308
PARTISAN REVIEW
after the demise, there is only the silence of the blank page.
The Dead
Father
is not a preface to Tom's happy song.
Barthelme touches these soft spots in our consciousness with
unerring accuracy, but it must be said, too, that the pressure of these
touches
in
The Dead Father
is deft-it doesn't bruise. The swing of his
writing in this book is so light and so heavy, Barthelme flirts adeptly
with ideas, the narrative has a teasing seriousness stroked into it, and
finally there it is-or where is it? Certainly this elusiveness constitutes a
great part of his charm as a writer. He is precisely where most critics see
him, at the forefront of the contemporary, skillfully manipulating the
ephemeral in a fast culture. And it is true, no one does this as well as
Barthelme. His fiction blends the technique of collage with that of
orchestration. There are picture and text, there are also the flick and
clash of different discursive channels. Barthelme composes verbal
incoherence, twisting and turning it into spasms of revelation. We
know this nonsense, we recognize its phrases, this is our own gabbling.
Set contrapuntally within the mock-saga, mock-epic, mock-novel of
the father's long death are a series of baffled conversations, shreds of
speech (somewhat like the noise in
Nashville)
that tell us again and
again: "I read about it. In
Die Welt."
"Oh yes I read about it. In the
Svenska Dagbladet."
" I read about it in
Le Monde."
This is the
knowledge of information, knowledge that damages the brain, and this
is how we know what we know. I read about it in the
Scientific
American.
How my heart beats, how cells reproduce. And yet, like a
Dada urinal, these long strings of talk-talk have a compelling force.
Through the random utterances, this static of data, stricken voices
struggle to gain a wavelength. But the place of these sections in the
flow of Barthelme's narrative is not clear. Is this what remains when
the discourse of the novel has been bulldozed, the meaning of heroic
enterprise reduced?
In
City Life,
in the brilliant sketch, "At the Tolstoy Museum," the
narrator wanders through the great halls and chambers of Tolstoy'S
oeuvre.
He pauses before a fifty-foot high Tolstoyan waistcoast, he
considers the immensity of the
oeuvre,
the extent of the accomplish–
ment, but what he cherishes amid all 'this imaginative richness is a
small fable concerning faith. Tolstoy wanted to believe in something.
The narrator wants to believe in Tolstoy. But there is too much of him,
too much plot, too much prose, too much moral earnestness. Tolstoy'S
accusing stare greets us at the entrance to this sketch. The narrator
hestitates in the "Summer in the Country" room and then doggedly
decides to tramp on to "A Landlord's Morning. " Evidently he is in the
short-fiction wing of the Tolstoy Museum. The sketch is merely an
