Apollo and Dionysus: Donald Barthelme's dance of life

Clearly, the catalyst in his new-found life is the woman: modern, intelligent, with that changeable quality we have encountered in Barthelme's women before. Significantly, the author defines her largely in terms of music: her nonconformity (she plays her accordion "over and over again, at the hour usually reserved for dinner"), her perseverance (as she practices a difficult piece), and her rejection of the "warlike music" that fills so many hearts. Instead of discord and competition, she yearns for the kind of harmony symbolized by the party to which her psychiatrist invites them:

patients will dance with doctors, doctors will dance with receptionists,

receptionists will dance with detail men, a man who once knew Ferenczi

will be there in a sharkskin suit, a motorized wheelchair--Yes, says the

psychiatrist, of course you can play "Cherokee," and for an encore,

anything of Victor Herbert's--.

Once again Barthelme uses the dance as a metaphor for social interaction, the coming together of opposing elements, the transcending even of sickness and despair; it represents, in short, the whole complicated pattern of life.

The dance, like life, also contains the element of change, shifting musical styles, different partners--and it is this that gives Barthelme's story that "lowkey emotional touch" that has long been his goal. The man may have fallen in love "forever," but the winter season, disapproving whispers in the hallways, the hotel's very name, and the demands of their careers all suggest that "forever" will not last long. Yet neither figure yields to despair, accepting instead the notion that "that which exists is more perfect than that which does not" (a rejection of many another Barthelme protagonist who yearns for the ideal, the imperishable, the eternally true). By the concluding paragraph we suddenly realize who this remarkable woman is. As she comes toward him "fresh from the bath" *and throws open her robe, she becomes fife itself, in all of its beauty, freshness, and contradictions. Barthelme's male protagonist accepts her invitation and joins the dance, even as the woman says "Goodbye."

In the end, the problem of authority remains, the forces of Apollo and Dionysus still pull us in different directions, but Barthelme's metaphor of music and particularly the dance suggests that some reconciliation is possible, if only in special and fleeting moments. The self may pay dearly for its occasional schottische, as the narrator notes in "Daumier"--life is a tease, always inviting and backing away; but through our recognition of interdependence--the dance--something "real solid [and] durable" may be done, particularly if we cease our yearning for perfection, either Apollonian or Dionysian, and embrace what exists. Perhaps there is an autobiographical element here. In the last years of his career Barthelme felt that he was finally getting more emotion into his work, reconciling himself to the world around him. In 1982, when asked about the artist's proper response to life, he put aside decades of protective irony, social criticism, inspired wordplay, manuscripts neatly typed and mailed to The New Yorker and answered simply, the artist should "embrace" the world (Brans 132). (1) Quoted in Schickel 42.