Donald Barthelme's use of the list

[alice malice]

Realism for Everyone

by Dan Piepenbring

Donald Barthelme would've been, and should be, eighty-three today. It
would be an exaggeration to say that I feel the absence of someone
whom I never met--someone who died when I was three--but I do wonder,
with something more than mere curiosity, what Barthelme would have
made of the past twenty-odd years. These are decades I feel we've
processed less acutely because he wasn't there to fictionalize them:
their surreal political flareups, their new technologies, their
various zeitgeists and intellectual fads and dumb advertisements. Part
of what I love about Barthelme's stories is the way they traffic in
cultural commentary without losing their intimacy, their humanity.
They feel something like channel-surfing with your favorite uncle;
he's running his mouth the whole time, but he's running it
brilliantly, he's interlarding his commentary with sad, sharp stories
from his own life, and you're learning, you're laughing, you're
feeling, because he's putting the show on for you, lovingly, his dear
nephew.

But I'm losing the thread. My point is not to reveal a secret wish
that Barthelme was my uncle.

I wanted to say something about lists. Barthelme was a master of many
things, but one of them was, of course, the list--the man could make a
prodigious inventory. I don't mean to be glib when I say that.
List-making is often dismissed as sloppy writing, but in Barthelme's
hands, a list never functions as an elision or a cheap workaround; he
makes marvelous profusions of nouns, testaments to the power of
juxtaposition. His lists feel noetic--they capture the motion of a mind
delighting in how many things there are, and how rampantly they're
proliferating, and how strangely they collide in life, when they do.
Here, for instance, is

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/04/07/realism-for-everyone/
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l