Chad Taylor

Beyond reasonable doubt

INTERVIEWER: What about the more awkward question of writers standing in your way?

BARTHELME: I think deep admirations force you away from the work admired, as well as having the generating influence we've mentioned. Joyce may have done this for Beckett, Márquez may do this for young Latin American writers—force them to do something that is not Márquez.

INTERVIEWER: But hasn't everything been done?

BARTHELME: One can't believe that because it's not profitable. The situation of painting is instructive. Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. They've been a laboratory for everybody. Some new attitudes have emerged. What seems clear is that if you exacerbate a problem, make it worse, new solutions are generated.
The great Donald Barthelme interviewed by J.D. O'Hara, The Paris Review.
"I abandoned the album three times before I finished it. It really caused a lot of sweat - and heart-ache, I suppose. At one point I thought that I could never achieve anything more, musically. Not that I'd achieved everything, just that there was nowhere else for me to go, you know?

"It affected everything I did in the end. I found myself saying 'You're just a dilettante. You're not doing anything with the kind of intensity that it deserves'. It was a crisis of confidence that went very deep.

"I use processes - which we'll discuss later - to generate the structures of my music. With this new album, I found that I had to work very very hard to get the results I wanted - the process didn't automatically generate them any more, whereas it used to.

"I used to be led by the work. Something would happen and I'd just follow it. This time it wasn't as easy as that. Things seemed to be going in directions which weren't interesting to me any more - I found myself trying to use a technique which was bound to give a particular class of outputs to give a different class. So I was working against the technique, to some extent.

"I suspect that I've come to the end of a way of working with this record. It's a loss of confidence and I think that comes through - something more like humanity than whimsicality, you know? Not so much tentativeness as reasonable doubt. It's less brash than other things I've done."
Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno interviewed by Ian MacDonald, NME, 1977.