The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme by Donald Barthelme
Monique Dufour

Donald Barthelme. Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme. Ed. Kim Herzinger. Intro. John Barth. Random House, 1997. 332 pp. $27.50.

Not-Knowing collects much of Barthelme’s nonfiction that, the editor explains, “only the most dedicated enthusiast of Barthelmismo, to use Thomas Pynchon’s useful word, will have had the opportunity to read . . . before now.” It is the second in a series of three planned volumes edited by Kim Herzinger, the first of which was The Teachings of Don B.: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories and Plays (the third will contain previously uncollected stories).
Barthelme’s essay “Not-Knowing” often circulates in the form of eighth-generation photocopies from Best American Essays 1986, with the faded marginalia of previous readers and fuzzy, degenerate type. His work in this book retains something of the quality of the bootleg photocopy even though it is an edited collection. This Barthelme may be bound, but he’s still elusive, thankfully. The essays and interviews in Not-Knowing fend off the posing and dogmatic proclamations—the rows of sharpened number-two pencils and the sage advice—that are the risk of the genres. Take even his most declamatory moments: “Art is a true account of the activity of mind. Because consciousness, in Husserl’s formulation, is always consciousness of something, art thinks ever of the world, cannot not think of the world, could not turn its back on the world even if it wished to.” This point, which he repeats several times throughout the collection, resonates with the Stevens poem, “Of Modern Poetry”: Modern poetry “has / To construct a new stage. / It has to be on that stage.” This is the Barthelme of Not-Knowing, rigging up the theater and the mise-en-scène, at the same time performing “the mind in the act of finding what will suffice.”
At the end of a late interview with Jo Brans, Barthelme is asked to describe his ideal reader. He responds, “Just ordinary folks like us.” We should be so ordinary. [Monique Dufour]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme by Donald Barthelme Monique Dufour Donald Barthelme. Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme. Ed. Kim Herzinger. Intro. John Barth. Random House, 1997. 332 pp. $27.50. Not-Knowing collects much of Barthelme’s nonfiction that, the editor explains, “only the most dedicated enthusiast of Barthelmismo, to use Thomas Pynchon’s useful word, will have had the opportunity to read . . . before now.” It is the second in a series of three planned volumes edited by Kim Herzinger, the first of which was The Teachings of Don B.: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories and Plays (the third will contain previously uncollected stories). Barthelme’s essay “Not-Knowing” often circulates in the form of eighth-generation photocopies from Best American Essays 1986, with the faded marginalia of previous readers and fuzzy, degenerate type. His work in this book retains something of the quality of the bootleg photocopy even though it is an edited collection. This Barthelme may be bound, but he’s still elusive, thankfully. The essays and interviews in Not-Knowing fend off the posing and dogmatic proclamations—the rows of sharpened number-two pencils and the sage advice—that are the risk of the genres. Take even his most declamatory moments: “Art is a true account of the activity of mind. Because consciousness, in Husserl’s formulation, is always consciousness of something, art thinks ever of the world, cannot not think of the world, could not turn its back on the world even if it wished to.” This point, which he repeats several times throughout the collection, resonates with the Stevens poem, “Of Modern Poetry”: Modern poetry “has / To construct a new stage. / It has to be on that stage.” This is the Barthelme of Not-Knowing, rigging up the theater and the mise-en-scène, at the same time performing “the mind in the act of finding what will suffice.” At the end of a late interview with Jo Brans, Barthelme is asked to describe his ideal reader. He responds, “Just ordinary folks like us.” We should be so ordinary. [Monique Dufour]

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