Donald Barthelme

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Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme (born April 7, 1931 in Philadelphia , † July 23, 1989 in Houston , Texas ) was an American writer . He is considered one of the most important representatives of "new fiction" or American postmodernism .

life and work

Barthelme's father was an architect who followed the tradition of modern classics like Mies van der Rohe . He also built the house on the Texas prairie where Donald Barthelme grew up with his brothers Steve and Frederick , who also became famous writers. Donald came into contact with modern currents in art and philosophy so early. He studied in Houston , Texas, and after his military service in Japan and Korea initially worked as a journalist and directed the Museum of Modern Art in Houston from 1961 to 1962. Without completing his journalism degree, he settled in Manhattan , New York City , as his adopted home in 1962 , to pursue his career as a writer there.

Barthelmes “new fiction” differs in several ways from contemporary literature. The most striking feature of his prose is its brevity. Barthelme published his first short story in 1963 in the New Yorker . This magazine remained his preferred platform; Most of his short stories were published there and later in book form. A selection of them came out in two volumes simply titled 60 Stories and 40 Stories . Barthelmes literary work consists of around 200 short prose texts and four short novels . The first publication of the greater part of his narrative texts in the New Yorker reflects the intelligence of the “distanced and relaxed observer of city life not too distant from snobbery”, which is characteristic of this magazine. In this respect, Barthelme is often seen as a successor to Nathanael West in the current literary or critical discussion . Significant for the difference, however, is Barthelmes' fundamentally different narrative style, which characterizes his special handwriting. More radically than other contemporary authors, Barthelme tries to use the loss of meaning of language as “meaning 'liberation'” in his narrative design to draw attention again to the “reality of modern consumer society that has remained as' dirt” ”in the form of the new text as "'Art' (?) Object" - in analogy to Pop Art .

Barthelme often plays with fantastic elements in his works . He published his first (short) novel Snow White in 1967 in The New Yorker . In literary criticism, Snow White is regarded as a “key work of postmodernism” and is seen as a successful example of the “ intertextual recording of a template”, here the fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , which Barthelme satirically continues. The novel can be read as a palimpsest not only from Grimm's fairy tale, but also from its Walt Disney film adaptation (1937). In this case, however, this palimpsest does not transfer the meaning of the presentation of the event into the present, but eliminates any meaning that was previously associated with it in a present reality of "waste" in which the text no longer has any meaning or any meaning can accept. Barthelmes heroine is no longer as determined in the Grimm fairy tales by the white, but by their black beauty spots (dt. "Beauty spots" ), but faking their beauty and are reminiscent of the wearer of a possible "Befleckheit". Snow White , as the reader will soon discover, has long since lost her innocence; she has already had sexual intercourse with all seven men in the commune where she lives. However, like in a fairy tale, she hopes for fulfillment from her dream prince; the chosen one, however, is not ready for it. He fully pays homage to Herbert Marcuse's theory of denial, which came into being at the same time, and is content with the role of a voyeur who ends up drinking the poisoned “vodka Gibson” intended for Snow White . Snow White herself becomes a virgin again, who experiences no redemption as in fairy tales. The plot of the novel shows little causal narrative logic or motivation , but rather provides a rather anecdotal sequence of events. The form and word structure of the fairy tale is dissolved; it is left to the reader to assemble the fragments of the novel himself into a new whole.

Barthelmes' second novel, The Dead Father , published in 1975 , can be viewed as a counterpart to Snow White . In the first novel, the focus was on the woman who expects fulfillment from a prince in vain; in his second novel, the focus is on the father, who tries to control everything, but ultimately remains impotent in search of the lost fleece . While in Snow White the Grimm fairy tale provides the template to be overwritten, The Dead Father Freud's Totem and Tabu can be assigned as the template to be overwritten. Freud's interpretation of the father-son relationship is overridden in Barthelme's text. With the dead father various ideas of a father image are connected with irrelevance; analogous to the characteristics of a monument or a person worth remembering, one remembers the father like a role model, but can at the same time dismiss him as unimportant or meaningless. The father image put together by Barthelme can be related by the readers to different father figures, in addition to Freud, references can be found to models such as Joyce's Finnegans Wake , Samuel Beckett , TS Eliot or Ionesco's Le roi se meurt (German: The King dies ). The meaning of the construct in Barthelmes novel consists primarily in the fact that it unites all the meanings historically assigned to the father image, only to be deconstructed in the end. The father in The Dead Father defines reality, despite his gradual disempowerment, not only for himself, but equally for his sons. The following are therefore determined by the draft of the previous on the part of the father. In this embodiment of the meaning of the dead father, Barthelme follows the concept of the influence of already existing art on all new art, which Harold Bloom developed in The Anxiety of Influence 1973.

The posthumously published novel The King is a continuation of the legend of King Arthur and his Round Table during World War II . As before in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court and John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat , King Arthur and his Round Table become new Brought to life. The uprising Mordred against his father, King Arthur, takes up the father-son theme from The Dead Father again , here superimposed with the events of the last world war .

In the 1960s, Barthelmes' preferred literary medium was collage in images and text, for example in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968) and Overnight In Many Distant Cities (1983). Later he used more conventional narrative patterns, but settled his stories in increasingly surreal landscapes. In his most famous short story, The Balloon , the whole of Manhattan is suddenly overshadowed by a gigantic balloon, which just as suddenly disappears after a few days. In this way, Barthelme constructs a situation in his narrative that makes it possible, in terms of narrative technology, to address different reactions to the phenomenon, but also to reality in general. Ultimately, the decisive function of the balloon is that it creates a counter-reality to the everyday reality that people feel every day. While Edgar Allan Poe tried to prove in his short story The Balloon Hoax that the reality that arises from the imagination can take on empirical reality , Barthelme simply contrasts it with another in his short story .

The “constructive character” of Barthelmes’s texts is often also shown in the fact that they can easily be found in theoretical expressions that correspond to the author’s views. For example, is the narrator in See the Moon? from the same collection as The Balloon memorabilia on the wall, in the hope that these could eventually come together and make sense. He can only trust such fragments and distrusts any given (meaning) meaning, but does not completely give up hope that one day, especially in the work of art, he will still discover a meaning. In this regard, Barthelme's prose proves to be a metafiction in which the texts address their own concerns in discussing the question of meaning.

Barthelme has written a total of four novels, over a hundred short stories and a children's book: He wrote The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or the Hithering Thithering Djinn for his daughter Anne and won the National Book Award in 1972 . The German translation by Harry Rowohlt appeared in 1991 as "Mathilda and the fire brigade that was not quite what it should be". He has also received several awards for his novels and stories. In addition to his literary works, he wrote numerous literary theoretical essays that helped to establish his position as an important intellectual. His influence on other writers, which he exercised not least as a “creative writing” teacher, is considered to be very great.

Since he often uses elements of the fantastic or takes these as a starting point, his texts often appear in relevant anthologies or in secondary literature, for example in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction .

In 1978 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Barthelme was married four times and has a daughter from a third and fourth marriage. He died of cancer in 1989. He has two brothers, Frederick Barthelme and Steve Barthelme.

Works

Novels:

  • Snow White (1967)
    • German: Snow White. Translated by Maria Bosse-Sporleder. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1968.
  • The Dead Father (1975)
  • Paradise (1986)
    • German: Paradisische conditions. Translated by Isabella Wohlrapp. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-608-95541-0 .
  • The King (1990)
    • German: The King. Translated by Maximilian Schäfer. Engeler, Basel & Weil am Rhein 2006, ISBN 3-938767-07-3 .

Collections:

  • Come back, Dr. Caligari (1964)
  • Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968)
    • German: unspeakable practices, unnatural acts: narratives. Translated by Hanna and Adolf Muschg . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1969.
  • City Life (1970)
    • German: City life. Translated by Marianne Oellers. Library Suhrkamp, ​​vol. 311.Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1972.
  • SADNESS (1972)
    • German: devastated. Translated by a group of translators at the English Institute of the University of Munich (final editor Christian Enzensberger) and by Marianne Frisch. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1986, ISBN 3-608-95065-6 .
  • Guilty Pleasures (1974)
  • Amateurs (1976)
    • German: Amatöre . Translated by a group of translators at the English Institute of the University of Munich (final editor Christian Enzensberger) and by Marianne Frisch. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-608-95066-4 .
  • Great Days (1979)
    • German: Great days. Translated by a group of translators at the English Institute of the University of Munich (final editor Christian Enzensberger) and by Marianne Frisch. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1985, ISBN 3-608-95067-2 .
  • Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1983)
    • German: Overnight to many distant cities. Translated by Isabella Wohlrapp. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1991, ISBN 3-608-95542-9 .
  • Sam's Bar (with illustrations by Seymour Chwast) (1987)
  • Sixty Stories (1981)
  • Forty Stories (1987)
  • Kim Herzinger (Ed.): The Teachings of Don B .: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992)
  • Kim Herzinger (ed.): Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme (1997)
  • Flying to America: 45 More Stories (2007)

Others:

  • The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine, or the Hithering Thithering Djinn (children's book, 1971)

Further translations:

  • The plunge: narratives. Translated by a group of translators at the English Institute of the University of Munich (final editor Christian Enzensberger) and by Marianne Frisch. Cotta's Library of Modernity Vol. 39. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1985, ISBN 3-608-95225-X .
  • Marginal phenomena. Translated by a group of translators at the English Institute of the University of Munich (final editor Christian Enzensberger) and by Marianne Frisch. Verlag Vold and Welt, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-353-00126-3 .
  • At the end of the mechanical age: selected prose. Ed. And with an afterword by Eva Manske. Translated by a group of translators at the English Institute of the University of Munich (final editor Christian Enzensberger) and by Marianne Frisch. Insel-Bücherei Vol. 1083. Insel, Leipzig 1989, ISBN 3-7351-0058-9 .

literature

  • Franz Link: Donald Barthelme . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 351-363.
  • Michael Winkemann: Relation to reality and metal-literary reflection in Donald Barthelmes' short prose . Lang Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1986, ISBN 3-8204-9708-0 .
  • Hubert Zapf : Postmodernism (60s and 70s) . In: Hubert Zapf u. a .: American literary history . Metzler Verlag, 2nd act. Edition, Stuttgart and Weimar 2004, ISBN 3-476-02036-3 , pp. 350–352.
  • Donald Barthelme . In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Hrsg.): Kindlers Literatur Lexikon . 3rd, completely revised edition. 18 Vols. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2009, ISBN 978-3-476-04000-8 , Volume 2, pp. 153–155 [biogram, work article on Snow White and The Dead Father by Joseph C. Schöpp].

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Franz Link: Donald Barthelme . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 351.
  2. ^ Franz Link: Donald Barthelme . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 351f.
  3. ^ Franz Link: Donald Barthelme . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 351f.
  4. ^ Franz Link: Donald Barthelme . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 357-359 and Hubert Zapf: Postmodernismus (60s and 70s) . In: Hubert Zapf u. a .: American literary history . Metzler Verlag, 2nd act. Edition, Stuttgart and Weimar 2004, ISBN 3-476-02036-3 , p. 351.
  5. ↑ Hubert Zapf: Postmodernism (60s and 70s) . In: Hubert Zapf u. a .: American literary history . Metzler Verlag, 2nd act. Edition, Stuttgart and Weimar 2004, ISBN 3-476-02036-3 , p. 360ff. Zapf refers here with regard to the intertextual references u. a. also to the analysis of Paul Goetsch : Donald Barthelmes “The Dead Father” . In: M. Dietrich and C. Schönreich (eds.): Studies on English and American prose after the First World War . Darmstadt 1968, pp. 200-214.
  6. ^ Franz Link: Donald Barthelme . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 362
  7. ^ Franz Link: Donald Barthelme . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 355-357.
  8. ^ Franz Link: Donald Barthelme . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 356.
  9. ↑ Peter Roberts, John Clute : Barthelme, Donald. In: John Clute, Peter Nicholls : The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. 3rd edition (online edition), version dated April 4, 2017.
  10. ↑ Members: Donald Barthelme. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed February 14, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Barthelme, Donald
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 7, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Philadelphia
DATE OF DEATH July 23, 1989
Place of death Houston , Texas