Apollo and Dionysus: Donald Barthelme's dance of life

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by Robert Waxman

Music also defines Constanze's liberation in "The Abduction from the Seraglio," both through the story's Mozart-derived title and a chorus that comments on the action.(12) Barthelme organizes his tale around a central contrast: while the narrator-sculptor inhabits a world of steel, concrete (he creates a "fifty-five pound reinforced concrete pork chop"), and machinery, Constanze represents joy, movement, the spirit of life that at times almost leaves our love-sick artist floating on air. But he pulls back from the implications of her values: "The really dreadful thought, to me, is that her real might be the real one." Needless to say, the abduction fails to take place; perhaps it is not Constanze but the narrator who needs rescuing.

Barthelme's most fervent devotee of Dionysus, albeit a shadowy figure, is "Momma" in "The New Music" whose Eleusinian followers, like those revelers outside of "The Party," beat on pots and pans and trashcan lids in their efforts to invoke Persephone and rejuvenate the earth (Roe 78). Momma's "ecstatic vision" may have been liberating for her, but it seems to have emotionally crippled her sons whom she ruled with an iron hand. Now in their middle years, they are fearful of old age and death--to overthrow which, ironically, their mother may have turned to the Greek goddess in the first place. Perhaps in reaction to her enthusiasm, from which they were excluded, her sons claim that their new music will be "drumless" and chaste. One brother even asserts, in the name of this music, that "life becomes more and more exciting as there is less and less time." But as they talk, Beckett-like, about taking a nap, removing nasal hair, visiting a retirement home where "the dead are shown in art galleries" and the living are put out to pasture like buffalo, we realize that the excitement of Dionysus is exactly what they lack. For all their talk, they do not hear the music, old or new.

A more amiable follower of Dionysus, in a more successful story, is Moonbelly from "City Life," who is destined to complicate Ramona's existence in the already "complicated city" where she lives with her best friend Elsa. The tedium of everyday life--underscored by predictable responses ("`Where shall we hang [the Magritte print]?' `How about on the wall?"') and Elsa's Apollonian tendency to shout "That's against the law!" whenever she is upset--is only heightened by Ramona's inability to attract a man. In contrast stands Moonbelly, a kind of satyr or earth god ("his great belly covered with plants and animals"), who appears magically in the shrubbery, sings songs about sex, birth, and rage, including a performance--we are told--in the "Ingres Garden," a calculated affront to the Apollonian tradition.

If Ramona is susceptible to Moonbelly's appeal, it is because she is searching for something natural and primitive, an original "paradise" beyond electricity and the difficulties of urban life. In a passage reminiscent of Thoreau's urging us to "work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion," Ramona offers this critique of the world around her: "We are locked in the most exquisite mysterious muck . . . Our muck is only part of a much greater muck--the nation-state--which is itself the creation of that muck of mucks, human consciousness." In the end Ramona is "impregnated" by Moonbelly's song, his primordial vision of life; for her a new way of living is "born," and she accepts it, especially since the alternative is her old life of boredom and isolation. Through the Dionysian figure of Moonbelly the musician, Barthelme dramatizes the "engendering force" of music and its power to make ideas reality.