Donald Barthelme Research Articles

A Study of the Absurdity in the Glass Mountain

As a leading writer of postmodernism, Donald Barthelme in his masterpiece The Glass Mountain makes use of some postmodern writing skills, such as parody, fragment and irony, to demonstrate a destructive world and clearly illustrates an absurd story. Actually, the absurdity in the story has its profound social meaning, reflecting the author’s profound insight into the postmodern social reality.

A Stylistic Study of "The School" by Donald Barthelme

Unfolding meanings, aims, purposes, and other targets through the dissection of the language is possible but not trouble-free since the procedure needs an obvious awareness of the structure of the language and a deep insight into the text. This paper tries to analyze "The School", a short story by Donald Barthelme, stylistically by using the transitivity system, which is based on Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), to reach the meanings which lie behind the words. The transitivity system is devised by Michael Halliday (1925-2018 -the British linguist), which consists of several process types. This system can externalize the meanings of the text through its clauses. Thus, the task of the present paper, as it is stated formerly, is to analyze the clauses in the chosen text adapting Halliday's transitivity system to obtain meanings related to the nature of the story. And analyzing the clauses of Barthelme's story, the nature of the story and the meanings are revealed as the study's major findings.

“Into the Widest Imagination”

“Into the Widest Imagination”

Nije ograničeno ni definirano, već konstruirano i internalizirano

Donald Barthelme’s short fiction is marked by a dashing concentration on everyday life, construction of meaning, and plurality of reality in addition to his playful, metafictional, and fragmentary style. Although a fertile ground for exploring sociopolitical matters, particularly in the mid and late 20th century America, the review of studies on Barthelme’s works highlights a lacuna in the application of conceivably pertinent sociological and political theories on Barthelme’s short stories. Accordingly, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966) could be a congruous theory with Barthelme’s sociological concerns in his short fiction. In their treatise, Berger and Luckmann see reality as a kind of “collective fiction” that is constructed by the processes of institutionalization, socialization, and everyday social interaction, particularly through language. In this article, we read “The Balloon” and “I Bought a Little City,” which are selected thematically, in light of “society as objective reality” through the concepts of objectivation, institutionalization, and legitimation. Linking literature and sociology, we aim to pinpoint how the stories observe, unveil, and potentially critique construction of meaning and the real workings of the processes in the social construction of reality.

A Broken Kaleidoscope——The Postmodern Writing Techniques in Donald Barthelme's “The School”

Viewed as “father of the new generation of postmodernism writers”, Donald Barthelme ranks top among the most influential postmodernism writers. “The School” is one of his postmodern short stories. With the application of innovative genre, style and language, and such writing techniques as collage and fragmentation, Barthelme juxtaposes intentionally incongruous elements of contemporary language and culture, creating an atmosphere both humorous and unsettling. And the story is no longer trying to offer a narrative that could be grounded in reality but instead addressing larger philosophical questions.

Foucauldian Panopticism in Donald Barthelme’s “Subpoena”

Some of Donald Barthelme’s works have been undeniably influenced by Michel Foucault’s socio-political philosophy, however, few scholars have explored such concepts in his works, especially the theme of “panopticism.” The purpose of this article, which is library based, is to analyze and scrutinize the panoptic society of Barthelme’s “Subpoena” in the light of Foucauldian “panopticism” which is a segment of his more general concept of power. Keeping the Benthamite “Panopticon” in the back of his mind, Foucault outlines the “new physics of power” represented by “panopticism” as a modern or disciplinary power; he, then, draws our attention to its most important feature, i.e., the penetration into the most trivial and personal affairs of social subjects. It is worth mentioning that the basic characteristics of disciplinary power such as omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence can be discovered in panoptic society of “Subpoena.” In this society, there is always the possibility of resistance and rebellion because wherever power is found, resistance emerges as well, though, eventually, power prevails upon individuals. Barthelme creatively portrays a post-modern society in which disciplinary power, with its meticulous and permanent surveillance, on the one hand, has transformed the subjects into the men of modern humanism, and, on the other hand, has changed the traditional society into a panoptic one. Barthelme successfully finalizes the story with the message that modern society intends to make obedient and useful machines out of the subjects.

Multi-intertextuality Strategy in Donald Barthelme’s Postmodern Writing

The present paper analyzes the multi-intertextuality strategy employed in Donald Barthelme’s postmodern writing. Intertextuality between text and reality, intertextuality between text and original text, intertextuality between text creation and text critique are analyzed respectively in detail. Through the analysis, the paper reaches its conclusion that as a responsible humanist and writer, Barthelme recreates a new reality in his text which is a proper comment on the reality he lives in by using his multi-intertextuality strategy.

Dirty Fighter

Dirty Fighter William Householder (bio) Staff Picks George Singleton LSU Press www.lsupress.org/books/detail/staff-picks/ 208 Pages; Print, $22.50 Here are a few things you may not know about George Singleton, Southern fiction writer, purveyor of "grit lit," and one of the funniest short story writers this benighted country has produced: George and his opossum buddy have time-traveling adventures as the superheroes Manna Man and Thanatosis Girl, righting wrongs throughout history. George likes to put his good friend, the acclaimed novelist and poet Ron Rash, into his stories in a most unseemly and grotesquely funny fashion. (It's not hard. "Rash" lends itself to abuse in so many ways). George likes flea markets. Fact or fiction? You decide. George Singleton is not just a funny Southern fiction writer in the grand tradition, which includes Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Donald Barthelme and Roy Blount, Jr. But he is also a first-class travel agent. How's that, you ask? I thought he worked for Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina? Rest assured, he still does, but his passion has always been travel. If you've ever read any of George's stories, you know he likes to send you to the most interesting places this side of the Mason-Dixon Line. Have you ever visited a town called Gruel? Or Poke? Or Forty-Five? Sure, there are towns with such odd names all over the South, and yes, the populations of such towns exist, but not in the same state! The Carolinas of George Singleton are familiar, but slightly skewed.The big problem with reading Singleton is after a while you start to talk and think like one his characters or worse yet, if you're a writer, you start to write like Singleton and nobody else can do that but him. For example, take a look at the opening of "Rinse Cycle": Tyler Fort would still be alive these thirty-plus years later had my father not thrown away the cheap Zebco rod and reel, if my best friend Arlie Capps's father hadn't beaten him after we got caught, if Mr. Fort had learned how to read and been able to get another job after the mill closed, if new owner, Mr. Patel, had drained the swimming pool after Labor Day behind the twelve-room Hilltop Motel like old owner, Mr. Liner, always did ... if Raj Patel had installed a higher fence or security cameras to let him know when two fourteen-year-old boys jumped a split rail in order to harass a boy pummeled by an unhinged father, if the town of Poke could still afford a single cop to work third shift driving around with a spotlight, and—to be honest—if Tyler Fort possessed the ability to say, "I don't want to wear dresses every Sunday night." But he's long dead. That story's opening paragraph has so much energy in its prose and momentum in the exposition it supplies, only to slam on the brakes in the last sentence: you have to read it twice just to be sure of what's happened. I read that opening and said, "Damn!" Further evidence that the writing of George Singleton will make you forget a good Baptist upbringing. The men in the fourteen stories comprising Staff Picks are middle-class, middle-aged, white guys from small Southern towns. They are hapless. They are suckers. They are schmucks trying to get by. The women are long-suffering or no-longer [End Page 32] suffering as they've wised up and left these pathetic men. Some good examples of these men are in "One More," "Gloryland," and "Resisting Separation." George Singleton is also a dirty fighter. You think you're getting a funny story about a couple's marital foibles and then out of nowhere he'll punch you in the gut with enough force that the air coming out of you sounds like a sob, then he'll throw dust into your eyes to make you tear up. His coup de grâce is his signature wrestling move, illegal in thirty of the continental United States...

Leaving the Gay Place: Billy Lee Brammer and the Great Society

Leaving the Gay Place: Billy Lee Brammer and the Great Society

The Subversion of Gender Stereotypes in Donald Barthelme’s Snow White

Donald Barthelme’s Snow White redefines gender roles in the 20th century. Barthelme retells the original fairy tale, subverting its presentation of stereotypical gender roles to depict postmodern ideologies, particularly feminism. The male voice and its controlling power, embodied within the original narrative, becomes the lost, weak, and subordinate side of his story. The female voice, repressed by social and cultural principles, is reshaped to represent the free, powerful, and dominant figure in his narrative. This novel’s presentation of Snow White’s characters reflects feminist battles, such as the fight for gender equality and women’s freedom from patriarchal restrictions or sexual objectification. Adopting a feminist perspective, this study investigates Barthelme’s demythologizing approach in Snow White to present his new identification of gender roles. Specifically, this study examines the novel as a subversive reworking of Grimm’s Snow White [the original fairy tale] by analyzing Barthelme’s reframing of Snow White, the seven dwarfs, and Prince Paul. The findings of the study will show how Barthelme’s text offers a feminist critique of patriarchal dominance to the original Grimm’s fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Through a close reading of the text, this study also seeks to highlight the novel’s subversive representation of socially constructed stereotypical male and female roles in the fairy tale to challenge the long-standing gender ideologies conceived by the patriarchal society.

Leaving the Gay Place: Billy Lee Brammer and the Great Society by Tracy Daugherty

Reviewed by: Leaving the Gay Place: Billy Lee Brammer and the Great Society by Tracy Daugherty Don Graham Tracy Daugherty, Leaving the Gay Place: Billy Lee Brammer and the Great Society. Austin: U of Texas P, 2018. 436 pp. Cloth, $29.95. Tracy Daugherty, biographer of major figures Joan Didion, Joseph Heller, and Donald Barthelme, here turns his attention to Billy Lee Brammer, a Texas writer who produced one book, The Gay Place (1961). Perhaps this is the place to point out that "gay" means happy and that the title derives from an obscure poem by Scott Fitzgerald, whose gauzy, gorgeous prose much influenced Brammer's style. The novel offers a tripartite portrait of a salty, licentious Texas governor, Arthur "Goddamn" Fenstermaker, based on Lyndon B. Johnson. Unlike most of his liberal friends, Brammer admired LBJ. Of course Johnson was never governor of Texas, but he was a piece of work, and Brammer knew him better than most because he and his wife Nadine worked on Johnson's staff when the great man was Senate Majority Leader. The novel did not sell, but it has persisted [End Page 335] down the decades and is still in print, and anybody interested in Texas writing or in a fictional portrait of LBJ will find much to commend it. Brammer struggled to write another, but the arc of his career is profoundly depressing. Early on he became addicted to narcotics of an increasingly dangerous kind and his post-Gay Place efforts consist of some journalism and a never completed sequel titled Fustian Days. Daugherty does a very good job of describing both the promise and the shear waste of Brammer's life. He was born into a working-class family living in Oak Cliff, a blue-collar suburb of Dallas, and was spoiled rotten as the phrase has it. He attended North Texas State Teachers College in Denton where he met the spirited Nadine Cannon, his first wife, who introduced him to the stay-up-all-night seduction of diet pills. The marriage would be marked by three children, serial infidelities by both parties, and divorce. Women were drawn to Brammer, and he had many affairs. In 1961 when he and Nadine and family were living in Washington, DC, he took up with a young Radcliffe graduate, Diana de Vegh, who as it happened was keeping company with another figure of that era, John E Kennedy. Both tormented and tantalized by his rival, Brammer made notes of Vegh's conservations with JFK, and Daugherty's inclusion of those is a high point if one is interested in the thirty-fifth president's priapic history. Brammer was in Dallas that fatal day of November 22, 1963, and as an insider and former intimate of the new president, publishers considered him the logical person to write a book about LBJ. Brammer leapt at the opportunity but either Johnson or, more likely, Lady Bird ("Sweet Mama" in the novel) slammed the door on that idea, and Brammer began the long drift into stupefied incoherence. Austin is where Brammer acquired his guru reputation, a celebrity among a group of hangers-on, writers, políticos, college girls, wives, and hipsters who formed a kind of salon centered on a local watering hole in Austin, Scholz's Biergarten. Members included the writers Edwin (Bud) Shrake, Gary Cartwright, Ronnie Dugger, Willy Morris, Larry L. King, and activist Ann Richards, who would recover from alcoholism to become a one-term governor of Texas [End Page 336] (1991–1995)· The former Dallas Cowboy Pete Gent (North Dallas Forty) was also part of this group that styled themselves as Mad Dog, Inc. Brammer's teenage daughters were not impressed. Shelby called them a "bunch of silly old men getting wasted and wasting time" (336). Her sister Sidney saw through them as well: "They were big and drunk and loud. He'd [her father] sit quietly and then let out a pithy remark, and they'd fall over—he enjoyed that" (336). Another Texas writer, Larry McMurtry, cast a cold eye on the Austin scene. For a brief period in 1961 he shared a rental house with Brammer in Austin, and in a recent...

The ‘Problem’ of Beckett in postmodern American fiction

ABSTRACT Despite having vanished from the epicentre of Beckett Studies, the modern/postmodern debate remains unsettled ground. Drawing from Beckett’s historical unwillingness to fall neatly within these markers, this article investigates Beckett’s legacy over the fiction and essays of John Barth and Donald Barthelme. Privileging Beckett as a generative ‘problem’, Barthelme’s category will be used to illustrate Beckett’s legacy as one that is both resisted and accommodated by postmodern authors. In this regard, Barthelme conceives of his works as written ‘in opposition’ to Beckett, while appropriating his aesthetic commitment to ‘not knowing’. This is supplemented by a discussion of Barth, in whose works we find a ‘shore’ erected against the ruins of Beckettian ‘silence’. Underwriting the ‘problem’ discussed in this article, we will also examine the contradictory models of legacy embodied in Beckett’s writing; in particular, the Texts for Nothing, (1955) following the impasse of The Unnamable, (1953) find Beckett forging a nominally post-Beckett voice in the space of his own corpus. Simultaneously engaging with and disavowing Beckett’s influence, Barth and Barthelme interrogate the shape of Beckett’s postmodern legacy, finding in Beckett’s works both the threat of ending and the promise of creative renewal.

The Visible Aspect of Things: Towards a Synchronic Reading of Donald Barthelme1

This essay seeks to address a distinct lacuna in criticism regarding the American author Donald Barthelme, one comprised of two dimensions. First, there is a scarcity of analysis of fragments in works apart from Snow White. Second, almost no attention has been paid to the formal intricacies of Barthelme’s fragments, nor to why their visible aspects might be significant. Arguing that Barthelme is an unusually visually-minded writer, this essay examines the use of fragments in a range of his short stories. A Saussurean framework is used to argue that Barthelme’s writing demands we shift the act of reading away from its diachronic conventions and towards a synchronic approach. I analyze such apparently unremarkable textual aspects as dashes, hyphens, and lists, showing that they are used by Barthelme in a way that demands a visual mode of reading. In questioning the significance of causality, this mode of reading has wider implications insofar as it challenges the typical view that the short story should be approached as a form that is driven by narrative.

This Old Man: All in Pieces by Roger Angell

Reviewed by: This Old Man: All in Pieces by Roger Angell Mike Broida (bio) Roger Angell, This Old Man: All in Pieces (Anchor Books, 2015), 320 pp. To live a "long and happy life" is one of those stock phrases with interchangeable parts: one might wish for a "long and productive" life or a "long and healthy" life or even the Trekkie motto to "live long and prosper." But what does it mean to live a long life, well after most of one's friends, colleagues, and loved ones are gone, and why do we desire it so? Born in 1920, nonagenarian and longtime New Yorker editor Roger Angell confronts the beauty and pain of this "long life" in This Old Man: All in Pieces, which Angell refers to as "a portrait of my brain at 94: a different serving, with good days and bad days in there, some losses and recurring afterthoughts right next to a midnight haiku, a fugitive great movie, a party conversation reborn." Angell is perhaps the last of The New Yorker's old guard of editors and writers; his mother, Katherine White, was an editor, and his stepfather, E. B. White, a frequent contributor. As an autobiographical retrospective, This Old Man presents a sort of writerly memento of life in and around the famed and quasi-secretive magazine. Filling the nooks and crannies between Angell's longer features and articles are inter-office memos, cartoons from the magazine, notes for the annual Christmas poem "Greetings, Friends!", and letters to numerous writers—including a charming correspondence with the poet Philip Levine and a kindhearted rejection letter to Ann Beattie, in reference to a story where "no one here [at The New Yorker] could recognize these people; they don't seem to have any connection with real life." In his tribute to former colleague William Maxwell and the bevy of famous writers he worked with, Angell sneaks in his own philosophical convictions about writing and its tug on the human spirit: I believe, rather, that their stories [those of Maxwell's authors] are the same stories that we tell ourselves, each of us, over and over, every day and every night, returning to our distant or recent past, possibly in search of happiness but much more often in the hope of finding an unexpected window or bend in the path there. We want our stories to come out differently, but they never do. [End Page 335] The assembled mass of essays makes Angell's collection feel part tip sheet—as in pieces like "Storyville," about his time as fiction editor for The New Yorker—and part history of the magazine, replete with tributes to men and women of yore: Harold Ross, Donald Barthelme, Edith Oliver, William Maxwell, and John Updike, among others. This rosy nostalgia—many of the pieces have the candor and warmth and soft edges of a story told by one's grandparent—suits Angell's preferred subject, baseball, nicely. As a sport, the "national pastime" is ripe and romantic in American consciousness. There is great power in Angell's ability to recast many of the long-ago greats who were never immortalized by the advent of the video camera. One is "The Heater from Van Meter," Cleveland Indians pitcher Bob Feller, nemesis and archrival to Angell's boyhood Yankees: "He'd glare in at the batter over his upraised left shoulder, kick his front leg straight across, and clamp down in late delivery and at the same instant, it seemed, the catcher was straightening up with the ball in his mitt again." Many of Angell's more recent pieces on baseball take a short form, often whimsical and nostalgic, such as a tribute to Derek Jeter after his retirement, as noted in "S'Long, Jeet" (a "Talk of the Town" piece), or recaps of World Series sagas in "The Best" or "Post Patsy," where "A World Series opening game always feels like a kid's first trip to Luna Park—a sunlit space, with good things happening all day." Angell's remembrances, from Jackie Robinson to Vladimir Nabokov, fill the implicit obligation of one of advanced age—to be a repository of memory and...

Le roi/The King de Donald Barthelme: les multiples facettes de la mémoire (d’un) Américain(e)

Since The King (1990) transposes the Arthurian myth into World War II, this article first aims at analyzing the posthumous novel by Donald Barthelme (1931-1989) as an allohistory staging the meeting of history and memory, two somehow antithetical notions. It also argues that despite the extensive cultural library that goes into the book’s making and the prominence of the English protagonist and setting, Barthelme fashions an American novel from the myth of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table by featuring emblematic American texts: a metafictional illustration of Pierre Nora’s argument that memory is both collective and individual.

FICTION IN REVIEW

1 4 8 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W G R E G J O H N S O N ‘‘If it looks funny on the page, I don’t read it,’’ said Flannery O’Connor of experimental fiction. This somewhat reactionary observation is in line with her aspersions on such authors as Virginia Woolf, whom she called ‘‘nuts’’ (though admitting this was an unfair characterization); and yet according to her biographer, Brad Gooch, she did admire such modernist works as James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), masterpieces that ‘‘made it new’’ in terms of subject matter if not of literary form. Had O’Connor lived into the 1970s (she died in 1964, at age thirty-nine), it’s doubtful she would have cared for the self-reflexive fictions of John Barth, the poetic ri√s of Donald Barthelme, or any of the other myriad postmodernist works that have tested the boundaries of contemporary fictional practice. Though a staunch Roman Catholic, O’Connor in her correspondence did recommend some of the up-and-coming Jewish writers of her day, including the young Norman Mailer (whose work she called ‘‘very fine’’) and especially the relatively conventional BerH e r e I A m , by Jonathan Safran Foer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 571 pp., $28) 1 4 9 R nard Malamud. Upon first reading Malamud’s The Magic Barrel (1958), she wrote, ‘‘I have discovered a short-story writer who is better than any of them, including myself.’’ In another letter, she amplified: ‘‘The stories deal with Jews and they are the real thing. Really spiritual and very funny. Somebody was telling me yesterday that the reason Jews are ahead of Catholics in every intellectual pursuit is very simple: they have more brains. I believe it.’’ But O’Connor could get cranky after reading books with either extreme subject matter or what she saw as too much sexual frankness . Had she survived long enough to witness the sexual revolution and to encounter such a novel as Philip Roth’s star-making Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), no doubt she would have blown a gasket. Certainly it’s fanciful to imagine her reading the highly experimental yet ethically grounded books Jonathan Safran Foer has published so far – the novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), along with the non- fiction work Eating Animals (2009) – but it seems likely that she would have appreciated Foer’s work for the same reason she did Malamud’s, even if Foer’s prose sometimes ‘‘looks funny on the page.’’ For his writing also evokes the spirituality and humor O’Connor liked in Malamud’s fiction. Foer’s obsession with Judaism , Israel, and Jewish identity are far removed from O’Connor’s abiding devotion to Catholicism, but she would no doubt have admired Foer’s interests in family tradition and religious principles , even if she did not share them. In his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, Foer produced a double-stranded narrative in alternating chapters featuring a young man named Jonathan Safran Foer and his guide, Alex, who helps Foer (usually called ‘‘the hero’’) travel to Ukraine in order to find the young girl who saved his grandfather from the Nazi death camps. More serious subject matter it’s di≈cult to imagine, but the novel is also uproariously funny. For Alex is the most delightful and original mangler of the English language since Mrs. Malaprop , and he shows on almost every page that he is idiomatically challenged, to say the least: ‘‘When his train finally arrived, both of my legs were needles and nails from being an upright person for such a duration.’’ As he admits when he and Foer meet face to face, 1 5 0 J O H N S O N Y ‘‘I implore you to forgive my speaking of English. I am not so premium with it.’’ Foer’s second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, displayed the kind of technical razzmatazz that O’Connor scorned, including experimental typography, blank pages, and oddly placed photographs. Yet this novel, too, was marked...

The Writing of “Dreck”: Consumerism, Waste and Re-use in Donald Barthelme’s Snow White

This paper examines the relationship between material waste, late capitalism, and the language and structure of Donald Barthelme’s fiction, with particular attention to Snow White (1967). Going against established modes of allegorizing the theme of waste in Barthelme’s work, I suggest the fruitfulness of a literal reading, and propose that his waste objects are framed as inevitable outcomes of a successful advertising campaign. They are the physical evidence or counterpart to the lexicons of marketing and advertising that so preoccupied the author. Such a reading is particularly apt given that Barthelme’s early fiction coincided with the birth of the environmental movement, and builds on recent scholarship in the fields of New Materialism and waste studies. By examining Barthelme’s depictions of waste through the dual lens of New Materialism and waste studies, and in relation to the work of his contemporaries as well as the literary experimentations of earlier avant-gardists, the paper establishes the different ways in which Barthelme articulates value.

“I’m a I’m a Scholar at the Moment”: The Voice of the Literary Critic in the Works of American Scholar-Metafictionists

Abstract In her seminal book on metafiction, Patricia Waugh describes this practice as an obliteration of the distinction between “creation” and “criticism.” This article examines the interplay of the “creative” and the “critical” in five American metafictions from the late 1960s, whose authors were both fictional writers and scholars: Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, William H. Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants and Ronald Sukenick’s The Death of the Novel and Other Stories. The article considers the ways in which the voice of the literary critic is incorporated into each work in the form of a self-reflexive commentary. Although the ostensible principle of metafiction is to merge fiction and criticism, most of the self-conscious texts under discussion are shown to adopt a predominantly negative attitude towards the critical voices they embody – by making them sound pompous, pretentious or banal. The article concludes with a claim that the five works do not advocate a rejection of academic criticism but rather insist on its reform. Their dissatisfaction with the prescriptivism of most contemporary literary criticism is compared to Susan Sontag’s arguments in her essay “Against Interpretation.”

"I did a nice thing": David Foster Wallace and the Gift Economy

"I did a nice thing":David Foster Wallace and the Gift Economy James McAdams (bio) I The artist appeals to that part of our being which is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation. Joseph Conrad Nigger of the Narcissus While david foster wallace only began writing seriously halfway through his undergraduate career, he experienced success at an extremely young age, an outcome he would later regret. Initially a self-described "hard-core syntax weenie," Wallace studied mathematical theory and modal logic at the University of Amherst until becoming exposed to avant-garde fiction, in particular Donald Barthelme's "The Red Balloon." Not until then, he admits, did he realize that those very special "clicks" one encounters in academia, described by a professor as "mathematical experiences," were essentially "aesthetic in nature, an epiphany in Joyce's original sense" (McCaffery 138). Ultimately, the work of fiction he submitted for [End Page 119] his English honours thesis would later be published as The Broom of the System, a zany, Pynchonesque novel replete with clever pyrotechnics and allusions to Wittgenstein, from whom it receives its title. However, as early as 1987, when he was obtaining his mfa at the University of Arizona, Wallace had grown ambivalent about the success and self-indulgent style of The Broom of the System. In 1993, he explained that the popularity of The Broom of the System mystified him, acknowledging, "there's a lot of stuff in that novel I'd like to reel back in and do better" (136). Much of his ambivalence involved the novel's penchant for what he identifies as narcissistic and egoistic writerly games that "deny" the essential fact that "the writer is over here with his agenda while the reader's over there … This paradox is what makes good fiction sort of magical, I think." Wallace laments, "The paradox can't be resolved, but it can somehow be mediated—re-mediated" (137 emphasis added). This remediation takes the form of Wallace re-imagining art as not performative and self-indulgent but, rather, as a gift. At the same time he was reconsidering his own approach to fiction, Wallace began to also re-evaluate his attitudes toward the metafictional and postmodern writers whose techniques had influenced his debut novel. These authors, including Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, and John Barth, had attracted the younger Wallace with their works' ironic humour, erudition, formal sophistication, and aesthetic innovation. As he became more critical of his own work, though, as well as the culture at large, Wallace began to question the effectiveness of these methods in a society dominated by corporate interests, marketing brands, and political cynicism. Ultimately, as he told David Lipsky about his time in late-80s Arizona: I was just really stuck about writing … I didn't know whether I really loved to write or whether I'd just gotten some kind of excited about having some early success. The story at the end of Curious ["Westward the Course of Empire Goes Its Way"], which not a lot of people like, was really meant to be extremely sad. And to sort of be a kind of suicide note. And I think by the time I got to the end of that story, I figured I wasn't going to write anymore. (61) In "Westward," Mark Nechtr, Wallace's alter-ego, observes "metafiction is untrue, as a lover. It cannot betray. It can only reveal. Itself is its only object. It's the act of a lonely solipsist's self-love." Conversely, the narrator reveals, Mark Nechtr "desires, some distant hard-earned day, to write [End Page 120] something that stabs you in the heart. That pierces you, makes you think you're going to die. Maybe it's called metalife. Or metafiction. Or realism. Or gfhrytytu. He doesn't know. He wonders who the hell really cares" (Girl With Curious Hair 332). If this story is a suicide note for a certain...

“Queer Rednecks”: Padgett Powell’s Manly South

“Queer Rednecks”Padgett Powell’s Manly South John Moran (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Padgett Powell’s recent work recognizes that straight hyper-masculinity, especially that of the southern “redneck” male, is itself “queer” and non-normative—as culturally disruptive as same-sex sexuality. Although the South is often considered the most homophobic U.S. region, in some ways we are the queerest, too. All images by Kenny Cole. “Knot,” 2010. [End Page 95] Padgett Powell has a habit of saying provocative things, and one such line that struck me was, “I am gay in every way except the sex.” While an undergraduate at the University of Florida, where Powell teaches creative writing, I thought he was trying to charm people like his colleague David Leavitt and myself (we are both gay, including the sex). Powell’s life and fiction are hyper-masculine and southern, and it is reasonable to argue that they are not considered paragons of gay culture. At the university, he is known for filling stews with the squirrels and raccoons that try to infiltrate his chicken pen. Typical, his first story collection, is built on references to dogfighting, whorehouses, chewing tobacco, trucking pulpwood, “miscegenational pimps,” guys drinking beer while picking loot out of floodwaters, and characters who think all women are “whores.” Powell, heir to the two southern weirdo fiction traditions of Flannery O’Connor and Donald Barthelme (and now christened with the James Tait Black Memorial Prize), demonstrates in his later work how white southern masculinity seems outside the norm, always too effeminate, or else too masculine. By tracking the changes in representations of same-sex sexuality, masculinity, and homophobia between Powell’s early “Rough South” fiction of the 1980s and early 1990s and his twenty-first century fiction, which has a more playful attitude or even disregard of gender expectations, we observe the blurring and equivocation of hyper-masculinity and male femininity, of “macho” and “pansy.” Powell’s recent work recognizes that straight hyper-masculinity, especially that of the southern “redneck” male, is itself “queer” and non-normative—as culturally disruptive as same-sex sexuality. Although the South is often considered the most homophobic U.S. region, in some ways we are the queerest, too.1 “Queer,” here, refers to non-normative and marginalized sex and gender behavior. The work of the queer theorist Jasbir Puar helps to explain how the South may be simultaneously seen as homophobic and perverse. Puar describes homonationalism, or the way that sexual minorities can be folded into America’s imperial project, fostering U.S. sovereignty through the claim of “sexual exceptionalism” (our nation is better than yours because we are friendly to gays). An important part of Puar’s work has been to center sexuality in analysis of the War on Terror. Looking from South Park to Abu Ghraib, Puar argues that the “terrorist body,” or more specifically, Muslim and Sikh bodies, are portrayed as simultaneously perverse and homophobic. Puar analyzes widely circulated images of the Empire State Building anally penetrating Osama bin Laden, and Iraqi prisoners stripped naked and positioned as if they were sodomizing each other at Abu Ghraib, as built on “colonial fantasies of Orientalist sexual excess, perversity, and pedophilia” as well as “animalistic instincts,” and on images of the Muslim other as “sexually lascivious and excessive, yet perversely repressed” and associated with “failed masculinity.” These images are further entrenched through homonationalism [End Page 96] when activists and governments contrast them with what other scholars have called “good queer citizens,” often white and wealthy “upright homosexuals engaged in sanctioned kinship norms.”2 At the same time, scholars have argued that the South is an Other and object of internal orientalism. Literary critic Jennifer Rae Greeson argues that “a concept of the South is essential to national identity” and U.S. exceptionalism. In the master narrative of U.S. exceptionalism, the South—as an imagined community, a site of national fantasy, and an ideological concept—has been associated with “slavery, white supremacy, under-development, poverty, [and] backwardness,” contradicting the republican model of U.S. nationalism through its exploitation (of slaves) and its being exploited itself (as a site of systematic under-development and...