PARTISAN REVIEW
435
became founding editor of the
University of Houston Forum.
Here
one finds the first traces of Barthelme's art -like his most recent
experiments, collages made of such simple yet subtle components as
Mother Whistler stolidly gazing past a portrait of Bugs Bunny. The
subliminal scrawl of "Kilroy was here" marks Barthelme's style from
those days to the present.
He was passing from this to his next position as editor of the
art
journal
Location,
when his first national publication appeared,
a review of the
39th Annual of Advertising and Editorial Art Design
for
Harper's
in October 1961. Looking over the year's best ads, he
noted that many "give not so much as a clue to what is being ad–
vertised." The award-winning spreads were nothing but form, with
content "typically nowhere in sight." But Barthelme knew they were
making millions, striking to the core of a new American sensibility,
and so it is not surprising that when his own short stories began
to appear the same year, their theme and technique followed the
same direction.
His basic concern was with the forms of language, even the
sounds of words, and he practiced clever disruptions to make people
see what was really happening before their eyes and ears. Many
stories played with puns, while others were suggestively disconcert–
ing, but in all cases readers were forced to think deeper of the
"poppycock" they were accustomed to hear. "We have rots, blights,
and rusts capable of attacking [the enemy's] alphabet," boasts an en–
gineer in "Report"; he has also studied "the area of realtime online
computer-controlled wish evaporation," for the simple reason that
"wish evaporation is going to be crucial in meeting the rising ex–
pectations of the world's peoples, which are as you know rising en–
tirely too fast." Some of Barthelme's early
New Yorker
stories, never
collected, are academic exercises in the uses of language. In these
early stories Barthelme would seize a conventional, accepted struc–
ture and inject it with a dose of absurdity, such as using the familiar
form of
TV Guide
to compose a single-page, forty-chapter novel
("On a field trip, Timmy finds a rock," announces a program note–
chapter; Chapter XVI reads, "Sandy Koufax and Sen. Hubert H.
Humphrey discuss ambergris").
'Vith an absolute sense of the shape of sentences and even words,
Barthelme found that he could shock readers into a new awareness
