Happy birthday, Donald Barthelme! Here are some quotes from his writing:
“The writer is that person who, embarking upon her task, does not know what to do.”
“The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.”
“Strings of language extend in every direction to bind the world into a rushing, ribald whole.”
“The combinatorial agility of words, the exponential generation of meaning once they’re allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven’t yet encountered.”
“One of the beautiful things about words is that you can put words together which in isolation mean nothing, or mean only what the dictionary says they mean, and you put them together and you get extraordinary effects.”
“It’s our good fortune to be able to imagine alternative realities, other possibilities. We can quarrel with the world, constructively. […] The aim of meditating about the world is finally to change the world.”
“I look for a particular kind of sentence, perhaps more often the awkward than the beautiful. A broke-back sentence is interesting. Any sentence that begins with the phrase, ‘It is not clear that…’ is clearly clumsy but preparing itself for greatness of a kind. A way of backing into a story—of getting past the reader’s hard-won armor.”
“Every writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence, or a hundred. What I am interested in is the ugly sentence that is also somehow beautiful. I agree that this is a highly specialized enterprise, akin to the manufacture of merkins, say—but it’s what I do. Probably I have missed the point of the literature business entirely.”
“I tell my students that one of the things readers want, and deserve, is a certain amount of blood on the floor. I don’t always produce it. Probably a function of being more interested in other parts of the process.”
“[T]here is the pressure on language from contemporary culture in the broadest sense—I mean our devouring commercial culture—which results in a double impoverishment: theft of complexity from the reader, theft of the reader from the writer.”
“Style enables us to speak, to imagine again.”
“Art cannot remain in one place. A certain amount of movement, up, down, across, even a gallop toward the past, is a necessary precondition.”
“Problems in part define the kind of work the writer chooses to do, and are not to be avoided but embraced. A writer, says Karl Kraus, is a man who can make a riddle out of an answer.”
“The problems that seem to me to define the writer’s task at this moment (to the extent that he has chosen them as his problems) are not of a kind that make for ease of communication, for work that rushes toward the reader with outflung arms—rather, they’re the reverse. Let me cite three such difficulties that I take to be important, all having to do with language. First, there is art’s own project…of restoring freshness to a much-handled language, essentially an effort toward finding a language in which making art is possible at all. This remains a ground theme, as potent, problematically, today as it was a century ago. Secondly, there is the political and social contamination of language by its use in manipulation of various kinds over time and the effort to find what might be called a ‘clean’ language…Finally, there is the pressure on language from contemporary culture in the broadest sense—I mean our devouring commercial culture —which results in a double impoverishment: theft of complexity from the reader, theft of the reader from the writer.”
“Problems are a comfort. Wittgenstein said, of philosophers, that some of them suffer from ‘loss of problems,’ a development in which everything seems quite simple to them and what they write becomes ‘immeasurably shallow and trivial.’ The same can be said of writers.”
“So, the project is next to impossible, which is what makes it interesting. There’s nothing so beautiful as having a very difficult problem. It gives purpose to life. And to work. I’m still worrying with it.”
“I am never needlessly obscure—I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.”
“Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be, in his work, simple, honest, and straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, and straightforward, nothing much happens: he speaks the speakable, whereas what we are looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken.”
“The difficulty here is not producing mere run-of-the-mill outrageousness, but the nature of the transformational process by which aspects of the world are made over into art. How to prevent the ugly (what we have agreed to call ugly) from becoming, in some sense, beautiful (what we now agree to call beautiful) over time, thus losing the electrical charge which made the artist choose it in the first place? You can’t. But there are strategies of delay. Céline, with the aid of some truly revolting politics, managed to remain a monster almost to the end.”
“One of the pleasures of art is that it enables the mind to move in unanticipated directions, to make connections that may be in some sense errors but are fruitful nonetheless.”
“Art is always aimed (like a rifle, if you wish) at the middle class. The working class has its own culture and will have no truck with fanciness of any kind. The upper class owns the world and thus needs know no more about the world than is necessary for its orderly exploitation. The notion that art cuts across class boundaries to stir the hearts of hoe hand and Morgan alike is, at best, a fiction useful to the artist, his Hail Mary. It is the poor puzzled bourgeoisie that is sufficiently uncertain, sufficiently hopeful, to pay attention to art. It follows (as the night the day) that the bourgeoisie should get it in the neck.”
“‘The aim of literature […] is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.'”
“‘Let me point out, if it has escaped your notice, that what an artist does, is fail.'”
“‘Yes, success is everything. Failure is more common. Most achieve a sort of middling thing, but fortunately one’s situation is always blurred, you never know absolutely quite where you are.'”
“‘How can you be alienated without first having been connected?'”
“‘All of us…still believe that the American flag betokens a kind of general righteousness. But I say…that signs are signs and some of them are lies.'”
“The best way to live is by not knowing what will happen to you at the end of the day, when the sun goes down and the supper is to be cooked.”
“Instant gratification is not as good as that gratification which comes dripping slow, over the sere seasons.”
“All I want is just a trace of skeleton—three bones from which the rest may be reasoned out.”
“When people don’t write letters, language deteriorates.”
“Originality is the last refuge of a hero…”
“I’m fated to deal in mixtures, slumgullions, which preclude tragedy, which require a pure line. It’s a habit of mind, a perversity. […] As soon as I hear a proposition I immediately consider its opposite. A double-minded man—makes for mixtures.”
“It is difficult to keep the public interested. The public demands new wonders piled on new wonders. Often we don’t know where our next marvel is coming from. The supply of strange ideas is not endless.”
