ABSTRACT
To read Donald Barthelme’s works is to experience the power and strangeness of fragmentation. Silence is also available in the form of white noise. Barthelme is telling us in effect that displacement is the nature of language, not only synchronically and superficially, but also in depth, diachronically. Barthelme’s fiction, ruled by displacement, is a manic-depressive drama of the superego, a battle, a race in which most of the verbal artefacts of our culture are summoned up. The object is deprived of its reality by what the author have said about it. Regarded in an ironical light, the object shivers, shatters, disappears. The race is, among other things, between elation and depression, tears and laughter, anguish caused by the loss and temporary relief at finding a substitute. So this fiction goes on, by fits and starts and fragments, never at one with itself, propelled forward by its constitutive principle – its instability, the art of displacement.
