On Views of My Father Weeping by Donald Barthelme
Donald Barthelme is considered by many to be the pioneer of American postmodernism. An associated and widespread critical notion about Barthelme's discourse is that lacking a central meaning or stable subject, Barthelme's characteristic tale forms itself out of the fragments and junk of our contemporary civilization¡ª¡°whose random components are pasted together in a manner akin to dadaist collage.¡± (Molesworth 1) Few authors exemplify this type of writing better than Donald Barthelme: stress technique over substance, structure over content, signifiers over signifieds, language "itself" over the materials - texts, ideas, realities - it represents and transforms. Lois Gordon claimed in her Twayne volume, Donald Barthelme that ¡°[He] rejects traditional chronology, plot, character, time, space, grammar, syntax, metaphor, and simile, as well as the traditional distinctions between fact and fiction. What used to organize reality -- time, space, and the structure of language -- is now often disjointed, and language, and the difficulties in using it, becomes the very subject of his art. Most obvious is . . . its refusal to be an orderly reflection of, and comment upon, a stable, external world.¡±
Barthelme's stories appropriately have no traditional beginnings, middles, or ends; they are irreducible or untotalizable, making no conventionally logical transitions between events and giving us an incoherent picture of the world. Hence the foregrounding of Barthelme's technique and his most quoted dictum goes like this, ¡°Fragments are the only forms I trust¡± ("See the Moon?" 107). Or as one early critic explained, "We perceive in fragments, live in fragments, are no doubt dying by fragments; should we not, then, write in fragments, emphasizing thereby the strange disjunctions, the even stranger juxtapositions, that are part of the everyday experience of modern life?" (Schickel 14) Lars Bang is the coachman driving the carriage that killed the narrator's father, and he provides an orderly version of the incident. Bang relates the details of the accident "as if he were telling a tavern story,"(708) characterizing the father as a brutal, irresponsible drunkard who caused his own death. Bang asserts that this account is the true one, but the beautiful girl who is listening with the narrator contradicts him and claims that "Bang is an absolute bloody liar." The narrator notes that the coachman' s name is "not unlike my own name,"(704) (where the wordplay is typically presented) which
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Donald Barthelme,
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Lars Bang,
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III Techniques,
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Approximate Word count = 874
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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