Analysis Of Barthelme's Not-Knowing

The often-reprinted “Not-Knowing” is a spirited, idiosyncratic analysis of creativity the search for an adequate rendering of the world's ``messiness''--as well as a playful, sometimes self-parodying literary performance piece. The essay contains a short ``letter to a literary critic'' expressing condolences on the demise of Postmodernism, which Barthelme recycled into an unsigned piece for his favorite publication. Barthelme's many other pieces for the magazine waver lamely between its characteristic wryness and his own fabulist flair, though there is one happy, humorous piece that purports to answer a Writer's Digest questionnaire about his drinking habits. Barthelme also tried his hand at film criticism for the New Yorker in 1979, but his

Let me cite three such difficulties that I take to be important, all having to do with language. First, there is art’s own project … of restoring freshness to a much-handled language, essentially an effort toward finding a language in which making art is possible at all. This remains a ground theme, as potent, problematically, today as it was a century ago. Secondly, there is the political and social contamination of language by its use in manipulation of various kinds over time and the effort to find what might be called a “clean” language. Finally, there is the pressure on language from contemporary culture in the broadest sense I mean our devouring commercial culture — which results in a double impoverishment: theft of complexity from the reader, theft of the reader from the

Art is a true account of the activity of mind. Because consciousness 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 does not mean that it’s going to be honest as a mailman; it’s more likely to appear as a drag queen. The problems I mentioned earlier, as well as others not taken up, enforce complexity. Style enables us to speak, to imagine again. Beckett speaks of “the long sonata of the dead” where on earth did the word sonata come from, imposing as it does an orderly, even exalted design upon the most disorderly, distressing phenomenon known to us? The fact is not challenged, but understood, momentarily, in a new way. It’s our good fortune to be able to imagine alternative realities, other