What is Multi-Textual? And does it work?

March 7, 2009

I’m trying to get caught up on my New Yorkers. Did you read the profile of Ian McEwan from the Feb. 23 issue (which, by the way, had that hilarous and grotesque cover with A Rod)?

Daniel Zalewski’s profile of the Atonement author (read it here) is so compelling, so readable, and SO long. I almost got a hernia on the elliptical trying to finish it (I didn’t–finish it on the elliptical or get a hernia for that matter– though I’ve already had two in my life–hernia’s that is– but that’s another blog entry).

I’ve decided i’m going to take a pen to the gym from now on so that when i’m reading the New Yorker on the elliptical I can mark places that I love.

Currently I earmark the page but sometimes I go back and look for what I was earmarking for and can’t find it. In fact, I earmarked a page in the McEwan piece and now can’t find why I had earmarked it.

Anyway…The other piece in this issue that I loved was on Donald Barthelme by Louis Menand. I first read him in grad school (60 Stories–here‘s a blogger who gives a pretty nifty analysis of Barthelme’s book) but was a little stymied by how he played with form; I was more of a traditionalist, linear writer then. Oh, my, how things have changed.

There’s a new biography of Barthelme, Hiding Man, by Tracy Daugherty (interestingly, a former student of Barthelme), which explains that “many people have got Barthelme wrong.”

“It’s not hard to see why they might have. Barthelme’s first short-story collection, “Come Back, Dr. Caligari” (1964), includes “The Joker’s Greatest Triumph,” which is based on characers from the Batman comics. His first novel, “Snow White,” which came out in 1967, is what they used to call, on the nineteen-sixties show “Rocky and Bullwinkle,” a fractured fairy tale–a modernized and mildly surealized adult version of an already Disney-ized story. His second collection, “Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts” (1968), includes a story, “The Dolt,” about a man preparing to take the National Writers’ Examination. In 1969, he published, in Esquire, “And Now Let’s Hear It for the ‘Ed Sullivan Show!,’” a scene-by-scene report of one of the programs in the manner of an agitated lover of the show. Many of the stories in his third collection, “City Life” (1970), are illustrated with images clipped from old books and magazines. Some of the stories are in Q. & A. form:

Q: Is the novel dead?

A: Oh yes. Very much so.

Q: What replaces it?

A: I should think that it is replaced by what existed before it was invented.

Q: The same thing?

A: The same sort of thing.

Q: Is the bicycle dead?

–”The Explanation”  (this excerpt from The New Yorker, Feb. 23, 2009)

I’ve only ever read 60 Stories, nothing else of Barthelme, but I’m thinking I might have to investigate these books. In the book I’m working on, I’m toying with the idea of using other texts throughout– letters, telegrams, photos, interviews, newspaper clippings, and various other documents i’ve acquired in my research.

Isn’t this called Mult-Textual? Intertextual?

Who else does this? David Foster Wallace, John Dos Passos… Who else? I know there are many more.

Is this distracting? Can it be done well so that it enhances the story?That’s what I’m trying to figure out.

Thoughts?