Likewise, there is a little gas station at the beginning of paragraph seven, when suddenly, from Dead Puppy, we leap to Dead Korean Orphan. This gas station has to do with the boldness of the escalation: Barthelme’s refusal to flinch at the logic of his own pattern. Some part of art, certainly of Barthelme’s art, involves the simple pleasure of watching someone be audacious. Another little audacity-related gas station—actually a series of gas stations, seeded throughout the story—is the pleasure we get from the narrator’s stuttering, fragmented syntax, a pleasure which comes in part from our awareness that this syntax is not exactly necessary; it is, yes, character-indicating, but mostly it’s funny, and also impressive: we take pleasure in how well it’s done. Another hidden pleasure of the story is the way that the pattern is not—if I could say it this way—load-bearing. A lesser writer, who believes writing is about knowing, control, and mastery, told to create a pattern in which things die, might (mis)understand his job to be: designing and executing an extremely meaningful pattern. He would spend a lot of time trying to decide, in advance, the answers to questions like, “In what order should I have the things die?” and “What will I have cause the deaths?” and “How is the main character to be implicated in, and changed by, these events?”
Mr. Lesser Writer, in other words, realizing with joy that he has a pattern to work with, sits down to do some Thinking. Barthelme proceeds in a more spontaneous, vaudevillian manner. He knows that the pattern is just an excuse for the real work of the story, which is to give the reader a series of pleasure-bursts. The story, then, can be seen as a series of repetitions of one event: the reader leaves a little gas station at high speed, looking forward to the next one.
ENDING IS STOPPING WITHOUT SUCKING
So: if the writer can put together enough gas stations, of sufficient power, distributed at just the right places around the track, he wins: the reader works his way through the full execution of the pattern, and is ready to receive the ending of the story.
Because all along, a question has been rising: OK, we’ve been feeling, this is funny, this is enjoyable, but how and when is it going to start being literature? How’s he going to take this Marx Brothers–quality romp and convert it at the last minute into a Post-Modernist Masterpiece?
How, in other words, is this story going to mean?
The land of the short story is a brutal land, a land very similar, in its strictness, to the land of the joke. When I tell a joke, everyone hearing knows that the joke is going to culminate in a punch line, and the intention of the punch line is to make them laugh. If it doesn’t, the joke is dumb, and I’m a dork. Likewise, when a person presumes to tell a literary short story, everyone reading knows that it is going to culminate in an ending, and that the intention of the ending is to…
Well, hold on—what is the intention of the ending?
Or—the million-dollar question for any of us who has ever tried to complete a short story: When constitutes a sufficient ending? In other words, what does Barthelme have to do here, as he goes forth from the end of paragraph nine (which I consider the end of the Rising Action), so that we will continue to love him?
His first responsibility is to not do something that will make us groan. What will make us groan? Something that too neatly “answers to” his Pattern.
Say he ended it:
Then I came in one day, and all the kids were dead.
And all of a sudden I wasn’t feeling so good myself!
That was one bad semester!
THE END!
This is not a story ending, but the ending of a lousy after-dinner speech; it knows its own pattern too well, and has stuck with it mindlessly, to the bitter end. It has done (merely) what it set out to do—and we require more of our endings than this.
Einstein once said something along the lines of: “No worthy problem is ever solved within the plane of its original conception.” Touching on the same idea, a famous poet once said: “If you set out to write a poem about two dogs fucking, and you write a poem about two dogs fucking, then you’ve written a poem about two dogs fucking.”
What we want our ending to do is to do more than we could have dreamed it would do.
Sheesh.
No wonder there’s such a thing as writer’s block.
But Barthelme understands that what he has to do in this last page is keep doing what has worked so far in the story: he has to escalate. The story has, so far, been captivating us via its nervy continual progress along the axis labeled: Deaths, Increasing. By paragraph nine (parents have died, fellow students have died) Barthelme’s gone about as far along that axis as he can, and now understands that, to continue escalating, he has to leap to another axis. He seems to intuit that the next order of escalation has to be escalating escalation.
“One day,” he tells us, “we had a discussion in class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. And they said, who knows? and I said, nobody knows.”
So there’s a possible ending, right? He’s turned to look back at his pattern, he’s addressed it—he’s wryly yet earnestly commented on it, saying a true thing: nobody knows why death happens. It’s not bad. But it’s not great. One can almost feel Barthelme squirming under the not-greatness of it, then pushing discontentedly onward, feeling around with his most substantial tool: the devastating adroitness of his language. Our narrator continues: “And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life?” (We notice this weird, illogical elevation of diction—three lines ago these kids were still saying “poppas and mommas.”) “And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life.” (We like that the narrator doesn’t balk at his students’ sudden new articulateness—he doesn’t even acknowledge it—maybe, it occurs to us, they talk like this all the time?) “Then they said, but isn’t death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted—”
Whoa, we think, slow down, they’re now talking in an even more elevated—
“…mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of—”
What’s happening here, I think, is that Barthelme’s mind has gotten tired of being polite. Without worrying about whether it’s allowed, or will be understood, or is logical within the world of the story (or whether the workshop will tolerate it), he races off in the direction his logic is taking him, appropriate diction be damned, trying to get the story to answer the questions the thing’s been asking all along: What are we to make of death? How are we to live in a world where death is king?
We follow because we find his courage thrilling.
Does he then use this new allowance we’ve granted him—this expanded diction—to glibly wrap the story up on some cool philosophical basis? (“Then little Sally Adams posited that, what manifested to them as mundanity could also be understood as simply as an example of Brugenheiser’s ‘vantage conundrum,’ at which time the bell rang, and they bolted from their desks, well-satisfied with Sally’s explanation, and our day was done, as all our days, eventually, will be done, for all of us, for good.”)
No, thank God, he does not.
He escalates again. The students (still in professorial diction) request that he make love with Helen. Where does this come from? Until just now, there was no Helen. Sorry, Don’s in a hurry, and can’t/won’t explain it to us, except to let us know, parenthetically, that Helen is “our teaching assistant.” “Come on, come on!” he seems to be saying. “It surprised me too! Just keep up!”
Will they do it? Will the narrator and Helen make love? The reader honestly doesn’t know, but does care. The narrator demurs: “I said I would be fired and that it was never, or almost never, done as a demonstration.” (The “or almost never” is a fine little gas station.)
And then the reader (this reader, anyway) falls, once and for all, forever, in love with this story, at the line: “Helen looked out of the window.”
Why? Well, for one thing, Helen wants to do it, and will do it, in front of the class, gladly, if only The Narrator will ask. She has loved him all along. A few lines ago we didn’t even know Helen existed, but we do now, and so does The Narrator, and the small voice in our mind that has all along been registering that The Narrator has no personal life in this story, that there are no real human emotions in the story, that this alleged story is just a pattern, is assuaged: this is now, writ small, a love story. It’s a love story! We see Helen plainly, her sensible shoes, the red-ink stains on her young hands, which she wrings every evening in her tiny, under-furnished, teacher’s assistant apartment, dreaming of a life with The Narrrator. But Helen is shy! She doesn’t want to demand anything! She’s not a pushy girl, our Helen—
But also—there is no Helen. Or, there’s barely a Helen. Helen has only existed for four short paragraphs, and already she represents quiet, faithful, unrequited love. Our pleasure in Helen is, partly, also pleasure in Barthelme’s incredible economy.
Little four-paragraph Helen sits, drumming her ink-stained fingers, gazing out the window, waiting, hoping…
The children press their case, and we see that making love with Helen would be a real win/win/win; not only would Helen like it, The Narrator seems kind of lonely, and it would also be good, you know, for the kids (“We require an assertion of value,” they plead, “we are frightened.”).
Weirdly, we are really curious, or at least I always am, to see if some lovemaking will in fact break out on this desk somewhere in the desolate, death-besieged Midwest, or what.
We have one long paragraph left.
And look what’s happened: suddenly, Barthelme can end this thing any way he pleases. The essential work has been done. If the narrator begins making love to Helen, that’s good. If he declines, also good. The air is charged with meaning. It is everywhere we look. It seems he’s going to pass—he kisses Helen on the brow—but we sense that he and Helen may very soon be demonstrating some lovemaking, if only to one another, possibly in Helen’s sparse apartment. Everything has changed between them. Suddenly there is death in the room, but also life, and love.
The reader is satisfied: so much has happened, in so short a time and in such an unexpected way. It could end with a simple line: “I looked at Helen, and she looked at me.”
But Barthelme, being great, abides long enough to produce from his sleeve one last escalation which, Barthelme being Barthelme, arrives in the person (?) of a gerbil.
Where does the gerbil come from? How did it find the classroom? And why is it a gerbil and not (if we are seeking circularity) an orange tree, or at least a snake? How did it knock on the door? Doesn’t it know this is exactly the wrong class, that soon it will die? Or—who can say?—maybe Helen’s just-revealed love for The Narrator’s love has changed everything, and the gerbil will live, and prosper, and get fat enough to overflow its cage!
It is ambiguous, and it is funny, and somehow perfect: this little expectant rodent, politely waiting for its knock to be answered, all set to die, or to live.
We, like the children, “cheer wildly.”
THE UNITED STATES OF HUCK
INTRODUCTION TOADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN
INTRODUCTION TO THE INTRODUCTION
Let me begin by confessing that I have had more trouble with this piece than I’ve ever had writing anything in my life, mainly because I love this book and was deathly afraid I would fail to do it justice, which caused me to rush off to the library and do hours and hours of research, which only terrified me further and reduced me to writing quaking tautological sentences like “Much has been written about the fact that much has been written about the fact that, whereas the shores of the Mississippi, mythologically speaking, represent America’s violence, the center of the river, which traditionally has been represented as Utopian, is also occasionally seen to contain bloated floating corpses.” Recognizing that my sentences were perhaps not as clear as they could be, I began furiously editing, bearing in mind at every instant that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is probably the greatest and certainly the most influential American novel of all time, and has inspired feelings of fierce love and loyalty in every important American writer, except in those other important American writers who have really, really disliked it and found it morally problematic, and soon I had worked myself into such a state of bowing obeisance and timidity that my sentences became a bland series of tenuous apologetic nouns, no verbs at all, as these, I felt, were too risky.
But luckily that phase is past, and I can now, using quite a number of verbs, espouse a Tentative Narrative Theory regarding Huck Finn.
A TENTATIVE NARRATIVE THEORY REGARDINGHUCK FINN
Have you ever been in an airport and seen those escalators whose purpose it is not to actually escalate, but to move people horizontally, which is why they are called people movers? Imagine the novelist as a person standing at one end of a people mover, with a shovel, in front of a big pile of dirt. The pile of dirt represents The Thing This Writer Loves To Do, And Does Naturally. The writer started writing so that he or she could endlessly and effortlessly do this thing and nothing else—be funny, say, or verbally brilliant, or write lush nature vignettes, or detailed descriptions of the interiors of rich people’s houses—and then be declared Wonderful, and buy a nicer car. But all writers soon find that their Dirt is not enough. Yes, their readership stands at the far end of the people mover, eagerly awaiting this Dirt, but if the writer simply dumps shovelful after shovelful of Dirt onto the people mover, the people mover grinds to a halt, and the readership walks away to see a movie. Three hundred pages of descriptions of rich people’s houses will not cut it: the writer must connect the dots of Dirt with something else, something narrative, something that imitates forward motion. The people mover must be fed Dirt a little at a time, so that it will keep moving, and in this way, and this way only, the readership will in time receive all the Dirt the writer wishes to administer.
Now, to extend this already rickety metaphor, let us say that what keeps the people mover moving is what we will call the Apparent Narrative Rationale. The Apparent Narrative Rationale is what the writer and the reader have tacitly agreed the book is “about.” In most cases, the Apparent Narrative Rationale is centered around simple curiosity: the reader understands that he is waiting to learn if Scrooge will repent, if Romeo will marry Juliet, if the crops will be saved, the widow rescued. While the reader waits for that answer, the writer gets a chance to create the Three Christmas Ghosts and compose the Balcony Speech, and in the end, the reader finds that this—the Dirt—is what he or she has wanted all along.
The Apparent Narrative Rationale, then, can be seen as the writer’s answer to his own question: “What exactly is it that I am doing here?”
I now skillfully segue back to Mark Twain, aka Samuel Clemens.
Twain is the funniest literary American writer, and his funniness is so energetic and true and pure that it must have been a great pleasure to be him, sitting there dressed all in white, smoking cigar after cigar in your hexagonal study, with the pure funniness pouring out of the top of your head, helping you combat your native grouchiness. Like many lower-class writers (Chekhov, Dickens, Gogol come to mind), he started his career being purely funny, in comic sketches that were mostly Dirt and very little people mover, and all his writing life struggled with the question of what his Apparent Narrative Rationale should be, which is why he left behind such a long trail of abandoned manuscripts. He was not an outliner, not a planner, did not establish an agenda and carry it through, but wrote as the spirit moved him, in as improvisatory a manner as any writer ever did. “Mr. Clemens,” wrote William Dean Howells, his friend and editor, “is the first writer to use in extended writing the fashion we all use in thinking, and to set down the thing that comes into his mind without fear or favor of the thing that went before or the thing that may be about to follow…. [H]e would take whatever offered itself to his hand out of that mystical chaos, that divine ragb
ag, which we call the mind, and leave the reader to look after relevancies and sequences for himself.”
Huck Finn was written in three or four distinct bursts of creativity, between which Twain put the manuscript away and wrote plays no one has ever heard of and invented machines no one has ever used. Each time he stopped, he apparently did so for the simplest of reasons: he didn’t know how to keep going. He lost faith in his Apparent Narrative Rationale, or interest in it, or found that it had led him to some seemingly insoluble narrative problem, and so put the book aside and invented an Invisible Ink Typewriter or a Systematic Noodle Identifier. Each time he came back to the book, he did so with renewed enthusiasm and a new plan on how to proceed: a new Apparent Narrative Rationale. This sequence of Apparent Narrative Rationales may be roughly described as follows: (1) I Will Rewrite Tom Sawyer, but from Huck’s Point of View; (2) I Will Take Huck and Jim Up the River, Ostensibly to Freedom; (3) I Will Write a Treatise on the Mores and Manners of the American Southwest; (4) I Will Build This Whole Deal Up into One of the Most Beautiful Moments of Impending Action Ever, in Which We See That Huck Must Risk His Life to Single-handedly Save Jim; and (5) I Will Let Tom Sawyer Come Inexplicably Back into My Story and Ruin My Ending.
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