Disastrous Aesthetics: Irony, Ethics, and Gender in Barthelme’s Snow White

Abstract

The observer ought to be an amorist. --Kierkegaard (47) From the opening of Donald Barthelme's Snow White, the reader is confronted with the question of the aesthetic and its seemingly ironic relation to gender. The text begins: SHE is a tall dark containing a great many spots: one above the breast, one above the belly, one above the knee, one above the ankle, one above the buttock, one on the back of the neck. All of these are on the left side, more or less in a row, as you go up and down: [dot] [dot] [dot] [dot] [dot] [dot] (3) Certainly it makes all the sense in the fairy-tale world that a like Snow White should have beauty spots, but within this seemingly self-evident opening passage are confronted with a series of difficult aesthetic, linguistic, and ideological questions. First, note a grammatical slippage in the word beauty--initially used as a noun, then as an adjective. However, this slippage, easy enough to deal with and explain linguistically, leads directly to higher-order questions. Is Snow White beautiful because of the spots--do the spots make her beautiful? Or are the spots seen as beautiful because they are attached to such a beauty--does she make them beautiful? Is the word spots even right here, or should it give way to the more postmodern marks? Or, conversely, is the whole question of here a merely tautological one--if she's a (whatever that may mean), then she's ipso facto got beauty spots. If do have a tautology, is it an enclosure out of which the novel cannot lift itself? Can aesthetics progress from this linguistic question? Can Barthelme's version of Snow White properly begin? Perhaps as compensation for the problems inherent in the word beauty, the reader is next invited to picture Snow White's through the marks that rest not so coincidentally near her fetishized erogenous zones: breast, belly, knee, ankle, buttock, neck. To assist the reader in attempting to conjure up an aesthetic image of Snow White's marks, there's a helpful representation provided in the text. However, this series of bullets on the left side of the page manages only to disrupt or frustrate the reader's representational desire and, in the process, links this frustrated desire to the failure of the word or category beauty--to the tautology that, let us say, opens the text or, perhaps, (fore)closes it as it attempts to begin. Unable to climb toward the light of the signified, remain exposed to the uncertainty of the signifier. This problem concerning meaning, which dogs all of Barthelme's Snow White, seems to rob textual or aesthetic production of its traditional privilege and put it on the same level as other cultural productions. This postmodern situation, in turn, troubles traditional aesthetic thinking on at least three registers: first, it robs aesthetics of its role as arbiter of taste and value; second, it collapses the aesthetic distance that is absolutely essential for a traditional notion of aesthetic judgment; (1) finally, and perhaps most cripplingly, such a leveling gesture robs aesthetics of its proper object--after Warhol, how to tell the difference between a disposable commodity and enduring art? But as Dan the dwarf puts it in Snow White's most famous passage, there may be a way for aesthetics to continue from the point where its founding distinctions are irremediably blurred, from the point where art cannot separate itself from trash: at such a point, you will agree, the question turns from a question of of this trash to a question of appreciating its qualities.... And there can no longer be any question of disposing of it, because it's all there is, and will simply have to learn how to dig it--that's slang, but particularly appropriate here. (97) Here have all the ingredients for a familiar reading of aesthetics in Snow White and Barthelme's project on the whole: Barthelme, it seems, asks us to consider an ironic aesthetic stance as compensation for the absence of a transcendental signified; whatever may think of trash, we will simply have to learn how to 'dig' it. …