This is not the "Snow White" in your mind...
crane(Beijing)
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 “lis......
full review2005-12-23 19:34 | comment
Write a review