In the polysynthetic languages, linguists tell us, a certain world will mean "to throw a slippery object far away," though no part of the word means "throw" or "slippery" or "far." This is how we feel about those literary works of our moment which we distance, if we do not domesticate, by calling them "original": We feel that they are something new and something entire, though we fail to perceive how that new entity is arrived at.
In fact, a better name for original writing might just be "polysynthetic language"—certainly that is how Donald Barthelme's six books of fictions (stories? texts? apostrophes? aporias? no one knows yet what to label them) strike me. I know they have a certain general effect (as of throwing a slippery object far away), but the way this operation is performed is so new to me that I cannot determine the elements, cannot detect the parts that make the cunning device function. The one thing I can tell so far—and this latest book of brief inventions confirms—is that the very brevity for which Barthelme is on the one hand so prized … and on the other hand so taxed …—this very brevity is a signal part of his form….
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