Reconstructing Masculinity: Donald Barthelme's Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts

Abstract

In his essay Failed Artists in Donald Barthelme's Sixty Stories/' Lee Upton presents as the essential the matic preoccupation of Barthelme's fiction (11). Perhaps _nowhere is this concern more evident than in the author's 1968 collection Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, wherein a specifically masculine failure is central to the impression of aes thetic wholeness. With striking efficiency, Barthelme encircles his topic with m?tonymie arrangements of powerless, guilty, and inse cure men. Unable to act and on the verge of self-destruction, these men reveal aspects of a male consciousness that is above all in con flict with itself. Meanwhile, as the collection unfolds, a consistent view of postmodern civilization gradually emerges from its modal structure. As Michael Zeitlin notes in his essay Father-Murder and Father Rescue, Barthelme's texts frequently contain large-scale patterns of thought that draw into conceptual coherence the complex dis play of the signifiers (188). In Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, it is as if Barthelme seeks to paint a portrait of man-in-general?call him Barthelmean Man?from multiple perspectives, just as he had done previously with his archetypal woman in Snow White (1967). From the vantage point in the mid 1960s, this man is as yet unsure of how to respond to the new era ushered in by Masters and Johnson, the sexual revolution, and the feminist movement. Ann, Sylvia, Alice, Pia, Nancy, Barbara?these are just some of the women who appear in shrouded contexts as love objects and antagonists to the host of nameless and often identical-seeming protagonists that