SLSL Intro "Our Common Nightmare"

[William Zantzinger]

Nevertheless, here are two illustrated stories, "The
Photographs," about the scientific discovery of the
soul, and "The Dassaud Prize," about a competitive
search for God, and what are we to make of them? Two
British scientists, after getting into another of
those stupefyingly stretched-out exchanges, agree to
destroy their photographs of the soul. Their French
counterparts, failing to discover God, generate as a
by-product this museumful of madinventor gear. In
both stories reachings after the transfinite fall
apart, into twit dialogue, into eccentric
technological dreaming, reentangled with Earth and the
earthbound. In a writer less attendant upon the given
world, this might have been occasion for some cheap
glee. But this being another luxury Barthelme couldn't
afford, he was
obliged to stick with reliable melancholy a less
dramatic mode but one he struggled for and came by
honorably.


Not to try to make any case for Barthelme as any
heavy-duty metaphysician. Heaven forfend. He was too
connected to calendar dates and named streets, too
engaged with the quotidian -- like García Márquez's
magician Melquiades in One Hundred Years of Solitude,
"in spite of his immense wisdom and mysterious        
breadth, he had a human burden, an earthly condition
that kept him involved in the small problems of daily
life." Because his verifiable miracles are all
literary in nature, Barthelme is probably not about to
make saint anytime soon, either. But
along with his published work, his other great gift to
us is precisely his melancholy, presented, if we will
but look, as praxis and example, a way to get us
through, trading off time for spectacle, now and then
even providing, as they used to sing at the end of Hee
Haw, "a smile and a laugh or two." If this is not
exactly a guide for the perplexed, it is still a good
honest push back against the forces that favor
tragedy, and who of us wouldn't like to have left
something like that behind us?
All things, in any event, will be set right when the
biopic or Donald Barthelme 


Who would have thought so many would be here? 

The only office no physically touching the others on
Beaverboard Row, intentionally set apart, is a little
corrugated shack...

...DEVIL'S ADVOCATE'S what the shingle sez, yes inside
is a Jesuit here to act in that capacity, here to
preach, like his colleague Teilhard de Chardin,
against return. 

God is not a Fairy Tale. None of the Gods are. If I
may be permitted to use the term loosely but not 
abuseively (we hope), the great stories about men and
gods are all fairy tails. All the great strories about
men and gods belong to folk literature, to the oral
tradition. Why not use "Myth" instead? Use myth.
"Undisplaced myth", "Romance", "'realism'" too. 

"Ironic literature begins with realism (another inept
term) and tends toward myth, its mythical patterns
being more suggestive of the demonic than the
apocalyptic." 139-40

Anatomy Of Criticism by Northrop Frye

Evil? 

Yes, believe me, some people kill for no reason at
all.   

 




 





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