A memorable postmodern, metafictional snapper straight from the outrageous imagination of Donald Barthelme. I love the delicacy and lyricism of The Balloon, a story with such a special beauty it deserves a review on its own. Thus, my write-up here although I included The Balloon as part of a collection of stories I reviewed previously.

Postmodern, lyrical and light, as light as a very large feather our tale begins with a narrator telling us he engineered a balloon expanding twenty city blocks north to south over buildings, from Fourteenth Street all the way up to Central Park. With such a whimsical happening, we are a world away from Hemingway’s old man sitting in the shadow of a café. In an interview, Donald Barthelme recounts when he first began writing, he wrote Hemingway-like stories but could see his efforts were awful and how his writer's voice needed to develop in a radically different direction.

This giant balloon is mostly muted grays and browns contrasted with walnut and soft yellows giving the surface a rough, forgotten quality and anchored by sliding weights on the inside. In his own creative writing, Barthelme was not so much influenced by other writers as by Abstract Expressionist painters like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning and Dadaist Collage Artists like Marcel Duchamp and Jean Arp.


Mark Rothko - Work in Gray and Brown
If I squint, I can even see these Rothko colors turning into Barthelme's balloon!

“There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the “meaning” of the balloon; this subsided because we have learned not to insist on meaning, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomenon.” In many ways, this letting go of the search for hidden meaning is the shared fate of those Abstract Expressionist paintings. However, perhaps ironically, the search for the meaning in works of fiction, both modern and postmodern, continues apace, including meaning in Donald Barthelme’s short fiction.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but what is the purpose? Such is the prime question forever posed in America, land of the pragmatist, the land where the only things really worth anybody’s time are those which have a useful function and, even better, make money. Thus, initially, the apparent purposelessness of the balloon proved vexing for all the hardheaded city officers and municipal officials. Sure, kids can run, jump, slide and bounce on the thing but why the hell is it there in the first place? But since the balloon could be neither removed nor destroyed (one night, in secret, city officials tried but failed) and a public warmth arose for the balloon from the ordinary citizen, the balloon became a city landmark.

Of course, occupying such a prominent position in the city, people began using various aspects of the balloon in many different ways: civic pride, sheer visual pleasure, enrich their metaphors, metaphysical speculation and, most frequently, as a point of reference to locate themselves, for example: “I’ll be at that place where it dips down into Forty-seventh Street almost to the sidewalk, near the Alamo Chile House.”

Here's a quote from Jacques Derrida’s The Truth of Painting: “Aesthetic judgment must properly bear upon intrinsic beauty, not on finery and surrounds. Hence one must know – this is a fundamental presupposition, presupposing what is fundamental – how to determine the intrinsic – what is framed – and know what one is excluding as frame and outside-the-frame.” And since the balloon is certainly a work of art, what would Jacques have to say about this public artwork stretching over half of mid-town Manhattan, a balloon with no hard edges, where what is inside or outside-the-frame is not clearly limited or defined?

French deconstructionist philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy chimes in this conversation when he states: “Construction and deconstruction are closely interconnected with one another. What is constructed according to a logic of ends and means is deconstructed when it comes into contact with the outermost edge.” Eventually, though, the outermost edge for the balloon could be clearly defined after twenty-two days: the flexible, undefined, mostly unlimited balloon became depleted fabric, trucked away to be stored in West Virginia, awaiting some other time when it can make its return to be reconstructed to deconstruct all the hard edges of city life.


It was agreed that since the meaning of the balloon could never be known absolutely, extended discussion was pointless, or at least less purposeful than the activities of those who, for example, hung green and blue paper lanterns from the warm gray underside, in certain streets, or seized the occasion to write messages on the surface, announcing their availability for the performance of unnatural acts, or the availability of acquaintances.”
― Donald Barthelme, The Balloon

The Balloon is part of Donald Barthelme's collection, Sixty Stories. Also, his collection, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts. And, also, can be located via a Google search. ( )