INTERTEXTUALITY AND COLLAGE IN BARTHELME’S SHORT FICTION

LUISA MARÍA GONZÁLEZ RODRÍGUEZ

Donald Barthelme belongs to the category of disruptive, innovative American writers who have not only abandoned the mimetic narrative modes, but have also engaged in formal experiments that have revitalized the short story genre. In “The State of the Short Story”, Susan Mernit1 lists Barthelme as one of the writers who helped to define the modern short story and suggests that he promoted the popular revival of the genre. In the same vein, Charles May2 has placed Barthelme among the most influential postmodernist short story writers who focus attention on the fiction-making process. His short fictions are also acclaimed for promoting new and inventive approaches and for addressing the problems of the postmodern age. As Miriam Clark aptly remarks, his short fiction, distinguished by its “depthlessness, incoherence and ephemerality”, falls under the category of the postmodern because it calls into question “metanarratives of self-knowledge and insight”.3 Moreover, Barthelme’s stories display all the characteristics that Lauro Zavala4 has attributed to the postmodern short story: they are not only rhizomatic, intertextual and anti-mimetic, but also seem to be under construction, such that their different components can be assembled

This study is part of a research project funded by the Regional Ministry of Culture of the Autonomous Government of Castile and Leon (ref. number SA012A10-1). 1 Susan Mernit, “The State of the Short Story”, Virginia Quarterly Review, LXII/2 (Spring 1986), 303. 2 Charles E. May, The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice, New York: Routledge, 2002. 3 Miriam Marty Clark, “Contemporary Short Fiction and the Postmodern Condition”, Studies in Short Fiction, XXXII/ 2 (Spring 1995), 148, 153. 4 Lauro Zavala, “De la teoría literaria a la minificción posmoderna”, Ciências Sociais Unisinos, XLIII/1 (January-April 2007), 91. 250 Luisa María González Rodríguez and reassembled ad infinitum. Furthermore, Barthelme’s original experiments with narrative structure seem to corroborate Noel Harold Kaylor’s opinion that “the innovations through which postmodernism finally gained its success in the United States were in form and structure rather than content and in the postmodernist’s inventive alternative to realist representation of the ‘world outside the work’”.5 Although Barthelme also produced longer fiction, he has been particularly praised for his short stories, which can be described as original collages that explore the textures of postmodern experience. His sense of cultural fragmentation made him resort to the short story genre as the best means of conveying the incoherence of a kaleidoscopic reality. For this reason, his short fiction is representative of the postmodern crisis of perception, the waning of subjectivity, and the shallowness and unreality of postmodern ordinary experience. Furthermore, Barthelme’s short fiction is marked by a creative interest in exploring the possibilities of fiction beyond its own limitations. Disenchantment with conventional narrative forms led him to explore new techniques in order to deconstruct traditional forms of representation; and in challenging the ordinary practices of meaning production, Barthelme’s fiction points to the essence of the postmodern mode. He experiments with narrative form in such a way as to emphasize the supremacy of form over content and to make it the very subject of his fiction. Barthelme resorts to collage and intertextuality as powerful techniques that enable him to insist on the story as artifice and also to privilege the artistic process at the expense of the finished work. Carl Malmgren cleverly draws attention to the relationship collage established between the artwork and reality when he points out that collage not only challenges mimetic aesthetics, but also represents an arbitrary, open system with crumbling boundaries.6 This description of collage is linked to Graham Allen’s ideas about intertextuality. This critic claims that postmodern fiction resorts to intertextual practices in order to highlight and control the tension between fiction and reality.7

5 Noel Harold Kaylor, “Postmodernism in the American Short Story: Some General Observations and Some Specific Cases”, in The Postmodern Short Story: Forms and Issues, eds Farhat Iftekharrudin et al., Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003, 247. 6 Carl D. Malmgren, Fictional Space in the Modernist and Postmodernist American Novel, Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1985, 129. 7 Graham Allen, Intertextuality, London: Routledge, 2000, 193.