BOOKS
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this large cumbersome object, this feeling, this stupid past, out of our
lives. The anonymous author of a manual for sons in
The Dead Father
indicts fatherhood with Jeffersonian vigor, urges responsible parricide,
and then proposes a new form of checked and balanced paternity.
"Fatherhood can be, if not conquered, at least 'turned down' in this
generation."
Indeed what emerges in the novel is a fierce voicing of
American anxiety so pure, so artlessly innocent and funn y, so classi–
cally declarative, that
The Dead Father
deserved really some kind of
hyperbolic Bicentennial Award. Barthelme should have dined at the
White House, appeared on
Meet the Press,
and been granted the feudal
rights to a small island in the West Indies. ''I'm too young," says this
Dead American Father when asked to sign his will and relinquish his
keys. Only an aging son can feel that dread. And this is how we
recognize our historicity, our imminent demise, our own failed father–
hood. ''I'm too young," says the Dead Father. And we are all in our
seventies.
This is the deception Barthelme unmasks in his novel. Nobody
wants to be a father in America, least of all an American father who is
also an artist, because fathers are for sententious dying while the earth
is for the living, the world is for the young, and on that unshakable
piece of foolishness the entire United States as a cultural entity firmly
rests. History is supposed to stop in the New World. We are supposed
to be wiser than our beguiled fathers . We are not here to reread the
Dead Father's tiresome lines. The novel ends with the persuaded father
reluctantly crawling into his grave. ' 'I'm in the hole now, said the Dead
Father. " Julie holds his hand. "One moment morel said the Dead
Father." Then: "Bulldozers." Surely a version of the American Dream:
the old fart expires.
Henceforth, be masterless!
This is where Walt
Whitman begins in the preface to the 1855
Leaves of Grass,
with a
bulldozer. The father's signifying carcass is trucked from the house just
as the forthcoming "well-shaped" heir arrives. And it is where Huck
Finn begins in
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
shucking an
obscene and murderous father. American literature, as D. H. Lawrence
recognized long ago, is largely the trick-strewn creation of uncomfor–
table sons trying to bury their fathers . Barthelme gives that interpreta–
tion a twist. The reverse of the Lawrentian
coin-Henceforth, be
masterless!-is
crudely inscribed: Do
not be old.
American sons are
inveterate sons, seduced by their dreams of rebellion, their fantasies of
refusal, and they will read the manual for sons in
The Dead Father
with a bitter glee, noting how precisely Dad is caught there in his
dumb poses and cruel routines. But after the bulldozing in this novel,
