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  • Reconstructing Masculinity:Donald Barthelme's Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts
  • Craig Medvecky (bio)

In his essay "Failed Artists in Donald Barthelme's Sixty Stories," Lee Upton presents "failure" as the essential thematic preoccupation of Barthelme's fiction (11). Perhaps nowhere is this concern more evident than in the author's 1968 collection Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, wherein a specifically masculine failure is central to the impression of aesthetic wholeness. With striking efficiency, Barthelme encircles his topic with metonymic arrangements of powerless, guilty, and insecure men. Unable to act and on the verge of self-destruction, these men reveal aspects of a male consciousness that is above all in conflict with itself. Meanwhile, as the collection unfolds, a consistent view of postmodern civilization gradually emerges from its modal structure.

As Michael Zeitlin notes in his essay "Father-Murder and Father-Rescue," Barthelme's texts frequently contain "large-scale patterns of thought" that "draw into conceptual coherence the complex display of the signifiers" (188). In Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, it is as if Barthelme seeks to paint a portrait of man-in-general—call him Barthelmean Man—from multiple perspectives, just as he had done previously with his archetypal woman in Snow White (1967). From the vantage point in the mid 1960s, this man is as yet unsure of how to respond to the new era ushered in by Masters and Johnson, the sexual revolution, and the feminist movement. Ann, Sylvia, Alice, Pia, Nancy, Barbara—these are just some of the women who appear in shrouded contexts as "love objects" and antagonists to the host of nameless and often identical-seeming protagonists that [End Page 554] oppose them. In love, or at least in attempting to approximate the acts of love, these protagonists and narrators encounter a frightening reality: the definition of masculinity, once as timeless as the centuries, is changing.

From the title of the collection onward, there exists the uneasy sensation of thwarted masculine desire. "I suffer from a frightful illness of the mind," says the narrator of "See the Moon?" (156). "I am not well," announces the narrator in "Game" (115). Indeed, these words resound ominously with regard to many of the narrators in the collection, for whom sexual desire is neither an affirmation of life nor a celebration of human nature. Rather, as Maurice Couturier observes, it is degraded with irony, embroiled in the "impotence of language" (249), and more often than not, abandoned to frustration in surreal admixtures of fantasy and reality (252). Further, sex has left the body and taken up residence in the mind, where it has become sexuality, a corruption of values and expectations, a jungle of false promises and psychological booby traps. With the foundations of their identities eroding like sand in an hourglass, these men then find themselves anachronistic. Invariably they fail to integrate with the surrounding social order. They are unable to relate to women, their own families, and society at large. Whether as warriors or as casualties of the sexual revolution, Barthelme challenges them to meet the needs of the postmodern heart in strange, uncharted places, psychosexual battlefields, American cities more Escher-like than Elysian.

Despite its formal complexity, "The Dolt" (59–70) offers a convenient entry point into the collection. In this fiction, a string of prior failures haunts the efforts of Edgar, the protagonist, to pass a "National Writers' Examination," which in turn bars his way to a longed-for social identity. For Edgar, creativity is the medium that he has chosen to redeem his social and sexual identities, wherein a failure in one area has led to failure everywhere. Consequently, both the surface narrative and Edgar's own fiction affect drama with the innuendo of anxious sex. The surface narrative initially depicts excitement. Via his new story, Edgar hopes that he will at last overcome the obstacles in his path to social fulfillment. As he reads the manuscript to his wife, Barbara, they exchange interstitial remarks that imply a sexual crescendo. While Edgar "pause[s] to breathe," [End Page 555] Barbara says, "The beginning turns me on. . . . More than usual, I mean" (65). In the midst of the reading, Barbara's eyes show "genuine pleasure," and later she...

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