Apollo and Dionysus: Donald Barthelme's dance of life

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by Robert Waxman

At the end the narrator acknowledges that critical awareness may be less important than feeling; that the artifacts of civilization, with which they have surrounded themselves, have cut them off from certain essential realities: "What made us think that we would escape things like bankruptcy, alcoholism, being disappointed, having children?" Clearly, in "The Party" the social rigidity of Barthelme's policemen has given way to enervation and a questioning of those Apollonian values the Pendragon was pledged to defend. As the narrator wearily asks, "Is this the best we can do?"

The barbarians outside the gates of "The Party" finally invade the citadel in "The Indian Uprising," Barthelme's portrait of the fall of Apollonian society. Early on Sylvia explains how she manages to play a piano piece for four hands: "I accelerate," she says, "ignoring the time signature"--and this is Barthelme's strategy, too: he collapses past, present, and future; all places and all wars into a single, shifting mosaic, what he once called "an archeological slice" (O'Hara 191)--to make us see, participate in, and understand the breakdown of traditional culture. As in "The Party" this culture has become effete, over-refined, far removed from the suffering all around us, as we see in this formal exchange between Sylvia and the narrator: "`Do you think this is good life?' The table held apples, books, long-playing records. She looked up. `No.'"(10) In this world of classical music and tables made from hollow-core doors, suffering has become commonplace, a never-ending game complete with "referees" and multicolored uniforms.

The conflict between a debilitated culture and a vigorous barbarism is summed up by references to two literary figures. On the one hand, there is "Gustave Aschenbach," Thomas Mann's repressed protagonist who chooses the rational life of rules, forms, and regulations ("his forebears had all been officers, judges, departmental functionaries"). His opposite is "Frank Wedekind," the German Expressionist author who was deeply concerned with human sexuality and primitive impulses. (In his essay "After Joyce" Barthelme speaks of "the Eros-principle whose repression means total calamity"--16; see also Evans 52.) The implication? Both rationality and the emotions must be embraced if we are to see life clearly and see it whole.

Unfortunately, the inhabitants of Barthelme's Waste Land have rejected the necessity of this union; like Aschenbach they attempt to suppress the forces of sexuality, love, and the irrational or buy them off. "We sent more heroin into the ghetto." When the narrator tries to tell these things to others, he discovers that they will not--can not--hear: "I leaned forward to touch the soft, ruined place where the hearing aid had been." He is left with a heap of broken images: ash trays, red wine, blankets and pillows, the music of "Gabrielli, Albinoni, Marcello, Vivaldi, Boccherini." As the rain begins to fall, we remember T. S. Eliot's Voice of the Thunder, reminding us that we have not given, we have not sympathized, we have not journeyed beyond the solipsistic self. In the end, our narrator stands arraigned before the Comanches--Cecilia's "Secret," the "horrors" from "The Policemen's Ball"--the life-force he and his fellows have refused to acknowledge.