I’m fated to deal in mixtures, slumgullions, which preclude tragedy, which require a pure line. It’s a habit of mind, a perversity. Tom Hess used to tell a story, maybe from Lewis Carroll, I don’t remember, about an enraged mob storming the palace shouting “More taxes! Less bread!” As soon as I hear a proposition I immediately consider its opposite. A double-minded man—makes for mixtures.
Authors Donald Barthelme
University of Houston
-
-
I don’t offer enough emotion. That’s one of the things people come to fiction for, and they’re not wrong. I mean emotion of the better class, hard to come by. Also, I can’t resist making jokes, although that’s much more under control than it used to be.
-
I think he’s interesting, but more interesting as an operator within a cultural scene than as a—oh, as a singer to my spirit. A quaint phrase that possibly betrays me.
Donald Barthelme
John Updike
-
There is always a little tug, in all the mess, a melody we recognize. He could catch you unexpectedly.
-
There’s nobody else like him […] and, in a strange way, no two of his stories are like each other.
Louis Menand
Donald Barthelme’s opinions on others
-
There were technical maneuvers in Autumn of the Patriarch—the business of the point of view changing within a given sentence, for instance—that I thought very effective, almost one hundred percent effective. It was his genius to stress the sorrows of the dictator, the angst of the monster.
-
Henderson the Rain King is a fantasia on the theme of Hemingway in Africa.
-
I don’t think I’ve ever had much to say about God except as a locus of complaint, a convention, someone to rail against. The Dead Father suggests that the process of becoming has bound up in it the experience of many other consciousnesses, the most important of which are in a law-giving relation to the self. The characters complain about this in what I hope is an interesting fashion.
Autumn of the Patriarch
Henderson the Rain King
The Dead Father
Paradise