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2005-12-23 19:34
From: crane
(Beijing)
a review of Snow White
 
Q: Is the novel dead?
A: Oh yes, very much so.
Q: What replaces it?
A: I should think that it is replaced by what existed before it was invented.
Q: The same thing?
A: The same sort of thing.
Q: Is the bicycle dead?
This is from on of Donald Barthelme’s short story “The Explanation”, a story in which somebody invented a new sort of machine which was believe to be able to help change government, understand and criticize Maoism, and peep girls in an apartment on the other side of the street.
Donald Barthelme was an American writer of short stories and novels. He also worked as a newspaper reporter and educator. He is truly an important figure in the history of postmodernism. The entire collection of Barthelme contains various explorations of describing the life and rebuilding the concepts of literature.
Many will think his works full of nonsense and weird expressions. But no one can deny that he and his works are highly philosophical beneath the seemingly alien writing style. Barthelme creates a world so unreal and so absurd in his works but the unreal and absurd image of world is just a reflection to the real world in which we live. The only difference between the two is that Donald Barthelme has fragmented the situations in the real world and rearranged these parts with his hands into a new form.
His style of writing is of much controversy. Some believe that he was meaningless and his novels and stories went too far away from the understanding ability of readings. But at the same time many regard him as profoundly disciplined. Barthelme’s writing and language style was even given a name – Barthelmismo.
It is true that for most readers, the first impression on “Barthelmismo” would be surprising, because the forms of his stories are rather unique or weird. He uses jargons, typos and obvious spelling mistakes in his oeuvre. He put fabricated or hard-to-understand illustrations in his stories. As in “At the Tolstoy Museum”, he put Tolstoy’s big photos together with Tolstoy's huge coats and other pictures. In “The Explanation”, he put big black squares as paragraph separators. He also employed other inventive ways of expressions. This make his novel does not look like “a novel”. As in “Glass Mountain”, Donald Barthelme put numbers in front every line of all the 100 sentences and made it more like a “list”. And as in “Sentence”, he wrote all his words in only one sentence, as its name is.
Among these non-traditional ways of expression, Donald Barthelme puts deep understandings of the human beings and the modern society in an existentialism and postmodernism way, criticisms say. Essentially, Donald Barthelme was trying to find a way out of the human situation by breaking down the norms of traditional story-telling and literature ideas. The human situation that we are now standing in and confronting with, is a result of the absence of belief. Beliefs in god (mostly in western countries) and in those –isms are gone while capitalism is growing stronger and the corporationism power and market economy system is threatening our simple lives. Donald Barthelme’s literature attempt is clue to our psychological state caused by the absence of belief and the embarrassing social situation. He tells stories about confusion, illusion, panic, and hesitation, as may of us feel all the time.
Donald Barthelme was a productive writer. He wrote more than 100 short stories, later compiled in Sixty Stories and Forty Stories, 4 novels, and a collection of essays and interviews. Also he wrote with his daughter a children book.
Among all his writings, the novel Snow White is the most important one. In this postmodernistic novel, Donald Barthelme told us the well-known fairy tale in a totally Barthelmismo way.
Like other Donald Barthelme stories, Snow White consists of a great deal of fragmented paragraphs, big bold headlines, and small italic emphasized words. Not only in a new form, the story is also differently situated and structured. The new story is rather irrelevant to the original simple and clean story, but there is only a vague shadow left in the new one.
Our grandmothers told our mothers and our mothers told us that Snow White is a tall dark beauty. Her hair is black as ebony and her skin white as snow. Her jealous stepmother tried to kill her time and time again but failed. Seven cherubic dwarfs in a forest saved Snow White. At last she married a handsome prince and they lived their happy life together ever after to the very end.
The Barthelmismo version is like this: Snow White is a tall dark beauty. The hair is black as ebony and skin white as snow. “She has a great many beauty spots on the body.” She lives with seven men in a same apartment in a modern American city. There seems to be something uninnocent between Snow White and every man of the seven. There is a “prince” in the story. But the only thing he loves is bath and he is reluctant to save the princess. They are not fairy tale characters any more, but common persons in a capitalized modern city, where no fairy tale is believed as true and no ideal believed as achievable.
In this new story, Snow White is a beautiful woman, as beautiful as in the old story, but no longer innocent or clean. She received college education. She has some feminism ideas and she is tired of daily life. She tried to change something, but she made no achievement on this.
Snow White exclaimed loudly “Oh I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words that I always hear.” Words are life. When there’s nothing new in life, the daily words must be all the same.
Snow White considers herself a horsewife, which is coined by Donald Barthelme as a mockery of housewife. Her feminism ideas make her dislike the man who call electric plugs “male” and “female”. But her attempt to give her life a change goes back to what she dislike. She “let down the ebony hair and try to attract some man” or just wait for a prince. Besides she is not desperate, brave and certain about her willing to give life a shift.
On the other hand, she enjoys her current life sometimes. She wrote “long dirty poems” and she kept it secret. She enjoys thinking strange things as “to make a hundred flowers bloom”. She also likes the intimacy between her and each one of the seven, because they make “it” in the shower.
Still, Snow White has her own “vacillations and confusions” about who to love, though she already loves the seven men “in a way, but it wasn’t enough. And still, she was slightly ashamed.” The one that Snow White should love is a prince, according to the old saying. But Snow White wondered when she was brushing her teeth, “Which prince?” She listed a lot of names and finally she said to herself, “it is terrific to be anticipating a prince … but it is still waiting … as a darksome mode of existence. I would rather be doing a hundred other things.”
Paul is the most similar prince character in the whole story. He enjoys “sitting in his baff (a tub), under falling water.” He was thinking about the “black hair” at the time, “Why some innocent person might come along, and see it, and conceive it his duty to climb up.” He refuses or at least is unwilling to climb up the hair and save the princess, although the hair made him nervous and he consider himself “princely”. He sometimes thought about “probably I should go out and effect a liaison with some beauty who needs me and save her, and ride away with her … I believe I have that right.” But there was no action at all.
The other thing that Paul was fond of is going to a monastery. On his way, he would either stand before a fence posing hoping to be discovered and be shown on the television, or he might peep Snow White’s long black hair or her naked body erotically.
Paul and Snow White were once noble and princely in the old story, but Donald Barthelme described them in a nasty postmodern way. They are now both ordinary people. This is a symbol of declining nobleness. Human beings are less and less noble or even decent in some ways.
The seven men represent ordinary people in a contemporary society. They do trifle things as washing building and making baby food to make livings. They are content to their life. They like to live with Snow White and to keep up unclean relationships with Snow White. In ways, they do not understand women and life. But this do not stop them talking in seemingly metaphysical ways. They tried to satisfy Snow White by changing a new red towel. Sometimes they start to dislike Snow White and dreamt about “cooking Snow White over fire as the scene of burning the Joan of Arc”.
This is the Barthelmismo styled Snow White story. If you are waiting for an end to the story, I don’t think what Donald Barthelme wrote at the end is a proper ending – the leader of the seven dwarfed persons was hanged. Paul probably died. The Barthelmismo ending was “THE FAILURE OF SNOW WHITE’S ARSE, REVIRGINIZATION OF SNOW WHITE, APOTHEOSIS OF SNOW WHITE, SNOW WHITE RISES INTO THE SKY, THE HEROES DEPART IN SEARCH OF A NEW PRINCIPLE, HEIGH-HO”
In the situation that our society now is, the dated concepts of novels are truly dead, as Donald Barthelme said in his stories. Still let’s answer some questions that Donald has asked in this novel:
1. Do you like the story so far?
Ummm, yup, very much. But call we call such a thing a story?
2. Does Snow White resemble the Snow White you remember?
No, but she resembles a university woman student in some way.
3. Have you understood, in reading to this point, that Paul is the prince-figure?
No, definitely not.
4. That Jane is the wicked stepmother-figure?
Ummm, by the way, what is a stepmother? Do you mean a mother sitting on a step?
5. In the further development of the story, would you like more emotion ____ or less emotion ____?
Whatever you like, as long as it is Barthelmismo and postmodern, HEIGH-HO!
6. Is there too much blague in the narration? Not enough blague?
Blague is good for your health…
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By Donald Barthelme
Touchstone
ISBN: 0684824795
Release Date: 1996-05-30
Paperback
List Price: USD 13.00
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