Donald Barthelme on Writing

 

Writer Donald Barthelme in his essay "Not-Knowing" says the writer not knowing what he or she is on about when he or she starts writing is crucial to the process. The process of writing is built around honed intuition, and for the writer, it all might as well be magic.

In this same essay on craft, Barthelme worries about many other things besides. One is the shrinking audience for literature. Another is the competition with TV and film. And still another is the possibility that the contemporary writer might have finally arrived at the point where there is not much more to do by way of art. Most of Barthelme's essay focuses on this latter issue.

First, Barthelme wants to make clear that he does not believe that art represents reality. In fact, he believes it never did. On Barthelme's view, a writer can only ever write from a perspective, and so there's no point in the writer thinking he or she is a real representationalist, no matter how closely the work may hews to the so-called hyperreal. And so Barthelme giggles at those who thumb their nose at him and his peers, the so-called postmodernists.

Interestingly, by essay's end, Barthelme endorses a view of art that is rather conventional. It might seem too procrustean for some while for others it may look dead on the nose. He believes that art is healing. That literature is healing.

One could trace this view of Barthelme's from the 1960s art therapy movement, but if one uses a telescope, one can see this image of art farther back. As far back as Aristotle, in fact.

Aristotle believed that art catharts. In other words, that art helps us through tensions. Which is why we return to it again and again.

Note that this view stands in contradistinction to Plato, who believed what? That art represents reality.

Set out for an original idea and find it dancing already in the plenum. Sit down at the piano and play the keys. It's always the same notes. The magic is in the arrangement.