A Sick Town
By Jason Vines
Object of discussion:
Barthelme, Donald. “A City of
Prester is a town
where everyone follows the same philosophy and lives the same way. The town’s
residents are not individuals with their own distinct identities, but units comprising a
ubiquitous and soulless collective. Surprisingly, Prester is not a city in the old Soviet
Union; instead, it is the setting of Donald Barthelme’s “A City of
Churches,” which takes place in the United States. Barthelme’s Prester is,
appropriately enough, a city filled with churches, which ordinarily would not inspire a
dark description such as soulless. Barthelme, however, uses diction and irony to paint a
picture of a town that is outwardly wholesome, but inwardly disconcerting.
Some people might
not understand how a city of churches could possibly be disturbing. After all, if churches
represent love, purity, and virtue, how could any amount of churches be too many?
Barthelme’s descriptions of Prester adeptly answer that question. Prester is a city
where the streets are “…solidly lined with churches, standing shoulder to
shoulder…” Everywhere in Prester, people are “…confronted with more
churches.” If variety is healthy, then these details reveal a town that should be in
the emergency room. All of Prester’s residents work at or live in a church; for
example, “A red-and-white striped barber pole was attached inconspicuously to the
front of the Antioch Pentecostal.” As this detail reveals, even the town’s
barber shop is in a church. Had Cecilia decided to stay in Prester, her car rental office
would have been in a church, complete with “…a counter and a telephone and a
rack of car keys. And a calendar.” Prester’s churches function as restaurants,
with Saint Barnabas serving “wonderful spaghetti suppers.” In Prester, nothing
other than a church offers dwellings, jobs, or services. Of course, after Cecilia asks if
any building other than a church even exists within Prester, Mr. Phillips, Prester’s
real estate agent, answers, “None.” Barthelme’s diction presents Prester as
a town with strikingly little diversity.
Barthelme’s
diction also portrays the churches within Prester as intensely eager for more members.
“The mouths of all the churches… [are] gaping open. Inside, lights could be seen
dimly.” To elaborate, the churches all have wide and tall entrances so passers-by can
see inside, with the lights serving as representations of heavenly energy, enticing people
to enter. If that fails to work, the churches engage in desperate behavior to win new
recruits, which Barthelme describes using excellent irony. In an attempt to gain just one
more devotee, Mr. Phillips tells Cecilia, “I don’t think I’d pick the
car-rental business if I was just starting out in Prester. But you’ll do fine.”
Later, Mr. Phillips says, “No one would rent a car here,” but then he maintains,
“We need a car-rental girl.” Mr. Phillips is apparently so irrational that he
has no idea Prester’s desire to have “a car-rental girl” contradicts its
lack of genuine need for one. Even when Cecilia refuses to stay in Prester, Mr. Phillips
begs her to change her mind. Mr. Phillips’s irrationality soon becomes frightening
when he grabs Cecilia’s arm and declares, “You are ours… There is nothing
you can do.” The real estate agent is willing to use force to compel Cecilia to stay,
despite his knowledge that his town has no need for her services. The irony of Mr.
Phillips’s actions—the irrationality of those actions—bespeaks a monumental
sickness in Prester’s way of life.
To reveal the
details of this sickness, Barthelme utilizes diction and irony to show a society in which
everyone is a myrmidon who does the same thing in the same way. Deviation from that
pattern is, to quote Mr. Phillips, “very unusual.” In Prester, expressions of
individuality are “funny”; all people are members of a group, represented by a
church. According to Mr. Phillips, people can join “…the church of their
choice,” but all of the churches in Prester are Christian, so no choice truly does
exist. Prester’s churches try to conceal their sameness by using a variety of names,
such as “Bethel Baptist,” “Holy Messiah Free Baptist,” “Saint
Paul’s Episcopal,” and “Church of the Holy Apostles,” but the practice
is merely a weak façade. Prester’s residents do seem to know, though, that their
town’s life-style is not healthy. In response to Cecilia, after she says the
concentration of churches in Prester probably is not “balanced,” Mr. Phillips
replies defensively, “We are famous for our churches. They are harmless.” Mr.
Phillips’s response is a non sequitur, and
as such, it indicates Mr. Phillips might have unconscious doubts about the health of life
in Prester. A short while later, while Mr. Phillips is still trying to convince Cecilia to
make her residence in Prester, a young fellow shouts to Cecilia, “Everyone in this town already has a car! There is no
one in this town who doesn’t have a car!” This could mean dissent against
Prester’s establishment does exist at some level in the town; the man’s youth
lends credence to that notion, because young people tend to join popular groups that rebel
against societal traditions. The year in which Barthelme wrote “A City of
Churches”—1973—was rife with the activities of such groups, and Barthelme
could be reflecting those activities with the young man here.
The diction and
irony with which Barthelme describes Prester effectively depict a town where uniformity
and stagnation permeate the way of life, and where the populace appears to know something
is wrong, but few dare to admit the truth. If these few persist in their beliefs, though,
they could help change Prester’s society for the better, just as a few dissenters did
in the Soviet Union to assist communism in its downfall and in the United States to bring
about civil rights for all citizens. Perhaps, in a decade or two, a building will spring
up in Prester that has no pretensions about being a church. Maybe Prester will gain the
vitality that comes with diversity.