Frederick Barthelme

Frederick Barthelme (born October 10, 1943 in Houston , Texas ) is an American writer . He is the brother of Donald and Steve Barthelme, who are also famous writers.

Life

Barthelme studied from 1961 to 1967 at Tulane University in New Orleans and the University of Houston . Originally, he aspired to a career as a visual artist - his father was a professor of architecture - and earned his living as an architectural draftsman, assistant to a gallery owner and creative director in an advertising agency . Despite his initial successes as an artist - in 1969 and 1970, for example, the Seattle Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed his works - he soon turned away from art because, as he put it, “he did not live his whole life wanted to drag large pieces of wood through the streets of New York ”. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1977 and became Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi at Hattiesburg after receiving the Eliot Coleman Award for Prose for his short story "Storyteller" . He has taught at Tulane and Johns Hopkins Universities, as well as film. Barthelme sees himself as an architect, artist and writer.

Literary work

Barthelmes short stories and novels are characterized by mostly paratactic sentence structure, linear but elliptical narrative structures and laconic . That is why he and Raymond Carver are considered literary minimalism by the critics , but like other minimalists, he does not want to be called such.

In an interview for Contemporary Authors he explicitly rejects such an assignment, although, as Link explains, his reasoning provides more of a justification for such a classification: “I don't like being called a minimalist, which I am called I think because my characters don't get up on boxes and shout out their views of the world. This is not because they do not have views of the world, but rather that they recognize that we make views of the world the same way we make cars - we produce a great many, but they're not very reliable. So the characters shut up. This pleases me. There are things implicit in shutting up, in avoiding lengthy rationalizations, [...] in not arguing the great public issues. ” (German: “ I don't like to be called the minimalist who I think I am called because my characters don't climb boxes and scream out their worldviews, but rather realize that we produce worldviews in the same way as cars - we produce a lot, but they are not reliable. So my characters are silent. I like that me. There are things that are implicit in silence, in avoiding lengthy rationalizations, in avoiding discussing the big public issues ”. )

In contrast to Carver and other minimalists, Barthelme's literary texts hardly require any speculative addition by the reader, it is precisely the behavior and discretion shown characterize his figures. Your thinking and feeling result from your behavior.

His first volume, Short Stories, appeared in 1970 before Carver's first publications, but Barthelme only became known to the wider public through the publication of his second collection, Moon Deluxe . With his second novel Second Marriage (1984), in which two of the short stories from Moon Deluxe ( The Browns and Exotic Nile ) are processed, Barthelme finally established himself as "one of the more important storytellers of the eighties" .

Shopping malls , chain restaurants , parking lots and motels are typical of Barthelme's stories, which are largely set in the southern United States . His pictures and dialogues, designed in short lines, give his texts, which are economically designed in all areas, the character of snapshots. Through the regular use of brand names and references to pop culture , Barthelme's prose becomes, as it were, placeless, appears in the uniform garb of contemporary consumer society and does not reveal any regional features, since his scenes look the same everywhere. His characters, who seem to have long since got over looking for a meaning in life or even just missing it, indulge in a sometimes happy, but mostly empty and depressed consumerism and try to hold onto their private life, in their relationships and To find marriages .

Barthelme even lets his protagonists, who often appear superficial and passive, sometimes be successful here, but leaves his readers in the dark as to how and why they succeed. In his stories, which are reminiscent of Hemingway in their reductionist style , the fate of helpless characters is portrayed who fail because of their "own inability to communicate with others and with themselves in their everyday world."

For example, in his novel Second Marriage , in which all relationships seem strangely random and contingent , the word “ love ” appears only once. Because of the great importance that alienation and loneliness play in Barthelme's stories, and because of its uniformly anonymous settings, the critic Daniel Akst called Barthelme "the bard of suburban disconnectedness", the bard of suburban disconnectedness .

In addition to such themes of general aimlessness ( Violet or Lumber , 1983), indecision ( Safeway ) or alienation and loneliness ( Raincheck ), the focus is almost always on self-confident women who unsettle the male figures. This is particularly evident in his novels Second Marriage (1984) and Tracer (1985), where the protagonist Martin appears as a male victim in the “gender war” (meaning “war of the sexes” ).

Barthelme himself characterized his work in the above-mentioned interview by the fact that he likes to write about people “who show through actions what they think and feel, through the decisions they make and through somewhat strange scraps of dialogue that are about these very thoughts and feelings Not speaking feelings, maybe because they noticed that, firstly, the things you are talking about are often far removed from the things you feel, and secondly, because they tend to disappear in all the talk. In other words, they are skeptical of the language and how it is used. ” (Originally: “ I try to write about people who show what they think and feel through actions and reactions, through choices, through oblique bits of dialogue, but who probably don't talk about those same thoughts and feelings, perhaps because they've noticed that things talked about 1) are often some distance from things felt, and 2) sometimes tend to disappear in all the talk. In other word they're skeptical [sic] about language and its use. But while they don't haul out their souls for flailing about the page, they do have something of the full range of human intelligence and emotion, which is communicated to the reader through gesture and resonance - every choice is a way of demonstrating a grasp and an appreciation and an opinion of the world in which the character finds him- or herself, and every choice reflects on every other choice. "

With these statements, Barthelme characterizes his own work in a similar way to that of other minimalists, even though his novels and short prose show a world that differs considerably from that of other minimalists. This applies in particular to his female characters, who often shape events and to whom the male protagonists are mostly helpless, as well as to the scenery he designed for modern consumer society.

From a literary point of view, Barthelme is considered to be an “artist with a keen eye for observation and the ability to describe in detail in laconic language” and as a “sovereign master of the short form that restricts himself to the essentials” .

Works

Novels

• War and war . 1971
• Second marriage . Simon & Schuster, New York 1984 (German second marriage, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1992)
• Tracer .Simon & Schuster, 1985 (German Leuchtspur , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1989)
• Two Against One . Weidenfeld & Nicolson, New York 1988
• Natural Selection . Viking, New York 1989
• The Brothers . Viking, 1993
• Painted Desert . Viking, 1995
• Bob the Gambler . Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1997
• Natural Selection: A Novel , 2001
• Elroy Nights , 2004
• Waveland , 2009
• There Must Be Some Mistake , 2014

Short stories

• Rangoon. 1970
• Moon Deluxe . New York, Simon & Schuster, 1983 (German Moon Deluxe . Suhrkamp, ​​1988)
• Chroma . New York, Simon & Schuster, 1987 (German coloratura . Suhrkamp, ​​1987)
• The Law of Averages. New & Selected Stories. Counterpoint, 2000

Non-fiction

• (together with Steven Barthelme) Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss . Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1999

literature

• Jutta Person: Less is More. Minimalism in short prose Raymond Carvers , Frederick Barthelmes and Mary Robisons , WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1999
• Franz Link: Frederick Barthelme , in American Storytellers since 1950. Topics, content, forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993 ISBN 3-506-70822-8 pp. 485-489

Web links

• Author's site
• Literature by and about Frederick Barthelme in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Martin Schulze: History of American Literature: From the Beginning to Today . Propylaen, Berlin 1999 ISBN 3-549-05776-8 p. 584.
2. ^ Franz Link: Frederick Barthelme , in American storytellers since 1950. Topics, contents, forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993 ISBN 3-506-70822-8 p. 485
3. ↑ Roland Sodowsky: The Minimalist Short Story. Its Definition, Writers, and (Small) Heyday. In: Studies in Short Fiction 33, 1996, pp. 529-540. See Hubert Zapf : Minimal Art and Neorealism , in American Literary History . Metzler, 2nd act. Aufl. Stuttgart 2004 ISBN 3-476-02036-3 p. 363, as well as Franz Link: Frederick Barthelme , in American narrators since 1950. Topics, contents, forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993 ISBN 3-506-70822-8 p. 485
4. ↑ In: Contemporary Authors , 122, 1988, pp. 46–51. See Franz Link: Frederick Barthelme , in American storytellers since 1950. Topics, content, forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993 p. 485. Barthelmes ’statement was cited from this source.
5. ^ Franz Link: Frederick Barthelme , in American storytellers since 1950. Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, p. 485f.
6. ^ Franz Link: Frederick Barthelme . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950. Topics, contents, forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, p. 485
7. ↑ ^{a b} Martin Schulze: History of American literature: from the beginnings to today . Propylaen, Berlin 1999 ISBN 3-549-05776-8 p. 584
8. ^ Franz Link: Frederick Barthelme . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 485.
9. ↑ Hubert Zapf : Minimal Art and Neorealism . In: Hubert Zapf: American literary history . Metzler, 2nd act. Edition Stuttgart 2004 ISBN 3-476-02036-3 p. 363.
10. ↑ Martin Schulze: History of American Literature: From the Beginning to Today . Propylaen Verlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-549-05776-8 , p. 584.
11. ↑ Quoted from Franz Link: Frederick Barthelme , in American storytellers since 1950. Topics, contents, forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, p. 485f.
12. ↑ cf. in detail Franz Link: Frederick Barthelme , in American storytellers since 1950. Topics, contents, forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, p. 485ff.