Donald Barthelme: Snow White (1967)

In Snow White, Donald Barthelme subjects the traditional fairy tale to postmodern aesthetics by moving the story to the present, giving the characters modern psychologies, and deliberately frustrating any expectations about the resolution of the plot. In the novel, the seven dwarves are men who earn a living by washing buildings and making Chinese baby food. They live with Snow White in a kind of 1960s communal situation, which includes being sexually serviced by her in the shower. Though they often refer to themselves as a collective “we,” most of the dwarves are alienated from each other because of individual weaknesses and obsessions. For example, their moody leader, Bill, has decided he no longer wants to be touched by anyone, not even Snow White, and has generally failed to lead the group. Loving Snow White is the dwarves’ “great enterprise,” but they quietly harbor fears about their ability to continue carrying out this task. Part of the problem is that Snow White is a modern woman who has been highly educated in psychology, literature, and literary criticism, and therefore accepts the dwarves with a fair amount of critical distance. Snow White’s dissatisfaction is evident early on when she quotes Mao (“Let a hundred flowers bloom”), wears the clothes of a Chinese socialist, and starts writing “tiny Chairman Mao poems.” Having adopted “waiting as a mode of existence,” Snow White reassures herself that “’Someday my prince will come.’ By this Snow White means that she lives her own being as incomplete, pending the arrival of one who will ‘complete’ her. That is, she lives her own being as ‘not-with’ (even though she is in some sense ‘with’ the seven men, Bill, Kevin, Clem, Hubert, Henry, Edward and Dan). But the ‘not-with’ is experienced as stronger, more real, at this particular instant in time, than the ‘being-with.’” Barthelme of course never lets Snow White’s imaginary complement, her masculine other, properly materialize. Snow White eventually reaches the conclusion, “I am in the wrong time,” when she realizes that something must be wrong with the world, “For not being able to at least be civilized enough to supply the correct ending to the story.” Although the dwarves continue to attend to her while she waits, they start to perceive how their different desires no longer form a productive geometry: “She still loves us, in a way, but it isn’t enough.” The book ends when “THE HEROES DEPART IN SEARCH OF A NEW PRINCIPLE HEIGH-HO.” As usual, Barthelme packs the novel full of fragments, digressions, and metafictional conceits, such as a questionnaire that asks readers about their enjoyment of the text and tests their ability to catch the allusions to the original fairy tale. He also scatters witty axioms in capitals throughout the text, the most famous of which is probably, “ANETHEMATIZATION OF THE WORLD IS NOT AN ADEQUATE RESPONSE TO THE WORLD.” Barthelme explains his literary style in an important section that discusses the pointless junk found in ordinary language. He admits, “We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant.” Barthelme explains, “That part, the ‘filling‘ you might say, of which the expression ‘you might say’ is a good example, is to me the most interesting part, and of course it might also be called the ‘stuffing.’” Just as the modern economy produces trash in increasing quantities, modern culture produces linguistic trash - meaningless details, empty phrases, and so on - in growing amounts. Barthelme argues that a change of strategy is required when trash becomes total: “Now at such a point, you will agree, the question turns from a question of disposing of this ‘trash’ to a question of appreciating its qualities. . . . And there can no longer be any question of ‘disposing’ of it, because it’s all there is, and we will simple have to learn how to ‘dig’ it – that’s slang, but peculiarly appropriate here.” He goes on, “It’s that we want to be on the leading edge of this trash phenomenon, the everted sphere of the future, and that’s why we pay particular attention, too, to those aspects of language that may be seen as a model of the trash phenomenon.”