Conclusion
"The greatest 'disruption' of fiction's tradition practiced
by the innovators of 1967-68 and after," Jerome Klinkowitz discusses
in his Literary Disruptions, "was the return of the genre to
a more purely aesthetic realm" (194). Apparently, my argument that
Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father works as an installation might
seem faithful not only to Klinkowitz's aesthetically oriented claim, except
for a slight but crucial shift of emphasis from its autonomy or "object-ness"
to its function, but even to most of the critical tradition of Barthelme
which has misleadingly confined his fiction almost exclusively to that "purely
aesthetic realm" which has nothing to do with engagement with the world.
What has become of, then, the claim made in the introduction that my specifically
aesthetic or "artistic" treatment of the novel is nevertheless
open to political application? The key to these apparently irreconcilable
contentions has been in fact already revealed in the way I have defined
the "context" of The Dead Father. The "context"
of the novel, in my definition, includes not just the precursory intertexts
upon which the novel draws, in other words, those linguistic practices which
are literary, but, more inclusively, the sum of all the utterances circulating
as of its birth as well as that of all the dead verbal practices sedimented
and accumulated till that time; i. e., its context is constituted by the
entire linguistic milieu which in fact contains, is contaminated by, verbal
practices which are not necessarily literary but belong as well to the political,
to the everyday social world. The novel is a parody, the making use of,
of this heterogeneous linguistic landscape of which and into which it is
born. It is in this heterogeneity of the linguistic materials which the
novel takes advantage of that the possibility of reading it in terms of
the political lies. Why this happens, why literary parody ranges over linguistic
areas including other non-literary signifying practices, whether social,
cultural, or sexual, is apparent: this is because the medium of literary
parody is language, a medium which is not exclusively for literature but
for advertisement, journalism, and the law as well. Language is, as Barthelme
puts it, a "furiously busy" medium, with its trace elements not
only of belles lettres but also of the real social world of flesh and blood
which constitutes the realm of the political. The aesthetic act of literary
parody, in this sense, always engages with the political world.
This perspective which foregrounds the heterogeneity of language,
the shared medium which links the literary realm and the everyday political
world together, has a possibility of opening up a way of expanding both
the definition and potentiality of literary parody. In the course of the
present discussion I have been using the term "parody" in the
sense of a literary son's act of making use of its fathering intertexts,
like The Dead Father's manipulation of the entire linguistic landscape
including the many myths. If language is already polluted by the disposable
commercial jingles as well as by the debased political mannerism, however,
literary parody is by no means confined to this kind of self-conscious manipulation
of a particular literary work's genealogy but rather is expanded to include
the act of employing language itself, that is, any kind of utterance. Every
word one enounces, every qualification of one word by another, as well as
the simplest act of everyday speech, is already charged with the "echoes"
of its past usage, as is exactly the word "echoes" here, and is
therefore a kind of recycle of somewhat rigidified linguistic conventions.
Even neology is impotent in breaking with these constraining echoes, for
it is already within a given, established system of one's mother tongue.
Whenever one speaks in his native language, he is inevitably involved in
parodying its corpus, only he is in most cases unconscious of this fact.
So "[d]eath of the Father would deprive literature," Roland Barthes
writes in The Pleasure of the Text,
of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why
tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling
always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with
the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred? (47)
Thus literary parody is not limited to self-conscious retelling of text-fathers;
the most realistic fiction, or even a critical commentary or an essay, is
already in a way a parody, for "every narrative . . . is a staging
of the (absent, hidden, or hypostatized) father . . ." (Barthes Pleasure
10). The simple act of storytelling is already a kind of parody. Alain Robbe-Grillet
comes to a similar conviction in his essay, "A Future for the Novel":
The writer himself, despite his desire for independence, is
situated within an intellectual culture and a literature which can only
be those of the past. It is impossible for him to escape altogether from
this tradition of which he is the product. Sometimes the very elements he
has tried hardest to oppose seem, on the contrary, to flourish more vigorously
than ever in the very work by which he hoped to destroy them; and he will
be congratulated, of course, with relief for having cultivated them so zealously.
(18)
To this "intellectual culture" within which any writer is situated
Patricia Waugh might add a realm of "body": "Art is autonomous
only in the sense that it is a different kind of discourse from the ratiocinative,
involving body as well as intellect" (18). A parodist, whether conscious
or not, is a kind of vortex into which a diversity of verbal practices,
not only that of literature but those of mass media, intellectual culture,
ratiocinative discourse, technology, body, gender, ethnicity, and foreign
cultures, is absorbed. He is interminably involved in dealing with the political.
It seems that most critics of Barthelme have reached a virtual consensus
on the fact that his fiction, a mélange of various types of parody
in its broadest sense just put forward above, is a response to the everyday
social world of the American mid-sixties and after, particularly to the
epistemological problems from which it suffers. These epistemological problems
have to do with the impossibility to know, in the so-called late-capitalist
mass culture in its postmodern condition, which information, coming as it
does from a diversity of linguistic practices, is legitimate. Every piece
of information seems fragmented and irrelevant to each other, hence in Barthelme's
"See the Moon?" its protagonist's famous paradoxical affirmation
of fragments: "Fragments are the only forms I trust" (153). This
affirmation comes from the same sensibility in Snow White that approves
of appreciating, not disposing, the qualities of "trash," a sensibility
which the seven dwarfs have in common: "We like books that have a lot
of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant
(or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply
a kind of 'sense' of what is going on" (Snow White 106). Paul
Maltby enumerates the traditional critical commentaries on Barthelme which
more or less refer to this kind of epistemological crisis in which everything
seems irrelevant -- "epistemological uncertainty" (Larry McCaffery;
Maurice Couturier and Regis Durand), "epistemological skepticism"
(McCaffery), "conventional epistemology [that] fails" (Klinkowitz)
-- commentaries which explain that his art "responds to epistemological
uncertainty by exempting itself from the obligation to 'know' the world
or reflect social meanings and, instead, makes a virtue of simply 'being,'
existing as an art-object, as a reality in its own right. . . ." Then
he dismisses them as unduly ignoring "the oppositional thrust
of [Barthelme's] aesthetic of nonrepresentation, its significance as a mode
of political discourse" (43). My argument has been that his aesthetics,
which no doubt is at the same time a mode of political discourse, is not
necessarily an "oppositional" or "dissident" one but
rather is imbued with a kind of ironic embrace.
The stylistic uniqueness of Barthelme's writing results from this
ironic embrace of age-specific epistemological uncertainty. John Barth,
in his memorial essay, "Thinking Man's Minimalist: Honoring Barthelme,"
published in the New York Times Book Review a few months after Barthelme's
death in July, 1989, at the age of 58, calls him "the thinking man's
-- and woman's -- Minimalist" (1). The labeling of him as a minimalist
is common enough, with his reputation for creating excellent pieces of short
stories as well as with his terse, and yet none the less imaginative, prose
which at times reminds the reader of stage directions in a Beckett drama.
This kind of minimalist tendency is also found in The Dead Father,
in which both the setting and the action are minimal, with the body of the
Dead Father simply hauled across a vast landscape by the band of children,
human activities are almost reduced to two poles, sex and slaughter, and
the narrator is reticent, sometimes even neglecting to supply an active
verb to the sentence. My abstraction of the novel which first of all regards
it as a text that simply discourses in a way respects the tradition which
has categorized him into the literary rubric of minimalist. The way his
minimalist tendency might be considered a product of his ironic embrace
of epistemological crisis is made clear by contrast with the other literary
style which flourished during the same period and might be equally thought
of as a response to the same crisis, a style which is broadly called maximalism.
Under this label come such writers as, among others, Thomas Pynchon and
Barth himself, whose bulky books are in marked contrast with Barthelme's
relatively thin novels and collections of short stories. These maximalists
are called by such an epithet because they, situated in the age of epistemological
uncertainty and therefore knowing that they can never know what is authentic
and inauthentic, attempt to include in their fiction everything belonging
to that age, to take these authentic and inauthentic things as they are
with all their uncertainty and inauthenticity included; their work intends
to contain the maximum of the age, in other words, to be the age itself,
and because of this their novels are often encyclopedic. As Tom LeClair
argues in The Art of Excess, the authors of these "masterworks"
even "gather, represent, and reform the time's excesses into fictions
that exceed the time's literary conventions and thereby master the time,
the methods of fiction, and the reader" (1). Minimalist writers like
Barthelme, on the other hand, are also involved in the same epistemological
crisis, and yet the way they respond is quite contrary: they say only the
minimum, that they are saying, which is all they are certain of. This minimalist
attitude of putting in question everything but one's own speech act is similar
to that of the seven dwarfs in Snow White toward reading, which approves
not so much of "reading between the lines (for there is nothing there,
in those white spaces)" as of "reading the lines themselves --
looking at them and so arriving at a feeling not of satisfaction exactly,
that is too much to expect, but of having read them, of having 'completed'
them" (106). To the minimalist, to appreciate the content, the "what,"
of what they speak or read is too much; he is content with the feeling of
having simply "completed" the act of speaking or reading. This
is the maximum of what he is able to know for sure. As is apparent from
this, Pynchon's and Barth's maximalism and Barthelme's minimalism -- the
latter might be descended from the symbolic suggestiveness of Edgar Allan
Poe, Emily Dickinson (whom the speaker of the poem included in Snow White
addresses, "Emily Dickinson, why have you left me and gone /
Ah ah ah ah ah / Emily Dickinson, don't you know what we could have meant"
72) and Ernest Hemingway, while the former might date back to the all-inclusiveness
of Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and William Faulkner -- are in fact the
both sides of a coin, two diametrically opposed responses to the same postmodern
condition which suffers from, as John Gardner puts it, confusion and doubt.
There is a good possibility that the minimalist tendency of Barthelme
might anticipate a totally new kind of fiction, as far as form is concerned.
The Dead Father's typographical playfulness, as Ronald Sukenick points
out in his essay, "The New Tradition in Fiction," foregrounds
the technological reality of the book, its "surface":
Opacity implies that we should direct our attention to the surface
of a work, and such techniques as graphics and typographical variations,
in calling the reader's attention to the technological reality of the book,
are useful in keeping his mind on that surface instead of undermining it
with profundities. (45)
Paradoxically enough, this kind of self-consciousness or fastidiousness,
"body-consciousness," about the technological aspect of the book,
at least in the case of minimalist writers, might eventually lead to indifference
to its technological form, for theoretically it never matters what form
his fiction takes insofar as it meets the minimum requirement for a work
of minimalist fiction, that it speaks. The minimalist tendency includes
not only minimal settings or terse prose but also adherence to the conceivable
minimum it takes to make a work of fiction, someone or something that speaks.
This means a possible disruption of the conventional form of the novel,
a narrative written or printed on the pages of a book bound in cloth or
paper, on which Sukenick comments in the same essay:
One can envision novels printed on scrolls, on globes, on moebius
strips (see John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse), on billboards --
or not printed at all but produced on electronic or video tape, or acted
out on a stage. Beyond the frame is certainly one possible direction to
go, though, as in the history of painting from cubism's "painting out"
to the total displacement of the work of art into reality in the "happening,"
there is some indefinable line beyond which the art you are working in becomes
some other art, or no art at all. (39)
To be conscious of the "frame," like Thomas, is the first step
toward going "beyond the frame," though this might lead the novel
to some other art or ultimately to no art at all, a mere series of discourse,
and signify the blurring of the boundaries between genres. One of the examples
of this blurring is the so-called "media art" of Jenny Holzer,
whose Truisms and The Survival Series install provocative
aphoristic sentences like "PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT" or "FATHERS
OFTEN USE TOO MUCH FORCE," which are "written," say, on the
spectacolor board in Times Square, New York. This local, site-specific work
of "media art," it might be easily seen, has Andy Warhol as its
chief precursor, whose "Pop art" mass-produced silkscreened Marilyns
and Jackies and whose famous democratic prophecy, "In the future everyone
will be famous for fifteen minutes" (Warhol and Hackett 130), might
be taken as a kind of manifesto of minimalist aesthetics which intends,
in the case of art, to be displayed on the local electronic signboard just
for fifteen seconds, not for fifteen years, and which is content, in the
case of literature, to be famous for fifteen short stories or even fifteen
beautiful sentences, not for fifteen masterpieces, thus making a striking
contrast with maximalist masterworks which master the whole of "Mediamerica"
(LeClair vii). Holzer's installation of words in a public place is a logical
extension of unframing The Dead Father's verbal installation directed
at the entire linguistic context. Barthelme, after all, is not just a writer
but, in the first place, an artist whose aesthetic scope far exceeds the
literary territory and who, like language which is the shared medium of
literature and other signifying practices of the everyday political world,
is a kind of liaison officer, a "medium," between the realm of
literature and the art world. In his early days he had a career as director
of Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, besides being managing editor of Location,
an arts and literature journal founded by critics Harold Rosenberg and Thomas
Hess; bold-faced words of greater point sizes in "Brain Damage"
which look exactly like a Holzer aphorism, photo-collages in "A Nation
of Wheels," and the wood engravings in The King, his posthumous
novel, might be all regarded as a reverse encroachment of art rhetoric upon
literary conventions. But both the interaction between art and literature
which Barthelme accelerates and, what is more, the interaction between the
aesthetic and the political, as is apparent not only from the political
intention of Holzer's media art which employs the very media, billboards
and language, of that which it criticizes but also from the status of language
as a medium already polluted by its past political, social, or cultural
usage, might seem to end in total linguistic disorder with the realm of
the political penetrating and undermining the boundaries of art. If it is
true that even the simplest act of everyday speech, not to speak of the
aesthetic act of storytelling, is already charged with discordant echoes,
it seems that there is no safe area in which one might be able to perform
beautiful, purely aesthetic music. This apparent constraint, however, as
Barthelme says, is a good opportunity, an opportunity for paradoxically
claiming that one's simplest everyday speech is already an aesthetic act
and that his aesthetic act of storytelling is already an installation, a
means of engagement with the world. The minimalist knows that it is only
this politico-aesthetic act of speaking beyond every possible formal frame
that ultimately matters.
Takayoshi Ishiwari / kp7t-iswr@asahi-net.or.jp