Snow White

Style and legacy

Barthelme's fiction was hailed by some for being profoundly disciplined and derided by others as being meaningless, academic postmodernism.[6] Barthelme's thoughts and work were largely the result of 20th-century angst[7] as he read extensively, for example in Pascal, Husserl, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Ionesco, Beckett, Sartre, and Camus.

Barthelme's stories typically avoid traditional plot structures, relying instead on a steady accumulation of seemingly unrelated detail. By subverting the reader's expectations through constant non-sequiturs, Barthelme creates a fragmented verbal collage reminiscent of such modernist works as T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses, whose linguistic experiments he often challenged. However, Barthelme's fundamental skepticism and irony distanced him from the modernists' belief in the power of art to reconstruct society, leading most critics to class him as a postmodernist writer. Literary critics have noted that Barthelme, like Stéphane Mallarmé, whom he admired, plays with the meanings of words, relying on poetic intuition to spark new connections of ideas buried in the expressions and conventional responses. The critic George Wicks called Barthelme "the leading American practitioner of surrealism today ... whose fiction continues the investigations of consciousness and experiments in expression that began with Dada and surrealism a half-century ago." Another critic, Jacob Appel, described him as "the most influential unread author in United States history".[8]

The great bulk of his work was published in The New Yorker. In 1964, he began to publish short stories collections beginning with Come Back, Dr. Caligari in 1964, followed by Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968) and City Life (1970). Time magazine named City Life one of the best books of the year and described the collection as written with "Kafka's purity of language and some of Beckett's grim humor". His formal originality can be seen in his fresh handling of the parodic dramatic monologue in "The School" or a list of one hundred numbered sentences and fragments in "The Glass Mountain". Joyce Carol Oates commented on this sense of fragmentation in "Whose Side Are You On?", a 1972 New York Times Book Review essay. She writes, "This from a writer of arguable genius whose works reflect what he himself must feel, in book after book, that his brain is all fragments ... just like everything else." Perhaps, the most discrete reference to this fragment comes from "See the Moon?" from Unspeakable Practices. The narrator states and repeats the phrase, "Fragments are the only forms I trust." It is important, however, to not conflate the quote's sentiment with Barthelme's personal philosophy, as he expressed irritation over the "fragments" quote being attributed so frequently to him rather than his narrator.

Another Barthelme device was breaking up a tale with illustrations culled from mostly popular 19th-century publications, collaged, and appended with ironic captions. Barthelme called his cutting up and pasting together pictures "a secret vice gone public". One of the pieces in the collection Guilty Pleasures, "The Expedition", featured a full-page illustration of a collision between ships, with the caption "Not our fault!"

Barthelme's legacy as an educator lives on at the University of Houston, where he was one of the founders of the prestigious Creative Writing Program. At the University of Houston, Barthelme became known as a sensitive, creative, and encouraging mentor to young creative writing students even as he continued his own writings. Thomas Cobb, one of his students, published his doctoral dissertation Crazy Heart in 1987 partly basing the main character on Barthelme.[9]


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