Re: new yorker
John Smith (johnsmiii@yahoo.com)
Fri, 27 Aug 1999 01:38:24 -0700 (PDT)
--- Tim O'Connor <tim@roughdraft.org> wrote:
> 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.
I didn't feel the melancholy or regret. Of course,
I'm only 22. Maybe he's got his eyes on the older
suburban public that can relate to losing everything.
> > 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.
Unrelated note: that tends to be the way with most of
the people I've met. The progression from birth to
death follows an upward optimistic, hopeful curve and
then falls after 16 when kids start to talk about
being disenfranchised proletarians after reading 1984
and convincing themselves that they are the only one
left on the planet with the proper advice (\*like
me*/) for the rest of their dreary lives, and only
given a few blips and hills and valleys on the curve
for the occasional epiphany, straight down to the
dentures in the glass saying life is a shit sandwich
as Grandpa Elmo confuses the glass for a toilet. I've
tried cynicism, it doesn't work for me.
> > 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.
>
Wow. I had always thought that Kafka was a very
serious artist. Hunger Artist comes to mind, maybe he
was making fun of the caged man. Maybe he's another
jackass. I wish I hadn't read that but I'm sort of
glad I did. Everyone seems to be analyzing him for
his relationship with his father and they often forget
to describe the author. That's dissapointing, but I
will still read him. I'll try Cathedral sometime
soon.
> > 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
So what's he going to do? Blast himself away? How
does Carver hint to that? I mean, the imagination can
go anywhere or nowhere without direction. How could I
think if I were popped out of the womb into a white
room and fed intravenously without any other stimuli
(and they novacained my body and plugged my noise and
waxed my ears and shut the lights out and cut my
tongue off). If the guy did blow himself away, then I
think the story is lesser for it. It explains things,
but it is too easy to do (not that I could do it, but
he could have done more). His writing style is great,
generously terse, he said, she said, few yadas or
etceteras. But, I'll retain my reservations until I
read Cathedral. Until then!
>
>
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