Perhaps the most astonishing thing that as a reader I’d ever seen—I first came across it in the collection Forty Stories. I’ve learned since that, as well as being the son of a reputable architect, Barthelme was an accomplished jazz drummer. Both show in his work. If Beckett had pared short fiction to its bare bones, Barthelme disassembled the skeleton, reassembling it into any number of anatomical collages and using the leftover bones to play a difficult—but delightful—jazz.
A series of antique engravings—illustrations, diagrams, architectural draughts—prompt the language of the piece, an account of the putting on of a theatrical spectacle which, of course, is the story itself.
I suppose the strategy had a sort of antecedent in Max Ernst and works such as Une Semaine de Bonté, but I didn’t know about Ernst’s collages then so it seemed entirely new to me. And because it seemed entirely new it was entirely new. Completely unprecedented. I’m glad I didn’t know about Une Semaine de Bonté—these little nuggets of ignorance, which I still treasure, can afford a reader a sort of revelation they would not otherwise have known. A personal literature is mapped out in them. And who wants an impersonal literature?
First published in The New Yorker, then collected in Sadness, 1972, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Now available in Forty Stories, Penguin Modern Classics
A Personal Anthology 