486
NEIL SCHMITZ
here there is no contrasted utopian El Dorado, no place except Paraguay.
And when it comes time to leave, problems present themselves. How does
one get out of this fiction? Survival in the Warholian manner, ration–
alized and minimized, is not an alternative seriously considered in
City
Life,
but the way out of Paraguay, the refusal, is difficult. The plan
finally produced is a "number of analyses of Brownian motion equipped,
at each end, with alligator clips." In brief, no plan at all. Barthelme's
image of the city is that of a container of teeming molecules, each ex–
istence on its own random (and absurd) trajectory, the city as con–
fined chaos. At the end of
City Life
one of his characters revises the
image but not the meaning: the city is a "multi-directional muck" re–
flecting "that muck of mucks, human consciousness."
Barthelme's response to this Paraguayan existence, to brain-damaged
life, has not always been as strenuous as it is in
City Life.
In the ear–
lier fiction, notably
Dr. Caligari,
he exorcises horrors with comic hyper–
bole, turning a visit to the "Akron slums" in "Up, Aloft in the Air"
into an amusing skit. Peterson, the minor artist who is the reluctant hero
of "A Shower of Gold," decides finally to live wholly in the imagina–
tion. He refuses to participate in an Orwellian TV program, "Who Am
I?"
which bombards contestants with ruthless Kierkegaardi an queries,
and instead resorts to the subversion of fantasy, creating other selves,
inventing experiences. Yet in
Snow White
it is Barthelme who directs
Kierkegaardian irony on those who seek such fanciful diversions. The
figure of Peterson reappears as the deluded princelike Paul, a doomed
character who keeps trying to take himself out of it and who finally
succeeds by mistakenly drinking the poison intended for Snow White.
It
is in
Snow White
that the deceit and squalor of modern existence is
kept relentlessly before the reader's view, that Barthelmian irony, peel–
ing away the distortions of jargon, the tireless circumlocutions of post–
baccalaureate introspection, continually presents the singular dread Hogo
de Bergerac alone clearly sees: "the terror of aloneness . . . the rot of
propinquity, and the absence of grace." Jane's letter to the petit bour–
geois Quistgaard in
Snow W
hit~
speaks directly to this issue. The in–
trusion of awareness into a contented plenum, an integrated universe
of discourse, destroys that "u. of d." but does not replace it. "Negative
thinkers," Kierkegaard writes in
Concluding Unscientific Postscript,
"al–
ways have one advantage, in that they have something positive, being
aware of the negative element in existence; the positive have nothing at
all, since they are deceived." In
Snow White
that advantage is a cold
comfort.
