Story: "I Bought a Little City"

A young Barthelme. Thanks to the Guardian books blog - this entry is part of a long series surveying the short story.

I have listened to all of the New Yorker fiction podcasts, and I am now filled with complex feelings about the short story. It seems to me the form that privileges the craft of story first, entertainment value second, and lastly social and political commentary. For comparison's sake, most television and genre fiction seems to go for entertainment value first, followed closely with social commentary; craft recedes into the background, even in the most highly-crafted works. In poetry, craft is probably everything, and poems with social content or entertainment value per se are now an endangered species.

That is preliminary bullshit, but it matters to the young critical thinker still too afraid or too plagued by petty anxieties and self-inflicted handicaps to write. I don't write, precisely, but I do comment. To comment seems the biggest procrastination of all.

Enough. Now I procrastinate even comment.

"I Bought a Little City" by Donald Barthelme is "absurdist" in the sense that a man cannot, in fact, purchase Galveston, Texas, to rule over as absolute monarch. Perhaps even more absurd is just how much the protagonist debates with himself before selfishly inflicting injustice (he shoots another man's dog -- not quite a beating offense). But the story's truth is that if we were to give high office to any of the whining social commentators of the land, from our finest poets to the most unimaginative dolts, they would very likely fail to uphold fairness and decency in the realm. The best they would be able to do is hand the land back, and move away from the center.