ABSTRACT
Donald Barthelme’s fiction – rather like Samuel Beckett’s – does point in the direction of a theoretical reconstruction of the self; this is a comic enterprise, however, and is undercut by one of Barthelme’s favourite strategies of displacement and defence, his constant irony. One is reminded of Beckett’s wonderful rebound in Company, of his cunning use, once more, of the voice, of what in recent theories has the highest creative potential, the verbal inventiveness, the sense of play and transaction. In ‘The New Music’, the two voices ‘doing mamma’ fall into it like musicians going through a routine number. The texts become the record of the activity of voices; more accurately, they are the activities themselves. Such a keen sense of transactions and strategies radically displaces the question of metafiction. The notion itself always had something formalistic and limiting about it.
