TPPM Barthelme: "Two Illustrated Stories"

[Dave Monroe]

   "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."

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

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

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


Barthleme, Donald.  "The Photographs."  Guilty
   Pleasures.  NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974.

"The Dassaud Prize" was previously uncollected ...

http://clausius.engr.utk.edu/planetc/books/barthelme/text/ttodb_002.html


"In both stories reachings after the transfinite fall
apart, into twit dialogue, into eccentric
technological dreaming, reentangled with Earth and the
earthbound."

Cf. Gravity's Rainbow?  Et al. ...


"cheap glee"

"A pose I found congenial in those days--fairly
common, I hope, among pre-adults--was that of somber
glee at any idea of mass destuction or decline.  Th
modern political thriller genre, in fact, has been
known to cash in on such visions of death made
large-scale or glamorous." (SL, "Intro," p. 13)

And see as well ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=73067


		
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