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DONALD BARTHELME and WRITING AS POLITICAL ACT By BEYOND FRAGMENTATION: DONALD BARTHELME AND WRITING AS POLITICAL ACT by DANIEL CHASKES B.A., Binghamton University, SUNY, 2001 M.A., University College London, 2005 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR A DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in The Faculty of Graduate Studies (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) May, 2012 © Daniel Chaskes, 2012 ABSTRACT “Beyond Fragmentation: Donald Barthelme and Writing as Political Act” extracts Barthelme from recursive debates over postmodernism and considers him, instead, within the intellectual contexts he himself recognized: the avant-garde, the phenomenological, and the transnational. It is these interests which were summoned by Barthelme in order to develop an aesthetic method characterized by collage, pastiche, and irony, and which together yielded a spirited response to political phenomena of the late twentieth century. I argue that Barthelme was an author who believed language had been corrupted by official discourse and who believed, more importantly, that it could be recovered through acts of combination and re-use. Criticism influenced by the cultural theory of Fredric Jameson has frequently labeled Barthelme’s work a mimesis of an age in which meaning had become devalued by rampant production and consumption. I revise this assumption by arguing that Barthelme’s work reacts to what was in fact a stubbornly efficient use of discourse for purposes of propaganda, bureaucracy, and public relations. Drawing on the biographical material available, and integrating that material with original archival work, I uncover the specific sources of Barthelme’s political discontent: Watergate, the war in Vietnam, a growing militarization in the United States, and the ideological rigidity of the 1960s counterculture. In three biographical chapters I connect these concerns to Barthelme’s novels and short stories, which represent attempts to create avant-garde objects that might challenge the specific rationalities (the commonality of violence, for example) political action is premised upon. I show ii Barthelme inserting political subject matter into texts alongside a formal apparatus that suggests the way such matter had been misconceived and misrepresented, often with horrific consequences. In two chapters of close reading, I first read the short story “Paraguay,” from City Life (1970), as a critique of American neo-imperialism in Latin America. In that piece, Barthelme explores the dual ways--official and cultural--a homogenizing American influence is felt abroad. Next, I compare Barthelme to author and activist Grace Paley, whose story collection Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) provides revealing context for Barthelme’s own political interventions. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT.......................................................................................................................ii TABLE OF CONTENTS...................................................................................................iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................v A NOTE ON THE TEXTS ................................................................................................vi INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................. 1 PART ONE..................................................................................................................... 24 1. Discovering the “Power of Revolt”: 1931-1966....................................................... 24 2. Arriving at the “Untruth”: 1967-1976....................................................................... 74 3. Autocracy at Home: 1976-1989............................................................................ 134 PART TWO.................................................................................................................. 190 4. A Journey through “Paraguay”: Donald Barthelme, the Americas, and the Postmodern.............................................................................................................. 190 5. Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, and the Politics of the Familial ......................... 219 WORKS CITED............................................................................................................ 260 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing on Donald Barthelme, whose work can defy attempts at even the most prosaic description, poses a unique challenge to the literary critic. I was therefore fortunate to have as an advisor Michael Zeitlin, who encouraged me to turn sources of frustration into opportunities for inquiry. Insofar as this study represents an original take on Barthelme, I thank Dr. Zeitlin for pushing me to trust my responses to the texts and for assuring me of the importance of my work when I was not yet so confident. I am indebted as well to Sandra Tomc and Ira Nadel for serving on my thesis committee. Dr. Nadel’s commentary on early drafts was indispensable in providing me with an understanding of what a dissertation chapter might ideally achieve. And I hope I have honored Dr. Tomc’s well-reasoned advice that this dissertation speak not only to Barthelme’s admirers and critics, but to broader audiences as well. I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank the English Department and Mark Vessey, Sian Echard, and Patricia Badir, in particular. The funding made available to me by the department, at a time when funding was in short supply, made the completion of this project possible. I must also thank Lois Parkinson Zamora of the University of Houston for inviting me to her home and graciously sharing with me some of her memories of “Don.” Finally I’d like to thank Amanda McCorquodale, whose faith in me I can’t possibly deserve, but which I hope I have honored with hard work and, of course, with love. v A NOTE ON THE TEXTS Nearly all of Barthelme’s short stories first appeared in magazines and Barthelme often later revised these stories for book publication. My references to Barthelme’s stories are to those revised texts. I have used two story anthologies, Sixty Stories and Forty Stories, when they feature a short story’s only appearance in book form. Otherwise, I have used the original story collections, which are sadly no longer in print. Collections are abbreviated in citations according to the following: Come Back, Dr. Caligari appears as CMDC, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts as UPUA, City Life as CL, Great Days as GD, Overnight to Many Distant Cities as OTMDC, Guilty Pleasures as GP, Sixty Stories as SS, Forty Stories as FS, and the non-fiction collection Not-Knowing appears as NK. In the final chapter, Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes at the Last Minute is abbreviated as ECLM. vi INTRODUCTION Writing in his 1983 essay “Not-Knowing,” Donald Barthelme sums up the chief problem faced by writers of the late twentieth century: The question is, what is the complicity of language in the massive crimes of Fascism, Stalinism or (by implication) our own policies in Vietnam? In the control of societies by the powerful and their busy functionaries? If these abominations are all in some sense facilitated by, made possible by, language, to what degree is that language ruinously contaminated? . (NK 16) Barthelme would later write that the author does well to look to the “messy” parts of everyday life, advice which seems to suggest how language might be reclaimed from those forces responsible for imperialism, war, and totalitarianism (NK 20). Much of the available criticism, however, describes Barthelme as a passive chronicler of an age in which language and meaning had been contaminated beyond repair by commodification and the excessive production of information. “Fragmented” is the term of choice for this lamentable condition and it is, indeed, a term Barthelme himself once used: the narrator in “See the Moon” at one point famously proclaims, “fragments are the only form I trust” (UPUA 153). But far from declaring admiration or acceptance for an experience without continuity, the narrator’s confession suggests dismay for the still-rigid orders represented by official discourse--what the narrator calls “poppycock” (UPUA 15)--and admiration for the form resistance to that discourse might take. 1 Introduction In short, scholarship has overwhelmingly left Barthelme stranded in retrograde understandings of the postmodern: understandings that, as per Fredric Jameson, emphasize an apolitical adherence to the (yes, fragmented) social logics of postmodernity. I show here that, far from blindly reproducing an age allegedly dominated by consumption and incoherence (and, insofar as pop culture is concerned, the consumption of incoherence), Barthelme’s fictions express a strategically disordered vision of American life at odds with ideological and political certainties. Specifically, they are at odds with the political calculations responsible for Watergate and the war in Vietnam, as well as those intellectual pieties underlying the counterculture of the 1960s. Recasting Barthelme as a fundamentally political writer requires removing him from the critical discourses surrounding postmodernism (with its emphasis on ontological fragmentation) and placing him within an avant-garde tradition he himself closely studied and linked to political purpose. I have done this by examining Barthelme’s responses to episodes of personal and historical crisis and showing how his fiction embodies those responses through use of collage,
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