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PARTISAN REVIEW
BARTHELME'S LIFE WITH FATHER
THE DEAD FATHER. By Donald Barthelme.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
$7.95.
GUILTY PLEASURES. By Donald Barthelme.
Farrar, Straus and Gi–
roux. $7.95.
GREAT DAYS. By Donald Barthelme.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $8.95.
Numerous fathers are represented in Donald Barthelme's
second novel,
The Dead Father:
Father Saga, Father Epic, and Father
Novel, as well as God the Father,
Mr.
President, Your Holiness, and
doubtless somewhere angles and aspects of the Real Father who
engendered skeptical Thomas, the son in charge of the funeral cortege,
and the bad bastard son, Edmund, who merely drinks. Exemplary
sons-Thomas is surly and occasionally stutters, Edmund drinks, their
imperious father has become an intolerable drag, and yet they must
bear him to the bitter end.
In
short the Dead Father is finally everyone's
father, the great mutilated self-important, self-indulgent Super-ego
whom we pull along behind us, the Past that is the Future, the inner
voice inexorably saying "yes no yes no yes no yes no," and Bathelme's
telling of this universal drama is-well, characteristically Bar–
thelmean. Allusions to Shakespeare and Swift carom in the text; one
might say that an elephantine Lear is herein hauled across Lilliput
through the land of the fatherless Wends. Barthelme comicall y invokes
the relevant literature, but his statement of the theme, however wide–
spread, is at last distinctively American in its expression.
The Dead Father is large. So, too, is the imperative to do away
with him.
"We want the Dead Father to be dead."
But the dragged
father continues to speak, to declare his omnipresence, and obviously
no one is free so long as he is there, speaking, saying
we
will do this,
we
will do that. Even the father at times senses his heaviness and is
amazed, like HCE, in Joycean runs: "I the All-Father but I never
figured out figured out wot sort of animal AndI was. Endshrouded in
endigmas. Never knew wot's wot. I reguarded my decisions and
dispositions but there wasn't timeto timeto timeto. Endmeshed in
endtanglements." Such are the lessons of the All-Father. He doesn't
have time to figure it out, either. One is enraptured (like Emerson) by
this knowing impudence, this alert and sharp perception of the deep
ignorance that fills Dad's lectures on the real. This is Franklin
observing a French king, John Adams a Prince-Regent. We, too, want
