1. ‘THORNY MATTERS’

Returning to Donald Barthelme’s “Not Knowing,” an essay on writing that deserves a few excerpts. Admittedly, I have completely ignoring DB’s paragraph breaks and replaced them with my own, for my own purposes, which remain unknown to me:

These are by no means the only thorny matters with which writer has to deal, nor (allowing for the very great differences am the practitioners under discussion) does every writer called “modern” respond to them in the same way and to the same degree nor is it the case that other writers of quite different tendencies innocent of these concerns. If I call these matters "thorny," because any adequate attempt to deal with them automatically creates barriers to the ready assimilation of the work.

2. ‘DIFFICULT ART’

OF “difficult art”— Barthelme doesn’t distinguish between the actually difficult and the merely moody, or the obfuscation of difficulty beneath one of those paintings that is purchased to match the living room:

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.

However much the writer might long to be, in his work, simple, honest, and straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, and straightforward, nothing much happens: he speaks the speakable, whereas what are looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken.

3. ‘PROBLEMS’

Art exists because problems exist, and artists are humans who relate to problems in a particular fashion:

Problems in part define the kind of work the writer chooses to do, and are not to be avoided but embraced.

A writer, says Karl Kraus, is a man who can make a riddle out of an answer.

4. REPETITION (‘MASTURBATORY’ ISSUES)

“Let me begin again,” Barthelme asserts, with a finger raised to Beckett’s wind:

Jacqueline and Jemima are instructing Zeno, who has returned the purloined GRE documents and is thus restored to dull respectability, in Postmodernism. Postmodernism, they tell him, has turned its back on the world, is not about the world but about its own processes, is masturbatory, certainly chilly, excludes readers by design, speaks only to the already tenured, or does not speak at all […]

The fictional scenario of the critic who serves as a guard at the art museum returns.

Barthelme includes it because he wants us to understand that the work of literature is philosophy, or an effort to think-through the world. So here is the scene (with my paragraph breaks rather than Barthelme’s):

Gaston, the critic who is a guard at the Whitney Museum, is in love with an IRS agent named Madelaine, the very IRS agent, in fact, who is auditing my return for the year 1982.

"Madelaine," I say kindly to her over lunch, "semiotics is in a position to claim that no phenomenon has any ontological status outside its place in the particular information system from which it draws its meaning, and therefore, all language is finally groundless, including that of those funny little notices you've been sending me."

"Yes," says Madelaine kindly, pulling from her pocket a large gold pocket watch that Alphonse has sold Gaston for twenty dollars, her lovely violet eyes atwitter, "but some information systems are more enforceable than others."

Alas, she’s right.

5. ‘TYRANNY OF GREAT EXPECTATIONS’

Then Barthelme ventures into the paradox of mystery, which is something the critic wants to ‘solve’ rather than appreciate as central to the work.

Each piece has its own mystery. Some pieces numb themselves with the aesthetics of mystery in order to guise their commitment to vagueness. How do we read against the desire to box categorically, and then find meaning based on the relation to the box?

I would argue that in the competing methodologies of contemporary criticism, many of them quite rich in implications, a sort of tyranny of great expectations obtains, a rage for final explanations, a refusal to allow a work that mystery which is essential to it. I hope I am not myself engaging in mystification if I say, not that the attempt should not be made, but that the mystery exists. I see no immediate way out of the paradox—-tear a mystery to tatters and you have tatters, not mystery—I merely note it and pass on.

This “rage for final explanations” is one that Samuel Beckett spent a lifetime parodying and emptying.

6. ‘THE GOAT GIRDLED WITH A TIRE’

Now Bartheleme approaches a particular work of art by Robert Rauschenberg, namely, Monogram (1955-6), a piece that boasts a goat and a tire:

We can, however, wonder for a moment why the goat girdled with its tire is somehow a magical object, rather than, say, only a dumb idea. Harold Rosenberg speaks of the contemporary artwork as "anxious," as wondering: Am I a masterpiece or simply a pile of junk? (If I take many of my examples here from the art world rather than the world of literature it is because the issues are more quickly seen in terms of the first: "goat" and "tire" are standing in for pages of prose, pounds of poetry.

It’s not secret that Robert Rauschenberg influenced Barthelme’s artistic process as well as his aesthetic interest in messiness. We are given messiness as a condition of thought. Messiness is one Eden wherein art thinks itself and stories the problems it wishes to approach:

Let us discuss the condition of my desk. It is messy, mildly messy.

The messiness is both physical (coffee cups, cigarette ash) and spiritual (unpaid bills, unwritten novels).

The scene is set; the author will move into the problem, which is a word for the interior of any human sitting before a desk:

The emotional life of the man who sits at the desk is also messy—I am in love with a set of twins, Hilda and Heidi, and in a fit of enthusiasm I have joined the Bolivian army. The apartment in which the desk is located seems to have been sublet from Moonbeam McSwine. In the streets outside the apartment melting snow has revealed a choice assortment of decaying et cetera. Furthermore, the social organization of the country is untidy, the world situation in disarray. How do I render all this messiness, and if I succeed, what have I done?

In a commonsense way we agree that I attempt to find verbal equivalents for whatever it is I wish to render. The unpaid bills are easy enough. I need merely quote one: FINAL DISCONNECT NOTICE.

Hilda and Heidi are somewhat more difficult. I can say that they are beautiful—why not? — and you will more or less agree, although the bald statement has hardly stirred your senses. I can describe them— Hilda has the map of Bolivia tattooed on her right cheek and Heidi habitually wears, on her left hand, a set of brass knuckles wrought of solid silver-and they move a step closer. Best of all, perhaps, I can permit them to speak, for they speak much as we do.

"On Valentine's Day," says Hilda, "he sent me oysters, a dozen and a half."

"He sent me oysters too," said Heidi, "two dozen."

"Mine were long-stemmed oysters," says Hilda, "on a bed of the most wonderful spinach."

Etc. etc.

7. ‘HALOS, PATINAS, OVERHANGS, ECHOES’

The dialogue between characters reveals part of the social organization, or the concerns that adjudicate status among humans. There’s that. So Barthelme returns to an explanation of the “messiness”—- this explanation just so happens to double as an exquisite lesson on what words can do to each other if we sit them side by side in a train, like two strangers, before entering a destination and committing ourselves to watching them for the duration of the ride.

Let’s start with chocolate, in B’s words:

The words with which I attempt to render "messy," like any other words, are not inert, rather they are furiously busy. We do not mistake the words the taste of chocolate for the taste of chocolate itself, but neither do we miss the tease in taste, the shock in chocolate.

Words have halos, patinas, overhangs, echoes.

The word halo, for instance, may invoke St. Hilarius, of whom we've seen too little lately. The word patina brings back the fine petery shine on the saint's hale. The word overhang reminds us that we have, hanging over us, a dinner date with St. Hilarius, that crashing bore. The word echo restores us to Echo herself, poised like the White Rock girl on the overhang of a patina of a halo in firm ground, we don't want the poor spirit to pitch into the pond where Narcissus blooms eternally, they will bump foreheads, or maybe other parts closer to the feet, a scandal.

There's chocolate smeared all over Hilarius' halo, messy, messy.

Messiness is holy, hallowed, delicious. Barthelme makes sure this is clear:

The combinatorial agility of words, the exponential generation of meaning once they're allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven't yet encountered.

8. ‘CRITIC-COMPUTERS’

Obviously, the work changes. Many of Barthelme’s short fictions began as novels; he wrote them and then gutted their corpses for a material to reframe in shorter form. The book you begin is rarely the one you publish.

At one point, Barthelme talks about A.I.—which was quite far away on the horizon in those pre-internet days. But it is interesting anyway:

It could be argued that computers can do this sort of thing for us, with critic-computers monitoring their output. When computers learn how to make exes, artists will be in serious trouble. But artists will respond in such a way as to make art impossible for the computer. They will define art to take into account (that is, to exclude) technology— photography's impact upon painting and painting's brilliant response being a clear and comparatively recent example.

Art will be fine. Barthelme believes this. The novel isn’t dead. Anytime a critic claims the novel is dead, what they need is a good vacation and a very demanding pet to distract them from the feeling that everything resembles itself. It’s easy to lose our capacity for discernment. It’s easy to burn out like a candle inside a rotting jack o lantern. We should anticipate that and make adjustments for it.

9. ‘THE ADVANTAGES OF OUR DISADVANTAGES’

“The prior history of words is one of the aspects of language the world uses to smuggle itself into the work,” Barthelme writes. “If words can be contaminated by the world, they can also carry with them into the trace elements of world which can be used in a positive sense.”

And so: “We must allow ourselves the advantages of our disadvantages.”

Life, like fiction, is filled with the messes of living:

A late bulletin: Hilda and Heidi have had a baby, with which hey're thoroughly displeased, it's got no credit cards and can't peak French, they'll send it back... Messy.

10. ‘TO IMAGINE AGAIN’

He ends with a few notes on style, and on the responsibility of imagining ‘again’. I leave him to do it:

Style is not much a matter of choice. One does not sit down to write and think: Is this poem going to be a Queen Anne poem, a Biedermeier poem, a Vienna Secession poem, or a Chinese Chippendale.

Art cannot remain in one place. A certain amount of movement, up, down, across, even a gallop toward the past, is a necessary precondition.

Style enables us to speak, to imagine again.

Beckett speaks of "the long sonata of the dead" —where on earth did the word sonata come from, imposing as it does an orderly, even exalted design upon the most disorderly, distressing phenomenon known to us? The tact is not challenged, but understood, momentarily, in a new way.

It's our good fortune to be able to imagine alternative realities, other possibilities. We can quarrel with the world, constructively (no one alive has quarreled with the world more extensively or splendidly than Beckett).

"Belief in progress," says Baudelaire, "is a doctrine of idlers and Belgians."

Perhaps.

But if I have anything unorthodox to offer here, it's that I think art's project is fundamentally ameliorative. The aim of meditating about the world is finally to change the world. It is this meliorative aspect of literature that provides its ethical dimension. We are all Upton Sinclairs, even that Hamlet, Stéphane Mallarmé.