A Surreal Shell Game

...Barthelme provided pictures for the text, and they are oddly impressive, in addition to being demode to the point of Camp, symbols of a moral imperative the author resents but is never quite able to throw off...

...His yammer darts in and out of all the rooms...

...there is no consistency of mood...

...The language, moreover, is mannered, a fact that contributes to the explosiveness of the verbal displacements, at the price of lifting the situation entirely oi" of its human context...

...where "Bone Bubbles" has neither syntax or punctuation, "The Glass Tower" is told in short sentences numbered from one to 100...

...Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts and now City Life, contain the same tricks...

...Angels, he said, are like men in some ways...

...Rarely going beyond a rather literary area of reference, it expresses a mere stylistic grotesque with little relation to human realities...

...The last sentence—a bit of Shakespearian rhetoric inappropriate enough to seem studied—adds further perversion to the scene...

...Stringing together a number of more or less surreal episodes and confessions of personal weakness, he finishes with a passage that evokes the extensive damage done to all quarters and all minds: "This is the country of brain damage, these are the rivers of brain damage, and, see, those light-ed-up places are the airports of brain damage where the damaged pilots land the big damaged ships...

...Such a victory, however, has certain disadvantages, not the least being a sense of estrangement...

...He talked about the situation of angels now...

...Many of the pieces in City Life come near to being fables or parables, a genre in which Barthelme has expressed his interest...

...The stories range from the formalized to the formless...

...Bodiless heads groan on blocks, and an eagle eviscerates the guts of a Tityus whose face is unmistakably stylized in its contortions...

...Yet one can no more be frightened by these images of violence than be put off by Barthelme's Da-daist image of a deceased chef served up cooked at his own funeral, together with a selection of his favorite dainties...

...its only consistency lies in exhausting all the ways of rendering events through language...

...The oppressiveness of Tolstoy's example is conveyed in the very structure of the museum ("the entire building, viewed from the street, suggests that it is about to fall on you") and the 30,000 pictures of the great man, "placed too high on the walls...

...Thus, his satire is directed against the framework in which traditional narrative dignity and coherence are embedded, not at values themselves...

...a gesture that effectively cheats the reader of the supposedly false satisfactions fiction supplies...

...One of the drawbacks of Barthelme's experimentation is that it is ap-parendy motivated by formal considerations alone...

...He is spewing like a fire hydrant with its lock knocked off...

...When the notion of reality is slight, the fabric of lies and half-truths about it is proportionately thin...

...His two most recent collections...

...Yet there is a rationale behind Barthelme's method...

...The power in Barthelme's hands irks him, and in a witty piece entitled "At the Tolstoy Museum" he admits to an ineradicable feeling of guilt when confronted with the works of the great realists...

...And while "Views of My Father Weeping" starts off with a sequence of realistically conceived occurences, the progression is abruptly halted by an "etc...

...Still, he is clearly reaching out toward new narrative forms...

...The metaphors here are too violently disparate to make the father's actions anything more than a series of convulsive gestures...

...Reviewed by Nicholas Fraser Donald Barthelme is a writer who has never had any use for the encumbrances and assumptions of realistic fiction...

...He said they are continuing to search for a new principle...

...It is hard to know what reaction he is trying for in a passage like this one from "Views of My Father Weeping": "Looking at him I see that something is wrong...

...Irony directed not at any given object but against the whole of experience" becomes, in Kierkegaard's words, "an infinite absolute negativity...

...Sentence" is a succession of clauses never actually closed off with a full stop...

...He seems to feel that coherent syntax or plot is an arbitrary imposition on the indeterminate motions of reality...

...His rage is great, his ambition commensurate...

...The total effect, he comments, is like "committing a small crime and being discovered at it by your father, who stands in four doorways, looking at you...

...Style by itself is not enough, and Barthelme's fictions tend to degenerate into a laborious, albeit clever game, an exercise in language...

...He said that for a time the angels had tried adoring each other, as we do, but had found it, finally, not enough...

...Typically, Barthelme would have us think he is not involved in anything so mundane, that his real concern lies in the brilliant mixture of Angelology and improvised metaphysical speculation displayed earlier in the piece—and perhaps it does...

...At one point in the book, there is a questionnaire soliciting the reader's response, a device that emphasizes the artificiality—or to use Barthelme's term, the "Objecthood"—of fiction...

...Brain Damage" effectively reduces apocalypse to a small, controlled experiment, an explosion of harmless materials...

...In "Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel," he characterizes himself as an ironist, and represents his fictions as contrived distortions of reality with some sort of therapeutic value...

...Barthelme is in earnest about these gloomy facts of existence and his cultivated evasion of them ("Ski-ing along on the soft surface of brain damage, never to sink, because we don't understand the danger...

...Indeed, in the latest Barthelme's innovative cunning stretches to a kind of desperation...

...One can never be sure whether his dandyish ironies are not in fact a complete exclusion of the earthly in his work, evidence of a cool that is elegant but, in the end, stultifying if not trivial...

...His sense of ambivalence toward the reality of events is exemplified in "Brain Damage," probably the strongest piece in the collection...

...On Angels," for example, is a fantasy about the existence of angels after the death of God...

...I saw a famous angel on television...

...In Snow White, he is up to much the same game, except that here pseudorealist appearance is done away with altogether, and the novel form supposedly made new in an ostensibly structureless series of episodes, interspersed with pages of jokes and slogans...

...a victory over the world...

...His first book, Come Back, Doctor Caligari, parodies the style relentlessly, taking on the whole apparatus and draining it of meaning, much after the fashion of the Absurdist plays of Eugene Ionesco...

...his garments glistened as if with light...

...In a melting mood I lay down my paw on my breast and say 'father.' This does not distract him from his plaint, which rises to a shriek, sinks to a pule...

...The trick is to minimize the horror by translating it into fantasy, and the exaggerated engravings that accompany the piece actually produce this result...

...Less subtle authors would have omitted the parenthetic human comparisons...

...Making a plausible attempt to justify irony as both a modus vivendi and an artistic procedure, he attributes to it the strength to nullify the significance of events, and consequently some of their destructive potential...

...The problem of adoration is felt to be central...