TPPM Barthelme: "Barthelme's Way with Dream Material"

[Dave Monroe]

   "Another combination of interest is the
interchapter material from Overnight to Many Distant
Cities, which furnishes an instance of Barthelme's way
with dream material. One out of several humiliating
features about writing fiction for a living is that
here after all is just about everybody else, all along
the capitalist spectrum from piano movers to systems
analysts, cheerfully selling their bodies or body
parts according to time-honored custom and usage,
while it's only writers, out at the fringes of the
entertainment sector, wretched and despised, who are
obliged, more intimately and painfully, actually to
sell their dreams, yes dreams these days you'll find
are every bit as commoditized as any pork bellies
there on the financial page. To be upbeat about it,
though, in most cases it doesn't present much moral
problem since dreams seldom make it through into print
with anything like the original production values
anyway. Even if you do good recovery learning to write
legibly in the dark and so forth, there's still the
matter of getting it down in words that can bring back
even a little of the clarity and sweep, the intensity
of emotion, the transcendent weirdness of the primary
experience. So it's a safe bet that most writers'
dreams, maybe even including the best ones, manage to
stay untranslated and private after all.
   "Barthelme, however, happens to be one of a handful
of American authors, there to make the rest of us look
bad, who know instinctively how to stash the
merchandise, bamboozle the inspectors, and smuggle
their nocturnal contraband right on past the
checkpoints of daylight 'reality.' What he called his
'secret vice' of 'cutting up and pasting together
pictures' bears an analogy, at least, to what is
supposed to go on in dreams, where images from the
public domain are said likewise to combine in unique
private, with luck spiritually useful, ways. How
exactly Barthelme then got this into print, or for
that matter pictorial, form, kept the transitions
flowing the way he did and so on, is way too
mysterious for me, though out of guild solidarity I
probably wouldn't share it even if I did know. The
effect each time, at any rate, is to put us in the
presence of something already eerily familiar ... to
remind us that we have lived in these visionary cities
and haunted forests, that the ancient faces we gaze
into are faces we know...."

http://www.vheissu.org/bio/eng_barthelme.htm

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/barthelme.html

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_barthelme.html


"secret vice"

Main Entry: col·lage
Pronunciation: k&-'läzh, ko-, kO-
Function: noun
Etymology: French, literally, gluing, from coller to
glue, from colle glue, from (assumed) Vulgar Latin
colla, from Greek kolla
1 : an artistic composition made of various materials
(as paper, cloth, or wood) glued on a surface
2 : the art of making collages
3 : an assembly of diverse fragments <a collage of
ideas>
4 : a work (as a film) having disparate scenes in
rapid succession without transitions ...

Main Entry: mon·tage
Pronunciation: män-'täzh, mOn(n)-, -'t[a']zh
Function: noun
Etymology: French, from monter to mount
1 : the production of a rapid succession of images in
a motion picture to illustrate an association of ideas
2 a : a literary, musical, or artistic composite of
juxtaposed more or less heterogeneous elements b : a
composite picture made by combining several separate
pictures
3 : a heterogeneous mixture : JUMBLE <a montage of
emotions>

http://m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary


"something already eerily familiar"

Cf. Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" (1925) ...

"At this point I will put forward two considerations
which, I think, contain the gist of this short study.
In the first place, if psychoanalytic theory is
correct in maintaining that every affect belonging to
an emotional impulse, whatever its kind, is
transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety, then
among instances of frightening things there must be
one class in which the frightening element can be
shown to be something repressed which recurs. This
class of frightening things would then constitute the
uncanny; and it must be a matter of indifference
whether what is uncanny was itself originally
frightening or whether it carried some other affect.
In the second place, if this is indeed the secret
nature of the uncanny, we can understand why
linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche ['homely']
into its opposite, das Unheimliche; for this uncanny
is in reality nothing new or alien, but something
which is familiar and old-established in the mind and
which has become alienated from it only through the
process of repression. This reference to the factor of
repression enables us, furthermore, to understand
Schelling's definition of the uncanny as something
which ought to have remained hidden but has come to
light."

http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.html

http://www.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/Gothic/Freud-uncanny.htm

http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/uncan.htm

http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html

And see as well ...

http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5735

And note the discussion throughout of E.T.A.
Hoffmann's "The Sandmsn" (cf. Offenbach's Tales of
Hoffamnn) ...


"the ancient faces we gaze into"

Cf. (?) ...

"... in the darkening and awful expanse of screen
something has kept on, a film we have not learned to
see...it is now a closeup of the face, a face we all
know." (GR, Pt. IV, p. 760)

Let me know ...


		
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