The Dead Father :: The Dead Father Donald Barthelmeis Essays

The cold FatherJerome Klinkowitzs remarkably insightful review of Donald Barthelmes work begins with an anecdote about an evening they spent together in Greenwich Village (Barthelmes home for most of his life as a writer), and how a utterly Freudian remark by Barthelmes wife put a stop to the writers boorish toughnessWhy Donald, she said, your fathers is bigger than yours.She was referring to their respective biosin Whos Who in America. It is Klinkowitzs well-argued contention that Barthelmes mid-career novel The Dead Father (1975) not further represents the high-water mark of his skill as a technical master of postmodern prose, but that it also embodies the central neurosis/inspiration driving most all his work, from his first published story, Me and Miss Mandible in 1961, to his blend novel, Paradise (1986).(Though The King is mentioned by Klinkowitz, it is clear he considers it to be still part of the Barthelme canon.)For Klinkowitz, Barthelmes near-obsessive goal as a po st-modernist is to bury his modernist father.For instance, Klinkowitz writes that, plot of land at first glance Me and Miss Mandible seems a perfectly Kafkaesque tale of a man awakening to grotesquely alter circumstances, in fact it is free of overweening anxiety and not painfully commit to existential questioning or angst ...1 Barthelmes first inclination is to laugh at rather than flail angrily against the forms and themes of an earlier style ...2Klinkowitz cites The Indian become and The Balloon as oft-anthologized stories which epitomize Barthelmes work prior to The Dead Father pieces which came to represent the postmodern short story with all its socially savvy and technically sophisticated style, yet stories whose primary tone is humorous rather than the stilted existential dread of Barthelmes modernist precursors.Thus anxiety of mold is defused through comedy and exaggeration.Klinkowitz implies that, in Barthelme we have our first authentic American Beckett, but one in whose work optimism is neither desperate nor self-canceling. skillfully mixing criticism and biography, Klinkowitz demonstrates how Barthelmes life influenced his work how his time in the army as a service newspaper writer, and later as a publicity writer and editor prepared him to handle speech and images as blocks of secular rather than as purveyors of conceptions ...3But the use of autobiographical material makes a point beyond that relevant to critical biography.Klinkowitz argues that a coherent thematic in Barthelmes writing was life as text--and accordingly text as some sort of incarnation of life.As Klinkowitz writes of his meeting with Barthelme in the village, Barthelme was firmly inside his text.