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PARTISAN REVIEW
in the seventies - really pioneered for us all the things that it is not
necessary to do . Under the aegis of exploring itself, exploring its
own means or the medium, painting really did a lot of dumb
things that showed poets and prose writers what might usefully
not be done . I'm thinking mostly of conceptual art , which seems to
me a bit sterile . Concrete poetry is an example of something that
is , for me , not very nourishing, though it can be said to be
explorative in the way that a lot of conceptual art is explorative . I
can see why in some sense it had to be done. But perhaps not
twice .
McCaffery :
What about some of the "New-New-Novelists" in France
-Pinget , Sollers , Baudry, LeClezio? They seem to be trying to
push fiction to the same limits of abstraction that conceptual
artists have pushed toward .
Barthelme:
Of a work like Butor's
Mobile,
after a time there's nothing
more you can say than "I like it" or "I don't like it" - the stupidest
of comments. A more refined ve rsion is "I know this is good, but I
still don't like it." And I think that this is a fair comment. There
are more
recherche
examples of this kind of thing.
Triquarterly
did an
issue a while back, entitled "In the Wake of the Wake," featuring
several gallant Frenchmen whose work I'd seen in scattered
places. The emphasis was towards "pure abstraction ." For me this
is a problem since they get further and further away from the
common reader. I understand the impulse - towards the
condition of music - but as a common reader I demand that this
be done in masterly fashion or not at all. Mallarme is perhaps the
extreme, along with Gertrude Stein . I admire them both . But I
don't have any great enthusiasm for fiction about fiction . Critics,
of course, have been searching for a term that would describe
fiction after the great period of modernism - "postmodernism,"
"metafiction," "surfiction," and "superfiction ." The last two are
terrible . I suppose "postmodernism" is the least ugly and most
descriptive.
McCaffery :
What do you think about Philip Roth's famous suggestion
back in the early sixties that reality was outstripping fiction's
ability to amaze us?
Barthelme:
I do think something happened in fiction about that time
but I'd locate it differently. I think writers got past being
intimidated by Joyce. Maybe the reality that Roth was talking
about was instrumental in this recognition, but I think people
realized that one didn't have to repeat Joyce (if that were even
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