Dance of Death

The literary movement known as Black Humor or Dark Comedy, which achieved a certain inflated prominence in the early sixties, has lately shown signs of reaching some condition of impasse or exhaustion. The high claims of its initial publicity have not been fulfilled, and although it has attracted talents as diversely original as John Barth, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Bruce Jay Friedman, and Donald Barthelme, these writers continue to seem notable more for their potential than for their clearly major distinction. The movement has also been compromised by the accumulation around it of a small army of camp followers, clowns, and pitchmen, who have apparently seen in it a chance to cash in on their mediocrity through emulation of their betters, and who have busied themselves perverting the styles of Black Humor into affectations, and affectations into platitudes.

From the beginning the movement has had considerably more than its share of critical attention because it appeared to be a development toward imaginative revitalization of a form that had long been moribund, the form of novelistic satire and selfparody, and because it seemed to promise some renewal of relationship between fiction and the actualities of the social world, a relationship which had grown so tenuous in the forties and fifties that vast sectors of the reading public eagerly mistook the erotic voyeurisms of John O’Hara for penetrating insights into the sociology of American life.

But it has gradually become evident that the promises which critics discovered in Black Humor were projections more of their own hopes than of creative possibilities actually present in the movement itself. For

Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts

by Donald Barthelme

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $4.95)

just as Black Humor has all along been characterized by a kind of fashionableness achieved without passing through any of the arduous stages of slow arrival and gradual acceptance, so it has quickly ossified into one more cliché of anti-cliché, one more casualty of the instantly assimilative and accommodative processes of our culture. As has happened with so much post-avant-garde art, there seems to have been only the briefest interval between the time when Black Humor was recognized as an important innovative gesture and the time when it was absorbed into style and decor and became nearly indistinguishable from the advertising gimmicks and promotional techniques which have so often been the rightful objects of its horror. The pose or stance of the Black Humorist soon became as familiar and predictable and as falsely provocative as the set of a Vogue mannequin’s thighs. Suddenly, it seemed capable of registering only the histrionics of a ritual angst, a merely ornamental, because creatively unearned, absurdity, a sleek couturier note of apocalypse.

Yet it was in the nature of Black Humor to be peculiarly susceptible to this kind of debasement. Even at its best it always verged perilously on the sick joke, the nightclub wisecrack, the pop art slapstick of the comic-strip cartoon. Its characteristic humor was often more black-face than black, and the ubiquitous Catch-22 of its satire seemed too flip and feeble, and above all too goodnatured, a mockery of the insidious workings of bureaucratic conspiracy. In fact, the most crippling weakness of Black Humor was that it cut itself off from the viial source of effective satire — the close observation of the social and political world—just because it was too easily horrified by the grotesqueness and complexity of that world, and so found it less painful to retreat into cuteness than to endure and create the true dark comedy of contemporary anguish. In its programmatic preoccupation with the sickness, the absurdity, the incomprehensibility of events, it abdicated its responsibility to deal coherently with events. The result was that, except in a very few cases, such as Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor and Friedman’s Stern, the prime requirement of successful satire was never fuddled by Black Humor writers: the living reality of the object or condition being satirized was too obliquely suggested in their work or was altogether missing from it.

It has often been argued in defense of Black Humor that fiction in our time has lost the possibility of making this social connection because the events of the social world have become themselves fictitious. Life not only imitates fiction but assimilates to itself the fiction-making functions, so that the happenings reported on any day in the newspapers will in effect out-imagine the creative mind and thus cheat it of its revelatory and prophetic powers. But this would seem to suggest that fiction is best produced in dull ages, and the history of literature indicates that just the opposite is true. Rather, it seems to be the case that contemporary experience has so anesthetized us to the impact of grotesque and appalling occurrences that we no longer believe they can have any connection with, or any power to influence, the course of individual destiny or the drama of our hermetically personal consciousness. We have suffered a paralysis or eclipse of imagination before the nightmare of history in this age. Hence, we cannot imagine a fictional rationale in which events might be interpreted meaningfully in relation to the self. Our only recourse seems to be to fantasize the feelings of dislocation which obsess the self, or project images which convey, however incoherently, our sense of moral and emotional trivialization in the face of events.

Of the Black Humor writers whose work represents some expression of, or adjustment to, this dilemma, Donald Barthelme is in many ways the most interesting because he has the talent and intelligence occasionally to overcome its worst effects. A few stories in both his first volume, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, and this new book brilliantly demonstrate the power of sheer creative imagination to make the vital connection between satire and the social world. Barthelme’s recurrent theme is precisely the trivialization of contemporary life and consciousness, and in these few stories he is able to dramatize his sense of that trivialization within the context of living fact and event which created it. But there is a vast distance between the stories which succeed in this way and the many others which are victimized by the fallacy of imitative form, in which dislocation is expressed through dislocation, and trivialization through trivia, to the amusement and edification of nobody. These stories strike one as exercises in free association and automatic writing or as descriptions of bad dreams jotted down in the middle of the night for the benefit of one’s analyst, and some of them sound as though they had been begun in the hope that of their own accord, through the sheer act of being written, they would eventually discover their subject and meaning.

Reading them is like finding oneself adrift in a sea of orbiting psychic garbage. Punctured beer cans, potato peelings, gnawed apple cores, squashed toothpaste tubes, stringy hanks of some dubious-looking viscous material float around and seemingly through one, always in the same fixed relation to oneself and everything else, and always somehow impenetrable because one is so completely penetrated by them. The stories are quite literally verbal immersions in dreck, the evacuated crud and muck of contemporary life, and they very effectively dramatize the sensations of being suffocated and shat upon and generally soiled and despoiled in soul and mind which accompany our daily experience of contemporary life. But they do not dramatize the cultural, political, or historical circumstances which give rise to these sensations, nor do they end in a satirical or even a specific thematic formulation. Everything is offered in dead pan and with the mechanical iterativeness of items recited from a grocery list. Everything is offered, but somehow finally nothing is given.

The effect is actually very much like that of some of the New Wave films which introduce the viewer to an experience through a process of such total saturation in trivial details that it is often impossible to tell which detail or episode is supposed to be more important than some other, hence impossible to detect the thematic principle which finally binds the details together into meaning. One always suspects the artist of suggesting that he does not really know what he intends the depicted experience to mean, and so will leave it to us to decide for ourselves. In such a case, we arc obliged, as Virginia Woolf once said, to do the artist’s imagining for him, and while that may be a kindness to him, it is no help whatever to the cause of art.

Barthelme appears to be indictable on the same charge. Over and over in his stories he seems to be inviting us to take over the job of bringing into focus some idea which has eluded his powers of imaginative resolution. For example, in this new volume the story called “Edward and Pia” apparently has to do with an American expatriate and his Scandinavian mistress and the emptiness of their existence in Europe. The characters move apathetically through a horizontal succession of experiences, none of which is distinguished from any other in the slightest way, presumably because they are all equally without meaning and value. We learn that Edward and Pia went to Sweden, that Pia was pregnant, that in London they had seen Marat/Sade at the Aldwych Theater, that Edward and Pia walked the streets of Amsterdam and were hungry, that they went to the cinema to see an Eddie Constantine picture, that on Sunday Edward went to the bakery and bought bread, that Edward and Pia went to Berlin on the train, that Edward received a letter from London, that Edward looked in the window of the used-radio store and it was full of used radios, that Edward put his hands on Pia’s breasts, that the nipples were the largest he had ever seen. Then he counted his money.

He had two hundred and forty crowns. And so on and on and on.

All this is undoubtedly redolent of the trivialization of life in our time, and it may well be an attempt to say something about the form of spiritual death that accompanies the atrophy of all sane responses to life and all hopes of finding causal relationships within experience. But it comes through most clearly as an example of imagination succumbing to the trivia which is its material.

There may even be some justice in the thought that such benumbed recitations of detail are intended to be viewed as if they were being enacted under the outraged eye of the cosmos, and we are meant to hear rumbling behind it all the distant thunder of the archangelic armies advancing to bring down upon us the terrible wrath of God. But as Auden saw, even during such a cosmic occurrence as the crucifixion, dogs go placidly on with their doggy life, and “the expensive delicate ship that must have seen something amazing,” the fall of Brueghel’s Icarus into the sea, “had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

It would appear that the cosmic and the apocalyptic, whether in art or in life, cannot be dramatized directly, cannot meaningfully stand alone. They can finally be understood only in terms of their simple and probably ironical relationship to the doggy life and the very real people sailing away on that ship. It is the task of fiction continually to reaffirm this relationship. Or, in an age such as ours, fiction may be obliged to reinvent it. For between the crucifixion and the doggy life, between our grandiose visions of doom and the specific creature experiences which embody them, there now lies a chasm which only the best talent and intelligence can hope to bridge. It takes little of either simply to say that the chasm is there and then to laugh at its existence. We know it is there, and the knowledge has long ago ceased to amuse.