Thomas Curreri

ENG 105: Formal Essay #1

10/18/07
 Lightness, quickness, exactitude—these are words one might use to describe the

successful technique of a hawk snatching its prey out of the water. But in fact these are terms

coined by the late, great Italo Calvino to describe successful techniques for writers in the 21 st

century. Like a keen-eyed hawk, the modern writer must use his most powerful natural means to

ensnare and draw out the perfect story; means that elevate literature above what any other form

of media can do and that will protect it from the flattening and dying of language—virtual

deforestation. In the age of information, it is easy to become overwhelmed and to feel burdened

by omniscience of every war and dying child, it is easy to become stressed and due to this to give

in to the homogenizing, flat screen of the television which presents every story just the same. But

there is hope, says Calvino, for balance in this battle between the picaresque and the grotesque,

between the troubadour and the reporter, and between monotony and cacophony. This balance is

realized in a 20th century writer of short stories and Houston Post newspaper articles named

Donald Barthelme. Barthelme floats like a hawk over the water, gliding above the world, and

snatches the reader up into this world of lightness with a gesture so swift that one hardly

questions the absurd logic of his stories. By the time one is done reading, anything can seem

light—including death.

It is unclear whether Calvino was aware of the English idioms he was inheriting when he

chose to use a word equivalent to “light” in the Italian-language lecture he was preparing on the

subject of “lightness”. For it is beyond a doubt that Barthelme in his stories can and does “make

light” of death. In “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby”, he details an

arrangement between friends to kill one among them, Colby, but pays little heed to the actual

killing itself and puts more emphasis on the way he will be killed, the music that will be playing,

whether it will be indoors or outdoors, if there will be drinks served, ad infinitum. This constant

barrage of trivial details—this atomization of Colby’s murder—serves to draw attention from the

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murder to more mild, everyday tedium. Significantly, his story “The School” is about death and

nothing else, but manages through sheer absurdity and the voice of a detached, naive narrating

schoolteacher to make the story light and humorous. Barthelme slyly progresses from the death

of trees to the death of humans in gradual steps so as to maintain a sloping sense of consistency,

rather than jumping from the over-watered seedlings to the crushed little boys, which would

create an instant sense of weight.

Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like

Perseus into a different space. I don’t mean escaping to dreams or into the
irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a
different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition
and verification. The images of lightness that I seek should not fade away like
dreams dissolved by the realities of present and future. (Calvino 7)

Barthelme recognizes the fearfulness and heaviness of death, and presents it “from a different

perspective, with a different logic.” The suffering of people and families is recalibrated and fit

into a different cognitive machine that releases the essence of pain and misery into the air and

leaves only the facts to be verified anew by this different cognitive machine, this curious logic.

The images he presents in his stories are not bound by any place or time period, but represent an

overcoming of pain in any place or time through the power and victory of renewed perspective

through the medium of literature. For literature succeeds where other media fail: literature

presents an image coupled with a perspective. One can judge any other visual image that is

presented and consider it and verify it according to one’s opinions or tastes, but literature more

fully engrosses the witness, who depends on the words for every thought he has while reading,

especially when the story progresses with Calvino’s other great literary principle, quickness.

Barthelme utilizes quickness more effectively than any of the other Calvinoist virtues,

and it can be seen in each of his stories without much difficulty. He makes use of this element of

writing almost as a means to suspend disbelief in his otherwise absurd stories. He swiftly and

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deftly snatches the reader up into his world—a wholly different world from the normally

perceived one—and pulls the reader through its strange logic without ever acknowledging the

absurdity itself. This, again, is most clear in “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend

Colby”. Before one even gets to grips with the fact that a group of friends is going to kill one of

their own for “going too far,” they begin discussing the details. Barthelme never reveals what

Colby actually did, or in fact anything else in the story; it simply progresses on a premise, much

like a fairy tale.

In fact, Barthelme’s “The Glass Mountain” is almost entirely based around the exact sort

of fairy tales that Calvino delivers a plaudit to in the opening pages of “Quickness”. “The secret

of the story lies in its economy,” says Calvino (Calvino 35). “The Glass Mountain” is actually

visibly reduced to one hundred bare facts by the way Barthelme numbers each image or idea in

the story. These images and ideas are bound by and centered around the glass mountain—the

narrative link that Calvino speaks of on page 32. The verbal link happens to be symbolism itself,

which is ironic and suiting of Barthelme’s strange writing style. One of the qualities that Calvino

emphasizes in important literature is that it rises above mere entertainment and supplies social

commentary. Barthelme in “The Glass Mountain” seems to be mocking the notion that literature

ought to be symbolic; and indeed there is little symbolism to be found in Barthelme’s stories.

There is certainly a vein of morality in them, however; Barthelme uses the “economy, rhythm,

and hard logic” that Calvino espouses in “Quickness” to rile up the reader’s conscience and

perhaps make the reader consider his own passivity in the face of the mass death portrayed so

coldly in the media today (Calvino 35). In this respect, Barthelme becomes the ironic poet,

commenting on the problems of the world by taking them for granted, applying their principles

plainly, innocently, and thus all the more grotesquely. Thus a certain form and poignant intent

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reveals itself in Barthelme’s works, something Calvino regards as paramount and calls

“exactitude.”

The hawk’s intent is clear; its image is unforgettable; and it must make the most use of

the one chance it has, it has to be painfully concentrated and exact, to successfully satisfy its

intent and catch its food. Barthelme’s stories, according to Calvino’s prescription, clearly follow

“a well-defined and well-calculated plan for the work in question” (Calvino 55). “Some of Us

Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby” begins with the decision to kill Colby and logically

progresses from the beginning of the decision, to its various elements, to its being carried out.

This line of logical progression can also be seen in “The School” and “The Baby”—the more the

baby tears out the book pages, the more and more time it has to spend in its room, until it reaches

a sort of climax, a feature all of the mentioned Barthelme stories have. The plan of “The Glass

Mountain” is, simply enough, to climb to the top of the glass mountain to reach the proverbial

castle. Likewise, in accordance with the second principle outlined by Calvino on exactness,

Barthelme makes use of “clear, incisive, memorable visual images” (Calvino 55). Some are more

concrete than others, but when one thinks of a Barthelme story, an image of that story

immediately comes to mind. Be it a skinny baby ripping pages from its book in a lonely room, or

Colby hanging from a tree, or a large glass mountain on the corner of a suburb street, or a cursed

classroom haunted by a past of death, Barthelme understands the importance of strange, novel

images in writing. In this way, Barthelme also avoids falling into the story-crushing vice of

stereotypes. Even in “The Glass Mountain”, the presence of the well-known maiden-and-castle

image is overwhelmed by the strange notion of a glass mountain, an image so unique it allows

the mind to wonder and wander in an effort to picture or conceive of such a thing. Calvino

expresses a sentiment of the poet Leopardi that may also be true of Barthelme: “[W]hat is

unknown is always more attractive than what is known; hope and imagination are the only

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consolations for the disappointments and sorrows of experience” (Calvino 63). Barthelme’s

ubiquitous strangeness must certainly be his challenge to “the disappointments and sorrows of

experience,” the product of hope and imagination in overcoming the monotonous, mind-numbing

perspective of the Great Flat Screen, called “television” in the vernacular. Finally, Barthelme

carefully words his stories, using “a language as precise as possible both in choice of words and

in expression of the subtleties of thought and imagination,” as he treads a very perilous line in

maintaining the suspension of disbelief of the reader (Calvino 56). One could easily throw such a

story as Barthelme tells to the side after beginning one, and say, “This is utterly implausible and

therefore not worth my time”; but Barthelme’s skillfulness with words keeps the reader curious,

almost relieved by the absurdity, and gratified by the proper structure and progression.

Barthelme represents the Vulcanic side of lightness. Sitting in the dark depths of the

world, he inspects hardship, death, even the troubles of parenting, each individually and each

with a refreshing, yet bizarre, even liberating, outlook. He picks apart the process of a formal

hanging and makes a story of it; he does the same for the story of a troublesome child; or for the

trials of a hero in “The Glass Mountain”. Barthelme turns Atlas into a juggler, Sisyphus into a

frolicking child, Prometheus into a man resolutely and tenaciously continuing to reach after the

apple or water, just as the unnamed hero continues to climb the glass mountain. Barthelme

professes no meaning or solution to life; he merely proposes to reduce the philosophically

Absurd to the intellectually absurd, and in his effort revitalizes the hopeless and desperate with

proof that a different perspective is, perhaps, all one needs to cope and to keep going in this

daunting and actively happiness-opposing world. Only literature, through its pivotal coupling of

image and perspective, can mass-propagate effective, revitalizing perspective changes.