192
PARTISAN REVIEW
over again anymore than you can do Joyce again. That would
waste everyone's time.
McCaffery:
Have you ever tried writing poetry, as such?
Barthelme:
No, too difficult. I can't do it. A very tough discipline, to
be attempted by saints or Villons.
McCaffery:
We've talked about the influence of painting on your
work. What about the cinema?
Barthelme:
I was bombarded with film from, let us say, my sixth year
right up to yesterday, when I saw Wiseman's
Basic Training.
There
has to have been an effect, including the effect of teaching me
what waste is. As with painting, film has shown us what not to
pursue. The movies provide a whole set of stock situations,
emotions, and responses that can be played against. They inflect
contemporary language, and one uses this.
McCaffery:
Your fiction has often drawn materials from the realm of
pop culture-Snow White, Batman, the Phantom of the Opera,
King Kong, and so forth. What do you find useful in this kind of
material?
Barthelme:
Relatively few of my stories have to do with pop culture, a
very small percentage, really. What's attractive about this kind of
thing is the given - you have to do very little establishing, and can
get right to the variations . The usefulness of the Snow White story
is that everybody knows it, and it can be played against. The
presence of the seven men made possible a "we" narration that
offered some tactical opportunities - there's a sort of generalized
narrator, a group spokesman who could be anyone of the seven.
Every small change in the story is momentous when everybody
knows the story backwards; possibly I wasn't as bold in making
these changes as I should have been.
McCaffery:
It's very obvious in
Snow White-and
in nearly all your
fiction - that you distrust the impulse to "go beneath the surface"
of your characters and events.
Barthelme:
If you mean doing psychological studies of some kind, no,
I'm not so interested. "Going beneath the surface" has all sorts of
positive-sounding associations, as if you were a Cousteau of the
heart. I'm not sure there isn't just as much to be seen if you remain
a student of the surfaces.
McCaffery:
What function do the lists that appear in your work serve?
Barthelme:
Litanies , incantations, have a certain richness per se.
They also provide stability in what is often a volatile environment,
