Donald Barthelme

One of the beautiful things about words is that you can put words together which in isolation mean nothing, or mean only what the dictionary says they mean, and you put them together and you get extraordinary effects.

DONALD BARTHELME: Kidding Father was an activity that took seven of us to do, and there were only six of us. Putting Father down was the main family sport.

JO BRANS: Is there any particular reason for the number of fathers in your work who are being done away with in one form or another? I’m thinking of The Dead Father. Using a father and beating him—is there anything autobiographical...?

BARTHELME: Well, not directly. The relation is the universal problem. You remember, I think in Gertrude Stein there’s a story about the guy who seizes his father by the hair and drags him out of the house into the orchard, and a certain point the father who is being dragged says, “Stop, stop. In my time I did not drag my father beyond this tree.”

...as one reads more and more and more you get more fathers in your hierarchy of fathers. And then, after summoning twenty or thirty fathers, perhaps you are born, or perhaps you are not born.

J.D. O’HARA: You don’t...believe in entropy?

DONALD BARTHELME: Entropy belongs to Pynchon. I read recently that somebody had come forward with evidence that the process is not irreversible. There is abroad a distinct feeling that everything’s getting worse... I don’t think we have the sociological index that would allow us to measure this in any meaningful way, but the feeling is there as a cultural fact. I feel entropy—Kraus on backache is a favorite text around here.

O’HARA: Do you see anything getting better—art, for instance?

BARTHELME: I don’t think you can talk about progress in art—improvement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it’s a horizontal line, not a vertical one. Similarly the notion of an avant-garde is a bit off. The function of the advance guard in military terms is exactly that of the rear guard, to protect the main body, which translates as the status quo. You can speak of political progress, social progress, of course—you may not see much of it, but it can be talked about.

JEROME KLINKOWITZ: [posing a question suggested by Carl Krampf] When you improvise, do you think of the chord changes or the melody?

DONALD BARTHELME: Both. This is an interesting question which I’m unable to answer adequately. If the melody is the skeleton of the particular object, then the chord changes are its wardrobe, its changes of clothes. I tend to pay rather more attention to the latter than to the former. All I want is just a trace of skeleton—three bones from which the rest may be reasoned out.

I do not think it fanciful...to say that Governor Rockefeller, standing among his Míros and de Koonings, is worked upon by them, and if they do not make a Democrat or a Socialist of him they at least alter the character of his Republicanism. Considered in this light, Soviet hostility to “formalist” art becomes more intelligible, as does the antipathy of senators, mayors, and chairmen of building committees. In the same way, Joyce’s book works its radicalizing will upon all men in all countries, even upon those who do not read it and will never read it.

We are all engaged in looting the past. (Only the greatest geniuses manage to steal from the future.)

JEROME KLINKOWITZ: Do you have any favorite comedians, and reasons for liking them?

DONALD BARTHELME: The government.

BOBBIE ROE: A few years ago, you seemed worried that perhaps a lack of emotion was a weakness in your stories.

DONALD BARTHELME: A constant worry. I’m still worried. I tell my students that one of the things readers want, and deserve, is a certain amount of blood on the floor. I don’t always produce it. Probably a function of being more interested in other parts of the process.

DONALD BARTHELME: ...I think there are two devices that have clearly had an enormous impact on language. One is television. I don’t wish to blame television for all the faults of the world, but it has had a vulgarizing effect. The other is the telephone, because we don’t write letters anymore. I don’t write letters—I don’t even write business letters. I call up on the telephone. When people don’t write letters, language deteriorates.

JO BRANS: Do you keep a journal?

BARTHELME: I keep a workbook with stray pieces of paper with things written on them. A kind of mulch pile.

DONALD BARTHELME: ...I was trying to make fiction that was like certain kinds of modern painting. You know, tending toward the abstract. But it’s really very dicey in fiction, because if you get too abstract it just looks like fog, for example.

JO BRANS: Words, after all, have referents. They mean something—colors don’t.

BARTHELME: Not in the same way. So, the project is next to impossible, which is what makes it interesting. There’s nothing so beautiful as having a very difficult problem. It gives purpose to life. And to work. I’m still worrying with it.

...there is a realm of possible knowledge which can be reached by artists, which is not susceptible of mathematical verification but which is true. This is sometimes spoken as the ineffable. If there is any word I detest in the language, this would be it, but the fact that it exists, the word ineffable, is suspicious in that it suggests that there might be something that is ineffable. And I believe that that’s the place artists are trying to get to, and I further believe that when they are successful, they reach it...