BOOKS
45 More Stories by Donald Barthelme
/ Brian Howe
01.24.08
Flying to America: 45 More Stories
by Donald Barthelme
432 pages
Shoemaker & Hoard
(October 28, 2007)
ISBN-10: 1593761724
Barthelme. Even the name is strange, with what seems to be a superfluous syllable of mysterious pronunciation dangling precariously from the end. That uncanny flourish, scored into the very meat of language, suits one of the United States’ greatest men of letters. “Man of letters” particularly suits Barthelme: his work’s meaning often resides not in imagery (though his technique birthed it prodigiously, miraculously, the way seeds sprout a garden), but in the semiotic payloads of typographical characters themselves. His stories tended to be short––a couple pages, maybe five or six––which perhaps explains his emphasis on the tiny moving part over the greater mechanism: compression wasn’t a luxury for Barthelme, it was mandatory. And when every letter is a world, you don’t need too many of them to flesh out a cosmos.
This tendency to treat language as an object unto itself, not just a conduit for meaning, is manifest in many of Barthelme’s well-known stories, from “Margins,” where a white square analyzes a black protestor’s handwriting for revelations of his character, to “The President”, in a description of an anklet where “each tiny silver circle held an initial: @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@.” It is also manifest in Flying to America: 45 More Stories, which collects all of Barthelme’s stories not previously collected in 40 Stories and 60 Stories, as well as a few that have never been published.
In “You Are as Brave as Vincent Van Gogh,” Barthelme makes fireworks for us:
* ! * !] * !! * [! * ! * and * % % * +&+&+ * % % *
And in “This Newspaper Here,” Barthelme, who’d amassed newsroom experience as a reporter at The Houston Post, again blurs the line between form and content, signifier and significance. “Sometimes on dull days,” he writes, “the compositors play which makes paragraphs like…” Then a block paragraph of patterned punctuation. In “Van Gogh”, text on a page mimics fireworks in the sky, and those fireworks, once established as such, reappear in another story to mimic words on a page. It’s a revealing alchemy from a writer whose wordplay always strived toward the pyrotechnic, by way of diacritical orgies or sonorous puns (such as the “verymerrywine” sipped in this volume).
In “The Big Broadcast of 1938,” Barthelme hums a few bars in a common parlance that, with pointedly chosen syllables, pay homage to a conceptual movement whose assaults on convention paved the way for his own, which, through sheer brio, would find a frequent home in that bastion of traditional fiction, The New Yorker: “da-da, da da da da da da da-a.” And Perpetua, a character who appears in several of these stories (most notably the title story and the one that takes her name) is named for a typeface: one whose elegant slenderness of form alludes to her legendary beauty. Literally “legendary”: the title story begins the volume with a riff on The Iliad’s opening lines:
Sing, goddess, the brilliance of Perpetua, who came then to lend her salt-sweet God-gift beauty to the film. Sing the beauty of the breasts of Perpetua, like unto the cancelment of action at law against you, sing the redness of her hair, like unto the anger of Peleus’ son who put pains a thousandfold upon the Achaeans.
by Donald Barthelme
432 pages
Shoemaker & Hoard
(October 28, 2007)
ISBN-10: 1593761724
Barthelme. Even the name is strange, with what seems to be a superfluous syllable of mysterious pronunciation dangling precariously from the end. That uncanny flourish, scored into the very meat of language, suits one of the United States’ greatest men of letters. “Man of letters” particularly suits Barthelme: his work’s meaning often resides not in imagery (though his technique birthed it prodigiously, miraculously, the way seeds sprout a garden), but in the semiotic payloads of typographical characters themselves. His stories tended to be short––a couple pages, maybe five or six––which perhaps explains his emphasis on the tiny moving part over the greater mechanism: compression wasn’t a luxury for Barthelme, it was mandatory. And when every letter is a world, you don’t need too many of them to flesh out a cosmos.
This tendency to treat language as an object unto itself, not just a conduit for meaning, is manifest in many of Barthelme’s well-known stories, from “Margins,” where a white square analyzes a black protestor’s handwriting for revelations of his character, to “The President”, in a description of an anklet where “each tiny silver circle held an initial: @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@.” It is also manifest in Flying to America: 45 More Stories, which collects all of Barthelme’s stories not previously collected in 40 Stories and 60 Stories, as well as a few that have never been published.
In “You Are as Brave as Vincent Van Gogh,” Barthelme makes fireworks for us:
* ! * !] * !! * [! * ! * and * % % * +&+&+ * % % *
And in “This Newspaper Here,” Barthelme, who’d amassed newsroom experience as a reporter at The Houston Post, again blurs the line between form and content, signifier and significance. “Sometimes on dull days,” he writes, “the compositors play which makes paragraphs like…” Then a block paragraph of patterned punctuation. In “Van Gogh”, text on a page mimics fireworks in the sky, and those fireworks, once established as such, reappear in another story to mimic words on a page. It’s a revealing alchemy from a writer whose wordplay always strived toward the pyrotechnic, by way of diacritical orgies or sonorous puns (such as the “verymerrywine” sipped in this volume).
In “The Big Broadcast of 1938,” Barthelme hums a few bars in a common parlance that, with pointedly chosen syllables, pay homage to a conceptual movement whose assaults on convention paved the way for his own, which, through sheer brio, would find a frequent home in that bastion of traditional fiction, The New Yorker: “da-da, da da da da da da da-a.” And Perpetua, a character who appears in several of these stories (most notably the title story and the one that takes her name) is named for a typeface: one whose elegant slenderness of form alludes to her legendary beauty. Literally “legendary”: the title story begins the volume with a riff on The Iliad’s opening lines:
Sing, goddess, the brilliance of Perpetua, who came then to lend her salt-sweet God-gift beauty to the film. Sing the beauty of the breasts of Perpetua, like unto the cancelment of action at law against you, sing the redness of her hair, like unto the anger of Peleus’ son who put pains a thousandfold upon the Achaeans.