Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews - Hardcover

Donald Barthelme

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679409831 ISBN 13: 9780679409830

Publisher: Random House, 1997

Synopsis

Donald Barthelme's premature death at the age of fifty-eight brought to an end one of the most provocative careers in the history of American literature.  Groundbreaking works such as Come Back, Dr. Caligari; The Dead Father; Snow White; Great Days; Overnight to Many Distant Cities; Guilty Pleasures; and his two short-fiction collections, Forty Stories and Sixty Stories, have earned him a place among the most influential and imitated authors of the last half-century. With his marvelously strange and darkly ironic vision of the world, his wizard satire and deadpan humor, Barthelme spoke of and for our time like no one else. He spoke of our national obsessions and weirdnesses, our unspeakable practices and unnatural acts, in what is for many the distinctive voice of postmodern America.

Not-Knowing is the second posthumous collection of Donald Barthelme's work. Like The Teachings of Don B. (1992), it brings together shorter works now almost impossible to come by. While the first volume featured the author's tantalizing experiments in satire, parable, fable, and playwriting, this new volume focuses on his diverse nonfiction pieces, collectively referred to here as essays, although, as always with Barthelme's work, they are feistily resistant to any label. Categorizable or not, Not-Knowing contains Barthelme's pungent comments on writing, art, literature, film, and city life, which are, as John Barth says in his Introduction, among the permanent literary treasures of American postmodernist writing. Also here are several interviews with the author--invaluable for understanding this very private man--including two never before available. The interviews range over the last eighteen years of Barthelme's life, and they give readers the opportunity to watch his ideas as they expand, change, and settle.

Kim Herzinger has gathered here an eclectic selection of pieces for Barthelme's many admirers, creating a work that will confirm his rightful standing as, in the words of Robert Coover, "one of the great citizens of contemporary world letters."

About this title

About the Author

The late Donald Barthelme was a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, winner of a National Book Award, a director of PEN and the Authors Guild, and a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His sixteen books--including Snow White, The Dead Father, and City Life--substantially redefined American short fiction for our time.

About the Editor:
Kim Herzinger teaches at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is the author of books and articles on D.H. Lawrence, modern and contemporary literature, Sherlock Holmes, and baseball, and is now at work on a cultural biography of Donald Barthelme.

From the Inside Flap

elme's premature death at the age of fifty-eight brought to an end one of the most provocative careers in the history of American literature. Groundbreaking works such as Come Back, Dr. Caligari; The Dead Father; Snow White; Great Days; Overnight to Many Distant Cities; Guilty Pleasures; and his two short-fiction collections, Forty Stories and Sixty Stories, have earned him a place among the most influential and imitated authors of the last half-century. With his marvelously strange and darkly ironic vision of the world, his wizard satire and deadpan humor, Barthelme spoke of and for our time like no one else. He spoke of our national obsessions and weirdnesses, our unspeakable practices and unnatural acts, in what is for many the distinctive voice of postmodern America.

Not-Knowing is the second posthumous collection of Donald Barthelme's work. Like The Teachings of Don B. (1992), it brings together shorter works now almost impossible to come by. While the first volume feature

Reviews

What Thomas Pynchon called ``Barthelmismo'' is somewhat lacking in the second posthumous collection edited by Herzinger of Barthelme's miscellaneous writings, which here includes film and book reviews, art catalog essays, and New Yorker pieces. ``Barthelme Takes On Task of Almost Deciphering His Fiction'' ran the New York Times headline when Barthelme delivered a lecture for New York University's Writer at Work series. That headline could equally well describe many of these abbreviated critical pieces and not wholly forthcoming interviews. The often-reprinted ``Not-Knowing'' (1982) is a spirited, idiosyncratic analysis of creativity--the search for an adequate rendering of the world's ``messiness''--as well as a playful, sometimes self-parodying literary performance piece. The essay contains a short ``letter to a literary critic'' expressing condolences on the demise of Postmodernism, which Barthelme recycled into an unsigned piece for his favorite publication, the New Yorker. Barthelme's many other pieces for the magazine waver lamely between its characteristic wryness and his own fabulist flair, though there is one happy, humorous piece that purports to answer a Writer's Digest questionnaire about his drinking habits. Barthelme also tried his hand at film criticism for the New Yorker in 1979, but his reviews of Truffaut, Herzog, and Bertolucci are surprisingly heavy going, as are his writings on abstract expressionists and contemporary architecture. Editor Herzinger (English/Univ. of Southern Mississippi) has also included a number of interviews with Barthelme, of widely varying quality. The longest interview, a radio serial chat from 197576, seems dated and pretentious (e.g.: ``I would not say that Snow White predicts the Manson case''); the most stimulating is actually the transcript of a 1975 symposium with his peers William Gass, Grace Paley, and Walker Percy. Though John Barth calls this a ``booksworth of encores'' in his introduction, many of the pieces seem to be merely magazine outtakes and literary b-sides. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

"Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art," wrote Barthelme in the title essay of this collection. That essay, a meditation on art as a necessary process of "not knowing," could be called a full-fledged aesthetic, a major statement, or perhaps even a synopsis of Barthelme's writing process and hopes for his art. But one could just as easily say that it is simply Barthelme playfully pondering and calling into question how we see the world. By exploring and incorporating the details of daily life and news, Barthelme produced innovative essays, hilarious commentaries on society, and astute reviews of art, literature, and film. Not-Knowing is a posthumous gift, and Kim Herzinger, who studied and carefully flushed out these writings from many sources, has given the reader a chance to "hear" Barthelme through interview and discussion-panel form. While this collection provides an opportunity to read Barthelme's previously unpublished work, it also encourages new generations of writers and readers to encounter Barthelme's wit, originality, sensitivity, and skill for the first time. His diversity of subject matter and oddities of expression and the marvelous spin he put on ordinary life all add to the overall impression that Barthelme's death left a wide gap in our contemporary writing, one that is not likely to be filled anytime soon. Janet St. John

In his early essay "After Joyce" (1964), the first title in this nonfiction omnibus, Barthelme, America's preeminent postmodern practitioner, made a strong argument for the literary work "as an object in the world rather than a commentary upon the world." The writer, "betrayed by outmoded forms," may find in play "one of the great possibilities of art." A whole generation of writers obliged, among them Gass, Elkin, Hawkes, Coover, Gaddis, and Pynchon. In one of his last essays, "Not-Knowing" (published not long before his death in 1989, at age 58), Barthelme, having shaken off that "rhetoric of the time," admits that much of contemporary criticism robs the work of its mystery, which indeed "exists." These two essays, offered back to back, buoy this collection, which includes later interviews that demonstrate for writing students his methods, influences, etc. Much of Barthelme's New Yorker commentary (on art, politics, living in Greenwich Village) seems dated now. Important for literature collections and writing programs.?Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679409831
• ISBN 13: 9780679409830
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 332
• Editor: Kim Herzinger