The Dragon Can't Dance. The author,Earl Lovelace, allows even the non-indigenous reader to understand, to feel the physical and psychological realities of poverty-stricken Calvary Hill - every "sweet, twisting, hurting ache"(p. 133) - more intensely , more completely, through his use of paradox. Indeed, oxymorons pepper the pages of his novel, challenging our habits of thought and provoking us into seeking another sense or context in which these self-contradictions may be resolved into truths, truths that are clearly universal yet at the same time inseparable from the combined colour and squalor of post-World War II Trinidadian life.Striking contradictions are employed most frequently in the author's characterization of Sylvia. While she is a relatively marginal character, in her, Lovelace limns a startlingly real portrait of a woman, body and soul, and, as virtually all male characters in the novel are mesmerized by her, it is fitting that the extent of her power is most regularly conveyed in terms of paradox. Already at age seventeen she possess a "knowing innocence"(p.39), intuitively aware of her sacrificial role to her overburdened mother's rent collector, Guy. When he would touch her, she sometimes stood still, sensing, almost mischievously, the need to perfect the "triumphant surrender"(p.40) fitted for the whoredom that was her destiny, if not her calling.Along with the omniscient narrator, the protagonist Aldrick Prospect is fascinated by her. When she comes with a white dress and oversized shoes to offer herself to him, he thinks that it is "as if she had come both to give herself and to resist his taking her." Unable to accept the social responsibility that she implies merely by her presence, Aldrick will later see Sylvia in necessarily contradictory terms as "Sylvia, that child, woman ... her eyes ... kindling a kind of active uncaring"(p. 114) toward him. Her physical beauty, "the rhythmic rise-fall of her buttocks, ...
