INTERVIEWER
Which reminds me: Some of your detractors say that you’re merely fashionable.
BARTHELME
Well, the mere has always been a useful category.
INTERVIEWER
That you’re a jackdaw, and your principle of selection is whatever glitters most.
BARTHELME
I weep and tear my hair. And disagree.
INTERVIEWER
Let’s look at a specific jackdaw’s nest, the barricade in “The Indian Uprising.”
BARTHELME
I don’t see anything particularly fashionable. The table made from a hollow-core door may be a 1960s reference but aren’t people still making them?
INTERVIEWER
But your barricade is not intended as straightforward realism; these things are artifacts of a certain culture.
BARTHELME
An archeological slice. Not much glitter.
INTERVIEWER
Won’t it require scholarly annotation in the future?
BARTHELME
I’d say no. If you read The Swiss Family Robinson and you’re reading about what they unpack from the pinnace as they shuttle from ship to shore you don’t need any footnotes, even though there may be four hundred pounds of tallow in the cargo. You have a vague recollection that it’s used to make candles.
Actually I think the jackdaw business is a function of appearing in the New Yorker with some frequency. People read the fiction with after images of Rolls Royces and Rolexes still sizzling in their eyes. Rare is the reviewer who can resist mentioning the magazine’s ads when talking about the fiction. One is gilded by association.
INTERVIEWER
Suppose we turn things around. Suppose I say that when I read that story I’m not at all concerned about whether people made tables from hollow-core doors in the 1960s. Rather, I’m interested in the speaker, who in the metaphorical context of the story is besieged by Comanches.
BARTHELME
Is besieged by very much more than Comanches, but also by Comanches. He’s not meant to be a walking-around person so much as a target, a butt. The arrows of the Comanches but also sensory insult, political insult, there are references to the war there, to race, to torture, jingoism . . . But none of the references in the story were picked at random, and none are used simply as decor. If they seem random it’s probably because the range of reference is rather wide for a short piece—you have Patton and Frank Wedekind and the seventh cavalry coexisting on the same plane—but the crowding is part of the design, is the design.
“An archeological slice. Not much glitter.” (Donald Barthelme)
Biblioklept 