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second important characterization of their works: a sense of distrust in
the very same fantasies that preoccupy them so much.
It
is a distrust
which spreads from the author to the readers while it sometimes, not
always, seems to bypass the characters involved. As emphasized earlier,
most of the novels of Pynchon, Vonnegut, Barth, Nabokov, or Bar–
thelme ultimately become case histories of failures where for disillu–
sioned observers inside and outside the novel's home-made myths
visibly do not stand up against the tests to which they are submitted.
Mythophilia is in constant danger of turning into mythodasm.
In
fact, there is often more than a suspicion that the fantastic
schemes which are at the core of such novels are not meant to stand up
against adversity. The third prevailing distinction of these books is a
sense of comedy, which, in this case, stems from the awareness that
something has gone awry with the protagonists' dreams. Characters
and authors alike realize that in every mythical drama somebody pulls
the strings from behind the stage. And for this manipulator behind the
scene, the scene itself is likely to become a world born of the blue air of
fantasy. This awareness provides a dignified retreat only for those who
can laugh about their craze for mythical order. Thus a sense of the
comic undercuts almost all contemporary attempts at myth-making,
implying, maybe, that the whole history of man as a myth-maker (or
fabulator as Robert Scholes puts it with a slight shift of emphasis) is
above all a history of futility, comic naivete, and frantic struggles
to
pull himself out of the bog by his own hair.
Aesthetically, such a recognition might lead to an attitude which
from Coleridge to Susan Sontag defenders of the self-referential charac–
ter of the work of art have taken. Imaginary constructs, it could be
argued, are neither intended to "mean" anything nor created to bring
order, structure and stability to anything other than the works in which
they appear. Maybe the home-spun myths of our contemporary novel–
ists are fantasies which have no function other than being what they.
are or, at best, celebrating the inventiveness of their inventors. And who
can call a fictional strategy a failure if it was never meant to be a success
in the first place?
In
sum, there is a suspicion that in many contempo–
rary novels the comic failure of imaginative projections has only one
message
to
spell: fantasies should not mean but be.
It
is on the basis of
such assumptions that Donald Barthelme can ridicule the attitude of
all those who habitually assume that a novel must be more than a self–
referential structure.
In
Snow White
Barthelme provocatively confronts
his readers with a questionnaire on the meaning of this book. Two of
the questions read:
