"The School" by Donald Barthelme

1.15.22

Donald Barthelme painted by Elaine de Kooning

Oh, Barthelme. The writer read by so many great writers, whose work I haven’t read much of. I think I haven’t read a lot of Barthelme because I am allergic to even a waft of pretension, but I’ve learned that the wafting often originates in certain types of readers rather than specific writers. No, that’s a lie. Pretension lives everywhere. Even in me.

A guy in my cohort in my MFA program loved Barthelme. He wasn’t pretentious. Because I am a human who has some extra time on the weekends, and because I’ve committed myself to this project, I took myself on an internet tour of Barthelme. Here’s what I know now: I want to read all of his stories and books. I’ve been ignorant. I love his writing.

Barthelme was a collagist. He spoke and wrote about collage a lot. Collage is one of my favorite artistic mediums, because it never pretends to exist outside of anything. It needs everything to exist. When someone looks at a collage, they aren’t being strongly directed anywhere. There’s not a specific, absolute interpretation, not that there ever is with art, but with collage there’s extra room for interpretation.

George Saunders calls this story a “pattern story,” linking it with Chekhov’s “The Darling” and Gogol’s “Dead Souls.” He says there’s an escalation. I say: there’s a pattern, yes. Also, a loop. A lemniscate. Things are dying. First it’s the orange trees:

“Well, we had all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that… that was part of their education, to see how, you know, the root systems… and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the best. We complained about it. So we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing.”

There are two ellipses in the first sentence and their presence establishes…what? The use of an ellipses means something is being left out. For example, if I hadn’t used the ellipses above, I’d have had to ask you…what? In which way? In this first paragraph of “The School,” what’s left out is the tangible definition of why they planted the trees. What they figured (a “we” has been established) and “the root systems.” Ah, the root systems. We all know what a root system is. A root system takes shape in our minds as we read… “and also a sense of responsibility”.

Along with what’s being established through the interpretation of grammar, the prose here also draws the reader in. There’s a “we,” which indicates that the narrator is one of many grownups caring for these kids (and makes space for a new character to sneak in (maybe unnoticed) near the end of the story). The narration is first-person and arrestingly casual. Conversational.

The orange trees aren’t the first things to die, but they’re the first thing we see die. In the next paragraph:

“It wouldn’t have been so bad except that just a couple of weeks before the thing with the trees, the snakes all died. But I think that the snakes — well, the reason that the snakes kicked off was that… you remember, the boiler was shut off for four days because of the strike, and that was explicable. It was something you could explain to the kids because of the strike. I mean, none of their parents would let them cross the picket line and they knew there was a strike going on and what it meant. So when things got started up again and we found the snakes they weren’t too disturbed.”

The snakes froze because of the strike. What’s happening in the structure here? We’re taken backwards in time, but we never really arrive back to the “present,” when the kids looked at their little brown sticks, formerly orange trees. From this second paragraph forward there’s no real time marker. We don’t know if the narrator is describing events in the past, like the snakes, or in the present, sometime after the dead orange trees.

For me, this prevents the story from really being an escalation and makes it more of a repetition. There’s no hierarchy here. That’s what makes it good. The reader may assign more or less value to the things that have died (some human, some animal, some fish, some plant), yet all things have equal value in the world of the story. Their dying is all bad, but their dying doesn’t bring about any change, necessarily.

The peak of the story for me is about three quarters through:

“One day, we had a discussion in class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. And they said, who knows? and I said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn’t death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of —

I said, yes, maybe.

They said, we don’t like it.

I said, that’s sound.

They said, it’s a bloody shame!

I said, it is.”

This is the only real dialogue in the story, a back-and-forth conversation about life’s meaning. But the story itself is a conversation about life’s meaning, and what life means as it juxtaposed with death, the natural occurrence of death. We continue living, no matter the gravity of death. We go to school, work, and ask questions. We beg our teacher to make out with his assistant and he does, just a little bit, just for some comfort and fun, but then there’s life, a new gerbil walking in the door. We cheer wildly, despite knowing the gerbil will surely die.

What did you think of this story?

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Tomorrow we read “The Aleph.”