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The Psychoanalytic Issue in the Short Stories of Donald Barthelme

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The Psychoanalytic Issue in the Short Stories of Donald Barthelme THE PSYCHOANALYTIC ISSUE IN THE SHORT STORIES OF DONALD BARTHELME by ROBERT JOHN MOORE, M.A. AThesis· Submitted to the Schoo1 of Graduate Studies in Partia1 Fu1fi1ment of the Requirements for the degree Doctor of Phi1osophy McMaster University May, 1988 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY(1988} McMASTER UNIVERSITY (English) Hamilton, Ontario TITLE: The Psychoanalytic Issue in the Short Stories of Donald Barthelme AUTHOR: Robert John Moore, B.A. (McMaster University) M.A. (McMaster University) SUPERVISOR: Professor Norman Rosenblood NUMBER OF PAGES: ...,,,·,) 3'15' ABSTRACT As the title of this thesis indicates, this work is a study of key psychoanalytic issues deemed to be central to a proper appreciation of the work of the contemporary American writer, Donald Barthelme. Much has been written about Barthelme's fiction in recent years (he has, for example, been the subject of four full-length studies in the last five years), but the approach taken by criticism in general to his work misinterprets what seems to me to be one of the most interesting and relevant issues raised by his work. Conventional wisdom assumes that Barthelme's short stories represent a uniquely successful challenge to the notion that fiction need embody meanings which originate in the author. It is asserted, in other words, that Barthelme's fiction has for all intents and purposes utterly subverted potential criticism which might attempt to establish a relationship between text and author. In the effective absence of an "author," Barthelme's prose is taken to represent a radically innovative form of discourse, a form of discourse which has influenced an entire generation of experimental writing. The context in which Barthelme's fiction is appreciated by criticism is informed by distinctively postmodern aesthetics. In particular, what critics identify as postmodernism's emphasis on "an aesthetic of process" (Hutcheon 1985, 2) has served to throw the entire concept of the artist or the author as the source of meaning in a text open to serious question. Postmodern fiction presents itself as a form of situation, a variety of experience in which author and reader are free to recreate meaning and recreate themselves in a dynamic gestalt through the process of text. What is most repugnant to postmodernism is the rule of definitions of the self that are anterior to the text, definitions that limit the existential freedom of the self to recreate itself in situation. Barthelme's fiction is widely proclaimed to be exemplary postmodern writing in the sense that it has created a form of discourse in which the author--a potentially limiting source of prefigured meanings--is effectively absent from the text, and can therefore be discounted as a factor in any interpretation of the meaning of the text. This study will show that the voice of the author in Barthelme's short fiction is neither absent nor as irrelevant as criticism would have us believe. Indeed, this study will show that Barthelme's fiction says essentially the opposite of what has hitherto been assumed with regard to the relevance of the authorial voice to the meaning of the fiction. This study is psychoanalytic in the sense that it will isolate the latent features of Barthelme's prose based on readings of patterns of association as they occur in the manifest content of the stories. To this point no criticism has considered the relevance of these patterns of association in Barthelme because it has been assumed that, in the absence of a legitimate authorial voice in his work, such patterns either do not exist, or if they do exist, they were deliberately woven into the fabric of the prose by an ironic author familiar with Freud. With a careful and comparative analysis of his earliest stories to serve as a reference point, this study proposes to demonstrate basically two things: first, that Barthelme's fictions have from the beginning implicitly affirmed the notion that an understanding of the psychoanalytic issues attached to the voice behind the fiction has been crucial to an appreciation of the full meaning of any given story; and second, that the psychoanalytic issues of concern to the authorial voice in Barthelme have not changed to any significant degree over the twenty years Barthelme has been publishing fiction. The implications of the latter point are especially worth noting: proof of the presence of a consistent authorial voice would require a radical readjustment to the popular view of the meaning of Barthelme's fiction. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Special thanks are due to my supervisor, Professor Norman Rosenblood, who has offered over the course of the last eight years his encouragement, his assistance, and his patience. Professor Joseph Sigm~~ also provided valuable assistance in reading and commenting on the manuscript. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER TWO: THE POSTMODERN CONTEXT 33 CHAPTER THREE: 11 BALLOON MAN DOESN'T LIE, EXACTLY 11 69 CHAPTER FOUR: AN ANTHOLOGY OF SELF 132 CHAPTER FIVE: THREADS OF THE DISCOURSE 236 CHAPTER SIX: A CONCLUSION 305 NOTES 318 APPENDIX A 322 WORKS CITED 326 V11 A NOTE ON THE TEXTS Quotations taken from Donald Barthelme's works are taken from the texts listed in Works Cited. The following abbreviations have been used: };_ Amateurs CBDC Come Back, Dr. Caligari CL City Life DF The Dead Father GD Great Days GP Guilty Pleasures .§ Sadness Sx Sixty Stories OTMDC Overnight To Many Distant Cities UPUA Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts VHI CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION BARTHELME: In a commonsense way, you write about the impingement of one upon the other--my subjectivity bumping into other subjectivities, or into the Prime rate. You exist for me in my perception of you ••• That•s what•s so curious when people say, of writers, this one•s a realist, this one•s a surrealist, this one•s a super-realist, and so forth. In fact, everybody•s a realist offering true accounts of the activity of the mind. There are only realists. 1 Donald Barthelme published his first collection of short stories, ~ Back, Dr. Caligari, just over twenty years ago. Since that time his work has consistently attracted the attention of important critics. As the body of his fictions grew over the subsequent years, so too did a substantial body of commentary (indeed, so varied and so substantial were both the body of the fictions and the body of the criticisms that in 1977 Jerome Klinkowitz, Asa Pieratt, and Robert Murray Davis published Donald Barthelme: A Comprehensive Bibliography and Annotated Checklist). Barthelme•s place among writers of contemporary fiction is such that it is difficult to find a work of criticism that deals with postmodern or contemporary American fiction that does not at some point consider Barthelme•s contribution. Without question Barthelme is generally regarded as an important writer, a leading contemporary figure who is almost always placed among authors like Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Gass, and others in critical pantheons of seminal American and international writers. It is virtually a commonplace to identify Barthelme, as for instance do the authors of the bibliography, as "one of the most significant writers in America," or as "one of the leading 1 2 practitioners of innovative American fiction 11 (Klinkowitz 1974, 7). Richard Gilman has called Barthelme 11 0ne of a handfull of American writers who are working to replenish and extend the art of fiction .. (27). John M. Ditsky, in 1975, described Barthelme as 11 easily the most written about of the 'experimental' writers.. {388), and Morris Dickstein identifies Barthelme as 11 the greatest influence on our developing writers 11 (270). Jack Hicks says that Barthelme's work 11 has established him as the best of the metafictionalists, both here and abroad. His work has consistently been that of one of the finest stylists in contemporary American fiction ...... (81). According to Larry McCaffery, 11 especially during the late 60's and early 70's Barthelme's work probably had more impact on American innovative fiction than that of any other writer 11 {1982, 99). In that same study, McCaffery calls Barthelme 11 our society's most consistently brilliant critic of the language process itself and of the symbol-making activity of modern manu {100). Jerome Klinkowitz, in 1980, fifteen years after Barthelme's first collection of stories was published, called Barthelme 11 one of the more prolific but also the most imitated fictionalists working in America today 11 (62). Finally, no less a figure than William Gass recently observed in an introduction to one of Barthelme's stories in Esquire that Barthelme 11 has permanently enlarged our perception of the possibilities open to short fiction .. (1986, 46). As these few illustrations suggest, mainstream criticism attests to the worth and importance of Barthelme as a writer of influence. This summary is not to suggest, of course, that there exists any real consensus among Barthelme's critics as to the ultimate worth of his contribution. Several critics complain, for instance, that, while Barthelme 3 is unquestionably a clever and accomplished stylist, his subject matter is finally too trivial. Indeed, if there is one aspect of Barthelme•s work with which even his most sympathetic critics find fault it is, as Morris Dickstein puts it, that his work is "too full of the trivial and the inconsequential, the merely decorative or the merely enigmatic., (270). Richard Gilman, too, is uncomfortable with Barthelme•s tendency to indulge 11 in what he takes to be "cheap incongruity or the merely bi zarre ; Gilman characterizes this tendency as a 11 certain kind of unseriousness which is not quite the same thing as high, conscious, daring frivolity" (27). Dickstein suggests that Barthelme•s real problem as a writer is that he lacks "a great subject, .
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