Re: new yorker

Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Thu, 26 Aug 1999 21:32:17 -0400 

At 11:09 AM -0700 on 8/26/1999, John wrote:

> Has anybody read, 'Why don't you dance?'  I've heard
> Carver was an amazing author but I found myself
> puzzled when I caught that story in a reprint.

It is a phenomenal story.

> Why is
> the man's dancing with her supposed to be so mystical?

He's lost everything: his family life, his hope, his future, and and
has all this possessions, which are pretty much everything that is
left of his life, out on the lawn for sale.  He's lost human contact.
He has lost everything.

Along comes a young couple.  The don't know why all this household
material is out in the yard; all they know is that a strange man
seems to be emptying his house for no reason at all.  It's suffused
with sadness and melancholy and regret all the way through.

>  Granted, it's strange for a man to reposition his
> bedroom furniture on his driveway and ask a stranger
> to dance, but what is this story supposed to
> represent?

Carver himself had a few brushes with the bleak side of life, and I
suspect that in this story he was showing us a man who had very
literally hit absolute bottom.  The innocent couple knows little or
nothing about it.  Perhaps this ruined man was like them once; so
many Carver characters start innocent and end up cynical.

> I've read some cryptic Kafka and it isn't
> nearly as puzzling as Carver's story, if it is
> supposed to resonate with meaning.  Is there some sort
> of mystery hidden between the lines that he expects us
> to assemble?  I've only read that one story, maybe if
> I was more acquainted with his style I would see what
> message he attempts to convey.

Yes, reading more Carver ("So Much Water...." and the story in, I
think, "Cathedral," in which a man with no hands, only hooks, goes
door-to-door selling people pictures of themselves in front of their
houses) would help  you put him in his own context.  But I think
"Dance" stands pretty strongly on its own.

It's not like Kafka, who impregnated his work with menace and dread.
Carver's dread always seems to take place in the unforgiving sunshine
of parking lots or the overcase days or the sad hours of the evening.
Kafka, at absolute bottom, is hilarious; his friends said that as he
read his work aloud, he could barely keep from laughing at what he
had written, at the underlying perversity of it.  There is very
little funniness in Carver.  His people and places are weatherbeaten.
his people inhabit places most of us hope we never find.

> Is it a puzzle or
> maybe a symbolic portrayal of suburban life?

It's the puzzle of what happens when you hit the end of your road and
think you have no more choices to make, I would say.

My thoughts on it, anyway.

--tim