Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme by Tracy Daugherty

Author:Tracy Daugherty
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Postmodernism (Literature) - United States, Barthelme, American, General, Literary, Biography & Autobiography, Donald, Literary Criticism, Authors, American - 20th century, Semiotics & Theory
ISBN: 9780312429300
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2010-02-02T17:28:48.813101+00:00

Don remained intrigued by the May Days and their aftermath. In 1972, he wrote a story entitled “Critique de la Vie Quotidienne,” which ends with a character studying “Marxist sociology with Lefebvre.” In the early 1980s, at the University of Houston, he bought for his students several copies of a special issue of the Chicago Review (vol. 32, no. 3, [1981]), which focused on “The French New Philosophers.” He didn’t say why he’d purchased the journal, but he placed a stack in the center of the student lounge, marked each copy with a rubber stamp—big baroque letters spelling out “Property of the University of Houston: Your Immortal Soul Is in Peril if You Do Not Return It”—and obviously expected students to study the issue.

The journal contained excerpts of writings by Guy Lardreau, Christian Jambet, André Glucksmann, and Bernard-Henri Lévy, philosophers wrestling with, among other things, the failure of the May 1968 uprising. Generally, their meditations involved reevaluations of Freud, Marx, Adorno, Althusser, and Lacan, and looked for ways to reconcile theories of sociology, psychology, and political activism.

The gist of their arguments was this: If sociologists insisted that individuals embody primitive, prelinguistic tendencies that determine their social actions, and literary structuralists argued that language and texts shape human behavior, was there any common ground between the two? Following Lacan, most of these “French New Philosophers” recognized no real boundary between self and society. Language is the foundation of culture’s social and political structures, they said, and the individual’s psychological states are mediated and symbolized by words. Primitive, prelinguistic tendencies—desire, repression—come to be clothed in language, and in this way, society dwells in us all. Psychoanalysis is politics. Freud is Marx.

Wistfully, this view proposed to show why the May 1968 slogans “Everything Is Possible” and “Imagination Is Power” were overly simplistic, though admirable in their utopian thrust.

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