelme's texts seek an accommodation with the religion their author apparently no longer believes in...

...Meditating upon the history of his profession, Barthelme's hero, Simon, shakes his head sadly over the folly of Le Corbusier's modernist ambitions, "the messianic-maniacal idea that architecture will make people better, civilize them...

...The romantic or transcendental ego is sidelined, and some kind of "system," whose very inscrutability constitutes its intimidating power, seems to be in control...

...both placed emphasis upon the limitations of the human domain...

...I would suggest," said Barthelme, that there is a realm of possible knowledge which can be reached by artists, which is not susceptible of mathematical verification but which is true...

...Augustine" if one could simultaneously listen to Rod Stewart and the B-52's...

...In fact, a patient's authorization is required not because an individual patient claims it, but because the community, through the institution of psychiatry, has established that authorization as ethically mandatory...

...There is an equation to be made here between Barthelme's subversion of Catholic scholastic theology and his subversion of the traditional realistic novel...

...It is important to stress, however, how Barthelme's is a specifically Catholic version of phenomenology: Barthelme's existential idiom is framed by a Catholic eschatology...

...That Sexton's daughter found much of the material (some of which concerns herself) "extremely painful," as one supposes others may as well, makes clear how little benefit there is likely to be in this transaction...

...He re-echoed this aspiration toward the "Absolute" in a 1976 symposium on fiction with Grace Paley, Walker Percy, and William Gass...

...While his texts offer no metaphysical formulas, their unexplained dimension works to subvert any movement toward closure from within the comfortable middle-class environment which they describe...

...postmodernist fabulators such as John Barth or Robert Coover or Thomas Pynchon...

...One such character is Simon, the architect in Barthelme's novel Paradise, who finds himself cooped up in his Manhattan apartment with three lingerie models...

...At the end of "The Rise of Capitalism," we find assorted saints come marching in to deliver their "same old message" about placing hope "in the word of God...

...In his 1986 novel, Paradise, Simon similarly asks himself whether Christ had to "visit each and every planet" in the solar system that supports life and "go through the same routine, the Agony in the Garden, the Crucifixion, and so on...

...But apart from her views on the matter, the central issue remains: Every breach of patient confidences affects the profession of psychiatry and the entire community...

...These ontological limitations of the human condition are stressed once again in the quotation from Pascal advanced in "A Shower of Gold": "The natural misfortune of our mortal and feeble condition is so wretched that when we consider it closely, nothing can console us...

...In this sense, Catholicism for Barthelme operates in the paradoxical condition of The Dead Father: "Dead, but still with us, still with us, but dead...

...Is there bluegrass in heaven...

...Other instances where a psychiatrist would be asked by the patient to breach confidentiality might include civil procedures, such as divorce or child custody, or criminal cases where the defendant petitions the psychiatrist to testify on the defendant's own behalf...

...Similarly, in the Beckett-like story "The Leap," two unnamed individuals talk about the possibility of making a leap of faith but then decide, all things considered, to put it offuntil another time...

...my painter friend, for example, reaches an area somewhere probably between mathematics and religion, in which what may fairly be called truth exists...

...Barthelme, however, extends this incongruity beyond simple comedy to produce an implicit critique of the more rigid and literal aspects of Catholic theology...

...What we find instead is a comedy of metaphysical displacement, where the fracture of worldly and otherwordly systems leaves Barthelme's heroes, like those of Walker Percy, with a sense of being alienated wayfarers, searching for something "ineffable" but intangible...

...In "The Genius," a man inspecting a church "because the nave is said to be a particularly fine example of Burgundian gothic" becomes deeply intimidated by the icy stare of a nun...

...This debt is made explicit in the story "The Catechist," and also in "The Indian Uprising" where "Miss R" says "The only form of discourse of which I approve...is the litany...

...Reviewing the biography in the New York Times (August 13), Michiko Kakutani offers substantial evidence from the biography itself that Anne Sexton may have cared far more for her privacy than her daughter, friends, and colleagues think...

...It is another version of the old debate between Aquinas and Pascal: Aquinas claimed God could be embodied in material ways, Pascal asserted the two realms were quite distinct...

...What is interesting here is the way Kazin's polemic--"almighty state," "system," "terrible discipline"--contains a slrange echo of the populist anti-Catholic rhetoric of Paul Blanshard and his followers in the late 1940s, with their complaints about the relentless and dehumanizing systems enforced by Rome...

...Both forms envision the world in an excessively literal way, ignoring those inconsistencies and absurdities which are inherent within each system...

...Certainly others may be harmed...

...Precisely: if accident and essence are no longer consubstantial, then all catalogues and litanies are useless, for worldly instruments can never be used to measure what is "ineffable...

...The random quality of these images, the way they are scattered throughout the texts without being subordinated to any kind of pattern of logical exegesis, suggests how Barthehne's Catholicism is no philosophical system 638: Commonweal but a lurking irrational shadow which seems to undermine the positivistic premises of quotidian life...

...In "Departures," a "friendly Franciscan" enters "in his brown robes" to inquire why the narrator entered "None" in the space for "Religion" on his hospital form...

...Both disdained the scholastic attempt to turn Catholic philosophy into dogma and concrete fact...

...There is no response to the miraculous suggestion...

...But even here it is the psychiatrist's judgment about the patient's condition and not a record of the therapy that is being requested...

...This interesting area "somewhere probably between mathematics and religion" need not necessarily signify any benign divinity, of course: one thinks of the dark neoplatonism of Samuel Beckett, where the austere rationalism of Cartesian "truth" dwarfs the squalid contingencies of worldly existence without offering to redeem human life in any way...

...While nearly all of Barthelme's religious references tend to be comic, indeed hilarious, they depend for that comedy upon recognition of an incongruity between their worldly and putatively "spiritual" frames of reference...

...It is evident enough as well that Barthelme's texts do not subscribe, either explicitly or implicitly, to Catholicism as an accredited system of belief...

...So, for example, a psychiatrist might break a confidence when a patient wants to get a job and asks the therapist to certify that he or she is capable of assuming, or reassuming, a position...

...This, indeed, is the "new principle" which the angels look for after the death of God (in the story "On Angels...

...I am not sure whether my ideas about various matters are correct or incorrect, but speak about them I must...

...Marcel's emphasis on the essentially circumscribed nature of bodily incarnation worked its way subliminally into many of Barthelme's fictions...

...Nevertheless, the philosophical and theological paradoxes in Barthelme's works demonstrate a fascinating example of the Catholic literary sensibility at work...

...This line of approach has some validity, and in many ways Barthelme's work fulfils that familiar mock-heroic dualism whereby the secular is sanctified at the same time as the sacred is secularized...

...Hence by taking the literalist tendencies of traditional Catholic theology to their logical conclusion, Barthelme reduces them to absurdity...

...Unlike writers such as Flannery O'Connor or his friend Walker Percy, Barthelme, who died in 1989, had almost nothing to say about his childhood religion or its influence upon his subsequent work...

...Crucially, this is a metaphysic of human limitation rather than human transcendence...

...Ironically, the traditional complaints about Farrell and Dreiser--about how they lack romantic imagination and possess an un-American sense of passive fatalism which compels them to reproduce their environment as afait accompli rather than striving to construct a new "world elsewhere"--recur in criticism of Barthelme...

...he avows it would not be so bad to "retire to one's cell at night to read St...

...In "Critique de la Vie Quotidienne," Wanda rebukes her husband with "a look upon her face corresponding to that which St...

...The narrator promptly concludes that Cardinal Y is "not serious," but he himself seems to take up the cardinal's point just a few paragraphs later when he concludes: "One can measure and measure and miss the most essential thing...

...The point about this paradise is that it is a distinctively earthly, materialist phenomenon, a "hog heaven" dependent upon the bounties of money and sex...

...I really liked that one...

...Barthelme's heroes, like Percy's, know they must confine their activities to this world, but they also possess the Kierkegaardian wayfaring sensibility which tells them this world is not enough...

...Barthelme parodies these systems by his technique of taking their premises to a ludicrous, though not illogical, conclusion...

...Images from Catholic liturgy and traditions pop up in all kinds of unexpected places within Barthelme's stories...

...Even Snow White is to be found reading the Catholic existentialist philosopher Teilhard de Chardin...

...It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Orne's unilateral decision has caused unnecessary and unjustifiable harm...

...As "Over the Sea of Hesitation" (1972) puts it: Wittgenstein was I think wrong when he said that about that which we do not know, we should not speak...

...This is sometimes spoken of as the ineffable...

...Writing of Barthelme, Alan Wilde called this a philosophy of "assent," an existential 8 November 1991:639 quest to discover not some essential truth, nor a modernist realm of order and the "anironic," but rather Heidegger's category of Dasein, "the contingency of being-in-the-world...

...Nevertheless, the idea of this quest for something "ineffable" helps to elucidate what many critics of Barthelme's fiction have felt, that his work does not simply celebrate anarchy but strives to put it in another perspective...

...This is an idea presaged in Snow White, where one of the dwarfs ironically contemplates how "Clean buildings fill your eyes with sunlight, and your heart with the idea that man is perfectible...

...He is under the terrible discipline that the system inflicts on those who are most fascinated with its relentlessness...

...All of these exceptions to the general rule of confidentiality have certain common points: the patient's initiative, a matter of urgency, and testimony or judgments that have a direct bearing on the patient's own interests...

...Like Marcel, Barthelme prioritizes es denkt in mir over cogito ergo sum: his characters cannot rationally understand truth, but they can--perhaps-irrationally embody it...

...only together do they serve as the conditions where an emerging rule could override the general obligation to maintain confidentiality...

...Barthelme, like Percy, adheres more closely to the Pascalian position, and it is this which lends to his characters (as Maurice Couturier said) the sense of being chance, accidental figures "in a world teeming with universals...

...Orne's action victimizes not only Sexton, but the practice of psychiatry as well as current and future psychiatric patients who rightly expect that theirs is a privileged communication, breached only under certain specific conditions over which they largely have control...

...Despite his avowed agnosticism, Barthelme in fact shares at least as many conceptual characteristics with the avowed believer Walker Percy as he does with his more obvious generic companions, PAUL GILES teaches English at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon...

...The point is not that these are nonsensical questions but that they appear, on the contrary, both logical and pertinent, and are in fact just the kind of issue with which old-fashioned scholastic theologians used to concern themselves...

...In "The New Music," for instance, the narrator wonders "Could Christ have performed the work of the Redemption had he come into the world in the shape of a pea...

...It is the black comedy of hesitation and doubt, where belief seems impossible, yet every secular affair reverberates with the tantalizing possibility of metaphysical significance...

...But it helps reveal that his allegiance to D. H. Lawrence's ideology of the novel as an emblem of the vital individual flame, a "bright book of life," is itself a culturally partial and not an impartial idea...

...Christian imagery is taught at the conservatory," so we are told, along with "Islamic imagery and the imagery of Public Safety," but this kind of bathetic and flattening explanation cannot cancel the aura of suggestiveness that Barthelme's religious references bring forth...

...here is a similarly tantalizing oscillation between presence and absence in those lists and catalogues which throng Bartheln~e's pages, in parody, as Jerome K1inkowitz has written, of the litanies and catechisms characteristic of Catholic dogma...

...I thought that one was fine...