PARTISAN REVIEW
~37
into one whose implications are not quite what they were at the
beginning.' " Caught in moments of reflection, he is no more helpful,
speaking vaguely of " an insUIUlountable obstacle," hurling himself
"into the midst of it," and proceeding "mechanically." He has
his
"dream," composed of lyrical orange trees and a farm in the
hills,
but also with "a steady stream of strange aircraft which resemble
kitchen implements, bread boards, cookie sheets, colanders ... on
their way to complete the bombing of Sidi-Madani." Finally the
writer performs the act of an actual reporter on a California beach
- he saves Kennedy from drowning. For once, "His flat black hat,
his
black cape, his sword are on the shore"; but the modem Ahab
cannot strike through, for Kennedy "retains
his
mask." His ultimate
words, on so crucial an occasion, are a simple" 'Thank you,' " even
less than expressed to the waiters who brought him
his
lunch. "Rob–
ert Kennedy Saved From Drowning" stands, intentionally, as a
formalistic example of a world of
dreck.
The random juxtaposition
of media accounts, documentaries, and personal reports - the raw
materials of our own history - add up to nothing conclusive; they
are the spatial reality of our age, but a new math is needed to in–
terpret their meaning.
Knowing the world is, for Barthelme, ultimately an achievement
of the imagination. His stories are formed on one level by the clever
manipulation of words and phrases, and on another by the introduc–
tion of startling conceptions, both of which are then worked out in
a deft parody of conventional structures. Barthelme's harshest cri–
tique of a fellow novelist, in a review for
Holiday
in April 1966,
is
that he is " tired," that "the feeling of terror Mr. [Graham] Greene
could once produce from these materials has leaked away," and that
"we are left with the manner." It is a case of "exhaustion at the deep–
est level, at the level of feeling." Barthelme does not exempt him–
self ; his agent reported in
T he New York Times Book Review
that
his
own "central obsession is not to
be
boring, because he is so easily
bored himself." Barthelme's measure against boredom is a revitaliza–
tion of material by imaginatively exploiting
it
within unlikely context.
He dismisses old and irrelevant forms which no longer conform to
the reality we experience, and by clever juxtaposition - of words, of
conceptions, and lately of pictures for
his
collage stories - shocks us
into an understanding of what
is
really going on . Barthelme's vignettes
