montres2

One way of making sense of these emphatic passages, then, is to read them as the language that constitutes the title character’s being. Snow White is Snow White, that is to say, she is textually composed, made of language. The repeated references to her skin white as snow and her hair black as ebony point to this identification; she is words on the page, black ink on white paper. She does not read as a smooth continuum of cause and effect, however, but rather a jumble of vague, half-remembered impressions: "THE HOUSE . . . WALLS . . . WHEN HE DOESN’T . . . I’M NOT . . . IN THE DARK . . . SHOULDERS . . . AFRAID . . . THE WATER WAS COLD . . . WANT TO KNOW . . . EFFORTLESSLY" (Snow White 165) and the official views of her culture expressed in its official language: "IT WAS NOT UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY THAT RUSSIA PRODUCED A LITERATURE WORTHY OF BECOMING PART OF THE WORLD’S CULTURAL HERITAGE" (Snow White 143). The fact that these two categories of statements do not correspond to one another points to the gulf between Snow White’s inwardly felt experience as a woman and the authorized version of reality imposed from the patriarchal society without.

There is an ironic correspondence, nevertheless, between the passages in the latter category and Barthelme’s updated Snow White tale. The passage on the second generation of the Romantic poets, a period which anticipates modernism, speaks of their problems being compounded by the evils of industrialism and solutions to those problems being found in heroism, art, and spiritual transcendence. The problems faced by the postmodern generation to which Barthelme belongs are further compounded by the evils of postindustrialism because heroism, art, and spiritual transcendence are no longer perceived as possible in such a world, as Snow White amply illustrates: the evil of Hogo is more compelling than the goodness of Paul, plastic buffalo humps are more compelling than poems, and Snow White’s supposed transcendence is a sneaky way to get rid of her (she is written out of existence) so that the dwarves can "DEPART IN SEARCH OF A NEW PRINCIPLE" after she, too, ceases to be compelling (Snow White 181). The malaise that first infected Bill—"Bill is tired of Snow White now"—has completed its rounds by novel’s end, when the reader is informed of "THE FAILURE OF SNOW WHITE’S ARSE" (it fails to lure) which precipitates her transcendence (Snow White 4, 181).

The final, ironic reference to the dwarves as "HEROES" (Snow White 181) illustrates Alan Wilde’s observation that postmodernism, skeptical of the modernist effort to reach toward the heroic, "presents itself as deliberately, consciously antiheroic" (Wilde 131). It also points to another important way in which Barthelme signals the reader that he is parodically distorting his material rather than reflecting it as pastiche. Barthelme’s work is suffused with what Wilde, following Kierkegaard, calls an ironic consciousness. One of the features of an ironic consciousness is that it distances and alienates itself from its

surroundings. This distancing effect is essential to the parodic function of Barthelme’s fiction, for as Hutcheon notes, "[u]nlike imitation, quotation, or even allusion, parody requires . . . critical ironic distance" (Hutcheon 34).

Indeed, the close interaction between parody and irony has caused some confusion among critics. Molesworth, for example, speaks of parody as "a special kind of irony . . . a mocking irony," a definition which does little to distinguish the terms since he concedes that "readers . . . don’t usually think of irony without it containing some elements of mockery" (Molesworth 49-45). This confusion is understandable given that both involve what Mikhail Bakhtin (who uses the phrase "parodic and ironic" three times on a single page without distinguishing between the two) calls dialogism, or double-voicing (Bakhtin 44). The ironic consciousness implies a double vision, for every utterance produces both a literal, surface meaning and a contrasting, underlying meaning. Parody, too, engages in dialogue, but as Margaret A. Rose shows, in a schema following Kristeva’s model of intertextuality, the dialogue is doubled—the reader engages in a dialogue with the parody text while the parody text engages in a dialogue with the original text (Rose 26). Since both irony and parody, however, so often produce a similar mocking effect, perhaps the clearest way to distinguish between the two is formally, as Hutcheon does, by stating that irony is a trope while parody is a genre (Hutcheon 56). Parody is, then, a literary form which involves quotation of other literary sources by means of an ironic voice. Because the ironic voice is a by-product of an ironic consciousness, such a consciousness will naturally be drawn to the genre which best reflects its double vision— parody.

It is as both a trope and a mode of consciousness that Wayne Booth speaks of irony in A Rhetoric of Irony, where he distinguishes between what he calls stable and unstable irony, a distinction which accounts for much of the difference between modern and postmodern parody. Booth clearly favors the stable irony associated with what Wilde describes as modernism’s "vision of disconnection and disjunction" (Wilde 131) because even though the reader must reject the literal meaning of the words, figuring out the intended meaning is not too difficult. The reader simply tries out a finite number of possibilities based on what is known about the author’s knowledge or beliefs. Booth finds the nature of stable irony affirmative because "it delimits a world of discourse in which we can say with great security certain things that are violated by the overt words of the discourse" (Booth 6). Unstable irony, corresponding to what Wilde characterizes as postmodernism’s "more radical . . . vision of randomness, multiplicity, and contingency" (Wilde 131), offers the reader no firm ground on which to stand, since "no stable reconstruction can be made out of the ruins revealed in the irony. In an absurd universe, all statements are subject to ironic undermining" (Booth 240). According to Booth, unstable irony offers two possible meanings: either the universe is meaningless or human beings are unable to comprehend its meaning.

Booth has pejoratively dubbed postmodernism "The Celebration of Infinitely Ironic Existence" (Booth 212), a reference to Kierkegaard, who characterizes irony as "infinite absolute negativity" which causes its object to shiver, shatter, and disappear (Kierkegaard 271). The violence of the ironist’s effect may account for the fragmented, de-centered quality of Barthelme’s Snow White and the final disappearance of its characters: Paul is dead, the dwarves depart, and Snow White rises skyward above her surroundings. Rising skyward above one’s surroundings is precisely how Kierkegaard describes the ironic consciousness in The Concept of Irony and suggests an identification between Barthelme’s own ironic consciousness and Snow White, the object of its creation. Moreover, Kierkegaard describes the ironic consciousness as one which "looks down . . . on plain and ordinary discourse immediately understood by everyone" (Kierkegaard 265), thus furthering the connection, since underlying Snow White’s dissatisfaction with the world is a dissatisfaction with conventional language. Her wish for "‘some words in the world that were not the words I always hear!’" (Snow White 6) corresponds to Barthelme’s foregrounding of dreck language as well as his desire to discard narrative conventions such as description and the development of character and plot in favor of an almost exclusive reliance on the collage as a means of reformulating the fairy tale.

Both the figure of Snow White and the novel Snow White are really collages, each being made up of fragments which refuse to cohere. The figure of Snow White is a mish-mash of other characters’ perceptions of her, odds and ends of her thoughts, feelings, and memories, and echoes of the voices of her culture which instilled her with her social role. The novel itself comprises all of this as well as a questionnaire, which addresses the reader midway through the text, lists, various type faces, quotations, and cut-ups.

Although Barthelme is undoubtedly the first to retell a fairy tale with as many stylistic innovations as he uses here, his method is traditional as well as iconoclastic, for it recalls the oral nature of folk cultural transmission and the inevitable changes imposed on a tale with each retelling. Even when the Snow White tale became codified by the brothers Grimm in their Nursery and Household Tales, it continued to undergo change. Each of the seventeen revisions of the Grimms collection which appeared in their lifetimes further de-emphasized sex, violence, death, and other elements of the original folk tales deemed unsuitable for children. Indeed, the emphasis on cleaning in Barthelme’ s perversely told tale—the shower as the "horsewife’s" stall and central locus of sexual activity, housecleaning as Snow White’s duty and responsibility, the importance for the dwarves of washing the vats and buildings—may be read as a critical comment on the sanitization of the tales perpetrated by the Grimms and subsequent tellers from Andrew Lang to Walt Disney.

But just as no amount of watering down can wholly diminish the exaggerated wishes and fears of the original tales which reflect a child’s psychic realities, so too, no amount of ironic distance and parodic word-play can entirely mask the powerful emotional contradictions which lie just beneath the surface of Barthelme’s writing. The author can be compared to a whale in his ambivalence; he masquerades as a cold-blooded fish, but he is a warm-blooded mammal, and every so often painful feelings break through the cool surface of his writing. While the playfulness of postmodern writing is one of its most widely accepted features, few critics have paid attention to its desperate edge. Regis Durand gleans from his sensitive reading of Barthelme that "irony becomes a defence in the face of a danger for the subject" and "play has been substituted for confrontation, analysis, and anxiety" (Couturier and Durand 32, 48). And although the reference is to Beckett, Ihab Hassan’s mantic pronouncement that "parody is indeed the form our pain must now take" (Hassan, Dismemberment 241) is equally pertinent here, for what is discernible in the manic antics of Snow White is an oscillation between two poles of pain: the disappointed idealism of the child whose wishful expectations remain unfulfilled and the disillusioned cynicism of the adult who dismisses these dreams as childish.

Villanova University

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson, Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist. Austin, Texas, and London: U of Texas P, 1981.
Barthelme, Donald. "Paraguay." Sixty Stories. New York: Dutton, 1981.
_____. Snow White. New York: Atheneum, 1967.
Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1974.
Couturier, Maurice and Regis Durand. Donald Barthelme. London: Methuen, 1982.
Hassan, Ihab. The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature. 2nd ed. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1982.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York: Methuen, 1985
Kierkegaard, Soren. The Concept of Irony: With Constant Reference to Socrates. Trans. Lee M. Kapel. New York: Harper, 1965
Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: Norton, 1979
Molesworth, Charles. Donald Barthelme’s Fiction: The Ironist Saved from Drowning. Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1982.
Rose, Margaret A. Parody/Meta-Fiction: An Analysis of Parody as a Cultural Mirror to the Writing and Reception of Fiction. London: Croom Helm, 1979.
Wilde, Alan. Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981.