Reconstructing Masculinity Donald Barthelme's Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts

The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
Reconstructing Masculinity: Donald Barthelme's "Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts"

Author(s): Craig Medvecky
Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Winter, 2007), pp. 554-579
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27563770
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CRAIG MEDVECKY
Reconstructing Masculinity: Donald Barthelme's

Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts
In hisessay "Failed Artists in Donald Barthelme's Sixty

Stories/' Lee Upton presents "failure" as the essential the
matic preoccupation of Barthelme's fiction (11). Perhaps
_nowhere is this concern more evident than in the author's
1968 collection Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, wherein a
specifically masculine failure is central to the impression of aes

thetic wholeness. With
striking efficiency, Barthelme encircles his
topic with m?tonymie arrangements of powerless, guilty, and inse

cure men. Unable to act and on the verge of self-destruction, these
men reveal aspects of a male consciousness that is above all in con
flict with itself. Meanwhile, as the collection unfolds, a consistent
view of postmodern civilization gradually emerges from its modal
structure.
As Michael Zeitlin notes in his essay "Father-Murder and Father

Rescue," Barthelme's texts
frequently contain
"large-scale patterns
of thought" that "draw into conceptual coherence the complex dis
play of the signifiers" (188). In Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts,

it is as if Barthelme seeks to paint a portrait of man-in-general?call
him Barthelmean Man?from multiple
perspectives, just as he had
done previously with his archetypal woman in Snow White (1967).
From the vantage point in the mid 1960s, this man is as yet unsure of
how to respond to the new era ushered in by Masters and Johnson,
the sexual revolution, and the feminist movement. Ann, Sylvia,
Alice, Pia, Nancy, Barbara?these are just some of the women who
appear in shrouded contexts as "love objects" and antagonists to the
host of nameless and often identical-seeming protagonists that
Contemporary Literature XLVIII, 4 0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949/07/0004-0554

? 2007 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
MEDVECKY 555
oppose them. In love, or at least in attempting to approximate the

acts of love, these protagonists and narrators encounter a
frighten
ing reality: the definition of masculinity, once as timeless as the cen
turies, is changing.
From the title of the collection onward, there exists the uneasy
sensation of thwarted masculine desire. "I suffer from a frightful ill
ness of the mind," says the narrator of "See the Moon?" (156). "I am
not well," announces the narrator in "Game" (115). Indeed, these
words resound ominously with regard to many of the narrators in
the collection, for whom sexual desire is neither an affirmation of
life nor a celebration of human nature. Rather, as Maurice Couturier
observes, it is degraded with irony, embroiled in the "impotence of
language" (249), and more often than not, abandoned to frustration

in surreal admixtures of fantasy and reality (252). Further, sex has
left the body and taken up residence in the mind, where it has
become a of values and expectations, a
sexuality, corruption jungle
of false promises and psychological booby traps. With the founda
tions of their identities eroding like sand in an hourglass, these men
then find themselves anachronistic. Invariably they fail to integrate
with the surrounding social order. They are unable to relate to
women, their own families, and society at large. Whether as war
riors or as casualties of the sexual revolution, Barthelme challenges
them to meet the needs of the postmodern heart in strange,
uncharted places, psychosexual battlefields, American cities more
Escher-like than Elysian.
Despite its formal complexity, "The Dolt" (59-70) offers a conve

nient entry point into the collection. In this fiction, a string of prior
failures haunts the efforts of Edgar, the protagonist, to pass a
"National Writers' Examination," which in turn bars his way to a
longed-for social identity. For Edgar, creativity is the medium that

he has chosen to redeem his social and sexual identities, wherein a
failure in one area has led to failure everywhere. Consequently, both
the surface narrative and Edgar's own fiction affect drama with the
innuendo of anxious sex. The surface narrative initially depicts
excitement. Via his new story, Edgar hopes that he will at last over
come the obstacles in his path to social fulfillment. As he reads the
manuscript to his wife, Barbara, they exchange interstitial remarks

that imply a sexual crescendo. While to breathe,"
Edgar "pause[s]
556 -CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
Barbara "The turns me on. .

. . More than
says, beginning usual,
Imean" (65). In the midst of the reading, Barbara's eyes show "gen
uine pleasure," and later she compliments the story's "swift
motion," while urging her husband to continue (66). But Edgar has
no staying power. His story concludes prematurely. Unable to finish
what he has begun, he falls short in his efforts to claim his masculin
ity in the eyes of family and society a creative act. "The

through
end? Is it the end already?" Barbara asks. "I've got the end but
I don't have the middle," Edgar says, "a little ashamed," the narra
tor notes (67). Barbara attempts to come to his rescue with ideas of
her own, but it is no use; Edgar cannot continue under her hand.
The climax is not forthcoming. They both fall back from his would
be act of creation in defeat. "I wouldn't have been great, even with
the certificate," Edgar says. "Your views would have become
known. You would have been something," Barbara counters (69). At
first her words may appear to console, but they confirm Edgar's
own sense of and return him to the homogeneous realm of
nonbeing
his past failures. With her diction, Barbara places Edgar beyond
masculine, beyond even human, relegating him to the status of a
neutered
"something."
David Leverenz, discussing constructions of masculinity, sug
gests that the myth of American manhood "dramatizes a
potential
for downward mobility on the liminal frontier, to save the man
hood of the upwardly mobile [man]" (29). Within this model,
Leverenz goes on to define American masculinity as "civilized and
savage in one
composite, self-divided transformation." As a base
line, this definition offers a motif with the potential to harmonize
structuralist discussions of the disrupted postmodern narrative
with New Critical approaches to content and meaning by positing
discrete narrative fragments as aspects of self-divided
masculinity
that have broken away from, yet still belong to, an overarching
subjectivity. More specifically, Leverenz's theory suggests that
postmodern man's loss of masculinity relates to his loss of the limi
nal world. Edgar, then, being an mobile, middle-class
upwardly
American male, must confront a civilization that has already
conquered its savage frontiers. With the jungle growing ever more
distant, there are fewer and fewer places into which he may
descend in order to become wild. Thus it is into the oneiric world of
M ED V EC K Y 557
his story that Edgar descends and becomes lost. In splitting his con
sciousness between the fiction of his story and the reality of his
family's needs, Edgar has self-divided, but he has not been trans
formed or reunified.
Edgar's one tenuous creative success, his surreal "son manqu?"

(69), appears at the close of the story to drive home this painful lack
of integration. The son is described as "eight feet tall and
[wearing]
a serape woven out of two hundred transistor radios, all turned on
and tuned to different stations." With words that recall a slogan of
the sixties youth movement, the text simultaneously sexualizes the
arrival of the son and locates Edgar's anxieties in relation to the
ascendant culture. Then Barbara and this monstrous son prepare to
get stoned, leaving Edgar apart from his family to wither ineffectu
in a state of of anything
ally being wherein "[t]hinking [is] beyond
him." In his abject condition, Edgar is less oppressed by the objec
tive Other (that is, the nameless arbiters of the National Writers'
Examination) than by his own inability to act in any efficacious or
remunerative fashion. Ever manqu? himself, promise as a
Edgar's
husband, father, and artist remains unfulfilled. With Edgar's failure
driven home on two levels, Barthelme strikes a tonic note in his
treatment of maleconsciousness, wherein creative inability drama
tizes a loss of masculinity.
The same motif appears in "See the Moon?" as another male pro
tagonist descends into the subliminal world of creative writing. This
narrator hopes that his collection of pseudoscholarly fragments will
one day achieve the redemptive status of art?a condition that can
occur only when the detritus is arranged "in the right way" (155).
and scatlike Baby Ruth wrappers can be corrected,
Paper airplanes
and made a creative
elevated, "right" by the artist, who through
power effects an alchemy that transforms dross into gold. However,
the narrator of "See the Moon?" has yet to achieve such transubstan
a
tial results. LikeEdgar, he is stuck in mode of fragmentation and
stands in envy of others who have managed to integrate (157).
this narrator somehow becomes a
Though initially "promising,"
writer of "poppycock," and subsequently a failed writer of "cocky
an antisocial student of self-indulgence taken to
pap," and finally
absurd heights in the form of "lunar hostility" research, in which his
thesis is that "the moon ... hates us" (156).
558 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
From the start of the story it seems that transferred anger is at

issue, for the moon is no true cause or villain. The narrator's
surely
opening line, "I know you think I'm wasting my time" (155), would
seem to indicate that his anger is to a certain extent self-directed.
Still, the second-person narration also seems to vilify the society
that neither accepts nor understands the narrator as an artist but
rather presumes to pass its judgment of failure in much the same
way as the autonomous voices of the National Writers' Examination

board in "The Dolt." In its indefiniteness, the text appears to be a
vehicle through which the narrator is searching for the causative
agent of his creative failure, the villain or thief responsible for

the loss of his masculine identity. The most obvious culprit is the
narrator's soon-to-be-born child, whose nickname as Bo
"Gog,"
Pettersson notes, may associate the child with "the satanic
prince"
in Ezekiel 38-39 (435). Although the address is never direct, the nar
rator reports that he intends his autobiographical rambling as an
object lesson for Gog, so that he may "[leap] fully armed from the
womb" (170). Perhaps this armor will help him to overthrow his
father, but like the farcically adversarial moon, Gog's lack of physi
cal form makes him a less than gratifying villain and exempts
him from responsibility for his father's failed condition. Indeed,
a tour de force of tone that fuses the narra
through miraculously
tor's humility, good-at-heart optimism, and tortuous self-mockery,
"Gog" comes to personify the possible and the hopeful, much as
Edgar's story draft offers the hope of a new at the start of

beginning
"The Dolt."
Looking further, one sees that the narrator forcibly excludes Ann
(the female half of this presumably parental relationship) from his
thoughts. The reader knows Ann only as the mother of Gog, and as
someone who is "good with" the narrator's other child from a pre
vious, failed marriage. Of Ann the narrator says, "I'm going to keep
her ghostly. Just the odd bit of dialogue. ... I don't want her burst
ing in on us with the freshness and originality of her observations"

(160-61). Like Barbara in "The Dolt," Ann does not get a voice in
this male narrator's secretive literary creation. Instead, Gog's
mother becomes a hostile force exactly because of her cheery useful
ness, her accomplishment, and her perceived lack of empathy with
the conditions that led to the narrator's own embitterment. She is an
MEDVECKY 559
unwelcome intrusion kept at a distance by force of will until the end

of the story, when the narrator rejects her sexually, saying, "Dear
Ann when I look atMan I don't want you. Unfolded Ursala Thigpen
seems eversomuchmore desirable" (169). In this moment, Ann
becomes the only explicit addressee of the epistolary effort. And yet
she is blameworthy least of all, leaving the narrator, after consider
able effort in his search for the guilty party, unable to find the per
son(s) or agency responsible for his ruin as a man.
With no one to blame for his condition, the narrator allows him
self no anger but self-directed anger. His father he holds above criti
cism or reproach, while in his own self-searching, the narrator
knows of "no particular point at which [he] stopped being promis
ing."1 And yet he must continue to suffer the fact that his promise
inexplicably vanished (164). With his frustration and futility

removed from the schema of cause and effect, the narrator pursues
two courses simultaneously. First he turns his anger outward, to
the absurd objectification of a mock villain?in this story, the
moon/fate. But as this is unsatisfying, he also channels his anger
inward, toward himself. Thus the narration ends in the eerie evoca
tion of an aborted suicide note, conjuring up self-pity, cries for atten
tion, and utter futility in regard to the narrator's role as father. After
all, what can he do for his son that Ann has not she
already proven
can do better? At last, the narrator's rue becomes viciously self
destructive: "What can I do for him? I can get him into A.A., I have
influence" (170). In his reaffirmation of uselessness and futility as
his life's the narrator
concludes with a sense of intellectual
legacy,
frustration, anomie, and a farcical to find masculine fulfill
inability
ment or purpose in postwar America. Certainly his original promise
and substantial learning have been made absurd in "lunar hostility"
scholarship. The
inquiry into faith via the "Cardinal Y" (why are we
here?) has also proven fruitless in its conclusion
that "any value that
. . .
must the whole
has value lie outside sphere of what happens"
(167). The net result of this autobiography-in-brief is a poignant
1. Pettersson the narrator's

takes denial of the father's as a form of
repeated guilt
indictment In this approach,
(436). however, one must be willing to admit that the father
as a consequence a fact that
is guilty per se, merely of his fatherhood, again places him
within a pattern of impractical and implausible villains.
attempt to redeem the impotence of a father to protect a son. On the

eve of fatherhood, a sense of irony about Freud's theory is
oedipal
this narrator's only bitter comfort; for it seems that the best this man
can do for his son is to be a failure, as near to dead as possible, in
order to save Gog the cost of overthrowing him. At least in that
respect, the frustration that the narrator feels as a consequence of his

thwarted masculinity finds its ultimate expression in a desire to die.
If one accepts the relationship between masculine action and mas
culine sexuality as amain concern of Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural
Acts, then the narrators of "The Dolt" and "See the Moon?" repre
sent distant antipodes of Leverenz's "real man." As Freud notes in
Totem and Taboo, a neurotic male psyche is one that has failed to get
free from the psychosexual conditions of childhood or has returned
to them, either through developmental inhibition or regression.
Freud further suggests that these "fixations of the libido continue to
play (or begin once more to play) the principal part in [the man's]
unconscious mental life" (17). Taking a broad view of the collection,
one can say that Barthelme seems to focus on just this type
particular
of neurotic male, alternately pitied and parodied, who has
descended into a subliminal underworld and become lost. Unable to
come to terms with the disruptions in the dominant patriarchal
order or to conquer savage desires, he wanders, confused and frus
trated. Cut off from the natural process of upward social mobility,
these men fail to reintegrate themselves into either family or society.
Gradually it becomes apparent that the male oedipal drama is
onstage, and that it resonates loudly through its multifaceted incar

nations, with significant personal, social, and political conse
quences; for rather than move in a socioeconomic sense, these men

move in a
psychological one, seeking refuge in oedipal regression.
Returning to "The Dolt" to examine the story-within-the-story,
own short fiction, one can see that its two narra
Edgar's parallel
tives create a neurotic, tale
post-oedipal masculinity Edgar's
to Baron A's "notorious . . .blunder at the Battle
purports explain
of Kolin" (64). The name
given to this fictitious battle, which is
the cause of the Baron'sdownfall, alludes to the Sophoclean
tragedy Oedipus at Colonus, but neither can Edgar/Barthelme resist
exploiting Sophocles for a further pun on the colon. In the context

of a "battle," this reference calls to mind the boy's anal stage of
MEDVECKY 561
development. French psychotherapist Christiane Olivier gives a
contemporary interpretation of Freud's theory:

[I]n the anal a sets in for the little
stage panic boy: he holds out, he refuses,
he for he thinks that are not out to his stool,
delays, they just get they're
out to get him. He wants no of what "she" is from him; he sees
part asking
himself as at, directly affected, threatened ... if and when he relives
got
the same fantasy
in later years he becomes impotent and suffers from pre
mature or He will not want?not be able?to her
delayed ejaculation. give
what she wants; a burdensome of the war son
consequence waged by
against mother.
(62)
While itmight seem troublesome to explore psychoanalytic princi
within a fictional realm, Zeitlin argues that in
ples convincingly
Barthelme's work, psychoanalysis is central to the discourse, and
that in the author's texts, the "postmodern must also mean post
Freudian" ("Father-Murder" 185). Further, the stories themselves
bear out the investigation. For example, from Olivier's definition, it
appears that the neurotic male regresses to a state characterized by
an adamant refusal to act and the aggressive denial of a woman's
desire. Within this paradigm, block can be viewed
Edgar's writer's
as the manifestation of his regressively boyish refusal to act, which
in turn is carried over to the Baron, whom Edgar creates as his fic
tional analogue. Edgar writes that the Baron willfully "withdraw[s]
the column under his command at a crucial moment in the fighting"
(64), thus posing the Baron's withdrawal of his column/phallus as a
passive-aggressive act of revenge against his wife for the emascula

tion he imagines to suffer in her love for a much
himself younger
man, Orsini (67). At the heart of the Baron's withdrawal is a sexual
denial of Madame A's desires as well as the wish for her destruction
at the hands of enemy forces, for the consequence that he attempts
to bring about through his willful inaction is the loss of the castle,
where he imagines that his wife is reposing with her lover. Of such
jealous aggression against one's wife, Olivier states: "[T]he man's

anal game comes down to this: how to stop the other from existing;
how to remove all trace of her desire, how to kill her in fantasy.
These murderous wishes come back into play each time a man con
fronts a woman, and especially his woman" (64). The Baron, who
quite literally attempts to kill his wife, is the model for all of these
aggressively oedipal male acts. Readers are nonetheless reminded

of Edgar, who tyrannizes Barbara intellectually with terms of art
and with his refusal of her creative suggestions. the narra
Similarly,
tor of "See the Moon?" attempts to erase his wife by making her
"ghostly," even as he replaces her with of Ursala Thigpen.

pictures
In addition to this latent animus between husband and wife, con
siderable interplay exists between Edgar's neurotic, post-oedipal
experience and that of the other characters he creates. For instance,
the conditions between Orsini and Madame A mirror
Edgar's per
ception of his wife's close relationship with their son and likely
reflect his own feelings of displacement. In writing of the adultery
of a married woman with a young,
single man, Edgar invokes the
taboo of incestuous desire between mother and son, which Barbara
seems to recognize she is "turned on" during the
intuitively. When
reading, it ismost probably by the promise of vicarious (and there
fore acceptable) oedipal gratification in the tryst between Madame
A and Orsini. Since fictiveness makes it safe, the story sparks her
sense of desire. It isMadame A's love affair that she refers to when
she describes the story as "very exciting" (66). As a result, Barbara's
wish for a complete story from Edgar seems to mirror the inaction
able oedipal desire of Edgar's own mother. Meanwhile, Edgar
describes his own son as being "eight feet tall" and "like a large . . .
building" (69), even as he explains that Friedrich Wilhelm I has
pressed Orsini into service as part of a of giants" by

"regiment
virtue of his being "a very tall man" (66). Here again Edgar's situa
tion parallels that of the narrator in "See the Moon?" who associates
his son with his own destruction by virtue of the Biblical allusion
attendant in the nickname Gog.2
Given that Edgar's fiction unfolds largely from the Baron's point
of view, the Baron's actions necessarily involve ameasure of aggres
sion against Orsini, the would-be son who desires to take over his
place as his wife's sexual partner. Yet with the Baron as Edgar's
2. In addition to the passages in Ezekiel 38-39 that Pettersson quotes, the name Gog
appears in Revelation 20:8 in connection with the end of days. In the King James Bible the
"
passage reads, [Satan] shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters
of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as
the sand of the sea."
MEDVECKY 563
analogue in the fictional family triangle, Edgar's story is ever a

defense of the Baron and a renunciation of his guilt. In this respect it
is important for Edgar-as-author to make clear that the Baron is not
wholly unjustified in his antipathy for Orsini. By virtue of his

omniscient position, Edgar points out that the sexual desire
between Madam A and Orsini real, even though
is quite it is never
consummated: "A deep sympathy established itself between them
[Madam A and Orsini], with this idiosyncrasy, that it was never
pressed to a conclusion, on his part, or

acknowledged in any way,
on hers. But both were aware that it existed, and drew secret nour
ishment from
it, and took much delight in the nearness, one to the
other" (66). It seems that the Baron gets to have his cake and eat it,
too. He has exaggerated the extent of the affair between Madame A
and this much younger man, Orsini. Edgar, as author, asserts no
actual misconduct between Madame A and Orsini, revealing
instead that it is the Baron whomerely "imagined" events to have
"ripened far beyond the point they had actually reached" (67). As a
result, the Baron is placed in a to own
position appreciate Edgar's
confused intuition of guilt and jealousy regarding the close relation
between his wife and his son (again reminiscent of the hostility
ship
the narrator swallowsin regard to Ann and his son by his first mar
riage in "See the Moon?"). To exculpate the Baron yet further, Edgar
transfers the experience of guilt and mental suffering to Orsini, the
fictitiousvillain, where the real villain(s) (Edgar's wife/mother and
the judges of the National Writers' Examination) are either too close
for comfort or nowhere to be found. Even as Edgar's story admits to
Orsini's unconsummated love, it states, "Orsini saw himself as a
sort of jackal skulking about the periphery of his benefactor's
domestic life, which had been harmonious and whole, but was now,
in whatsoever slight degree, compromised" (67). Just as the narrator
of "See the Moon?" transfers anger into the safe outlet of the moon
when denied his masculine potential, Edgar, when denied "some
finds a safe external outlet for his rage in the fictional
thingness,"
son, Orsini.
Meanwhile, Edgar's own guilt, or the self-directed aspect of his

aggression, also enters on both fictional levels. The Baron,
oedipal
who started life so heroically, ends as sacrificial
Edgar's analogue,
victim and surrogate suicide. After his inaction at the Battle of Kolin
proves him a failure, the Baron's life is blurred out of existence, and
Edgar leaves him in an ambiguous limbo somewhere between
"alleged suicide" and life "in a hidden place" (67). In the process he
bears out Freud's early hypothesis from Totem and Taboo that
"impulses to suicide in a neurotic turn out to be self-pun

regularly
ishments for wishes for someone else's death" (154).3 Similarly,
no recourse in overt violence, reclaims his sense of
Edgar, who has
self in the only way left to him, through his self-destructive refusal
to gratify his wife's desire for a complete story. Thus it is failure that
allows Edgar to win the oedipal battle on all levels. Within his story,
the Baron, his analogue, gains proof of the plot to overthrow him
and yet holds to the incompleteness of its consummation. On the
intermediate plane of Edgar's own reality, he wins again by deny
ing Barbara the gratification of her desires through his refusal to fin
ish the story in a satisfactory way. Unfortunately for Edgar, the end
result is that his subliminal existence is in conflict with his material
reality. As he is living on handouts from his brother and unemploy

ment compensation, his oedipal victories come at the expense of
successful participation in social and family orders. Unwittingly he
is twice the pawn of his subconscious desire, and consequently, the
story satirizes him as a "dolt," underscoring the fact that no one else
is playing along in his regressive games. When viewed from an
a Still, on a
objective height, Edgar becomes misanthropic person.
personal level, he is pitiable, because in order to render his desire for
violence innocuous, he must hurt himself. It seems that Barthelme
a persistent insofar as
has found irony in the male oedipal drama
sons may also be fathers. In Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts,
masculinity becomes a tenuous position, with this inherent
doubly
duality at the root of its overdetermination.
These men do not go quietly, however. Though lost, they demand
acknowledgment for their position in the indeterminate space
between guilt and desire. Like Oedipus at Colonus, who states, "For
I have suffered these deeds much worse than I have acted them,"
3. Freud restated this idea nearly twenty years after Totem and Taboo in Civilization and
Its Discontents, holding to his belief that neurotic masculine ends up
aggressiveness
"introjected, internalized [and] sent back where it came from?that is directed toward
[the man's] own (70).
ego"
MEDVECKY 565
the Barthelmean Man repeatedly proclaims himself victim rather

than misdoer (171). In "See the Moon?" as in both fictions within
"The Dolt," the male actors find redemption only insofar as their
prose constructions succeed in generating a force in the
sympathetic
admission and observation of their respective failures. "The Dolt,"
for an narrator who
example, presents anonymous first-person
appears only at the close of the story. He announces: "I sympathize.

Imyself have these are elusive, middles are
problems. Endings
nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin"
(69). As the focalization a construc
extends, Edgar himself becomes
tion within a construction. Likewise, other stories in the collection
depict similar encounters between external observers and the fic

tion as object, during which the observers are asked to excuse and
relate to the weakness and vaguely sexualized failure of the male
protagonist.
In "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning," for example, K.'s
of incisive and wondrous acts suddenly an ironic
litany undergoes
reversal when the reader at last discovers that the all-powerful
Kennedy cannot swim. Only after the foreshortened K. has experi

enced both humiliation and mortality?thereby a basis
establishing
for sympathy with the Barthelmean Man?does the mysterious
first-person narrator materialize to save the day: "I pull him out of
the water. He stands now on the bank, gasping" (47). Again, at the
close of "The Balloon," a narrator appears to interpret the fiction as
object: "The balloon, I said, is a spontaneous autobiographical dis

closure, to do with the unease I felt at your absence, and
having
with sexual deprivation" (22). If one function of these last-second
narrators is to locate the narratives as units in a series of self
deprecating creative acts, then the cumulative weight of these inter
pretations is, if not a single consciousness, at least an archetypal
masculinity. These narrators and protagonists reflect a disconnec

tion from action, from heroic potential, and from the savage founda
tions of masculine identity and subsequently
that Freud Leverenz
describe. Because the process of civilization has reduced them, in
many instances, to antiheroes, the anxious artists, husbands, and
lovers stand in the shadow of true men of action who emerge as foil
wielding foils. Edgar locates the trope of the swashbuckling hero

within his own fiction when he proudly tells his wife, "Brand, tuck,
. . . Those are four names for the sword" (63).

glave, claymore.
Likewise, Robert dresses as Zorro, and Errol Flynn
Kennedy
appears amid the m?lange of Pia's dreams.
These swordsmen exist on some occasions as ameans for the nar
rator to bring the observer into sympathy with his own feelings of
At other times, they serve to juxtapose the narrator's
ineffectuality.
present failures with his bygone promise. Indeed the sword image
also belongs to Oedipus, who describes his position thus: "It stabs
me like a sword, / That two-edged word / [that] Sprang from wife
and mother's travail?pain" (197). The image retains its force in
Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, where many of the narrators

ask observers to appreciate them as caught between historical eras
as by the two generations of women in the post-oedipal
represented
neurosis. As Olivier points out, "Misogyny is 'a crop sown by one
woman [the mother] and reaped by another [the wife/lover]'" (43).
Of the first woman, this man claims himself a victim, and of the sec
ond, he gets his own back. Thus Edgar seems to take as much bitter
joy in the ruination of the Baron as the narrator presumably takes in

the marginalization of his own alter ego, Edgar.
From the point of view of Barthelmean Man, the fear of
failure/impotence blocks access to action/masculinity. Concor

the oedipal drama serves as a nexus between form and con
dantly,
tent, where the much-discussed "loss of the subject" is reflected not
only in the surface disruptions of the narrative but also in the

content-centered notion of a masculine
postmodern identity
disrupted. In "Donald Barthelme and the President of the United
States," Zeitlin clarifies this progressive obsolescence of the
Freudian subject in the post-Freudian world. Like Barthelme's
male narrators, Zeitlin knows that it is not possible to identify a
specific historical moment when "the contours of the would-be

concrete individual subject or ego [became] (62).
ambiguous"
Consequently, he points a
to masculinity that clings to "'older'
forms of subjectivity?fantasy, dependence, addiction, mourning,
depression which themselves a kind of latent protest if not an
signal
involuntary romantic survival of that older, modernist self-as
alienated" (65). Suffused with latent longing for past glory, the sex
ual revolution of the 1960s must have taken on the aspect of a
must-win war for masculinity. On the one hand, the promise of
MEDVECKY 567
a new era of sexual offered the possibility of gratification

conquest
for man's primal need for acceptance and upward social mobility.
On the other hand, countervailing forces threatened the last frontier
of masculine dominance?sex. In
1963, Betty Friedan's social
polemic The Feminine Mystique began the feminist movement by
urging women to challenge the constructs of a dominant, patriar
chal order.4 In 1965, Masters and Johnson published their ground
breaking study Human Sexual Response, which in its emphasis on

clitoris rather than vagina as the locus of female ques
sexuality
tioned a centuries-old sexual paradigm.
phallocentric
In Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, where changing gender
and sexual relations present a challenge on the liminal frontiers of
masculinity, it is not surprising that Barthelmean Man often equates

sexual dominance with masculine redemption. In "The President,"
these ideas are conflated in a single prose construction. On one
level, the text takes the form of a biographical inquiry into the char
acter of a new
president. Much as in "Alice," the construction of
"The President" seems to compress action and time in between
nearly exact of a moment. In "Alice," this is

repetitions single key
the narrator's attempt to peer into the private world of a woman's
grocery bag, while in "The President" the moment is split between
Sylvia's two unequivocal declarations of love for the narrator.

The first of these moments occurs in the fourth line of the story, as
Sylvia says, "I love

you" in response to the narrator's tentative
question, "Is strangeness alone enough?" (147). Initially the words
4. In her
landmark work of social criticism, Friedan a phenomenon of
catalogues
anomie among American women, paradoxically at a time of unparalleled national wealth
and freedom. In exploring the roots of this malaise, Friedan pauses to question the extent
to which postmodern literature might be responsible for perpetuating the feminine mys
tique: "The public symbol of male hostility [toward women] is the retreat of playwrights
and novelists from the problems of the world to an obsession with images of the preda
tory female, passivemartyred male hero, the promiscuous childlike heroine, and the
details of arrested sexual development" (262). Although Friedan does not mention
Donald Barthelme specifically, he nonetheless chose to respond to her argument in his
essay "Not-knowing." Though admitting that he is a member of the "alleged Post

modernists," Barthelme ardently contests the idea that postmodern writing has "turned
its back on the world" (15). Instead, he maintains that postmodern art is more difficult
and because it intends to reflect a world that itself has become much more diffi
complex
cult and complex.
seem like a non but in the context

sequitur, of a love scene, they
a narrator the rational, deterministic cause of Sylvia's
imply seeking
love and receiving in response a denial of the rational in favor of the
irrational. What then follows, as the story, is a lacuna in the narra
tor's mind, which for the sake of continuity Iwill set aside briefly, if
only to point out that Sylvia closes her parenthesis eight lines from
the end, when she again tells the narrator, "I love you" (152).
Perhaps she feels that her first assurance has not had the desired
effect. Or perhaps these words are the spontaneous and uninhibited
utterances of lovemaking. Consider the text that follows:
The President the roaring curtain. We until

stepped through applauded
our arms hurt. We shouted until the ushers set off flares silence.
enforcing
The orchestra tuned itself. the second lead. The President was
Sylvia sang
in his box. At the finale, the entire cast into the orchestra
smiling slipped pit
in a great, mass. We cheered until the ushers tore up our tickets.
swooning
(152)
Almost a sexual act is

certainly, implied here between the unnamed
narrator and Sylvia; it is only that the sex per se is covered over by
euphemism. Yet the scene needs clarification. What has tran

hardly
a
spired between Sylvia and the narrator is surely sexual act. The
President smiling in his box amid swooning masses and parting
curtains?these images do nothing if not recall humorous theatrical
clich?s in which, since such matters cannot be stated explicitly, pic
tures of rockets launching, entering trains tunnels, and fireworks
exploding must suffice.

A key question for the Barthelmean Man, then, is whether this
orgasmic conclusion represents a triumph for his masculinity on

Leverenz's liminal frontier. Given that both of Sylvia's declarations
of love go unanswered, the story creates a discomforting sense of
irresolution and begs a reconsideration of the sections that exist in
contemplation of the new President. To begin with, we are told that

the President is "not like the other Presidents we've had" (148). He
is not a "handsome meliorist" like his defeated rival (150). Instead,
the President is a man who has struggled and emerged victorious
over issues that typically threaten manhood. he has risen to
Namely,
power despite his "strangeness" and his smallness of being, "only
forty-eight inches high at the shoulder" (147). In the surreal image
MEDVECKY 569
of this unlikely figure as president, the story offers the primacy of

the subliminal, the sense of a world in which Barthelmean Man can
once again hope for success.
Since the President's own unexpected success parallels that of the
narrator in love, the story appears to point toward victory by associ
ation for the Barthelmean Man. As a result, the ascendancy of the
President seems to reflect the of the narrator's masculin
ascendancy
ity as well. This type of parallel construction is familiar from "The
Dolt," where Barthelme maintains a mirrorlike between
relationship
the narrator and his foil, the man of action. This time the relationship
of protagonist to foil ismerely inverted, because the narrator's self
indicate a instead of a failure of his masculinity.
perceptions triumph
Consequently, instead of being obliged to suffer sympathetically, the
President bears witness to the sexual triumph and exists as willing
accomplice. theUnlike
previous stories, which surround the narrator
in pity and irony, this time Barthelme seems to
laugh wholeheartedly
at the puffed-up pride of his narrator in likening him to a new
President, into office as itwere, at the beginning of a love
coming
relationship. Expertly handling two simultaneous levels of action
and meaning, Barthelme creates a surreal world in sexualized lan
guage, with the President suddenly thrusting himself between
Sylvia and the narrator in the middle of an intimate moment.

Still, a sense of oddness lingers. As Zeitlin perceives, the character
of the President "is uncanny in the more Freudian sense
properly
of the father-imago, a disturber of relations of love" ("Donald
Barthelme" 70). Further, there is reason to assert that the narrator
here is the same character as the narrator in "See the Moon?" who
has already mentioned Sylvia in a failed context as his ex-wife. This
is not a coincidence of names; Sylvia is a repeating character who
several stories in the collection as a romantic To be cer
spans figure.
tain that readers understand this, the narrator of "See the Moon?"
echoes a key section of the text of "The President": in talking of his
past life, he says, "The crowd roared. Sylvia roared" (164) and
therein reveals a direct knowledge of the experiences presented in
"The President," from a later point in time.
however, should the narrator reduce his youthful sex act
Why,
with to such a clich?d pastiche of imagery? Perhaps this
Sylvia
narrator's is a form of an avoidance of
euphemism self-censorship,
the truth, a wish to eradicate of guilty

prudish representations
desire. As such, it smacks of Freud's oedipal paradigm, where it is
man's guilty desire that has ever been a fragmenting force, both
socially and personally, insofar as it recalls the unspeakable prac
tice of parricide and the unnatural act of incest (Totem and Taboo
141-45). Consequently, Olivier notes that a man's sexual relations
can become in "finding a way to give and yet hold the
entangled
'selfback, guard the 'self against the other and her demands"
(65). Chief among these tempting escapes is male detachment
from responsibility for the sexual act. Certainly one means for a
man to escape his guilt is to portray his penis as an
independent
actor?to name it, or to impart his masculinity to the penis.
A popular expression of the masculine sexual experience holds
that men who are driven by uncontrollable desire "think" with
their penises.
Perhaps, then, the principal body of the text, the lacuna of the sur
real, contains a representation of the President-as-penis in order that
this narrator, through his dissociation, may solve the riddle of how
to give in to his love object without the associated guilt
or loss of
self. It is, after all, the President whom the narrator sees
"standing
stiffly" (149), and "cankered and difficult enough" "to plunge into
the heart of the problem" (150). Here, the phallic language of post
oedipal male confusion, with its troublesome sexualized uncer
tainty, describes the President, who in turn mediates the narrator's

sexual relations much as the moon and medieval literature do in
"See the Moon" and "The Dolt." The conflict is again defined in
terms of a problematic union, the solution in terms of plunging in.
Given the oedipal preoccupation of the collection, one cannot help
but sense that this Barthelmean Man is still haunted and
by Mother,
that he must pass through her ghost to achieve any sense of comple
tion with another woman. Consider another notion, that
popular
of a man who
thinks of his mother in order to rid himself of bad
sexual desires or to prolong sexual a
performance. Curiously,
description of the President's mother appears amid the non
panting
sequiturs "Copulation," "Strangeness," "Applause" (151). As a
seeming coitus interruptus of text, the narrator speculates about the
President's mother, giving four possible descriptions of her and
concluding with the statement: "Little is known about her. We are
MEDVECKY 571
assured, however, that the same damnable involvements that

obsess us obsess her too" (151). But even as the narrator reaches for
his idealized symbiosis, he appears to sense that his desire is as
impossible as it is afflicted. Rather than to
neurotically respond
Sylvia's declaration of love, the narrator points to "a fiasco of tiny
crusted slashes" on her thumb. with love, this transfer
Juxtaposed
ence suggests a wounded that clouds the narrator's
intimacy
moment of action with hesitationand uncertainty. As the characters
progress toward physical intimacy, the narrator's sense of
injury
and disease becomes further entangled with his sense of his own
sexuality. Ultimately, he refers to the President as "cankered," recall
ing not only Sylvia's crusty wound but also Oedipus's curse on
Thebes, which Ismene describes as "[t]he canker that infected all
thy
race" (181).
Throughout the story, this cankerous sexuality dramatizes the
narrator's latent guilt and characterizes the bogus separation
between his ego and his alter ego, the President. Distrust and uncer
tainty are the emotions that repeatedly come across in relation to the
agency of the President. It seems that the self-image of the narrator
hangs precariously in the balance of this irreal distinction: "Certain
things about the new President are not clear. I can't make out what
he is thinking. When he has finished speaking I can never remember
what he has said" (149). Why should the narrator know what
the President is thinking, unless there is a biological connection
between them? They seem to share strangeness, as indicated
by the
narrator's initial question to Sylvia, "Is strangeness alone enough?"
In one sense, the narrator might be asking himself whether he can
satisfy Sylvia's desire (with his unusually small penis) and thereby
redeem his masculinity with physical conquest. This concern trans
lates into much uneasiness in the general Zeitgeist, as the narrator
expresses a belief that his epoch "will be characterized in future
histories a period
as of tentativeness and uncertainty" (149).
Meanwhile, the incessant repetition of the word "strange" cannot
a over the
help but hang pall of hesitation impending intercourse.
And what of the fainting and swooning that correspond with the
President's general location? Humorously, these images evoke self
defeating urges, comic impressions of impotence, loss of erection,

lack of blood to the head.
In such a troublesome atmosphere all the more necessary

it seems
for the Barthelmean Man sort of fantasy as the vehi
to deploy some
cle through which he can avoid the self-loathing and strangeness
he feels when being loved. At least, in portraying his penis
as-President, the story presents an alter ego that allows the narrator
to consummate his relationship with Sylvia. But as to whether
this consummation is a true victory, the story seems to answer
no. Within the euphemized climax, is rendered as a per
lovemaking
formance. Rather than the traditional male-centered notion of sex
ual performance, however, it is Sylvia who is onstage, both as an
opera singer and as the one who takes the first step by unabashedly
declaring her love. Years later, the remarried narrator of "See

the Moon?" remembers Sylvia as the feminist, the woman who
"roared," while in the moment, he is silent. The expected affirma
tion of his own love for Sylvia is never uttered. Therefore it is only
Sylvia, the modern woman, who wins the day. It is Sylvia who is
empowered in her
sexuality. The narrator has ceded his identity to
his penis and his power to Sylvia as the quid pro quo for acting on
his forbidden desire. To avoid responsibility for the feared trans
gression, he has passively allowed himself to take the oedipal stance

of Mother's plaything. Consequently, it seems that once again we
have the makings of a manqu?-to-be at the hands of a woman who
is forced to take sole responsibility for intimacy. Moreover, it is irrel
evant whether is a hero
Sylvia today, for tomorrow she will again be
the man-eating wife/mother and he the self-defeated artist. With
his own sense of masculinity shrouded in false sexual bravado and
self-congratulation, the Barthelmean Man fails to realize that he is

still not fully actualized. He may have won a
Pyrrhic victory
over
his fears?indeed, "The President" seems at first glance the clearest
moment of triumph in the collection, and positively orgasmic at
that?but the last action belongs to the ushers, and that action is
destructive. They tear up the tickets, even as the stars of the show
bathe in the echoes of their fleeting joy.
Ultimately, "The President" is a story of a ruin foretold for the
musical Sylvia and her nameless suitor, a ruin that finally comes to
fruition in "The Indian Uprising." As does "The President," "The
Indian Uprising" opens in medias res. Here, however, the narrator
and Sylvia have fallen on hard times. Their meeting is contex
MEDVECKY 573
tualized not by the comings and goings of a charismatic president

but rather by a military invasion. Disguised in the background, the
side ground, the underground, everywhere but the an
foreground,
Indian "uprising" threatens the city and, by extension, the narrator
and Sylvia. Just as in "The President," the narrator begins with a
question expressive of his deeply felt insecurity. "Do you think this
is a good life?" he asks Sylvia. "No," she replies (3). Yet despite this
bluntly dissatisfied rejoinder, the narrator reports, "I sat there get
ting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love. We
talked" (4). For amoment Barthelme resurrects the joy felt at the end
of "The President," as the narrator basks in the a
glory of single, joy
ously concise sentence: "We talked." The sheer transcendence of
communication, even if is powerfully felt against
only summarized,
a collection heavily weighted toward frustration in the narrator's
point of view. Owing to conning prose that seduces readers no less
easily than the narrator is himself seduced, one almost fails to notice
that the rapport is one-sided. The narrator is drunk, and given
Sylvia's perfunctory response?as unequivocal in its denial as once

she had been affirmative?one wonders if the narrator's feelings for
Sylvia may not be too little, too late.

In the coincidence of the narrator's apparent love for Sylvia and
the Comanche invasion of the city, Barthelmean Man most clearly
resembles Leverenz's on the liminal frontier amid the
Natty Bumpo
savage, totemic Indians. The difference is that this frontier has
become a surreal blend of ancient and modern city, more a
plain
psychological projection than a real place for redemption. In the
absence of a true frontier, this imaginary one must suffice as a battle
for the men and women of the sexual revolution?or per
ground
haps more accurately, for a man and his love object, for this notion
of war comes decidedly from the man's perspective. Sylvia makes
no mention of these circumstances. Rather, it is the narrator who
casts himself as a passive defender against the Cupidian arrows that
rain down on him "in clouds" (3).
Throughout the story, the red men keep coming, or rather
they
keep it up?the invasion, that is. To be sure, as warriors, the
Comanche braves look very much like the President. They are
unmistakably farcical, clad in phallic terms as an "uprising" of "red

men" that wield "threatening short, ugly lances with fur at the
throat" (6). By all appearances are the precarious erection, the

they
of forbidden desire, once again interposing itself between
symbol
the narrator and Sylvia. To stop them, a barricade is constructed,
where the elements of the wall suggest Freud's vision of a moder
nity that exists primarily to hold in check man's ancient desires

(Civilization and Its Discontents 4). Indeed, the elements of this narra
tor's barricade suggest the shattered archaeological artifacts of a
once a
great, romantic city: red wine and ashtrays, liquor cabinet,
and as the pi?ce de r?sistance of love, the narrator's own handicraft, a
hollow-core door table. As the narrator recites the litany of lovers to
whom he has previously offered the gift of door table?lovers who
have all refused or desecrated his narcissistic, artistic labor of love?
it seems certain that Sylvia, too, will shortly join the list. Yet where
the image of the Comanche suggests a last stand of the heart, the
narrator as Custer must battle through to the end, complete with
the self-defeating litany of death's throes familiar to his ilk. As in
"The President," he attempts to cede the power in the relationship
to Sylvia, telling her, "Call off your braves," as though they could
possibly be hers (6). As in "See the Moon?" he implores fate with the
image of "a city that does not know what it has done to deserve
baldness, errors, and infidelity" (6). As in "The Dolt," he seeks his
own death and destruction, to submit to something, to
begging
revert to a state of powerlessness, to give in to Thanatos in fear of
Eros, rushing headlong into his self-defeating urges.
At first, itwould seem that the Barthelmean Man would have us
take part once again in his feelings of victimization. a sub
Surely,
conscious that paints love as a savage invader betrays its own self
destructive tendencies. As before, a familiar voice
second-person
emerges in interior monologue that recalls the abject empathy
seeker: "[Y]ou can never touch a girl in the same way more than
once, twice, or another number of times however much you may
wish to hold, wrap, or otherwise fix her hand, or look, or some other
quality, or incident, known to you previously" (10). Still, however
pained or wistful, this second-person expression seems also to
approach a true rhetorical self-examination: "And when shot

they
the scene in the bed Iwondered how you felt"
(4). Although the
addressee is hidden, as in "See the Moon?" the vague dislocation of
the prose, smacking as it does of invites us into the narra
infidelity,
MEDVECKY 575
tor's alienation. Someone has despoiled theirlove, and the prepon

derance of guilt and shameful skulking on the part of the narrator
points to him in all probability as the perpetrator of this infidelity.

His denial of his wife's desires has likely taken the form of a regret
table adultery. While it is true that the reader learns of Sylvia's asso
ciation with another man, Kenneth, Sylvia is hardly a presence in
the story. She has moved on, where the narrator still clings. The
narrator's friend tries to tell him, "That girl is not in love with
Kenneth. . . . She is in love with his coat," but it is no use (7).
The error to the narrator, just as does the baldness.
belongs
Consequently, he searches for truth amid regret, only to arrive at
summations, such as "And you can never return to felici
grandiose
ties in the same way, the brilliant body, the distinguished spirit reca
moments that occur once, twice, or another number of
pitulating
times in rebellions, or water" (11).
as
Though they are mere sophisms masquerading knowledge,
this attempt to pursue self-awareness marks a of tone. In an
change
ironic reversal, the Barthelmean Man, who once considered "not
to be an inferior "feminine position," now discovers that
knowing"
all along he himself has been the one who has not known (63). In
this presenting tension, the concern of "The Indian Uprising" seems
to be one of ultimate self-awareness. Will the narrator grow to
escape the savage ignorance that has caused him to withdraw his
love and/or sublimate it into art? In abjection he says, "I decided
I knew nothing" (5). Perhaps this is his first spark of genuine knowl
edge, the intuition that he must take responsibility for something. An

Orwellian reeducation follows. The narrator's desire is satirized as
wicked, and a dominatrix/reeducator, Miss R., metes out his pun
ishment: "a teacher, unorthodox they said, excellent they said, suc
cessful with difficult cases" (5). And it isMiss R. who tells him the
. ..
real truth: "You know nothing you feel nothing, you are locked
in a most savage and terrible ignorance, I despise you, my boy, mon
cher, my heart" (5). This savage and terrible condition is none other
than the narrator's masculine desire, as reflected in the synecdoche
wherein Miss R. employs the heart to represent the man.
By the end of the story, the narrator confesses his earlier attempts to
resist change, he had "refused to listen to reason or to under
saying
stand that itwas real and that our water supply had evaporated and
that our credit was no longer what it had been, once" (10). Yet while
the narrator may understand his war with Sylvia to have been false,
whatever perspective he has is only nascent. He still does not under
stand that his true struggle is to reconcile the deterministic forces of
his masculine desire with the changing social conditions of the
emerging post-Freudian world. In that regard, "The Indian Uprising"
presents the vision of a man who has only just begun to learn. As the
narrator struggles violently to grasp the full extent of his circum
stances, he arrives at a plausible beginning, not only for the collection
but for this society of postmodern men as well. The question then
becomes, can such men, armed with the knowledge of their condi
tion, change course for the better? Or as the narrator of "A Picture
History of the War" expresses it, "Can impotence be cured?" (144).

Can this nameless, middle-class Everyman reeducate himself and his
society in a healthy way? Arguably the fate of art and literature hangs
in the balance, for if self-knowledge is useless to protect man from a
predetermined programmatic destruction, then art can only be the
conciliatory act of failure.

Itmust be due to the fact that "The Indian Uprising" arrives at
such a point, with this precipitous tension, that the story has
become an emblem of Barthelme's career. Still, the notion of a cure
remains beyond articulation. At first awareness, the heart is over
matched by neurosis. For the time being, at least, the narrator must
sit with the savageness of this conclusion, and so he remands him
self to his reeducator, who takes his belt and shoes to forestall the
ever-present threat of suicide. It is not without some sense of

urgency that Barthelme addresses his readers on this point, how
ever. the collection, he reminds audiences
Throughout continually
that those hearts refusing reeducation may instead look for fights
they are more sure of winning.

Assuredly, in "The Indian Uprising,"
the specter of Vietnam lurks in the final paragraph: "We killed a
great many in the south suddenly with helicopters and rockets"

(11). Just as Edgar, in "The Dolt," unconsciously involves his charac
ters in a mirror of his own oedipal drama, at a cost to the Baron
of "13,000 out of 33,000 men" (64)?so too may a of
society
Barthelmean Men act unconsciously in geopolitical transferences
of the primary conflict. The idea of war becomes linked with wounded
masculine identity that washes its guilt in innocent blood. Like
MEDVECKY 577
Oedipus at Colonus, full of shame at dragging down the next gener

ation, "The Indian Uprising" concludes, "but we found that those
we had killed were children" (11).
As the stories in the collection repeatedly recollect eras when the
path to manhood was clear and sexual conquest linked with ready
deeds, one the interrelated nature of sexual action
perceives
and military action within the male psyche. In "Report," a group
of broken and fractured engineers come off like potential
Oppenheimers, all blind to the consequences of pursuing the wrong
kind of knowledge. The narrator tells them: "We are interested in
your thing, which seems to be functioning. In the midst of so much
dysfunction, function is interesting. Other people's things don't

seem to be working" (52). As in "The Dolt," the absence of function
equates with the absence of gender and summons forth the emascu
lated fraternity narrators
of doltlike that places this narrator as a
representative of a group seeking to regain sexual potency through

some surrogate act. On a quest to replace a lost masculine identity,
the neurotically afflicted Barthelmean Men gravitate toward what
physical frontiers they may, bringing with them their phallic power
symbols, namely the missiles and bombs that have come to replace
the sword-carrying swashbucklers of yesteryear. Although his ori
entation shifts from story to story, the Barthelmean Man remains a
generically regressive oedipal figure and reflects a deeply disturb
ing view of man's propensity in the face of oedipal guilt to dissoci

ate his ego from his conscience, with disastrous consequences. Even
in "Report," the narrator returns to his watch group, assuring them
that the engineers will not "unleash all this technology" (56)
because (thankfully) their moral sense is preserved on punched
cards: "I said, We have a moral sense. I said, We're not going to do it.
They didn't believe me" (57). Of course not?"we" had already

done it long ago.
Like as not, the presentation of patriarchal men as victims will
be uncomfortable for some, even if it is at times ironic, and perhaps
the unpopularity of this stance accounts for much of the early critical
distaste for Barthelme's fictions. Yet in pointing to the "objectness" of
the fictional experience with his fragments and telescoping focaliza
tions, Barthelme creates both ministructures and superstructure
that involve his audience in a deeply masculine concern with the
contemporary nuclear family and its larger construct, society. At the

moment in which many of the stories summon external observers to
encounter the fiction as "object," readers are reminded of Barthelme's
response to his critics?that art is fundamentally ameliorative and

transformative (Not-knowing 5). "We are all Upton Sinclairs," he says
both modestly and immodestly (24). In these objective moments lies
the catch, for it is not without some sense of having lived that
Barthelmean Man invokes his fate as a means to justify his pleas for
sympathy. Thereader is invited to share in the self-knowledge of

as itwere, between a rock and a hard between
being caught, place,
desire and guilt. If sympathy occurs, then it is proof of readers' close
relationship to the described conditions and fuel for further inquiry.
Just as the story-within-the-story is correlative, by
Edgar's objective
virtue of the last paragraph, "The Dolt" becomes the readers' correla
tive. What Barthelme's critics occasionally dismiss in their inherent
distrust of Freud and/or seemingly predatory depictions of women is
that theseimages belong to an ancient drama that very much depicts
a of the world?quite the problem of modern
problem possibly
America. At the very least, our masculine ontology is an object that
we must bring to light in order to dispel its anachronisms and reach
some
higher plane of social development.
University ofWisconsin-Milwaukee
WORKS CITED
Donald. The Essays and of Donald
Barthelme, Not-knowing: Interviews Barthelme.
Ed. Kim New York: Random, 1997.
Herzinger.
-. Practices, Unnatural Acts. New York: Farrar, 1968.
Unspeakable
Couturier, Maurice. "Sex vs. Text: From Miller to Nabokov." Revue Fran?aise
d'?tudes Am?ricaines. 9.20 1984): 243-60.
(May
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James New
Sigmund. Strachey.
York: Norton, 1961.
-. Totem and Taboo. Trans. James New York: Norton, 1950.
Strachey.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Dell, 1963.
Leverenz, David. "The Last Real Man in America: From to

Natty Bumpo
Batman." Fictions ofMasculinity: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities. Ed.
Peter Murphy. New York: New York UP, 1994. 21-53.
Masters, William H., and E. Johnson. Human Sexual Boston:

Virginia Response.
Little, 1966.
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_MEDVECKY 579_
Christiane. Children: The

Olivier, Jocasta's Imprint of the Mother. Trans. George
Craig. London: Routledge, 1989.
Pettersson, Bo. "Method in Narrative Madness: Barthelme's 'See the Moon?'"
Organization in Discourse: the Turku 1995. Ed.

Proceedings from Conference,
Brita Warvik et al. Turkuensia 14 (1995): 431-38.
Anglicana
at Colonus: I. Trans. F. Storr. Harvard
Sophocles. Oedipus Sophocles Cambridge:
UP, 1912.
Lee. "Failed Artists in Donald Barthelme's Stories." 26.1
Upton, Sixty Critique
(1984): 11-17.
Zeitlin, Michael. "Donald Barthelme and the President of the United States."
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-. "Father-Murder and Father-Rescue: The Post-Freudian of
Allegories
Donald Barthelme." Literature 34 (1993): 182-203.
Contemporary

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The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

Reconstructing Masculinity: Donald Barthelme's "Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts"

Reconstructing Masculinity: Donald Barthelme's

In hisessay "Failed Artists in Donald Barthelme's Sixty

specifically masculine failure is central to the impression of aes

topic with m?tonymie arrangements of powerless, guilty, and inse

As Michael Zeitlin notes in his essay "Father-Murder and Father

play of the signifiers" (188). In Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts,

Contemporary Literature XLVIII, 4 0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949/07/0004-0554

oppose them. In love, or at least in attempting to approximate the

language" (249), and more often than not, abandoned to frustration

Despite its formal complexity, "The Dolt" (59-70) offers a conve

longed-for social identity. For Edgar, creativity is the medium that

manuscript to his wife, Barbara, they exchange interstitial remarks

Barbara "The turns me on. .

ity in the eyes of family and society a creative act. "The

Edgar's one tenuous creative success, his surreal "son manqu?"

From the start of the story it seems that transferred anger is at

way as the autonomous voices of the National Writers' Examination

agent of his creative failure, the villain or thief responsible for

Edgar's story draft offers the hope of a new at the start of

ing in on us with the freshness and originality of her observations"

unwelcome intrusion kept at a distance by force of will until the end

inexplicably vanished (164). With his frustration and futility

1. Pettersson the narrator's

attempt to redeem the impotence of a father to protect a son. On the

respect, the frustration that the narrator feels as a consequence of his

Gradually it becomes apparent that the male oedipal drama is

onstage, and that it resonates loudly through its multifaceted incar

quences; for rather than move in a socioeconomic sense, these men

exploiting Sophocles for a further pun on the colon. In the context

development. French psychotherapist Christiane Olivier gives a

contemporary interpretation of Freud's theory:

passive-aggressive act of revenge against his wife for the emascula

jealous aggression against one's wife, Olivier states: "[T]he man's

aggressively oedipal male acts. Readers are nonetheless reminded

"ghostly," even as he replaces her with of Ursala Thigpen.

building" (69), even as he explains that Friedrich Wilhelm I has

pressed Orsini into service as part of a of giants" by

analogue in the fictional family triangle, Edgar's story is ever a

wholly unjustified in his antipathy for Orsini. By virtue of his

pressed to a conclusion, on his part, or

Meanwhile, Edgar's own guilt, or the self-directed aspect of his

Edgar leaves him in an ambiguous limbo somewhere between

"impulses to suicide in a neurotic turn out to be self-pun

reality. As he is living on handouts from his brother and unemploy

the Barthelmean Man repeatedly proclaims himself victim rather

appears only at the close of the story. He announces: "I sympathize.

depict similar encounters between external observers and the fic

Kennedy cannot swim. Only after the foreshortened K. has experi

object: "The balloon, I said, is a spontaneous autobiographical dis

deprecating creative acts, then the cumulative weight of these inter

pretations is, if not a single consciousness, at least an archetypal

masculinity. These narrators and protagonists reflect a disconnec

wielding foils. Edgar locates the trope of the swashbuckling hero

. . . Those are four names for the sword" (63).

Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, where many of the narrators

joy in the ruination of the Baron as the narrator presumably takes in

failure/impotence blocks access to action/masculinity. Concor

only in the surface disruptions of the narrative but also in the

specific historical moment when "the contours of the would-be

a new era of sexual offered the possibility of gratification

breaking study Human Sexual Response, which in its emphasis on

Reconstructing Masculinity Donald Barthelme's Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts

Reconstructing Masculinity Donald Barthelme's Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts