ABSTRACT
The extravagant manipulation of narrative strategies, the construction of vivid semantic images and the tactics of displacement do not necessarily preclude the unfolding of more or less linear stories – as the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth and even Thomas Pynchon testify. Donald Barthelme constantly denounces what he calls this “blanketing” effect of ordinary language’. Barthelme seems to be coaching his readers into developing a kind of Escherian perception that goes beyond the primitive ‘iconic perception’ about which Ernst Cassirer wrote. Barthelme thus challenges the reader and the critic in a variety of ways which go far beyond pure provocation and raise, as people have tried to show, some fundamental questions about modern literary art. He also provides a surface readability, a ‘text of pleasure’ which makes it possible to dispense with the fundamental questions: the text can be enjoyed as pure comedy, linguistic slapstick, ‘surrealism’, ‘music’, and so on.
