The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace by Donald Barthelme

Annie Jones, the Bearded Lady.

I suppose it is Donald Barthelme week on this blog. We'll see how it goes. 

After reading his magnificent short-story "The Glass Mountain", anything else by the author was bound to pale in comparison. "The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace" is slightly amusing but feels very light, lacking the author's penchant for biting satire or irreverent social commentary. By Barthelme standards, this is a fairly straight-forward narrative, replacing the surrealism and experimental prose with a series of  self-contained vignettes. The absurdist humor remains but it is subdued, more somber in tone.

The narrator is a circus ring master, a P.T. Barnum type character that is recruiting various acts for his show. The venue will be an abandoned palazzo once it is all cleaned up. Each section provides a brief description of the acts, perhaps a little backstory and how they might contribute to the show's spectacular wonders. There is the Numbered Man and the Sulking Lady. He might just mention an act in passing without any explanation, like the Singing Sword and a Stone Eater. Or, one section might contain a single sentence, such as: "We auditioned an explosion." How does that work exactly? That's not important because the author is going for quirky and absurdist humor. During opening night, Edgar Allan Poe will be one of the main attractions. Maybe he'll perform a live-reading of one his short-stories. Now that would be worth the price of admission!

So, there's a whole lot of nonsense going on in this story and I suppose that's intentional. Barthelme embraces the absurd, the irrational and the uncanny through the lens of postmodern magical realism. 

There are different performances such as "The Sale of the Public Library", "Theological Novelties" and "Cereal Music." Again, it is all very silly and one can imagine the type of showmanship and hilarity that would ensue with some of these titles. 

The narrator also interrupts the flow of the story to drop some profound philosophical nuggets (a common Barthelme technique): 

"It is difficult to keep the public interested. The public demands new wonders piled on new wonders. Often we don't know where our next marvel is coming from. The supply of strange ideas is not endless." 

This self-reflexivity is another recurring feature in Barthelme's work with art often commenting on itself and drawing attention to the artifice of fiction. In postmodernist theory, there are no new ideas and therefore the artist's goal is borrow, recycle, rearrange and make it new through innovative techniques. The author is successful in his endeavor to present a short-story in playbill form, but I'm not sure there is enough depth here for it to be memorable or worth revisiting. Still enjoyable though.