MORRIS DICKSTEIN
507
gether too smoothly detached, too well-defended. Both were consum–
mate craftsmen, yet their stories seemed too
written,
too finished, for a
world that was coming apart. The exp losive contradictions of the age,
with its noisy public confrontations and wild loss of inhibitions, de–
manded a fiction that was more fragmentary and surreal, more sophisti–
cated yet also more carnivalcsque. The age demanded Donald Barthelme,
whose inspired
bricolage
swept up everything from Snow White to
Tolstoy, from Robert Kennedy to Kierkegaard.
Barthelme's early stories, with their haunting illustrations and ob–
scure titles, were a Sargasso Sea of the whole history of culture. The taste
of the sixties, grounded in Pop Art, had undone the old cultural hierar–
chies, especially those that divided trash from art. It fostered a metafiction
that would look more assembled than written, a two-dimensional, open–
ended fiction toying with its own devices, acutely conscious of its fic–
tionality. But Barthelme went beyond this clever reflexiveness; his work
was elegant and dry, witty and detached, facetiously mock-serious. Yet,
for a few years in the late 1960s, it was also full of powerful intimations
of mystery and pathos. For all his debts to playful, nonlinear writers of
the past, from Laurence Sterne to Borges, Barthelme was an original, a
writer with a different tone, a new way of proce sing cultural waste.
Barthelme, like Thomas Pynchon, situated himself neatly "on the
leading edge of this trash phenomenon," but with the passage of time his
work became flatter and less magical; his prose remained elegant, his wit
was undimmed, but the deeper current of feeling ran dry, the ironies
grew predictable. He had gone to the well once too often. The 1970s,
with its fuel crises and chronic recessions and political disasters, from the
loss of Vietnam to the fiasco of Watergate, were in every way a more
pinched and depressed period than the sixties. As the economy soured
and America's role in the world seemed to contract, the culture needed
a writer who reflected the downbeat mood, the sense of frustration and
failure that worked its way into the fiber of individual lives. No writer
was less suited to play the role of social prophet than Raymond Carver.
Despite his meticulous craftsmanship, a thick fog of depression hangs over
his early collections of stories . Yet they tell us a great deal about
forgotten American lives. Most of Carver's stories are set in the Pacific
Northwest; his blue-collar characters live far from the mainstream of
upper middle-class life, with its chic urban irony and sophistication. These
stories deal not with cosmic dilemmas but with the routine unhappiness
of marriage and family life, in which subjects like alcoholism, casual
infidelity, dull jobs, and unemployment have become trite. Carver's
characters are not especially sensitive or introspective, but he never
condescends to them or directly judges them; instead, he works their
