Robert Coover: Pricksongs & Descants (1969)

In Pricksongs & Descants, Robert Coover shows off his mastery of postmodern fabulation. Coover’s primary component of construction is the paragraph, which he tends to treat as unit and isolate through extra spacing, numbers, or other typographic insertions. William Gass compares Coover’s paragraphs to playing cards, which can be dealt and redealt. Gass writes, “Sharply drawn and brightly painted paragraphs are arranged like pasteboards in ascending or descending scales of alternating colors to compose the story, and the impression that we might scoop them all up and reshuffle, altering not the elements but the order or the rules of the play, is deliberate.” Rather than weave a single narrative across these paragraphs, Coover often presents variations of one story, or recombinations of different story elements, so that one foundational scenario may end up with multiple, incompatible endings. Gass again is a useful commentator: “Just like the figures in old fairy tales and fables, we are constantly coming to forks in the road (always fateful), except here we take all of them, and our simultaneous journeys are simultaneous stories, yet in different genres, sometimes different styles, as if fantasy, romance and reality, nightmare and daydream, were fingers on the same hand.” For example, “The Elevator” describes a character’s daily elevator trip up to his office on the fourteenth floor of an office building. The seriality of the work week, the dull repetition of daily routines, as well as the seriality of the floors in the skyscraper, leads to a serial story in which the paragraphs don’t really advance but rather repeat the same journey with variations that range from the banal to the embarrassing to the fatal. This blatant disregard for the law of noncontradiction is even more dramatically displayed in “The Babysitter,” perhaps the most successful story in the collection. In the story, a babysitter’s night of work develops toward a series of parallel and incompatible climaxes (which include a threesome with her boyfriend and his best friend, sex with the child’s father, the accidental death of the infant, and, of course, a calm and unexceptional evening). The story works so well because it does not refuse the dramatic power of any possible plot development or conclusion; in Coover’s world, the author and his characters truly can have their cake and eat it too. Like the work of his metafictional contemporaries such as Barth and Barthelme, a number of Coover’s stories retell fairy tales, legends, or myths from a twisted perspective. “The Brother” narrates the story of Noah’s Ark from the viewpoint of Noah’s brother, who, skeptically criticizing his apparently insane sibling, ends up drowned by the flood. “The Gingerbread House” retells the story of Hansel and Gretel, but shifts the story’s subtext, the lurking menace and sexuality, into the foreground. Coover also shows a fondness for narrating stories from the perspective of power, law, or the State. In “The Wayfarer,” a lawman coolly describes his encounter with a mute wayfarer who seems unable or unwilling to acknowledge and respond to the lawman’s questions; in what he views as a righteous act, the lawman viciously murders the wayfarer for this failure to respond to commands. “Morris in Chains” also takes the viewpoint of oppressive power that remains outright antagonistic to anything that resists its totalizing systems of control. The story describes the capture of Morris, a nomadic goat herder, and is narrated by one of Morris’s captors, a member of the team of technicians that tracks Morris down by gathering data and using computers. The head of this team, Dr. Peloris, proudly asserts the power of systems analysis to deal with apparent chaos, claiming: “Even nonpattern eventually betrays a secret system.” When laying the preparations for the final trap, Peloris describes the predictive power of the team’s systems: “[I]t is now certain that Morris will camp here in this valley, beside this canal and that grove, within five days. The order of his disorder, as exposed by [our] charts and the processed data, forces him to do so no matter what operations his mind might undertake in order to arrive at what he would tend to think of as a decision. Unless, of course, it included the foreknowledge that we await him here. And who knows? perhaps even this knowledge would not suffice to break the power of pattern over mere mind-activity.” The group of tales collected in the section titled “Seven Exemplary Fictions” is preceded by a critical commentary that explains Coover’s aesthetic aims. Coover begins by praising the work of Cervantes as “exemplars of a revolution in narrative fiction,” and he presents his own stories as related “challenges to the assumptions of a dying age, exemplary adventures of the Poetic Imagination.” He writes, “The novelist uses familiar mythic or historical forms to combat the content of those forms and to conduct the reader . . . to the real, away from mystification to revelation. And it is above all the need for new modes of perception and fictional forms able to encompass them that I . . . address the stories.” The collection’s final piece, “The Hat Act,” functions as an allegory of Coover’s literary practice. In front of a demanding and punishing audience, a magician performs a show that involves the transmutation of objects and bodies. His technical virtuosity initially receives the audience’s applause, but as he proceeds the results become disturbing, grotesque, and absurd. Like Coover’s fiction, the performance is a spectacle that is hard to look away from, though the bloodless formality of the proceedings (despite the story's bloody ending) leaves a tinge of disappointment to the experience. Fittingly, the story prematurely ends with: “THIS ACT IS CONCLUDED THE MANAGEMENT REGRETS THERE WILL BE NO REFUND”

Ronald Sukenick: The Death of the Novel (1969)

In the short stories collected in The Death of the Novel, Ronald Sukenick situates his particular brand of metafiction within the political conflicts of the late 1960s. Many of these stories feature a narrator named Sukenick, an author-character whose life as a part-time academic, leftist sympathizer, and (unfortunately) sexist womanizer resembles the real Sukenick’s life. Metafictional navel-gazing is therefore an inevitable aspect of the collection, but Sukenick’s preoccupation with improvisation undoes any sense of a fixed autobiographical self. Sukenick writes, “We improvise our novels as we improvise our lives.” Through the sheer speed of composition, Sukenick aims to escape the confines of traditional literary form and of subjectivity. His most important predecessor would be Jack Kerouac, who famously taped sheets of paper together to create a roll that could continuously flow through his typewriter as he composed On the Road. Like Kerouac’s novel, Sukenick’s stories have an undeniable forward momentum, as well as an often glaring dearth of craft and refinement. In two of the stories, Sukenick takes advantage of tape recording to capture “live” composition. “Roast Beef: A Slice of Life” is merely a transcription of a recording of a chaotic, banal conversation Sukenick has with his wife during dinner time. The story “Momentum” also is presented as a transcription of a recording, and starts as if hitting the record button on the machine: “okay here we go.” Near the beginning, Sukenick states his goal for the literary experiment: “i want to say this as it comes without premeditation because i want to say it before i lose it or not so much say it as tell it tell it to myself so i’ll have it down so that i can come back to it again and recapture it so the speed of the tape is my form.” The story attempts to capture the “chaos of [Sukenick’s] mind,” the sequence of present moments that are always slipping away, and the end product is a barrage of fragments from Sukenick’s life. The story “The Death of the Novel” offers a more thorough explanation of Sukenick’s goals. In typical metafictional fashion, the piece begins with a discourse on the “contemporary post-realistic novel.” Sukenick writes, “The contemporary writer – the writer who is acutely in touch with the life of which he is part – is forced to start from scratch: Reality doesn’t exist, time doesn’t exist, personality doesn’t exist.” He adds, “Time is reduced to presence, the content of a series of discontinuous moments. Time is no longer purposive, and so there is no destiny, only chance. Reality is, simply, our experience and objectivity is, of course, an illusion. Personality, after passing through a phase of awkward self-consciousness, has become, quite minimally, a mere locus for our experience. In view of these annihilations, it should be no surprise that literature, also, does not exist--how could it?” Such reflections on literature within the text are more dramatically motivated than in most metafictional works because the narrator has been hired as a part-time teacher to give “an advanced honors seminar on The Death of the Novel.” The lectures he gives his bored, stoned students therefore often return in his story. The social and political turmoil of the late 1960s clearly influenced Sukenick’s formulation of this literary project. In addition to making reference to hippies, diggers, and yippies, the story discusses the State’s persecution of the leftist underground and includes news reports about the student movement, antiwar protests, and anti-antiwar protests. A very specific historical context lurks behind statements such as: “Reality has become a literal chaos. It has escaped our definitions. . . . If reality exists, it doesn’t do so a priori, but only to be put together. Thus one might say reality is an activity, of which literature is part, an important part, but one among many.” Sukenick adds, “Freedom in this context can mean only one thing, the freedom to create, and to create continuously, out of the fragmented, contradictory, anomalous, and progressively dissociating elements of our experience, a life that is coherent as a work of art is coherent, that continually comes together as it continuously comes apart.” The end of the story involves a return to the chaos of reality. The text stages its own (necessary) failure when Sukenick gives himself one hour to finish the piece, and then pushes himself to meet his self-imposed deadline, writing things such as, “Go on” and “Faster.” But the phones ring and his life intrudes anyway: ”Everything’s blowing up, falling to pieces. Art dissolves back into life. Chaos. It’s not the way I planned it.” The story ends in a favorite metafictional manner: “So long. End of story.” The final story, “The Birds,” is the collection’s most experimental and opaque piece. Most of the text consists of linguistic play on its titular subject, with sections on the names of birds, bird jokes, and bird symbolism. Sukenick compares this improvisational chaos (of dubious quality) directly to the Watts Towers, repeating a description of that work: “Built entirely without design precedent or orderly planning, created bit by bit on sheer impulse, a natural artist’s instinct, and the fantasy of the moment.” Sukenick also links his aesthetic project to the politics of May ’68 by including long news reports about the unfolding of the events of that month, from the occupation of the Sorbonne to the erecting of the barricades to the spread of mass striking. For Sukenick, May ’68 demonstrates the ability of spontaneous action to escape the power of existing forms, and underscores that “we must remain open to the unknown.” As the reports state: “THE PRINICIPAL THREAT LIES IN THE SPONTANEOUS, POPULAR AND UTTERLY UNCONTROLLED NATURE OF THE MOVEMENT.” “SOMETHING HAS BEEN CREATED THAT IS IRREVERSIBLE. THERE WILL BE NO GOING BACK TO THE STATUS QUO.”

William Gass: In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968)

William Gass’s In the Heart of the Heart of the Country is a collection of painfully beautiful and innovative short stories by a conspicuously talented writer. Gass may be responsible for coining the term “metafiction,” but these pieces demonstrate few of the reflexive excesses of his contemporaries like John Barth or Robert Coover. Having indulged in wild, often nonsensical, and quasi-pornographical textual play in Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, and saving his philosophically-informed comments on literature for his essays (found in Fiction and the Figures of Life), Gass in this collection instead undermines traditional literary realism by emphasizing the sensuous qualities of the words he uses. By offering his readers an intense aesthetic experience of language itself, Gass makes his readers comprehend, as he writes in his essay “The Medium of Fiction”: “[that fiction] should be made of words, and merely words, is shocking, really.” Words, as the “flesh” of his “concepts,” are the only physical traits available to his readers, so Gass exploits every opportunity to direct attention to the arbitrary qualities and independent being of those words, but without ever totally severing them from their function and meaning in the story. For Gass, narrative doesn’t occur at the level of plot but at the level of words, “the coming on and passing off of words,” so that a microdrama occurs as each word gives way to the next (Gass speaks of “the exasperatingly slow search among the words I had already written for the words which were to come.”). The novella “The Pedersen Kid” is the most conventional piece here, but it bears obvious traces of an aesthetic overhaul. Gass admits in his preface that he undermined a thrilling tale involving murder in the isolated countryside by “covering the moral layer with a frost of epistemological doubt” and “erasing the plot to make a fiction of it.” The final product whites out its origins in genre fiction by obsessively repeating the word “snow,” creating a cold, barren, and ambiguous atmosphere in which murder appears liberatory for the young son of an alcoholic and abusive father. “Order of Insects” discretely functions as an allegory of the uncanny power of literature. In the story, a suburban housewife, despite being constrained by her gender role and domestic duties, develops an obsession with the bodies of the black bugs that she discovers every morning on her downstairs carpet. The insects, which are never seen alive, only lying on their backs dead with their legs up in the air, offer the woman a mystical vision of order that seems incompatible with her mundane existence. She reflects on the insects’ bodies: “The dark plates glisten. They are wonderfully shaped; even the buttons of the compound eyes show a geometrical precision which prevents my earlier horror. It isn’t possible to feel disgust toward such a order.” After the insects have taken over her imagination, the woman adds, “When I examine my collection now it isn’t any longer roaches I observe but gracious order, wholeness, and divinity.” At a couple points in the story, Gass underscores how the shriveled corpses of the insects resemble the apparently lifeless words printed in black on the page. He writes, “if the drapes were pulled, [the insects appeared] so like ink stains or deep burns they terrified me,” and later on, “Corruption, in these bugs, is splendid. I’ve a collection now I keep in typewriter ribbon tins, and though, in time, their bodies dry and the interior flesh decays, their features hold.” [emphasis added to both] The order of insects at such moments dissolves into the order of Gass’s words, and the reader converges with the woman, confronted by material traces on the page that always exceed any demands for meaning. The collection’s titular piece, “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” abandons any interest in plot; Gass divides his imaginary construction of a Midwest town into sections with quasi-objective labels such as “PLACE,” “WEATHER,” “PEOPLE,” “BUSINESS,” and “VITAL DATA.” The narrator, perhaps recoiling from a failed love affair (“For I am now in B, Indiana: out of job and out of patience, out of love and time and money, out of bread and out of body.”), presents some fundamentally ambivalent, but gorgeously written, reflections on the town. At times, he exhibits a nostalgic and idealistic fondness for the setting: “The shade is ample, the grass is good, the sky a glorious fall violet; the apple trees are heavy and red, the roads are calm and empty; corn has sifted from the chains of tractored wagons to speckle the streets with gold and with the russet fragments of the cob, and a man would be a fool who wanted, blessed with this, to live anywhere else in the world.” But such statements are usually quickly contradicted by more critical comments (“It’s a lie of old poetry. The modern husbandman uses chemical from cylinders and sacks, spike-ball-and-claw machines, metal sheds, and cost accounting. Nature in the old sense does not matter. It does not exist.”) or by troubling details, such as the fact that most of the town’s industry has been lost to bigger cities or to the monopolies of corporations (“Everywhere . . . the past speaks, and it mostly speaks of failure. The empty stores, the old signs and dusty fixtures, the debris in alleys, the flaking paint and rusty gutters, the heavy locks and sagging boards: they say the same disagreeable things.”). Discussing the difficulties of defining the Midwest, Gass writes, “This Midwest. A dissonance of parts and people, we are a consonance of Towns. Like a man grown fat in everything but heart, we overlabor; outlook never really urban, never rural either, we enlarge and linger at the same time.” The Midwest - a non-place, a nondescript setting - is a fitting subject (or even a character) for Gass’s particularly writing project. In his preface, Gass discusses his own undistinguished Midwest origins, which left him no recourse but to use language to construct an identity from nothing but potential noise: “I was forced to form myself from sounds and syllables.” Returning to the geographically and culturally empty terrain of the Midwest, which offers little for simple representation, he has to construct an order through language, producing himself at the same time as he produces his subject: “I was born in a place as empty of distinction as my writing desk. When I wrote most of these stories, it was a dining table, featureless as Fargo.” But in the story itself, the success of this project is ultimately far more ambiguous, the constructed order more tenuous: “I must pull myself together, get a grip, just as they say, but I feel spilled, bewildered, quite mislaid. I did not restore my house to its youth, but to its age.”

John Barth: Lost in the Funhouse (1968)

John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse is metafiction’s degree zero. Barth’s “pieces” take literary self-reflexivity to a solipsistic extreme that few other authors have attempted to match. The pattern is quickly established with the first piece, “Frame-Tale,” which instructs the reader to construct a Mobius Strip by tearing out the page and twisting and then taping its sides together, creating an endless story that reads: “Once Upon a Time There was a Story That Began Once Upon a Time. . . .” Most of the pieces that follow continue this attack on linear literary realism (as well as on the conventions of modernism) by either persistently commenting on the techniques used by traditional literature, even while subversively using them, or offering up disembodied, self-composing discourses that reflect on their textual being. The title piece, “Lost in the Funhouse,” insistently adds meta-comments on everything from the naming of cities in 19th-century fiction to the proper use of physical descriptions. These comments not only puncture any tendencies toward realism, but also directly obstruct the linear development of the plot. For example, the piece comments near its beginning on the purpose of beginnings: “The function of the beginning of a story is to introduce the principal characters, establish their initial relationships, set the scene for the main action, expose the background of the situation if necessary, plant motifs and foreshadowings where appropriate, and initiate the first complication or whatever of the ‘rising action.’” But as these meta-comments multiply, the plot gets sidetracked, producing the fear that the story will never really get started, not to mention completed: “So far there’s been no real dialogue, very little sensory detail, and nothing in the way of a theme. . . . We haven’t even reached Ocean City yet: we will never get out of the funhouse.” Later on, as the protagonist, Ambrose, wanders, lost in the funhouse, the text contemplates different possible endings, dividing itself into a kind of garden of forking paths. By including diagrams of the arcs of conventional narratives, Barth only pushes the text further from any conventional conclusion. The result is an echo of Beckett: “This can’t go on much longer; it can go on forever.” “[T]he plot doesn’t rise by meaningful steps but winds upon itself, digresses, retreats, hesitates, sighs, collapses, expires. The climax of the story must be its protagonist’s discovery of a way to get through the funhouse. But he has found none, may have ceased to search.” The pleasures of traditional literary forms are lost from sight, but the protagonist manages to resign himself to the conditions of life in the metafictional funhouse: “He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he’s not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator – though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.” The piece “Title” most explicitly defends Barth’s dismantling of literary tradition. The text regularly underscores the excessive reflexivity of the contemporary writer through interventions such as randomly substituting grammatical terms for syntactical elements: “The novel is predicate adjective, as is the innocent anecdote of bygone days when life made a degree of sense and subject joined to complement by copula.” “Title” offers three possibilities (besides silence and extinction) for literature in this late, reflexive era: “The first is rejuvenation: having become an exhausted parody of itself, perhaps a form . . . may rise neoprimitively from its own ashes. A tired prospect. The second, more appealing I’m sure but scarcely likely at this advanced date, is that moribund what-have-yous will be supplanted by vigorous new: the demise of the novel and short story . . . needn’t be the end of the narrative art.” The third possibility, “a temporary expedient,” “is to turn ultimacy, exhaustion, paralyzing self-consciousness and the adjective weight of accumulated history. . . . Go on. Go on. To turn ultimacy against itself to make something new and valid, the essence whereof would be the impossibility of making something new.” In his manifesto for metafiction, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” Barth explains his argument more fully. Expressing an admiration for Beckett and, especially, Borges, Barth praises the latter’s “Pierre Menard” as “a remarkable and original work of literature, the implicit theme of which is the difficulty, perhaps the unnecessity, of writing original works of literature. His artistic victory, if you like, is that he confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work.” For Barth, the most interesting literature takes its limiting conditions – in this case, the impossibility of creating something new – and makes them the foundation for new works. The piece “Life-Story” pre-emptively responds to potential accusations that Barth’s metafiction is hollow and pleasureless. The speaker is a writer who has come to “suspect that the world is a novel, himself a fictional personage.” Despite this metafictional theme, the speaker hopes to “to tell his tale from start to finish in a conservative, ‘realistic,’ unself-conscious way.” Like his wife and child, he hates the avant-garde, preferring the traditional comforts of a writer like Updike. So when it slowly dawns on him that he is a character in a Barth story, he states, “It’s particularly disquieting to suspect not only that one is a fictional character but that the fiction that one’s in – the fiction one is – is quite the sort one least prefers.” He more strongly states his distaste for this kind of fiction in an outburst: “Another story about a writer writing a story! Another regressus in infinitum! Who doesn’t prefer art that at least overtly imitates something other than its own processes? That doesn’t continually proclaim ‘Don’t forget I’m an artifice!’?” Ultimately, the reader’s attention is held responsible for his intolerable existence: “You dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it’s you I’m addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You’ve read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don’t go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where’s your shame?”

Raymond Federman: Double or Nothing (1971)

Raymond Federman’s experimental novel Double or Nothing is subtitled a “real fictitious discourse.” An example of what Federman calls “surfiction” (a fiction on the fictions of life), Double or Nothing uses typographical experimentation and metafictional play to work through autobiographical trauma. The novel’s non-beginning outlines a complexly stratified literary discourse. By locking himself up in a room for a year, an “inventor” plans on writing a novel about the arrival of a Jewish immigrant “protagonist” in America. A “recorder” takes note of everything the inventor does and thinks while making preparations on the day before moving into the room, while a “supervisor” stands over and beyond the entire text. As the novel progresses, these four discursive levels/characters - protagonist, inventor, recorder, supervisor - begin to “converge or merge,” to collapse into one another, often within a single sentence as it shifts point of view from “I” to “he” to “we.” The inventor spends most of his time obsessively calculating the cost of a year’s worth of different basic goods – noodles, toothpaste, cigarettes, toilet paper – while the recorder faithfully keeps track of “everything [the inventor] was doing, saying, thinking, planning, calculating, organizing, inventing, composing, anticipating, projecting, writing, etc., even though much of it appeared totally incoherent, illogical, gratuitous, fragmented, all loused up, messed up, zero, irrational, unreadable, irresponsible, unpublishable, full of errors, bad, etc.” This noise is presented to the reader through the unique typographical format that Federman creates for each page, so that the work is ultimately what Brian McHale terms “concrete prose.” With a nod to jazz, Federman blasts open the walls of his prose, creating an improvised performance that underscores the materiality and technicity of the text.
Later sections of the novel offer a more explicit critique of traditional fiction, and especially plot, and serve as a justification for this experimentation. Rejecting any simple mimetic function for literature, Federman writes, “the essence of a literary discourse . . . is to find its own point of reference, its own rules of organization in itself, and not in the real or imaginary experience, on which it rests. Through all the detours that one wishes, the subject who writes will never seize himself in the novel: he will only seize the novel which, by definition, excludes him.” But less literary-critical, more autobiographical motives for the novel’s typographical and formal experimentation can be found in the fragments of the protagonist’s life that the inventor does manage to relate. The protagonist, whose name keeps changing, “has really no voice” and goes through a “mute period” while trying to learn English. Although the inventor deliberately refuses to discuss the protagonist’s life before America, it is revealed that the protagonist (just like Federman) lost his parents and siblings in the Holocaust. The novel’s seemingly superficial typographical play – that is, its experimentation with placing words on the surface of the page – therefore works through this traumatic rupture in the protagonist’s existence, his exile from his origins and even his language. Double or Nothing should be read alongside Federman’s later The Voice in the Closet (1979), a brutal yet important text that addresses Federman’s memories of being locked in a closet while the rest of his family was taken from his home and shipped off to a concentration camp. Lacking page numbers and punctuation, The Voice in the Closet offers a “verbal delirium,” intense “wordshit,” so as to “invent you federman,” “to invent an origin for myself.” Faced with unrepresentable horror and aware of the accidental nature of his existence, Federman states, “yes the whole story crossed out my whole family parenthetically xxxx into typographic symbols while I endure my survival from its implausible beginning to its unthinkable end.” However, Federman does seem to reflect in this haunting text on the different tone of Double or Nothing when he writes, “my survival a mistake he cannot accept forces him to begin conditionally by another form of sequestration pretends to lock himself in a room with the if of my existence the story told in laughter but it resists and recites first the displacement of its displacement.”

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.”