Donald Barthelme: The Dead Father (1975)

Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father is a picaresque satire of paternity, a postmodern allegory of a faltering patriarchal law. A group of young people, with the help of hired labor, drags across the countryside the Dead Father, an enormous being with a mechanical leg who is “Dead, but still with us, still with us, but dead.” The Dead Father believes he is on a voyage to recover his lost youth, but his younger companions may simply be humoring him on his way to the grave. The pilgrimage seemingly takes place during medieval times, but anachronistic details often appear, including references to car washes, Stockhausen, and Lenin. Although dead, the Dead Father could be, as one character suggests, “a little more dead,” and he regularly stands up and interacts with his travel partners. Vaguely his offspring, these characters are ambivalent about the Dead Father, wavering between fondness and hatred. When they upset the Dead Father, he tends to run off and go “slaying,” leaving behind a trail of human and animal corpses. Essentially a short story writer, Barthelme constructs the narrative through short episodes while indulging in various forms of linguistic experimentation. In addition to making up words, Barthelme plays with syntax, cropping sentences short or deliberately leaving prepositions dangling. For example, he writes, “Thomas walks to the edge. Regards the edge. Aspect of one about to hurtle over the. Thomas retreats from the edge.” He also presents long, absurd, collage-like conversations composed of clichés and cultural detritus. This linguistic play seems aimed at subverting the institutions of the patriarchal law the Dead Father smugly claims to set down, such as when he says, “A son can never, in the fullest sense, become a father. Some amount of amateur effort is possible. A son may after honest endeavor produce what some people might call, technically, children. But he remains a son. In the fullest sense.” In one episode, the Dead Father and his companions face troubles passing through the land of the Wends, who father themselves by impregnating their own mothers. The Dead Father of course criticizes the Wends, claiming, “Those that are the fathers of themselves miss something, said the Dead Father. Fathers, to be precise.” The episodic structure does start to feel wearying as the novel becomes stuck in the formula, stated by one character: “Attending, departing, arriving, ignoring.” But two-thirds of the way into the novel, Barthelme presents a book within the book in the form of a guidebook titled “A Manual For Sons” that is given to the group of travelers. This text, supposedly ”translated from English . . . into English,” is one of the most inventive and amusing accomplishments of Barthelme’s career, and one can see strong traces of its influence on more recent writers such as Ben Marcus. The manual claims that there are twenty-two kinds of fathers, including the “mad father,” “the leaping father,” “the tunneling father,” the “text-father” (usually bound between blue covers), and the murderous “king-father.” In addition to sample transcriptions of some their voices, “A Manual For Sons” offers descriptions of the more important kinds of fathers and instructions for dealing with them. It also offers general advice and reflections on fathers, satirical bits of wisdom, such as, “Fathers are teachers of the true and not-true, and no father ever knowingly teaches what is not true. In a cloud of unknowing, then, the father proceeds with his instruction.” That is, “Fathers teach much that is of value. Much that is not.” Or in a section on rescuing fathers: “When you have rescued a father from whatever terrible threat menaces him, then you feel, for a moment, that you are the father and he is not. For a moment. This is the only moment in your life you will feel this way.” Despite being wary of fathers, the manual treats them as a structural problem that cannot be directly overcome. “Fathers are like blocks of marble, giant cubes, highly polished, with veins and seams, placed squarely in your path. They block your path. They cannot be climbed over, neither can they be slithered past. . . . If you attempt to go around one, you will find that another (winking at the first) has mysteriously appeared athwart the trail. Or maybe it is the same one, moving with the speed of paternity.” Perhaps a manifesto for Barthelme’s own postmodern, parodic disruption of literary traditions from within, the manual argues, “Patricide is a bad idea, first because it is contrary to law and custom and second because it proves, beyond a doubt, that the father’s every fluted accusation against you was correct: you are a thoroughly bad individual, a patricide!” “It is not necessary to slay your father, time will slay him, that is a virtual certainty. . . . Your true task, as a son, is to reproduce every one of the enormities touched upon in this manual, but in attenuated form. You must become your father, but a paler, weaker version of him. The enormities go with the job, but close study will allow you to perform the job less well than it has previously been done, thus moving toward a golden age of decency, quiet, and calmed fevers.”