482
NEIL SCHMITZ
this is your time yet, don't keep your appointment," don Juan says. One
can hear the hesitation of the old sorcerer who has perhaps experienced
too much of his apprentice. "Nothing is gained by forcing the issue.
If
you want to survive you must be crystal clear and deadly sure of your–
self." Don Juan walks away without looking back. Don Genaro - al–
ways the clown - turns a couple of times and urges him forward with
a wink and a movement of the head. Castaneda waits until they dis–
appear and then walks off to his car. Courage is not to be found in the
confession but in the act.
Vincent Crapanzano
WH AT IRONY UNRAVELS
SADNESS. By Donald Barthelme. Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. $5.95.
He knows the deaths of the heart, Hogo does.
And he knows the terror of aloneness, and the
rot of propinquity, and the absence of grace.
-Snow White
Because it returns to familiar topics in the same perplexed
voice, Donald Barthelme's
Sadness
will undoubtedly strike some readers
as the "rationalized art" he attacked in
City Life
(1970), ,Barthelmian
fiction that in its fifth volume has become thoroughly barthelmiated.
But then artistic failure has always been a lively subject for Barthelme,
who has carved out a successful career confessing his literary incompe–
tence, and in
Sadness
it serves him again - only here the wit that in
previous work enabled him to make his failures brilliant becomes itself
the subject.
Sadness
brings to a close the experimental quest begun in
Come Back, Dr. Caligari
(1964) and the novella,
Snow White (1967).
The laconic style and abrupt forms Barthelme subsequently perfected
in
Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts
(1968) and
City Life
con–
stitute the mode of
Sadness,
an approach that still works extraordinarily
well in certain stories, "The Rise of Capitalism" and "The Catechist,"
but which is decidedly strained
in
others, notably "A City of Churches"
and "Subpoena." Not surprisingly, the decadence of Barthelme's mode
