DONALD BARTHELME
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the photographer, to take some pictures . Rauschenberg was doing
silk-screen pieces, and the tonality of these things was gray - very,
very gray. I looked out the windows and they were dirty, very
much the tonality of the pictures. So I asked Rudy to get some
shots of the windows, and we ran one of them with the paintings.
They were very much New York lower Broadway windows. A
footnote.
McCaffery:
Your narrator in "See the Moon?" comments enviously at
one point about the "fantastic metaphys ical advantage" possessed
by painters. What is he referring to?
Barthelme:
The physicality of the medium - there's a physicality of
color, of an object present before the spectator, which painters
don't have to project by means of words. I can peel the label off
that bottle of beer you're drinking and glue it to the canvas and it's
there . This sort of thing is of course what Dos Passos did in the
Newsreels, what Joyce did in various ways. I suppose the theater
has the possibility of doing this in the most immediate way. I'm on
the stage, and I suddenly climb down into the pit and kick you in
the knee . That's not like writing about kicking you in the knee, it's
not like painting you being kicked in the knee , because you have a
pain in the knee. This sounds a bit aggressive, forgive me .
McCaffery:
Another aspect of painting that seems relevant to your
fiction is the surrealist practice of juxtaposing two elements–
different sorts of language - for certain kinds of effects in fiction or
poetry.
Barthelme:
It's a principle of construction. This can be terribly easy
and can become cheapo surrealism, mechanically linking contra–
dictions. Take Duchamp's phrase, in reference to
The Bride and the
Bachelors,
that the Bride "warmly refuses" her suitors. The phrase
is very nice, but you can see how it could become a formula.
McCaffery:
How do you avoid falling into this trap in your own work?
Barthelme:
I think you stare at the sentence for a long time . The
better elements are retained, and the worse fall out of the
manuscript.
McCaffery:
There is a tendency in the painting of this century to
explore itself, its own medium - the nature of paint, colors,
shapes, and lines, rather than attempting to reproduce or
comment on something outside
its~lf.
This tendency seems
relevant not only to your work , but also to that of several other
important writers of the past fifteen years. Is this a fair analogy?
Barthelme:
It is. I also think that painting- in the sixties but especially
