Apollo and Dionysus: Donald Barthelme's dance of life

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by Robert Waxman

"Willie & Wade" is one of Barthelme's most poignant fictions; there is no laughter here, even at the thought of a pop singer's "great contributions" to Western culture. The narrator's adulation, his desire to be included in a community of believers who speak the same language, share the same musical tastes, is understandable and probably harmless (think of the phenomenon of Elvis Presley, whose frequent sightings are anticipated, by some, with the fervor of the Second Coming). But in other stories this search for order, community, and control is more disturbing.

In "A City of Churches," for example, Barthelme's parable of aggressive conformity, country music has been replaced by the sound of church bells that demand assent. When Cecilia asks, "Do they actually ring these bells?" the real-estate agent who shows her the belfry apartment explains, "Three times a day . . . Morning, noon, and night. Of course when they're rung you have to be pretty quick at getting out of the way." Getting out of the way of the bells is an appropriate metaphor for a community where the needs of the individual--"I want a place of my own"--have been usurped by the coercive power of the group. "You are ours," says the agent, gripping Cecilia's arm. It is clear that the town has lost its "balance" in its Apollonian search for "perfection" and control over the vagaries of life.

In "A City of Churches" Barthelme borrows the ambiance of a Stephen King novel ("The mouths of all the churches were gaping open . . . Cecilia could see a number of heads looking out of the windows. But when they saw that she was staring at them, the heads disappeared"--the churches, disapproving of sensuality, seem to have swallowed up all the bodies; only floating heads remain). In "Paraguay" Barthelme's model is the travelogue or anthropological fable. Here we encounter a carefully programmed society in which art has been "rationalized," literature operates according to agreed-upon rules, and the country's very existence is "predictive." Unlike the visual arts ("Each citizen is given as much art as his system can tolerate"), music plays only a small part in Paraguay's civic life. But at one point the woman who shelters our traveling narrator sits down at a cherrywood piano and plays "a tiny sonata of Bibblemann's." In his essay "Not-Knowing" Barthelme refers to the sonata form as imposing "an orderly, even exalted design upon the most disorderly, distressing phenomenon known to us" (24). Is this not the goal of Paraguay's citizens, with their identical fingerprints, carefully calculated mixtures of animals, and marshals to maintain order? This is the dystopian vision that Barthelme's narrator takes with him when he descends "(into? out of?)" the country. The author's ambiguity is deliberate. Is the narrator leaving this planned community behind or is he entering one just as insanely rational--our own?

Barthelme's most elaborate use of music as a metaphor for the Apollonian vision gone mad appears in his early story "The Policemen's Ball," a study in repression and sublimation as captured in the ritual--the toasts and speeches, the couples sweeping across a ballroom floor--of the policemen's annual gathering. That the Apollonian values of "decency, order, safety, [and] strength" celebrated by these public servants have atrophied into something cold and repressive ("the steel gray of high rank") is clear from Barthelme's use of repetition: of individual sentences, individual paragraphs, entire sections of his text. The effect is to dramatize the entrapping ceremony that the ball has become. Repetition of a different but equally stultifying kind invades the speech of the chief policeman, the Pendragon; as he utters one cliche after another ("most honored in the breach . . . You are fine men, the finest. You are Americans . . . in the name of the Father . . ."), confusing America's theological and civic religions, we realize that Barthelme has recycled not only paragraphs but thoughts themselves.