The King by Donald Barthelme

First published: 1990

Type of plot: Alternative history

Time of work: The early 1940’s

Locale: Great Britain

Principal Characters:

• King Arthur, the legendary British leader, who is pictured as still living in 1940
• Guinevere, the queen, his wife
• Launcelot du Lac, the queen’s lover and chief general of King Arthur
• Lord Haw Haw, a German radio propagandist
• Sir Kay, Arthur’s aide
• Sir Roger de Ibadan, the Black Knight, a visiting knight from Africa
• Varley, Guinevere’s maid
• Lyonesse, the queen of Gore
• Lieutenant Edward, a former plasterer, Lyonesse’s lover
• Mordred, Arthur’s bastard son, a traitor
• The Brown Knight, a knight from Scotland
• The Yellow Knight, Sir Colgrevaunce of Gore
• The Red Knight, Sir Ironside of the Red Lands, a Communist
• The Blue Knight, a man searching for the Grail, the ultimate weapon

The Novel

The King is an attempt to fit the Arthurian tales of Sir Thomas Malory to the situation during the Battle of Britain. In a series of small, unnumbered chapters, Donald Barthelme delineates, in an almost offhand, oral style, the concerns of Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and many minor characters.

The first chapter, written in a parody of the medieval Malory’s convoluted style, describes Launcelot riding about furiously in a state of wild and random action. It becomes clear that this story will be something different, however, when Guinevere is shown in the next chapter sitting with her maid listening to Lord Haw Haw, a historical English traitor who broadcasts propaganda for the Germans in World War II.

The story, what there is of one, is told as a series of conversations by an ever-widening number of characters who discuss the Battle of Britain, worry that the war is not going well, and intersperse their comments with talk of love affairs and politics. The main plot is the attempt of Arthur and the few knights to deal with World War II, especially the Battle of Britain. They endure two radio harassments: Lord Haw Haw, the legendary English traitor trying to convince the English to surrender, seems to concentrate his satire on Queen Guinevere, continually harping on her infidelities to Arthur and her frivolous lifestyle. Readers wonder how he seems to know every one of her deviant actions. The other radio annoyance is known only as Ezra, an obvious reference to Ezra Pound, the famous American poet who made pro-Axis broadcasts. He harps on anti-Semitic propaganda, blaming World War II on the Jews. The characters all seem to listen carefully to these men and then ignore them.

Side plots erupt. The lady Lyonesse, Queen of Gore (wherever that is), falls in love with a medical officer, a Lieutenant Edward, who in civilian life is a plasterer. Sir Roger de Ibadan, the Black Knight from Dahomey, tells tales of his native land, with its evil king and its love of sculpture. He in his turn falls hopelessly in love with a ruthless highwaywoman named Clarice. A quasi-communist crusade is preached by a homeless beggar named Walter the Penniless; another communist, the Red Knight, advocates the overthrow of Arthur, whom he derides as an anachronism. The Blue Knight, on the other hand, has a solution for the war: The Holy Grail. It is a bomb, he says, a blue bomb made of cobalt that is bigger than all the other bombs of the world and will successfully end the war.

In the spring, Guinevere decides to leave the government in the hands of Mordred, whom everyone knows is no good. The young Mordred immediately has dreams of power and plots to overthrow Arthur. Arthur is in military headquarters with Sir Kay, lamenting the loss of Tobruk to General Rommel and having trouble reconciling his plans with the interference of Sir Winston.

Sir Kay, worried about the outcome of the war, wants to look at the prophecies of Merlin, which only Arthur is supposed to see. Arthur, after much cajoling, allows Sir Kay a brief look at the next few years of the prophecy. All readers of Malory’s original story know that Arthur’s reign is supposed to end in an immense battle with Mordred in which almost everyone, including Arthur and Mordred, is killed. The battle is indeed held, and Mordred is indeed killed, along with almost all the others involved, but Arthur is not. Kay, surprised, asks Arthur about his; Arthur explains that he did not like the prophecy the way it was, so he rewrote it.

The war seems to recede into the distance, even though there is mention that it ends much as the real war did, through the intervention of rather unsympathetic Americans. The King and Queen go back to playing their mythic roles, and the book ends as it began, with an adventure of Sir Launcelot told in the language of Malory.

The Characters

King Arthur, the legendary leader of Great Britain, is a somewhat shadowy character. He leaves politics to “Winston” and the propaganda machines and interests himself in the military. He vaguely feels that his kingly role has outlived its usefulness and feels keenly the loss of the old, romantic Round Table.

Guinevere plays the part of the bored and spoiled queen, a characterization Barthelme appropriated from Malory. Like all the characters, she is not rounded out, because the purpose of the novel is not the characterization but the reaction of the characters to the situation. Guinevere seems to accept the accusations of Lord Haw Haw, the radio traitor, that she is “dallying” with Sir Launcelot, even though during the period of the book she is sleeping with the Brown Knight and not with Launcelot. She feels weary and bored and perhaps understands that the romantic role of queens is dead. She does insist, however, that “all myths come from queens.”

Sir Launcelot du Lac is a sort of noncharacter. The book opens with his fighting, and his character seems to be defined by his first jousting with and then befriending a strange knight. The book ends with his dream of “the softness of Guinevere.” He is concerned only with Malory’s two principal themes, fighting and love.

Sir Kay is King Arthur’s aide-de-camp and is primarily a sounding board for Arthur’s discussions of war and kingship. He worries about Merlin’s prophecies because, although he has never read them, he knows that there is an upcoming battle with Mordred.

Sir Roger de Ibadan, the Black Knight, is a visitor from the African country of Dahomey, where “white people are regarded as freaks of nature.” There seems to be little prejudice here, however; Launcelot invites him to join “our side.” Sir Roger is a vaguely passionate fellow who falls “tragically” in love with the female thief, Clarice, to whom he is second only to her thieving in importance.

Lyonesse is the Queen of Gore and is the wife of King Unthank. She claims that her husband does not love her and treats her badly, so she seeks comfort in the arms of Lieutenant Edward. She seems to stand for the dislocation of people and the dissolution of families that inevitably occur in wartime.

Lieutenant Edward is the soldier freed from the bonds of duty and family, footloose and confused. In civilian life, he was a plasterer, and he feels quite ashamed of his common upbringing, especially after he falls in love with the queen of Gore.

Less developed characters include the Red Knight, a communist who spouts the party line about parasitic nobles stealing money from the people; the Blue Knight, who urges Arthur to seek the Grail, an atomic bomb; the Brown Knight, a Scotsman with bad taste who sleeps with Queen Guinevere; and a crusading fanatic named Walter the Penniless who lashes out in a sermon at the “Pomp and Orgulity” of Arthur and his knights.

Critical Context

Barthelme identified his primary influence as Samuel Beckett. From the beginning of his career, however, he has been identified as a postmodernist, one who has absorbed the techniques of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce and gone “beyond” them. His writing technique seems to be that of the collage, a form borrowed perhaps from modernist painters. In his use of this form, Barthelme joins literary allusions, attitudes, and clichés, often of a romantic nature, in a sort of upside-down way to modern moral and social problems. His method demonstrates, in an inappropriateness of the fit, how badly such romantic formulae illuminate the modern world.

The King seems to be a mellower version of this constant practice. The merging of a romantic Camelot with the Battle of Britain creates a strange, inappropriate world. The romantic clichés seem inadequate, and the more modern situation seems banal and not to the point.

The tone of the novel is less harsh than in many of Barthelme’s earlier stories; the author seems to be saying that this is certainly not the way to run the world, but that he cannot think of another way. Such a tone is perhaps more in tune with more optimistic postmoderns such as Frederick Turner. There is, for example, a sense of affirmation in Guinevere’s assertion that queens are myth-makers, and Arthur almost accepts the fact that a mythic structure shapes his life.

The novel’s impact has been small. Barthelme’s popularity has never been overwhelming; in fact, he has often been accused of elitism, of appealing only to the well-read and culturally chic. In the wake of his death, his works have been removed from some anthologies in favor of works by such writers as Raymond Carver, James Allen McPherson, and Bobbie Ann Mason. Such a practice indicates that the editors of anthologies, at least, believe Barthelme to have been no more than a minor writer.

Bibliography

Couturier, Maurice, and Regis Durand. Donald Barthelme. London: Methuen, 1982. A brief (eighty-page) but illuminating consideration of the use of language in Barthelme’s fiction, with an eye to situating this use among that of other postmodern authors. Specific works are considered only in fragmentary excerpts.

Gordon, Lois. Donald Barthelme. Boston: Twayne, 1981. The most accessible and complete overview of Barthelme’s fiction up to 1981. Its 223 pages begin with a biographical sketch and, besides analyses of the first two novels and most of the short-story collections, include a selected bibliography.

Klinkowitz, Jerome. “Donald Barthelme.” In The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers, edited by Joe David Bellamy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974. One of the most informative, standard sources for biographical information regarding Barthelme’s life.

Klinkowitz, Jerome. Donald Barthelme. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. Klinkowitz writes about all of Barthelme’s major novels, but he argues for the “centrality” of The Dead Father. Includes a useful bibliography.

Stengel, Wayne B. The Shape of Art in the Short Stories of Donald Barthelme. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. This longer (227-page) scholarly work is a readable consideration of Barthelme’s short stories, examined under typal rubrics. Despite the lack of overt consideration of the novels, the work is useful in situating the longer works in their larger context.

Trachtenberg, Stanley. Understanding Donald Barthelme. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. A basic guide to Barthelme’s body of work, including brief discussions of his biography and major work. Includes excellent annotated bibliography.