more barthelme

[Otto]

Kyle:
> its just that, the point does come to me. i try.
> but i don't want to read it unless, i can get something
> out of it. i agree that reading should expand the mind,
> but what if like barthelme says: everything is revealed at the
> moment it is needed? what if...? barthelme seems very blunt
> and, dare i say it? show-offy about his philosophical knowingness.
> i heard Foster Wallace does this too. thoughts? insults?
> best and regards.
>

Of course it's "philosophical knowingness", because he's postmodernism at
its best. These are my notes, no fixed interpretation but the way it has
occured to me, or, how I love it:

For "The Sandman" someone told me to read Susan Sontag's "Against
Interpretation" and I do find in my book references to Freud's
Interpretation of a certain E.T.A. Hoffman-story where Freud speaks about
the Uncanny, references to Nietzsche, Heidegger and Paul de Man.

Sontag says: "Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a
work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is
already there. Our task is to cut back back content so that we can see the
thing at all." (IX)

The story is about different versions of a story, the problem of competing
interpretations, of ambiguities and ambivalence, indeterminacies, about the
binary oppositions of manifest versus latent content, of voyeur versus
object. This is compared to the process of psychoanalysis. The shrink tries
to get the truth out of Susan's stories like a traditional reader the fixed
meaning out of a text, in order to get her "fixed" for a "proper" living
along traditional values (in trad. literary terms: "lives happily ever
after" (195).
(D. Barthelme, "Sixty Stories", "The Sandman", London 1991 Minerva
pb-edition)

Susan says: "I want to buy a piano." (text)
You think: She wishes to terminate the analysis and escape into the piano.
(interpretation)
(p. 192)

The letter-writer has lost his faith in the traditional point of view that
there must be a fixed meaning behind every text. The "methodology (...) in
question" (ibid) is literary interpretation, but "an analysis can succed or
fail" (193). He believes there are always different version of "truth":
"This is a variant; there are other versions, but this the one I prefer"
(192). Sontag quotes Nietzsche: "There are no facts, only interpretations."
(Sontag, III). Note what happens to the story (how it changes) of the beaten
black kids in the course of the story of his "own experience of analysis" on
193-194.

"Ebony" -- a defined, special group of readers (194)
"Allow for this bias" (194) -- this is directly about competing
interpretations.

For the writer Susan's ability to love different people and to "get burned"
(195) along the way isn't a failure per se, because any "reading of the
literature (...) will persuade you instantly that the paradigmatic artistic
experience is that of failure" (196).

The way he reasons that Susan shouldn't be changed (from having different
lovers to get married) is simply great. With this and the following
phonecall with the other lover (the musician) he (a lover not jealous of
other lovers, oh happy 60s, if he was he would support the Shrink's effort
to "stabilize" Susan by marrying -preferably him- and dropping the habit of
different lovers) argues for freedom and different readings (lovers) of the
text (Susan). He's not greedy, even at the risk of loosing Susan to the
musician he's voting for the piano:

"What do you do with a patient who finds the world unsatisfactory? The world
*is* unsatisfactory; only a fool would deny it. (...) Susan's perception
that America has somehow got hold of the greed ethic and that the greed
ethic has turned America into a tidy little hell is not, I think, wrong.
What do you do with such a perception? (...) About her depressions, I
wouldn't do anything. I'd leave them alone. Put it on a record." (footnote)
(197)

And the record is:

*Wah-wah
You've given me a wah-wah
And I'm thinking of you
And all the things that we used to do
Wah-wah, wah-wah

Wah-wah
You made me such a big star
Being there at the right time
Cheaper than a dime
Wah-wah, you've given me your wah-wah, wah-wah

Oh, you don't see me crying
Oh, you don't hear me sighing

Wah-wah
I don't need no wah-wah
And I know how sweet life can be
If I keep myself free from the wah-wah
I don't need no wah-wah

Oh, you don't see me crying
Hey baby, you don't hear me sighing
Oh, no no-no no

Wah-wah
Now I don't need no wah-wah's
And I know how sweet life can be
If I keep myself free - of wah-wah
I don't need no wah-wah
George Harrison
http://web.mit.edu/scholvin/www/harrison/c301.htm#1-3

The phonecall:
"When will you be finished?", and she said, "Never." Are you, Doctor dear,
in a position to appreciate the beauty of this reply, in this context?"
(...) What I am saying is that Susan is wonderful. As *is*. There are not so
many things around to which that word can be accurately applied. Therefore I
must view your efforts to improve her with, let us say, a certain amount of
ambivalence." (198)

-- He should know, he's one of her current lovers & knows her art.

X
In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
(Susan Sontag, 1964)

For me this is (partly) a story about this sentence.

Otto