May 5th, 2011 / 10:04 pm
Random

“The Balloon” by Donald Barthelme

In college I went through a stage of searching for and printing off as many David Foster Wallace interviews as I could find. I remember printing of the interview he gave to Larry McCaffery and reading it and stumbling into the passage wherein he speaks of ‘the click.’

At some point in my reading and writing that fall I discovered the click in literature, too. It was real lucky that just when I stopped being able to get the click from math logic I started to be able to get it from fiction. The first fictional clicks I encountered were in Donald Barthelme’s “The Balloon” and in parts of the first story I ever wrote, which has been in my trunk since I finished it. I don’t know whether I have that much natural talent going for me fiction wise, but I know I can hear the click, when there is a click.

Of course, I had to go find a copy of “The Balloon.” I had never read and Barthelme, had only vaguely heard of him and for some reason thought he was an author writing in the 1800s.

So I found a copy of “The Balloon” and began reading quickly; I really wanted to find out what ‘the click’ was all about. In my haste, I committed what I’ve long thought of as one of my most egregious misreadings of a story.

Here’s what my hurrying brain read the first time around:

The balloon, beginning at a point on Fourteenth Street, the exact location of which I cannot reveal, expanded northward all one night, while people were sleeping, until it reached the Park. There, it stopped;

Of course, the real version goes like this:

The balloon, beginning at a point on Fourteenth Street, the exact location of which I cannot reveal, expanded northward all one night, while people were sleeping, until it reached the Park. There, I stopped it;

As I read on, I was so excited by what I was reading–a story recommended by David Foster Wallace–that I missed several other subtle references to the narrator’s control over the balloon. You can imagine my surprise at the final paragraph. I remember thinking to myself, “That’s it?”

I am a reader who must constantly remind himself to slow down, or else I’ll miss ‘the click.’

Tags: , ,

15 Comments

  1. Joe Sutton

      I’m glad I came across this, as I’d just read “The Balloon” for the first time the other night and must have slipped over the same references–the final paragraph certainly caught me by surprise. I’ll have to re-read with extra attention.

      I’ve gotten into Barthelme from some school reading this semester and have been unable to lose my grip on the book since the class’s end.

  2. Je-me-moi, inc

      add to your reflection (winkwink) the fact that the books you have to read at the utmostslowest speed are sometimes the heaviest (in terms of page, for example, but far from just that), and you get the crave for having a 90plus years old lifespan. Click.

  3. justin

      definitely read it as “the dick” for long enough to feel crazy

  4. Arty Sellfish

      meta-ass bullshit.

  5. Ryan Call
  6. Je-me-moi, inc

      uh, the link doesn’t work.

  7. Je-me-moi, inc

      uh, the link doesn’t work.

  8. Ryan Call
  9. Ryan Call
  10. Ryan Call
  11. Je-me-moi, inc

      don’t hurt your throat, Arty!

  12. Je-me-moi, inc

      don’t hurt your throat, Arty!

  13. Je-me-moi, inc

      don’t hurt your throat, Arty!

  14. kb

      There’s a difference in personal narratives for me with this. I get the click, but I would rather call it a ka-chunk. I get “clicks” a lot, but the ka-chunks are better. Obviously, a guy like Wallace, his clicks are probably around the same feeling as my ka-chunks.

      I read McCarthy’s Child of God the summer I was out of high school, and there’s a scene / chapter early on, alone in the abandoned shack, and hounds run through. This is the earliest RESOUNDING KA-CHUNK that I can remember w/fiction (I didn’t care about fiction at all until I was out of school and I wasn’t going to go to college). What happened was I didn’t sleep for 48 hours or so after this. I can’t analyze away what that page and a half or so did, but I swear I was more “grown-up” after that. Two Mark Richard stories did that later in the summer, weird summer.

  15. Anonymous

      tinyurl.com/297sxrk