Meaning and Non-Meaning in Barthelme's Fictions

Abstract

Anyone who has taught a course in contemporary American fiction may well have had this experience: you've passed through Mailer, Salinger, Malamud, and Bellow with hardly a snag; your class has responded enthusiastically to what these writers are saying -they claim they can identify with this business about isolation and impersonality; they seem to appreciate existentialist thing, and so on. Problems begin developing, however, when you move on to Barthelme, Brautigan, Coover, and Sukenick writers you feel should be included in the course, but whom you feel uneasy about. Students seem puzzled by these authors' refusals to tell stories in the conventional way, by their lack of character development, by their playful tone; students continually ask that question which seems embarrassingly difficult for you to respond to: Is this thing supposed to mean something? The source of problems of this nature, as has been suggested by such critics as Ihab Hassan, Jerome Klinkowitz, Raymond Federman, Joe David Bellamy, and Richard Kostelanetz,1 is that a new type of fiction seems to be appearing in America, and many readers, teachers, and critics are having a difficult time dealing with it. This fiction is not as new as it might first appear. Its impulses are rooted in a variety of avant-garde approaches to art which were developed earlier in this century, but this fiction has seemingly now become the mainstream Superfiction of our times (as Klinkowitz and Bellamy have playfully termed it), and in the process it has begun replacing the familiar, realistic approaches to fiction-writing with what its creators feel are fresher, more vital fictional strategies. Precisely because this new type