The history of the short story

Prof. Lex Williford Danilo Lopez

Summer 2010

“The Indian Uprising”: Local Collaged Elements of Fiction

In “The Indian Uprising” Donald Barthelme brings one important innovation to the

technique of collage in fiction: he mixes three story strands using local language-only, as

opposed to pictorial elements imported into the work. In other words, the collaged elements are

the elements of fiction themselves: plot, character, POV, theme, setting, style and theme with the

medium of the written word.

Collage

Donald Barthelme compared his style of short fiction writing with that of collage (102).

Collage, which originated in pictorial art, consists of the assemblage of works (found objects or

original artwork by other artists) into one piece that forms a new whole, a new meaning. Collage

had a surge in art at the beginning of the XX Century Modernism with the works of Pablo

Picasso and George Braque. Dadaist and surrealist artist Max Ernst (1891-1976) is considered

the creator of collage in fiction with his novel “Les malheurs des immortels” (1922). Collage in

literature is also savored in poems like “The Waste land” (1922) by T.S. Eliot (1888-1965).

Nevertheless, all those works make use of pieces of works by other artists. Thus, in The

Waste Land, Eliot makes profuse use of quotations and footnotes, indicating citations of works

by others. He assembled them into his famous poem. In Ernst novel, the extensive use of images

by other artists within his text indicates as well the use of imported material into the narrative. In

The Indian Uprising, on the other hand, there is no evidence that Barthelme is using works by

others. There are no quotations, no references, and no apparent imported material. The three

strands of plot in his text appear to be all his: the Indian uprising, the relationship of the narrator

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with Sylvia, and the teachings of Miss R.

Plot-strands

The story has three plot-strands. 1) The Uprising-strand, which depicts the war with the

Indians and dominates the narrative. It is this dominance what gives or justifies the title of the

story. It is a chaotic strand, noisy, and violent: “Two of us forced his head back while another

poured water into his nostrils” (103), “…causing that portion held by the IRA to swell and

collapse” (104), “We attached wires to the testicles of the captured Comanche” (106), “We killed

a great many in the south” (106).

2) The Sylvia-strand, which talks about the narrator’s relationship with this woman. It is a

calmer narrative, with another sort of inner violence, the swarming feelings on insecurity, love,

infidelity, and jealousy: “Do you think this is a good life?” (103), “And when they shot the scene

in the bed I wondered how you felt under the eyes of the cameramen, grips, juicers, men in the

mixing booth: excited? Stimulated?” (103), “She ran off down George C. Marshall Allee,

uttering shrill cries” (104).

3) The mysterious Miss R.-strand, which conveys a deeper sense of the subconscious, a

hypnotizing and dreamy voice, and a sort of psychical confrontation: “Friends put me in touch

with Miss R., a teacher, unorthodox they said, excellent they said, successful with difficult

cases…” (103), “I sat on one chair and Miss R. sat in the other” (104). Miss R. also seems to

incarnate the pure-language portion of the narrative, the self-reflective idea, the meta-fictional

element: “I was disappointed by…the absence of books” (104), “A former king of Spain…”

(105), “The only form of discourse of which I approve” (105), and she goes on to list a litany,

another sort of collage itself. Other meta-fictional elements are “(it is Valery)” (105), “Skin”,
The history of the short story
Prof. Lex Williford Danilo Lopez
Summer 2010

Miss R. said softly in the white, yellow room” (106). And the one that condensates the whole

story: “Strings of language extend in every direction to bind the world into a rushing, ribald

whole” (106).

Symbols

We know that Barthelme admired the French poet Mallarme (102) (1842-1898) a

Symbolist who inspired Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism. This could be an indication that The

Indian Uprising may contain symbols at many levels: the uprising of the peoples (challenging

political establishments), the uprising of human relationships (challenging the concept of love),

and the uprising of language (challenging the making of meaning). Barthelme was looking for a

way to tame language, “People were trying to understand” (102).

Object as symbol

Throughout the text there are repetitive elements or symbols that bind or bridge the three

narratives: 1) Tables. In the Sylvia strand: “I had made after all other tables, one while living

with Nancy, one while living with Alice, one while living with Eunice, one while living with

Marianne” (103). Is the table a representation of the stability of marriage or a couple’s union? If

so, why so many tables-relationships? Why no permanent union? This paradox alters the

meaning of the table as a symbol of stability on four legs in a home as an object of reunion and

sharing. Then right after the Miss R.-strand, when she speaks we read again: “I showed the table

to Nancy, ‘See the table?’”. In response Nancy, “who is married to Harold” (106) sticks out her

tongue “red as a blood test” (105). Is this an indication that women don’t care about tables as a

product, as a build of the man of the house? And also in the Uprising strand, after a long

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surrealist description of a coat walking by itself, the paragraph ends: “See the table?”. Is this a

depiction of the table as an element of concreteness that binds the surreal? Or quite the contrary,

does the table belong to the surreal world as well?

2) Arrows. They attack in a poetic way, in clouds (102), but they also illuminate the “way

to the post office” (105). Each symbols seems to be a paradox, contain a dual meaning. This

duality of opposites is one of the characteristics of Modernism and Post-Modernism so widely

criticized by Structuralism and Deconstructivism theories.

3) The Comanche, who is captured and tortured at the beginning (103), who cuts the

narrator’s leg with “his short, ugly knife” (105), who finally spoke when they “threw the switch”

on his testicles (106), happens to be Gustav Aschenbach, a name that has nothing to do with

Comanches, who came from Silesia. In the end most of the people they killed were children

(106). Does the Comanche represent the futility of labels about race, national origin, and names?

Character as symbol

Characters could also be considered as symbols. Miss R. represents the subtleties of

language. Block is the boldness of honesty “Block said frankly” (104, 105). Sylvia represents the

need for love and acceptance even with the paradox of poisoning her with drugs, “You gave me

heroin first a year ago” (104). There are secondary characters that participate in the story: Block,

Jane, Kenneth, whom I do not go into their analysis here, but am quite sure they play a role in the

story’s structure.

Imagery as setting

Another difference with the traditional use of fiction collage in this story is the absence of
The history of the short story
Prof. Lex Williford Danilo Lopez
Summer 2010

pictorial images. Barthelme’s images are given in words and create the world of the story. His

medium is language alone and the images are on the page the same matter-of-factly way that

they lay on a canvas. In the Uprising story-strand: “The arrows of the Comanches came in

clouds” (102), “His body jerked, he choked and wept” (103), “Fire arrows lit my way to the post

office in Patton Place…” (105). In the Sylvia story-strand: “The table held apples, books, long-

playing records” (103),

Some of the images are a composite of images, a collage onto themselves, as in the long:

“Red men in waves like people scattering in a square startled by something tragic or a sudden,

loud noise accumulated against the barricades we had made of window dummies, silk,

thoughtfully planned job descriptions (including scales of the orderly progress of other colors),

wine in demijohns, and robes” (103). Here the description alludes to colors, objects, actions,

characters, sounds, describing a complete collage within the larger collage, depicting the setting

sense of war and chaos, yet with the logic and order of a planned work of art a pictorial collage

is. The apparent dis-order of a collage wants to transmit meaning with its assemblage. Or, it

merely wants to disrupt meaning as collage in architecture wanted to do or as Language Poets

since the 1980s want to do.

POV

Barthelme varies constantly between different POVs as the narrative progresses. Yet, in

the Indian Uprising plot-strand, he mostly uses 3rd person plural: “We defended the city as best

we could” (102), “Then it was learned they had infiltrated our ghetto” (104), which is a mixture

of the neutral it and the 3rd plural we.

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 In the Sylvia-strand most of the POV is 1st: “I spoke to Sylvia” (103), “And I sat there

getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love” (103). Although at times he also

uses 2nd POV: “But it is you I want now” (104), “It is when I am with you that I am happiest”

(104).

In the Miss R strand he uses1st person and 3rd: “Miss R. pushed me into a large room”

(104), “Miss R. began to speak” (105), “She wore a blue dress containing a red figure” (104),

“Miss R said” (105).

Voice

Barthelme’s voice is his own. In this story he uses a mix of poetic, lyric diction “clear

fields of fire” (103), “windows where men tasted the history of the heart” (104), “the sickness of

the quarrel lay thick in the bed” (106); with dialogic interventions (the colloquial conversations

between the narrator and Sylvia, Block’s words about the status of the war; and surreal

emanations, especially from Miss R.

Theme

To circumscribe this story to the apparent, outer layer of meaning would be unjust. In

each story-strand a theme may be found: the failed relationships of the narrator, the failed war

against the Indians (in the end the Clemency Committee is about to pass judgment on the

attackers), and the fluidity, the ungraspability of language. The theme might the impossibility to

know anything, “I decided I knew noting” (103).

Exhibit 1 – Overlapping Story-Strands in The Indian Uprising

 The history of the short story
Prof. Lex Williford Danilo Lopez
Summer 2010

cades and brigades to counter-attack and maintain the status quo. They torture. They only killed children. They fail. They

us relationships. He hurt Sylvia, he does not know her anymore. He is jealous, weary. Half way into the story Sylvia is no m

ectures on language, pushes the narrator around, and in the end she presides the Clemency Committee. This appears to b

Symbols that bind the strands

Works consulted

Ann Charters, The Story and its Writer (Bedford/St. Martin’s, Boston, 2007)

Lex Williford, History of the short story, course materials (UT-El Paso, 2010)