INTERTEXTUALITY AND COLLAGE IN BARTHELME’S SHORT FICTION

Abstract

Donald Barthelme belongs to category of disruptive, innovative American writers who have not only abandoned mimetic narrative modes, but have also engaged in formal experiments that have revitalized short story genre. In The State of Short Story, Susan Mernit1 lists Barthelme as one of writers who helped to define modern short story and suggests that he promoted popular revival of genre. In same vein, Charles May2 has placed Barthelme among most influential postmodernist short story writers who focus attention on fiction-making process. His short fictions are also acclaimed for promoting new and inventive approaches and for addressing problems of postmodern age. As Miriam Clark aptly remarks, his short fiction, distinguished by its depthlessness, incoherence and ephemerality, falls under category of postmodern because it calls into question metanarratives of self-knowledge and insight.3 Moreover, Barthelme's stories display all characteristics that Lauro Zavala4 has attributed to postmodern short story: they are not only rhizomatic, intertextual and anti-mimetic, but also seem to be under construction, such that their different components can be assembled and reassembled ad infinitum. Furthermore, Barthelme's original experiments with narrative structure seem to corroborate Noel Harold Kaylor's opinion that the innovations through which postmodernism finally gained its success in United States were in form and structure rather than content and in postmodernist's inventive alternative to realist representation of 'world outside work'.5Although Barthelme also produced longer fiction, he has been particularly praised for his short stories, which can be described as original collages that explore textures of postmodern experience. His sense of cultural fragmentation made him resort to short story genre as best means of conveying incoherence of a kaleidoscopic reality. For this reason, his short fiction is representative of postmodern crisis of perception, waning of subjectivity, and shallowness and unreality of postmodern ordinary experience. Furthermore, Barthelme's short fiction is marked by a creative interest in exploring possibilities of fiction beyond its own limitations. Disenchantment with conventional narrative forms led him to explore new techniques in order to deconstruct traditional forms of representation; and in challenging ordinary practices of meaning production, Barthelme's fiction points to essence of postmodern mode. He experiments with narrative form in such a way as to emphasize supremacy of form over content and to make it very subject of his fiction.Barthelme resorts to collage and intertextuality as powerful techniques that enable him to insist on story as artifice and also to privilege artistic process at expense of finished work. Carl Malmgren cleverly draws attention to relationship collage established between artwork and reality when he points out that collage not only challenges mimetic aesthetics, but also represents an arbitrary, open system with crumbling boundaries.6 This description of collage is linked to Graham Allen's ideas about intertextuality. This critic claims that postmodern fiction resorts to intertextual practices in order to highlight and control tension between fiction and reality.7 It seems obvious that Barthelme uses both techniques in an attempt to emphasize notion of literary texts as constructed artifacts pointing to dynamics of artistic creation. Thus, he conceives his short stories as complex intertextual spaces where collage and intertextuality work on metafictional paradox between construction of a fictional reality and laying bare ofthat illusion.Barthelme has published about eight collections of short stories. This article focuses on several works excerpted from Sixty Stories? …