"Is the bicycle dead?"

Donald Barthelme, "The Explanation" (pasted in from Jerome Weeks' post on Tracy Daugherty's new biography of Barthelme, but first seen by me in Louis Menand's New Yorker piece):

Q: Is the novel dead?
A: Oh yes. Very much so.
Q: What replaces it?
A: I should think that it is replaced by what existed before it was invented.
Q: The same thing?
A: The same sort of thing.
Q: Is the bicycle dead?