484
NEIL
SCHMITZ
als of the consuming power of irony, but with this difference - in
Sad–
ness
it is the self, the ironic genius, who suffers the withering scrutiny.
Sadness
is a reckoning of the writer's ironic consciousness, that continu–
ous "long sentence" briefly manifest in
City Life
as "The Sentence"
thinking itself discursively "down the page," always present in tense,
stuck fast to the quotidian, articulating its knowledge even though at–
tention may be directed elsewhere. Burdened with its own "festering
consciousness," the grammar of its existence, and moving inexorably
toward its conclusive (but not yet bestowed) period, this comprehen–
sive sentence finally swerves out of the text in
City Life,
but its discourse
remains the organizing principle in Barthelme's fiction, the self-reflexive
line that connects the fiction in his books and the books themselves with–
in a coalescing narrative. But before we come to
Sadness
itself and the
dubious
modus vivendi
fashioned in its final piece, "Daumier," it is first
necessary to consider the achievement of that complex
1
disclosing the
Barthelmian sentence, the great artist of "The Genius" to whom the
Mayor and City Council of Houston send their homage: a field of stain–
less steel tulips.
Since
Dr. Caligari
Barthelme has dealt almost obsessively with two
related themes: the rigorous life of confusion led by the modern writer
(who is intensely aware of what he and others do not know) and the
"brain damage" that blankets his world, covering every aspect of con–
temporary life "like an unbreakable lease." These are well-trodden
themes in modern literature, but Barthelme has always boldly met their
banality with the pertinent cliche, conceded his part in the problem and
therein avoided lectures and allegories. Writing as one casualty to an–
other, keeping to the known (the war in Vietnam manifest in New
York:
vide
"The Indian Uprising" in
Unspeakable Practices)
and the
commonplace (domestic crises, itineraries, official functions, and private
parties) he has instead, often with Kafkaesque intensity, restated the
questions these themes beg. How does the artist represent this brain–
damaged world? And how does he survive in it, endure his own damaged
consciousness, the "run-mad skimble-skamble of information sickness"
vividly portrayed in
City Life,
without the recourse of madness, Dr.
Caligari's fate? In "The Dolt," which appears in
Unspeakable Practices,
a hopelessly blocked writer strives to write a coherent linear narrative
and miserably fails, confounded at last by the arrival of an immense son
wearing a serape woven of transistor radios each tuned to a different
station. A jangling serape that in its texture is not unlike "The Indian
Uprising" where "strings of language," shafts of diverse discourse, are
