Dionysius Doesn't Dance Alone

The Greeks had their maenads. Women under the spell of Dionysius would dance all night and then rip small animals apart with their bare hands. The Balinese have the Monkey Chant. The Sioux had the Ghost Dance. Hippie counter-culture had the Grateful Dead and The Doors. The French and others have carnival.

Throughout human history, across the centuries and across cultures, people have come together to lose themselves in drink, dance, drugs, music, and ritual. We all want, it seems, to expand our boundaries and lose ourselves in the company of others.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s thoroughly remarkable Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy delves into the history of group ecstasy, its suppression by colonialists, church officials, and political elites, and what it means for us now as we struggle to hold together a society of individualists.

This sort of social history is where Ehrenreich truly excels. While recent work as an undercover journalist (Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch) have brought her writing to new audiences, one hopes they will move along with her to embrace this profoundly meaningful history of joy.

Euripides’ Bacchae, often described as the most inexplicable of plays, explores the tension between ecstatic experience and order as Pentheus the king and Dionysius the androgynous stranger face off in a farcical yet deadly power struggle.

This archetypal conflict of Pentheus and Dionysius echoes on throughout much of human history. As the increasing popularity of such events as Burning Man and the enduring appeal of storefront charismatic churches and small dark music venues attest, the historic victory of Pentheus, while significant, is never complete.

The depth of the European ecstatic heritage is perhaps best illustrated by the cooptation of Dionysian myth in the social construction of Christ. Dionysius, with his various festivals and close association with the benefits of wine, was the most wildly popular of the pagan deities, although Baal and Asheroth were popular as well for many of the same reasons.

Nor are depictions of the Dionysian limited to the New Testament. While the militaristic god that evolves throughout the Pentateuch was well suited to an imperial religion held by a surrounded people, every time the chosen folk got a little breathing room they’d go running right back to Baal.

A dozen or more centuries later, as class and hierarchy increasingly defined the social experience, the central role of dancing and celebration in the life of the community came under fire, and under the watchful eye of the Calvinists was nearly extinguished.

Ehrenreich traces the evolution of the suppression of community to the emergence of social hierarchy. In case after case, the pattern is the same: elites increasingly pulled back from popular celebration into more exclusive and careful gatherings of their own. As elites withdrew, the subversive aspects of carnival-like celebrations offered both the opportunity and organizing structure to parody and sometimes attack the upper classes. They became threatened, and gradually outlawed popular celebration.

As Europeans took their increasingly dour worldview abroad, the suppression of ecstatic ritual was a mere footnote to the wholesale extermination of entire civilizations. Yet, as in the case of American slaves, what was driven underground would often reemerge in less overtly threatening yet still subversive forms.

While Ehrenreich stops short of offering a blueprint for the restoration of collective joy, she offers the universalizing influence of festival as an antidote to the impoverishment of public life. Being responsible to one another, she says, begins with establishing emotional connection. Recovering joy isn’t just about loosening up and having more fun. It may be a matter of survival.

Flight

Fuck neutrality. I love everything Sherman Alexie writes. I’ve got eight and a half inches of Sherman, not including the poetry, sitting right on my top shelf. Nelson Algren lives next to him. He was a prose poet too, before his writing went all to hell in a puddle of scotch. Algren's career spans just seven and three-quarters inches.

But Sherman's sober. Before he’s done, I’m hoping for a good ‘nother foot.

Flight is Alexie’s second novel, the first in more than a decade. Indian Killer came out in ‘96, and I loved that one too.

Lots of people didn’t. I gave it to my mother-in-law and it freaked her out. Novels about guys who scalp people aren't for everyone. Sherman’s issues were less resolved in those days. Since then, his work has grown.

Shockingly, I loved Flight too. When Sherman read the first chapter at Town Hall, I heard why. He writes for the ear. He inhabits the lines. He’s what happens when a natural poet who possesses a deep understanding of the spoken word decides to do prose. It lands as poetry. Words remind us that life is beautiful.

Many of Flight’s reviewers sound like my mother-in-law before she’s had her coffee. The Village Voice calls it a simplistic teen novel. The Seattle Times deems it “self-important.” The LA Times whines that Flight is “thin and disappointing.” Our good friends at the Seattle Weekly say it “barely deserves to be called a novel.”

The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Review of Books liked it just fine. They’re smart. Let’s hear it for east coast elitism!

Who can explain? Maybe it’s just garden-variety literary bitchiness. Or maybe they just don’t get it.

By happy accident, I’d reread Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five just months before. Flight inspired me to re-reread Slaughterhouse, and then return once more to Flight. And then Vonnegut died. So it goes.

Flight pays homage to Vonnegut’s masterpiece by giving us the awkward outsider’s view of a world that is both awful and sublime. While Alexie’s touch is grounded in his trademark humor and appreciation for the absurd, the material, like Vonnegut’s treatment of the bombing of Dresden, is deadly serious, and never lapses into cynical farce. Flight’s protagonist careens through time and space to participate in the various highs and lows of which humans are capable, and in the end finds a version of acceptance and peace.

Alexie is, first and foremost, a storyteller, and the time traveling format allows him to piece together a variety of vignettes, any one of which could have developed into a short story of its own. In some ways, this novel isn’t so far off from Ten Little Indians, his last collection of stories. We have a range of characters who hop across class and race and, now, time itself, to offer multiple points of view on the human condition.

We are reminded that, yes, people suck, but at the same time, love transcends. There are a thousand instances of horrible cruelty in any given moment, but there are also epic acts of love and kindness between strangers. There is abandonment and heartbreak, but we also see everyday rituals of affection and the eternal possibilities of redemption.

The climactic scene, which involves a drunken Indian, a harried professional, and a parboiled parakeet, is top shelf Alexie, pulling the best of which we are capable from the wreckage of everyday failure and disappointment. Flight may not, like Slaughterhouse-Five, be an enduring work of genius. But it’s a damn good book, worth reading at least twice.