American
Studies Colloquium, Olomouc, September 2 - 7, 2001
”What
is and What is Not (Post)Modernism:
(Mis)Understanding Donald Barthelme's Novel Paradise.”
Jaroslav Kušnír
Univerzita Prešov
Most scholars consider Donald Barthelme to be an exclusively postmodernist
author, and his short stories and novels such as Snow White, The Dead
Father or posthumously published The King are considered to be the "classic"
postmodernist texts. There is one exception, however. This is his novel
Paradise published in 1986. Analyzing Donald Barthelme's novels brings
me to the conlusion that this novel is a modernist exception in Barthelme's
work. Through a comparative analysis of this and the other novel by
Barthelme, Snow White, which I find a "classic" example of
postmodernist fiction, I would like to point out the modernist character
of his novel Paradise, as well as differences between modernism and
postmodernism, however ambiguous the latter term may appear.
It can be said that Barthelme's narrative strategies in his novel Snow
White, the use of metafiction, of fragmentary and often unfinished multiple
narrative voices which establish and then undermine their 'serious'
status (their function of a signifier) and meaning too through the use
of irony and parody, as well as his inclusion of various discourses
representing different jargons of private and public, scientific and
popular, artistic and commercial culture, all these are the strategies
of the "ontological dominant" through which the author interrogates
the principles of construction of real and fictional worlds and reveals
the ability of language to construct an autonomous world, as well as
the relation between the real and the fictional, present and past worlds.
Drawing on McHale's theory of epistemological (modernist) and ontological
(postmodernist) dominants, I argue that since Barthelme's focus in Snow
White, in contrast to his novel Paradise, is not on the epistemological
but on the ontological questions, his novel Paradise is a modernist
novel. On the other hand, Barthelme's use of narrative techniques in
Snow White confirm the ontological dominant of this novel, that is its
postmodern character par excellence. Thus the difference between the
novels Paradise and Snow White shows also the difference between literary
Modernism and Postmodernism.
