The Dead Father :: The Dead Father Donald Barthelmeis Essays

The Dead FatherJerome Klinkowitzs remarkably insightful review of Donald Barthelmes work begins with an anecdote about an evening they spent together in Greenwich Village (Barthelmes home for most of his life as a writer), and how a perfectly Freudian remark by Barthelmes wife put a stop to the writers boorish moodWhy Donald, she said, your fathers is bigger than yours.She was referring to their respective biosin Whos Who in America. It is Klinkowitzs well-argued contention that Barthelmes mid-career novel The Dead Father (1975) not only represents the high-water mark of his skill as a adept master of postmodernist prose, but that it also embodies the central neurosis/inspiration driving nearly all his work, from his first published story, Me and Miss Mandible in 1961, to his last novel, Paradise (1986).(Though The King is mentioned by Klinkowitz, it is clear he considers it to be barely part of the Barthelme canon.)For Klinkowitz, Barthelmes near-obsessive goal as a post-modernist is to bury his modernist father.For instance, Klinkowitz writes that, piece at first glance Me and Miss Mandible seems a perfectly Kafkaesque tale of a man awakening to grotesquely transformed circumstances, in fact it is free of overweening anxiety and not painfully dedicated to existential questioning or angst ...1 Barthelmes first inclination is to laugh at rather than fly the coop angrily against the forms and themes of an earlier style ...2Klinkowitz cites The Indian Uprising and The Balloon as oft-anthologized stories which epitomize Barthelmes work prior to The Dead Father pieces which came to represent the postmodern short story with all its socially savvy and technically sophisticated style, yet stories whose primary tone is comic rather than the stilted existential apprehensiveness of Barthelmes modernist precursors.Thus anxiety of influence is defused through comedy and exaggeration.Klinkowitz implies that, in Barthelme we have our first authentic American Beckett, bu t one in whose work optimism is neither desperate nor self-canceling. Skillfully mixing criticism and biography, Klinkowitz demonstrates how Barthelmes life influenced his work how his time in the army as a service newspaper writer, and later on as a publicity writer and editor prepared him to handle words and images as blocks of actual rather than as purveyors of conceptions ...3But the use of autobiographical material makes a point beyond that relevant to critical biography.Klinkowitz argues that a consistent thematic in Barthelmes writing was life as textual matter--and therefore text as some sort of incarnation of life.As Klinkowitz writes of his meeting with Barthelme in the village, Barthelme was firmly inside his text.