The Dead Father :: The Dead Father Donald Barthelmeis Essays

The Dead Father Jerome Klinkowitzà ­s remarkably insightful review of Donald Barthelmeà ­s work begins with an anecdote about an evening they spent together in Greenwich Village (Barthelmeà ­s home for most of his life as a writer), and how a perfectly Freudian remark by Barthelmeà ­s wife put a stop to the writerà ­s boorish mood:à ¬Ãƒ «Why Donald,à ­ she said, à «your fatherà ­s is bigger than yours.à ­She was referring to their respective biosin Whoà ­s Who in America.à ® It is Klinkowitz's well-argued contention that Barthelmeà ­s mid-career novel The Dead Father (1975) not only represents the high-water mark of his skill as a technical master of postmodern prose, but that it also embodies the central neurosis/inspiration driving nearly all his work, from his first published story, à ¬Me and Miss Mandibleà ® 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, Barthelmeà ­s near-obsessive goal as a post-modernist is to à ¬buryà ® his modernist father.For instance, Klinkowitz writes that, while at first glance à ¬Me and Miss Mandibleà ® seems a perfectly Kafkaesque tale of a man awakening to grotesquely transformed circumstances, in fact it is à ¬[f]ree of overweening anxiety and not painfully dedicated to existential questioning or angst ...à ®[1] à ¬[Barthelmeà ­s] first inclination is to laugh at rather than flail angrily against the forms and themes of an earlier style ...à ®[2]Klinkowitz cites à ¬The Indian Uprisingà ® and à ¬The Balloonà ® as oft-anthologized stories which epitomize Barthelmeà ­s 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 dread of Barthelmeà ­s modernist precursors.Thus anxiety of influence is defused through comedy and exaggeration.Klinkowitz implies that, in Barthelme we have our first authentic American Beckett, but one in whose work optimism is neither desperate nor self-canceling. Skillfully mixing criticism and biography, Klinkowitz demonstrates how Barthelmeà ­s life influenced his work; how his time in the army as a service newspaper writer, and later as a publicity writer and editor prepared him to handle à ¬words and images as blocks of material rather than as purveyors of conceptions ...à ®[3]But the use of autobiographical material makes a point beyond that relevant to critical biography.Klinkowitz argues that a consistent thematic in Barthelmeà ­s writing was life as text--and therefore text as some sort of incarnation of life.As Klinkowitz writes of his meeting with Barthelme in the village, Barthelme à ¬was firmly inside his text.