Sex Wars in 'Moon Deluxe': Frederick Barthelme and Postmodern Prufrock
1996; Volume: 33; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0039-3789
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoMinimalism is dead, or so it has been portrayed recently, and most who are in a position to speak on the subject are glad to see it go.(1) Raymond Carver survived the assault on the movement with his reputation intact, only to succumb to cancer. Ann Beattie draws a fair amount of critical attention and is widely anthologized. But other writers lumped in with them have fared less well. So I was glad to see in 1994 the beginnings of a critical conversation about the writings of the convicted minimalist Frederick Barthelme. Although he is often lumped together with other minimalists for discussion, none of the detractors have taken a serious enough look at specifically. However, two recent articles examine his work in enough detail to call for response. Timothy Peters's `80s Pastoral: Frederick Barthelme's Moon Deluxe Ten Years On takes issue with John Aldridge's attack on minimalist writers and on in particular. Robert Brinkmeyer's Suburban Culture, Imaginative Wonder: Fiction of Frederick Barthelme focuses on the novels, employing a definition of the grotesque that allows Brinkmeyer to read the novels with an eye to locating them in a distinctly southern tradition. In both essays the writers attempt to extricate from the sinking ship of minimalism and to find in his work something that refutes his dismissal critics who do not like that not-so-new writing. Both agree he elevates the mundane, the quotidian, and the pedestrian to the level of art. Brinkmeyer says by the detailed evocation of a place--suburbia--that is its very definition placeless, a place that could be anyplace ... he achieves poetry (105). Peters argues that is working in a mode, if not a genre, that goes back to the eighteenth century: that of the urban, or town, eclogue, and its cousin the mock pastoral (181). In both articles there is much to agree with, much to provoke a thoughtful rereading of Barthelme, and many tools with which to begin prying open his texts. What I would like to do here is offer an alternative to Peters's method of approaching Barthelme's Moon Deluxe. Peters's approach yokes together the stories in Moon Deluxe and Nabokov's Lolita. The suburban dreamscape, he says of the territory of Moon Deluxe, now seems as innocent as that lost America of Nabokov's Lolita (175). He points out another connection between these two texts: some of the stories depict relationships between older men and young girls or much younger (175). latter at least is true. But I do not agree with the notion that Moon Deluxe portrays a kind of American arcadia, a nostalgic rendering of the Myth of the Good Ole Days. Rather, I would like to propose that what we see in the Barthelme's stories are the remains of a battlefield, with his male protagonists as the shell-shocked, walking-wounded survivors of the sex wars. I think Barthelme's protagonists and narrators are better seen as post-revolutionary men--that is, men best defined as post-sexual-revolution and post-feminist. Their reticence, voyeurism, extreme self-consciousness, and yielding of power to women suggest that J. Alfred Prufrock rather than Humbert Humbert may be a better comparison in approaching Moon Deluxe. In Iron John Robert Bly writes, Fifties male had a clear vision of what a man was, and what male responsibilities were.... During the sixties, another sort of man appeared. waste and violence of the Vietnam war made men question whether they knew what an adult male really was. If manhood meant Vietnam, did they want any part of it? Meanwhile the feminist movement encouraged men to actually look at women, forcing them to become conscious of concerns and sufferings that the Fifties male labored to avoid.... In the seventies I began to see all over the country a phenomenon that we might call the soft male. …
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