Montressor1

SANITIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS: REFUSE AND REFUSAL IN
DONALD BARTHELME’S SNOW WHITE

Jaye Berman Montresor

"The seven of them only add up to the equivalent of about two real men , as we know them from the films and from our childhood, when there were giants on the earth." Snow White

The attention that postmodern parodists such as Donald Barthelme pay to popular and mass culture is one of the chief features that distinguish postmodern parody from modern parody. High modernists like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound turned to the classics when they imbedded fragments of earlier literature into their own. Perhaps an even more important distinction between modem and postmodern parodists can be made with regard to the view these authors take of their own work as being "high" or "low" literature. Even when James Joyce quoted from racing forms, newspapers, and folk ballads, it was in the service of producing high art. But the postmodernists consciously (and self-consciously) toppled the artist from the pedestal on which the modernists worshipped each other and themselves, "dedeifying" themselves as the father of Snow White’s Paul did "during his long lack of reign" (Snow White 27). Instead of breathing in the rarefied literary atmosphere in which the modernists exclusively dwelled, the postmodernists drunkenly filled their lungs with the polluted air circulating in the streets below—rock lyrics, advertising slogans, brand names, newspaper headlines , self-improvement mottoes, political graffiti, and so on.

No one has embarked more prodigiously on the ecological enterprise of recycling these linguistic waste products than Barthelme, whose numerous short stories can be seen as freeze-frames of contemporary, urban American culture, employing experimental forms to contain what members of a consumer society spend their time and money consuming—the cigarettes they smoke, the food they eat, the beer they drink, and, neither more nor less significantly, the language they use, the people they exploit, and "as much art as [their] system[s] can tolerate" (Barthelme, "Paraguay" 130). This refraining and renaming of the "passed over"

preterit materials that are commonly regarded as garbage is a technique which parodies visual art, such as Marcel Duchamp’s surrealist collages of "ready-mades" and the mass-produced prints of mass-produced commodities by Andy Warhol. Several of Barthelme’s stories, in fact, are macronic mixtures of words and pictures, which can be read as attempts to use words as things, linguistic equivalents of the collagist’s "objets trouvés."

If, as Charles Molesworth claims, the short story is a genre particularly suited to the incorporation of garbage, then the motivation behind Barthelme’s three published novels may be that he wanted more room to incorporate more garbage, larger canvases on which to arrange the assorted fragments of American culture (Molesworth 12-15). For despite their greater length, Snow White, The Dead Father, and Paradise share the same aesthetic principles as the short stories and might be more appropriately labeled "anti-novels" since, in all three works, the literary conventions which have come to be associated with the novel genre are present only in highly parodied form.

In Snow White (1967), the first of his longer narratives, Barthelme uses a familiar fairy tale to provide a basic narrative framework on which to construct his deconstructions of contemporary America. As the focal point of the dwarves’ concern (and therefore of the concern of the nameless narrator, who is presumably one of them), Snow White provides an opportunity for Barthelme to satirize, among other issues, the plight of the newly liberated sixties woman, by turns respecting and rejecting the values with which she was raised. Snow White is riddled with conflicts: she tolerates and even initiates group sex with the dwarves but worries about her reputation in society; she is strongly attracted to logo’ s dark vileness but feels equal longing for Paul’s princely blood; she is proud to be writing a poem but ashamed to let anyone see it; she finds the life of a "horsewife" unfulfilling but her exploration of alternatives amounts to sitting passively at the window with her hair hanging down in order to attract another man for whom she will perform a similar role.

Snow White’s ambivalence may be seen as analogous to the parodist’s attitude toward the original text. One detects in Barthelme’s fragmented fictions both the modernists’ yearning for a previous wholeness, harmony, and order and the postmodernists’ rejection of nostalgia in favor of frolicking in the fragments, exulting in multiplicity, indeterminacy, and the absolute freedom that chaos affords. The use of a fairy tale motif, in this instance, belies not only a longing for the stability and predictability of childhood stories (and perhaps childhood itself) but also the adult’s recognition of the disparity between the world such stories represent and the world one lives in. Furthermore, there is the recognition that even if the fairy tale world did coincide with our own, we would feel constrained by its limited range of possibilities since neither Snow White, Paul, Jane, nor Hogo comfortably wears the mantle of his or her respective role as

heroine, hero, villainess, and villain. Yet, however much at odds with their assigned roles these characters feel themselves to be, they are curiously compelled to play them, for these roles are all that distinguish them as individuals against the backdrop of colorless, undifferentiated mediocrity provided by the dwarves.

Although the narrator dwarf complains that Snow White’s intrusion on their routine, equanimous existence has changed them from simple bourgeois who knew what to do" to "complex bourgeois who are at a loss" (Snow White 88), the dwarves are the only characters who feel comfortably at home in late capitalistic society. They exist in an unalienated relation to the means of production, functioning as both blue-collar workers (tending the vats, washing the buildings, manufacturing plastic buffalo humps) and white-collar bosses (running the Chinese baby food and plastic buffalo hump factories). Whistling while they work to produce fad items for members of a culture so jaded in its incessant appetite for something new and different that even its babies crave exotic cuisine, the dwarves have no moral qualms about the quality or necessity of their contribution to society. It is fitting that their major concern regarding the complexity which love has introduced into their lives is, "Is it, perhaps, bad for business?" (Snow White 88).

It is one of the dwarves, in fact, who blithely coins the term "the trash phenomenon," which some critics have mistaken as a manifesto of Barthelme’s own aesthetic, just as they have treated the statement of one of Barthelme’s characters that "fragments are the only form I trust" as if it expressed the author’s philosophy. The "trash phenomenon" refers to the steady climb of "the per-capita production of trash in this country" (Snow White 97) . As trash production approaches 100 percent, one of the dwarves points out to those whom he is guiding on a tour of the buffalo hump factory:

the question turns from a question of disposing of this ‘trash’ to a question of appreciating its qualities . . . because it’s all there is So that’s why we’re in humps, right now, more really from a philosophical point of view than because we find them a great moneymaker. They are ‘trash,’ and what in fact could be more useless or trashlike?

(Snow White 97)

Thus Dan, the dwarf, defends their production of worthless consumer goods and conceals their profit motive "behind the veil of flummery that usually veils these matters" (Snow White 74). Rather than serving as mouthpieces of the author’s values, the dwarves are best seen as voicing the values of a money-grubbing society that is hostile to art and thought. That the dwarves are to be seen as anti-artists and anti-intellectuals is

evident in their feeling threatened by Snow White’s "dirty great poem four pages long" and her reading of revolutionary materials such as Dissent, Liberation, and the writings of Mao Tse Tung (Snow White 10). It is also apparent in their plot to steal Paul’s typewriter, which symbolizes for them Paul’s artistic and intellectual pretensions—he had "wanted to be great once . . . make a powerful statement . . . make a significant contribution . . . bring about a heightened awareness . . . provide a definitive account . . . achieve a breakthrough" with his "survey of the incidence of weeping in the bedrooms of members of the faculty of the University of Bridgeport" as well as through his "life-enhancing poem" (Snow White 51-52). Moreover, the narrator dwarf’s disappointment in Paul’s failure to "take up his sword as part of the President’s war on poetry" (a clever parody of Lyndon Johnson’s pledge to wage war on poverty) reveals the dwarves’ philistinism (Snow White 55).

Christopher Lasch seemingly ignores the dwarves’ roles as representatives of consumer capitalism, however, and instead lashes out at Snow White as a "latter-day Madame Bovary" and

a typical victim of mass culture, the culture of commodities and consumerism with its suggestive message that experiences formerly reserved for those of high birth, deep understanding, or much practical acquaintance of life can be enjoyed by all without effort, on purchase of the appropriate commodity.

(Lasch 263)

This attitude is proper to the dwarves rather than to Snow White. They are the ones who purchase the appropriate commodity (the new shower curtain) as a means of gaining an experience (Snow White’s love) formerly reserved for those of high birth (a Prince). Snow White, on the contrary, is the one who resists the bait of the new shower curtain; she also tries to subvert the dwarves’ consumer capitalist ethos by slipping "tiny Chairman Mao poems in the baby food" (Snow White 16). Nevertheless, it would be misleading to conclude from these examples that Snow White is truly revolutionary, for her flirtation with revolution remains at the level of superficial rebellion—"wearing heavy blue bulky shapeless quilted People’s Volunteers trousers rather than the tight tempting how-the-West-was-won trousers she formerly wore," nailing a "dozen-odd red flags and bugles ... to the dining-room table," and quoting Maoist poetry (Snow White 16). Lasch is correct in identifying her as an unhappy product of her society, but he fails to credit her efforts to resist that society, however feeble and futile those efforts prove to be.

The dwarves, on the other hand, are "at one" with their society, and their appreciation of its trash includes "those aspects of language that

may be seen as a model of the trash phenomenon" (Snow White 97-98). One of the dwarves, for instance, says that he finds empty phrases, like you might say," the most interesting part of language, and the downward pull brought about by the heavy, "sludge" quality of such linguistic "stuffing" is declared "valuable, although it’s hard to say just how, right at the moment" (Snow White 96-97). It is with this in mind that the narrator dwarf explains:

We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of "sense" of what is going on. This "sense" is not to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lines themselves—looking at them and so arriving at a feeling not of satisfaction exactly, that is too much to expect, but of having read them, of having "completed" them.

(Snow White 106)

Like everything else in the consumer society the dwarves speak for, literature, too, is something to be devoured but not digested, something which neither nourishes nor satisfies. Barthelme deftly displays the connection between consumerism, consumption, and consummation by introducing the above passage with Hubert’s refusal to read his part of the book, "the outer part where the author is praised and the price quoted" and immediately following it with Bill’s refusal to take off his pajamas in order to participate in a sexual orgy with Snow White and the other dwarves (Snow White 105-06).

Many readers have interpreted this passage as a self-referential description of Barthelme’s own writing; however, there is an important distinction to be made between literature that parodies dreck language, as Barthelme’s does, and literature that simply reflects dreck language, which is the type of literature that the dwarves appreciate. The former implies criticism of such language; the latter, which is what Fredric Jameson calls pastiche, may well produce reinforcement by authorizing such language.

It is the parodist’s task, then, to signal the reader to interpret the writing as parodic distortion rather than realistic reflection, a situation that is problematized by the need for readers who are properly sensitive to the author’s signals. As Linda Hutcheon tells us, however, deciding whether a given text is parody or pastiche "does not mean that we have to return to a Romantic interest in the extra-textual intention of the god-like

creator; it is more a matter of inferring the activities of an encoding agent" (Hutcheon 86).

One of the ways we can infer the activities of this particular encoding agent is by paying careful attention to the ways in which different voices in the text are presented as carriers of various cultural codes. Barthelme consistently robs these voices of their authority by depriving the text of the formal devices which invest that authority in a realistic novel. For example, there are several instances in the novel where a page is printed in large, bold-type, capital letters as if meant to be proclaimed authoritatively in a stentorian voice.

These pronouncements fall into two categories: 1) seemingly relevant statements about the Snow White fairy tale, and 2) seemingly irrelevant statements about various aspects of Western civilization: literature, religion, the "horsewife" in history, psychology, and philosophy. What these two categories have in common is that in neither case is the authority who utters these truths identified nor do the fragments of information add up to a full picture either of Snow White or of Western civilization.

In the category of statements about Snow White, to take one example, the reader is told that "PAUL HAS NEVER BEFORE REALLY SEEN SNOW WHITE AS A WOMAN" (Snow White 150), a statement which sounds reasonable enough until one realizes that it is not at all clear who is making this judgment presented as fact—the narrating dwarf (perhaps making notes on a novel about Snow White on the typewriter stolen from Paul), a fairy tale expert, a disembodied omniscient narrative voice, Barthelme himself intruding on the text in order to explain Paul’s voyeurism to the reader, or is this statement meant to reflect the conclusion the reader might be likely to draw upon reading of Paul’s voyeurism on the preceding page? Cut off from any identifying tag linking it to the author or any other authority, this statement offers no clue as to its meaning or, by extension, to the meaning of Snow White. Likewise, the other statements concerning Snow White’s psychology—her thoughts, fears, and memories—do not add up to a cohesive ego with whom the reader becomes acquainted bit by bit, as in a conventional narrative where pieces of biographical information might be woven into the text in order to gradually reveal a character’s depths. All that the reader of Snow White becomes acquainted with are the bits and pieces.

Critics have found the statements concerning Western civilization even more baffling, since they seem irrelevant to the doings of Snow White and the dwarves. Although the sources of the statements are not identified, they all possess the authoritative tone of college textbooks, presenting a subjective interpretation as if it were objective fact, as in the following:

THE SECOND GENERATION OF ENGLISH ROMANTICS
INHERITED THE PROBLEMS OF THE FIRST, BUT
COMPLICATED BY THE EVILS OF INDUSTRIALISM AND
POLITICAL REPRESSION. ULTIMATELY THEY FOUND AN
ANSWER NOT IN SOCIETY BUT IN VARIOUS FORMS OF INDEPENDENCE FROM SOCIETY:

HEROISM
ART
SPIRITUAL TRANSCENDENCE

(Snow White 24)

It is not surprising, then, that on the facing page, the reader is presented with a catalogue of what Snow White studied at Beaver College, including a course called English Romantic Poets II: Shelley, Byron and Keats. Similarly, a passage on the value the mind sets on erotic needs under various conditions may very well come from her Theoretical Foundations of Psychology textbook, the list of various aspects of "horsewifery" reads like an outline for the course Snow White took on the Modern Woman, Her Privileges and Responsibilities, and so on.

If Barthelme merely wanted to reflect realistically the modern world, he could have worked these materials into his novel in a less obtrusive way. Instead, he parodies the realist tradition by "misrepresenting the mechanics of representation" (Molesworth 46). The very manner in which he presents this material—the unconventional appearance of the words, their spatial arrangement on the page, and their lack of identifying markers—points to his intention to parody the dillettantish college education of the first generation of women to pursue higher education in large numbers but whose purpose in doing so was neither to improve the mind nor to prepare for a career but rather to participate in a certain rite of passage for white, middle-class women whose ultimate goal was still marriage. The very name of the college, a slang term for the female genitals, implies criticism of this type of curriculum which ultimately reinforces traditional sex roles. The outline on the "horsewife," for example, emphasizes the views of those who advocate "horsewifery" as the proper "career" for women:

VIEWS OF ST. AUGUSTINE
VIEWS OF THE VENERABLE BEDE
EMERSON ON THE AMERICAN HORSEWIFE . . .
ACCEPT ROLE, PSYCHOLOGIST URGES (Snow White 61)