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Abstract: The Glass Mountain is one of Barthelme’s best-known and frequently anthologized fictions. Barthelme has reproduced the traditional Glass Mountain by using a postmodernist method, namely, fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and collages of different materials. Though it completes the basic plot of the original fairy tale, the novel is quite a different one. By carrying out an experiment on language, he created a ridiculous and senseless world in which people’s spiritual pursuit is absurd too. The climber in the novel is just a rebel who wants to pursue something more significant.
Key words: the Glass Mountain, Barthelme, postmodern, rebel
［CLC number］I06
［Document code］A
［Article ID］1006-2831(2006)11-0051-4
1. Barthelme and his writing style
Donald Barthelme, an original and influential American writer of short stories and novels, known for his postmodernist “collages,”which are marked by technical experimentation and a kind of melancholy gaiety, is the father of postmodern fiction. As a productive writer, he wrote more than 100 short stories, 4 novels, and a collection of essays and interviews. The entire collection of Barthelme contains various explorations of describing life and rebuilding the concepts of literature. He is truly an important figure in the history of postmodernism.
Barthelme’s works are less about the usual themes of unselfconscious fiction (people, people’s relationships, society, etc.) than they are about the process of fiction-writing itself. One common term for this kind of storytelling is 896Aeta-fiction” which flourished in the 1970s and 1980s. His style of writing is of much controversy. Some believe his works are full of nonsense and weird expressions, and his novels and stories go too far away from the understanding ability of readers. But at the same time many regard him as profoundly disciplined. Anyway, no one can deny that he and his works are highly philosophical beneath the seemingly alien writing style. The unreal and absurd image of the world he creates is just a reflection of the real world in which we live. Anticonservative in many ways, Barthelme’s fiction taunts the current society and its attitudes at every turn. And Barthelme’s self-reflexive and fragmentary style was even given a name— Barthelmismo. Absurdity, parody, irony, burlesque, farce, satire and so on abound at the stratum of events in Barthelme’s projects. (Lance, 1986)
2.Understanding the Barthelmismo version of the Glass Mountain
The Barthelmismo version describes the ascent of the narrator up a large glass mountain located at the corner of Thirteenth Street and Eighth Avenue. At the top of the mountain, there is a golden castle in which dwells a beautiful enchanted symbol. The climber is reviled by his materialistic acquaintances. Nevertheless, he defeats the huge eagle, succeeds in attaining the top of the mountain and finally enters into the castle, but he only finds the enchanted symbol changes into a beautiful princess. In a fit of disgust or disappointment brought on by the transformation, the climber throws the princess headfirst down the mountain.
Though it completes the basic plot of the original one, the novel is rather irrelevant to the original simple and clean story and it is no longer a story with a traditional ending. This is the Barthelmismo styled Glass Mountain story: an imaginative and distinctive story, not only in a new form, but also differently situated and structured. The purpose of his parodying of the fairytale is not to reveal the real world but to expose the falsity of the novel by using language fragments.
Then we will discuss some characteristics of the story as follows.
2.1 A post-modern text
Postmodernism, rejecting boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony, and playfulness, puts emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and collages of different materials. Postmodern fiction in America often extends the novel beyond its conventional generic boundaries and favors reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity (especially in narrative structures), ambiguity, simultaneity, and emphasizes on the destructured, decentered and dehumanized subject. Few authors exemplify this type of writing better than Donald Barthelme. The Glass Mountain is one of Barthelme’s best-known and frequently anthologized fictions (Lance, 1986). Barthelme has reproduced the traditional Glass Mountain by using a postmodernist method, namely, the collage of loose fragments. Barthelme compared his style of writing short fiction to that of collage, saying that “the principle of collage is the central principle of all art in the twentieth century.”Jerome, 1980) In the Glass Mountain, Barthelme carried out an experiment on language, he created a ridiculous and senseless world, in which he combined truth and fiction, seriousness and absurdity.
In the Barthelmismo version of the Glass Mountain, we can find those characteristics of postmodern fiction quite easily. The composition of the novel is only a game of words. In this new story, each sentence is an independent and intentionally numbered paragraph, and the whole story consists of 100 such paragraphs, which makes the story more like a“list” The author is not to express any deep meaning, but to write an article with 100 sentences. We can also notice that the skill of repetition is adopted. The author repeated the sentence“I was new in the neighborhood”three times and the sentence“I unstuck the lefthand / righthand plumber’s friend...”seven times. Besides the repetition of words, the narration of his experience is just the same as the original fairy tale. The pileup of words is in effect another kind of word game. Sentence 30 lists those colors of dogshit “The sidewalks were full of dogshit in brilliant colors: ocher, umber, Mars yellow, sienna, viridian, ivory black, rose madder.”and Sentence 63 lists many names of knights, “The following-named knights had failed to climb the mountain and were groaning in the heap: Sir Giles Guilford ... Sir Lionel Beaufort, and many others.”Those names are chosen or invented by the author at random to represent English knighthood. And the quotations (some of which are coined by the author), like sentence 56, adds to the absurdity of the story. Apparently, we can say now The Glass Mountain is a typical post-modernism text.
2.2 Symbolic meanings
The whole story is a combination of reality and fantasy. Those common things in real life are presented in a new way. The post-modernism style of the story gives its images deeply signified meanings. The nightingale is undoubtedly the modern plane, and the glass mountain is not a natural mountain but an artificial high building, which means the main conflict is no longer between man and nature. In other words, it is not a tale about man conquers nature and supernatural creatures, but a story about conflict between man and society. Sentence 31 presents the conflict in modern life: the conflict between the development of industry and the destruction of the environment. Things like Skyscraper, VWs and planes indicate that the story happens in modern society. But this story is a modern fairy tale, and the climber travels between the real world and the fantasy world.
The glass mountain symbolizes art, loftiness, and a kind of spiritual pursuit above reality. The climber was attracted to it, so he climbed the mountain determinedly. He is an intellectual, at least a cynical person who is not satisfied with reality and has a certain spiritual pursuit. Why was he always new in the neighbourhood though he has got quite a lot of acquaintances” We can easily figure out the answer through the author’s description about the neighbourhood. What a chaotic and ugly world it is! There were cold-blooded and greedy watchers, hypocritical and numb passers-by, gun-fighting gangs, colorful dogshit, and power-sawn woods. Living in such a world, he has no alternative except climbing the glass mountain to flee away. However, the process of climbing is painstaking and difficult, the author repeated the sentence “I unstuck the lefthand / righthand plumber’s friend...”seven times, which implies the difficulties that an individual struggles against vulgar reality while pursuing his spiritual ideal. Those knights are his comrades somehow. These knights signified another kind of intellectual in reality. They don’t know armor is only a burden and their horses are murderers while climbing the slippery mountain. They are brave enough to challenge the terrible society, but their pedanticism makes them bound to fail.
Though the world is unbearable, the author doesn’t provide us with any solution or outlet. It seems the glass mountain is the very way to free us from this post-industrial and post-modern society, but the story’s end tells us there is no paradise above the reality, and nobody can break away from society. When he finally reached the golden castle, the climber only finds that the enchanted symbol is a beautiful princess, something real, material, and vulgar. His ideal is also at the society’s disposal. It still has to be usurped and distorted by the secular world. If we understand this, it is no wonder that he throws the princess headfirst down the mountain unhesitatingly. He realizes the absurdity of the system, but he is unable to flee.
2.3 Subversion of the traditional story
Fairy tales are usually told in this way, “Once upon a time, there was...and they lived happily ever after.”However, one of the very purposes of the Barthelmismo version of the Glass Mountain is to overthrow such meta-narratives.
From the symbolic meanings of the text, we can do some further speculation. The author had drawn a world that is meaningless, insignificant, and unreasonable. People walk dogs, drink, fight, and destroy. Their lives are filled with boredom and despair. Such boredom makes us think about the significance of lives. An individual can do nothing with nature, society, or even his own psych and thoughts. Not only is the world irrational, but also man’s spiritual pursuit — signified by the enchanted symbol. Actually, no matter what the symbol finally became, our feeling of absurdity would be aroused inevitably.
Our world is absurd, and our spiritual pursuit is absurd too. Then we wonder what significance makes us continue living in this boring, despairing, and absurd world. One can not live meaninglessly. The image of the climber in the Glass Mountain is an exact image of a rebel. He resists the absurd reality by leaving it and climbing the mountain, as well as he resists the absurd ideal by throwing the enchanted symbol away. He gets his own significance through resistance.
3. Conclusion
It is true that for most readers, their first reaction towards “Barthelmismo”would be surprise, because the forms of his stories are rather unique and weird. It is not easy to understand his novel with the first reading, but the Barthelmismo version of the Glass Mountain greatly shakes the reader’s aesthetic habits and produces effects that traditional novels can not reach. The story reveals the absurdity of the real world through its parody of the fairy tale and the climber is just a rebel who wants to pursue something more significant, though it’s quite difficult.
References
Jerome Klinkowitz. Literary Disruptions: the Makings of Post-Contemporary American Fiction[M]. University of Illinois Press, 1980.
Lance Olsen. Linguistic Pratfalls in Barthelme[J]. South Atlantic Review, Vol. 51, No. 4(Nov., 1986): 69-77.
刘辉. 从《玻璃山》管窥后现代主义文学的创作特点[J]. 广东外语外贸大学学报，2003（3）：48-50.
Key words: the Glass Mountain, Barthelme, postmodern, rebel
［CLC number］I06
［Document code］A
［Article ID］1006-2831(2006)11-0051-4
1. Barthelme and his writing style
Donald Barthelme, an original and influential American writer of short stories and novels, known for his postmodernist “collages,”which are marked by technical experimentation and a kind of melancholy gaiety, is the father of postmodern fiction. As a productive writer, he wrote more than 100 short stories, 4 novels, and a collection of essays and interviews. The entire collection of Barthelme contains various explorations of describing life and rebuilding the concepts of literature. He is truly an important figure in the history of postmodernism.
Barthelme’s works are less about the usual themes of unselfconscious fiction (people, people’s relationships, society, etc.) than they are about the process of fiction-writing itself. One common term for this kind of storytelling is 896Aeta-fiction” which flourished in the 1970s and 1980s. His style of writing is of much controversy. Some believe his works are full of nonsense and weird expressions, and his novels and stories go too far away from the understanding ability of readers. But at the same time many regard him as profoundly disciplined. Anyway, no one can deny that he and his works are highly philosophical beneath the seemingly alien writing style. The unreal and absurd image of the world he creates is just a reflection of the real world in which we live. Anticonservative in many ways, Barthelme’s fiction taunts the current society and its attitudes at every turn. And Barthelme’s self-reflexive and fragmentary style was even given a name— Barthelmismo. Absurdity, parody, irony, burlesque, farce, satire and so on abound at the stratum of events in Barthelme’s projects. (Lance, 1986)
2.Understanding the Barthelmismo version of the Glass Mountain
The Barthelmismo version describes the ascent of the narrator up a large glass mountain located at the corner of Thirteenth Street and Eighth Avenue. At the top of the mountain, there is a golden castle in which dwells a beautiful enchanted symbol. The climber is reviled by his materialistic acquaintances. Nevertheless, he defeats the huge eagle, succeeds in attaining the top of the mountain and finally enters into the castle, but he only finds the enchanted symbol changes into a beautiful princess. In a fit of disgust or disappointment brought on by the transformation, the climber throws the princess headfirst down the mountain.
Though it completes the basic plot of the original one, the novel is rather irrelevant to the original simple and clean story and it is no longer a story with a traditional ending. This is the Barthelmismo styled Glass Mountain story: an imaginative and distinctive story, not only in a new form, but also differently situated and structured. The purpose of his parodying of the fairytale is not to reveal the real world but to expose the falsity of the novel by using language fragments.
Then we will discuss some characteristics of the story as follows.
2.1 A post-modern text
Postmodernism, rejecting boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony, and playfulness, puts emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and collages of different materials. Postmodern fiction in America often extends the novel beyond its conventional generic boundaries and favors reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity (especially in narrative structures), ambiguity, simultaneity, and emphasizes on the destructured, decentered and dehumanized subject. Few authors exemplify this type of writing better than Donald Barthelme. The Glass Mountain is one of Barthelme’s best-known and frequently anthologized fictions (Lance, 1986). Barthelme has reproduced the traditional Glass Mountain by using a postmodernist method, namely, the collage of loose fragments. Barthelme compared his style of writing short fiction to that of collage, saying that “the principle of collage is the central principle of all art in the twentieth century.”Jerome, 1980) In the Glass Mountain, Barthelme carried out an experiment on language, he created a ridiculous and senseless world, in which he combined truth and fiction, seriousness and absurdity.
In the Barthelmismo version of the Glass Mountain, we can find those characteristics of postmodern fiction quite easily. The composition of the novel is only a game of words. In this new story, each sentence is an independent and intentionally numbered paragraph, and the whole story consists of 100 such paragraphs, which makes the story more like a“list” The author is not to express any deep meaning, but to write an article with 100 sentences. We can also notice that the skill of repetition is adopted. The author repeated the sentence“I was new in the neighborhood”three times and the sentence“I unstuck the lefthand / righthand plumber’s friend...”seven times. Besides the repetition of words, the narration of his experience is just the same as the original fairy tale. The pileup of words is in effect another kind of word game. Sentence 30 lists those colors of dogshit “The sidewalks were full of dogshit in brilliant colors: ocher, umber, Mars yellow, sienna, viridian, ivory black, rose madder.”and Sentence 63 lists many names of knights, “The following-named knights had failed to climb the mountain and were groaning in the heap: Sir Giles Guilford ... Sir Lionel Beaufort, and many others.”Those names are chosen or invented by the author at random to represent English knighthood. And the quotations (some of which are coined by the author), like sentence 56, adds to the absurdity of the story. Apparently, we can say now The Glass Mountain is a typical post-modernism text.
2.2 Symbolic meanings
The whole story is a combination of reality and fantasy. Those common things in real life are presented in a new way. The post-modernism style of the story gives its images deeply signified meanings. The nightingale is undoubtedly the modern plane, and the glass mountain is not a natural mountain but an artificial high building, which means the main conflict is no longer between man and nature. In other words, it is not a tale about man conquers nature and supernatural creatures, but a story about conflict between man and society. Sentence 31 presents the conflict in modern life: the conflict between the development of industry and the destruction of the environment. Things like Skyscraper, VWs and planes indicate that the story happens in modern society. But this story is a modern fairy tale, and the climber travels between the real world and the fantasy world.
The glass mountain symbolizes art, loftiness, and a kind of spiritual pursuit above reality. The climber was attracted to it, so he climbed the mountain determinedly. He is an intellectual, at least a cynical person who is not satisfied with reality and has a certain spiritual pursuit. Why was he always new in the neighbourhood though he has got quite a lot of acquaintances” We can easily figure out the answer through the author’s description about the neighbourhood. What a chaotic and ugly world it is! There were cold-blooded and greedy watchers, hypocritical and numb passers-by, gun-fighting gangs, colorful dogshit, and power-sawn woods. Living in such a world, he has no alternative except climbing the glass mountain to flee away. However, the process of climbing is painstaking and difficult, the author repeated the sentence “I unstuck the lefthand / righthand plumber’s friend...”seven times, which implies the difficulties that an individual struggles against vulgar reality while pursuing his spiritual ideal. Those knights are his comrades somehow. These knights signified another kind of intellectual in reality. They don’t know armor is only a burden and their horses are murderers while climbing the slippery mountain. They are brave enough to challenge the terrible society, but their pedanticism makes them bound to fail.
Though the world is unbearable, the author doesn’t provide us with any solution or outlet. It seems the glass mountain is the very way to free us from this post-industrial and post-modern society, but the story’s end tells us there is no paradise above the reality, and nobody can break away from society. When he finally reached the golden castle, the climber only finds that the enchanted symbol is a beautiful princess, something real, material, and vulgar. His ideal is also at the society’s disposal. It still has to be usurped and distorted by the secular world. If we understand this, it is no wonder that he throws the princess headfirst down the mountain unhesitatingly. He realizes the absurdity of the system, but he is unable to flee.
2.3 Subversion of the traditional story
Fairy tales are usually told in this way, “Once upon a time, there was...and they lived happily ever after.”However, one of the very purposes of the Barthelmismo version of the Glass Mountain is to overthrow such meta-narratives.
From the symbolic meanings of the text, we can do some further speculation. The author had drawn a world that is meaningless, insignificant, and unreasonable. People walk dogs, drink, fight, and destroy. Their lives are filled with boredom and despair. Such boredom makes us think about the significance of lives. An individual can do nothing with nature, society, or even his own psych and thoughts. Not only is the world irrational, but also man’s spiritual pursuit — signified by the enchanted symbol. Actually, no matter what the symbol finally became, our feeling of absurdity would be aroused inevitably.
Our world is absurd, and our spiritual pursuit is absurd too. Then we wonder what significance makes us continue living in this boring, despairing, and absurd world. One can not live meaninglessly. The image of the climber in the Glass Mountain is an exact image of a rebel. He resists the absurd reality by leaving it and climbing the mountain, as well as he resists the absurd ideal by throwing the enchanted symbol away. He gets his own significance through resistance.
3. Conclusion
It is true that for most readers, their first reaction towards “Barthelmismo”would be surprise, because the forms of his stories are rather unique and weird. It is not easy to understand his novel with the first reading, but the Barthelmismo version of the Glass Mountain greatly shakes the reader’s aesthetic habits and produces effects that traditional novels can not reach. The story reveals the absurdity of the real world through its parody of the fairy tale and the climber is just a rebel who wants to pursue something more significant, though it’s quite difficult.
References
Jerome Klinkowitz. Literary Disruptions: the Makings of Post-Contemporary American Fiction[M]. University of Illinois Press, 1980.
Lance Olsen. Linguistic Pratfalls in Barthelme[J]. South Atlantic Review, Vol. 51, No. 4(Nov., 1986): 69-77.
刘辉. 从《玻璃山》管窥后现代主义文学的创作特点[J]. 广东外语外贸大学学报，2003（3）：48-50.