The Land Across

Well, I finished Gene Wolfe's most recent book last night. It's filled to the brim with Wolfeish strangeness. Now, however, I feel like I'm better able to articulate why this phenomenon occurs. It's all about the narrators.

Wolfe writes many of his books in the voice of one of the characters. In the case of many of them, that narrator's perspective skews what's going on. Sometimes they're downright unreliable. In The Land Across, the narrator is an American who goes to a mysterious country that appears to be in Eastern Europe and gets into trouble. He meets lots of people and has adventures, none of which make a lot of sense until the end. There are cults, and severed hands (well, just one, I guess), and the crumbling castle of Vlad the Impaler.

Throughout, the narrator never tells us everything. And half the dialogue feels like it's intentionally non sequitur. The whole thing made me light headed, but in a good way. Especially the last two pages.

I was reading along, thinking I had wrapped my mind around everything. I understood the severed hand, and the undead dragon, and there was the mystery of the man in black, but I never expected to understand that one...and then I came to the sentence, "Except that I switched seats on the plane."

Nothing in the previous 285 pages had prepared me for that sentence. I read the rest of the book (all of a page) in a stupor. He switched seats on the airplane. I just wasn't ready for that.

Edited to add: He also includes a cool proverb that, apparently, he invented, on page 174: He that hunts the devil need pack a long spear.  Also I fixed the airplane sentence above.

The Best Stories in the World: The Bottle Imp

Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Bottle Imp" feels like a folktale. Not a fairy tale, notice. It's got none of the romantic aspects of the fairy tale. It earns its "happily ever after," but in a different manner. We'll get to that soon enough.

Stevenson's story occupies 28 pages of my Modern Library edition of Selected Writings of RLS volume. It's pretty long--longer than a folktale from oral tradition would generally be; it wouldn't be comfortable to read aloud. Here's the gist of it:

Keawe, a fine mariner, travels from Hawaii to San Francisco. There he meets a man who sells him a bottle. The imp in the bottle grants wishes, but anyone who owns the bottle must sell it before death, or the owner's soul will be damned. The catch is that the owner must sell it for less than he paid for it. Keawe paid fifty dollars. He experiments with the imp's powers and finds them to be genuine. He and his friend Lopaka soon discover that the imp fulfills the wishes in tricky ways, giving grief as well as fortune. For example, Keawe's wish to have a house on Hawaii is fulfilled upon the death of his uncle and cousin, who left him land and money. "Little as I like the way it comes to me, I am in for it now, and I may as well take the good along with the evil," says Keawe. He takes the house, and Lopaka decides to buy the bottle to fulfill his own dream of having a schooner.

One of my favorite parts of the story comes next: Lopaka wants to see the imp clearly, which the bottle has theretofore prevented. So they command the imp to show itself. Stevenson writes it thusly.

Now as soon as that was said, the imp looked out of the bottle, and in again, swift as a lizard; and there sat Keawe and Lopaka turned to stone. The night had quite come, before either found a thought to say or voice to say it with; and then Lopaka pushed the money over and took the bottle.

Sometime in the future I'll write about Gerald Kersh and his fixation on things that cannot be described and his attempts to describe them anyway. This is as good an example of that as any. By telling us of the men's reaction to the sight, Stevenson taunts our imaginations and makes a better vision of the bottle imp than adjectives could ever conjure.

Lopaka takes the bottle and Keawe feels okay about the whole thing.He meets a woman named Kokua and they get engaged. However, Keawe that very night discovers that he has leprosy. Remembering the bottle, he seeks out Lopaka, who--having obtained his schooner--has sold the bottle to a lawyer. The lawyer directs Keawe to another man, who sends him to another, and so on. He follows a trail of seeming good fortune to the current owner, who will gladly part with it. The problem is that the current owner has paid only two pennies for it.

Keawe buys it for a penny and the imp rids him of the leprosy. But now he can think of nothing but getting rid of the bottle. His misery infects his new wife, and she despairs until he tells her his story. Hearing it, she vows to save him, and she is wise enough to know that the world has more to it than American money. They have trouble selling the bottle, of course, and seeing Keawe's despair Kokua pays a man four centimes (a French coin, which are 5 to a penny) to buy it from Keawe. She then buys it from the old man for 3 centimes, thus taking the curse upon herself. Discovering this, Keawe gets a man to buy the bottle from her at 2 centimes, intending to pay the man 1 centime for it and take the curse off his wife.

But the man who bought it for 2 centimes refuses to sell it. He has tested the imp's power and now wants to keep it. Drunkenly, he staggers off, "and there goes the bottle out of our story." Keawe and Kokua return home, "and great, since then, has been the peace of all their days."

It's a German story, so it seems. Joseph Warren Beach traces its sources well enough in a 1910 article. Helen Grant has written a more comprehensive look at the history of the story. It's got some precedent in the Grimms' collection (tales 19 and 99--also apparently a legend in their book Deutsche Sagen, but I haven't tracked that down) and in The Arabian Nights (what with the bottle imp being very much like a genie). It was adapted for the stage in England, where Stevenson encountered it. He then made it a Polynesian story, according to the recent biography by Claire Harman, and it won him favor in that geography, particularly in Samoa, where he lived. Harman had this to say about the story:

The currency of the tale among the islanders raised Stevenson's prestige to a new level; he was perceived not only as rich and kingly in his strange mansion above Apia..., but a sense of magic and glamour clung to him. He was given the name 'Tusi Tala'--'teller of tales--and became the subject of avid and possibly satirical speculation. Stevenson told Arthur Conan Doyle...that native visitors to Vailima who had read 'The Bottle Imp' were apt to imagine it was not a fiction at all, and looking round his house and grounds would ask, 'Where is the bottle?'

Make of that what you will. Apparently in that house Stevenson had a large safe where the bottle was supposed to be.

Why is this one of the best stories in the world? Well, it's about the dangers of wish fulfillment. It provides its teller with the opportunity to be clever. And it's malleable. Though there's no particular tale type in the index that covers the core of this story (at least not that I can see), it's very much a traditional story. The various versions throughout time have proved that, with different endings, different settings, and the like, it can adapt and survive.

Saved by a Watermelon Helmet

I was fifteen when I discovered that near-death experiences could be fun. There’s something in them that affirms life, something that energizes and validates existence. This all takes place just before my sophomore year of high school.

Several months earlier, I would have said just the opposite. One ill-fated Friday, two of my friends decided to get a guy they knew to act like he wanted to beat me up. I'd never even met the guy. After a few minutes of my confused rambling, he got me in a headlock and dragged me down the hall past the indifferent principal’s office (seriously, the principal looked right at me in a headlock and just shook his head).  His watch scratched my neck rather badly. My friends thought this was a great joke.  Also, on that same day, I was playing basketball after school when a leap for a rebound resulted in my head hitting the black top with Tom Kraus’s elbow in my ear. I didn’t get the ball. And, I was nearly decapitated by a Mack truck in a bike accident. All that was when I was fourteen.  By fifteen, everything had changed.

The family belonging to my friend Mike went on a canoe trip. He and his younger brother, David, each got to bring two friends along. Mike asked our mutual friend Chris and myself. David somehow conned two girls into going.  He was ten at the time.

We drove in the family van to a town called Omer, Michigan, on the Rifle River.  Besides River Bend campground, where set up our tents, the Omer also boasted about its ice cream parlor. It served eight flavors, nine on some days. We had a whole weekend to explore the woods, canoe, float on inner tubes, and try to meet girls. Before that trip ended, all three of us—Mike, Chris and me—would nearly die.

My ordeal came our very first night. The three of us decided to walk upstream a ways, leaving Dave with his two girlfriends. We went by water mostly, and were enjoying swimming when it deepened enough. After about two miles, we found a bend in the river where the bottom dropped to about twelve feet and the current somehow quickened. Right at this ben a fifteen-foot cliff shot out of the water.

We had no small amount of fun hurling ourselves off the cliff into the waters below. The only problem we encountered was in scaling the cliff after each jump. Wet clay is rather slippery.

             

While ascending one time, I began to lose my footing. I was at the top, needing only to find some handhold to pull myself over the edge.  I grabbed a root, the biggest and sturdiest I could see. I soon discovered that it wasn’t attached to anything.

I had already lost purchase with my feet, and my other hand had no sturdy hold. So, with my trust in the traitorous root unfounded, I fell, I spun, and I smashed into the slightly jutting base of the cliff.  I slid into the water.

I didn’t hear the yells of my friends as they called to me. Evidently I was underwater for some time. I wasn’t the strongest of swimmers, but they stood on the cliff and waited.  All was black around me, though I retained consciousness all the while.

Eventually, I reached out and grabbed a tree branch, pulling myself to shore some twenty yards downstream. They described the scene later, to much greater effect:  the silence, broken only by the ubiquitous running of the river; the stillness of the air after I submerged; then the small and almost insignificant hand suddenly jutting out of the water to catch hold of the only branch within reach.

The next morning, Saturday, we got in canoes and paddled downriver. Two canoes—Mike, Chris, and me in one; Dave and his two friends (whose names I think were Amber and Jodie) in the other—got ahead of the group and got to the spot where the canoe livery van would pick us up well before the rest of the group.

             

We’d even stopped for lunch, which consisted of sandwiches and watermelon. We wore the eviscerated watermelon rinds as helmets.

             

We were to be picked up at a bridge out in the middle of a bunch of cornfields. There, the road passed over the river by means of a rusted, metal contraption that was covered with dirt and stones, the same as the road itself. A single house stood nearby, with a lawn so green it seemed out of place. The corn had not yet grown.

             

We were very early, as most of the others had stayed in a mass. Groups move more slowly than individuals, and it seems that larger groups move more slowly than small ones.

             

While I explored the house and its yard, the others went up onto the bridge. Soon, I saw stones flying by my head. They were attempting to snipe me.

            

Stones kept coming. I stood, unarmed by the fact that I stood in a well-kept lawn.  They had an arsenal. I’d been playing baseball for ten years, studied karate for four.

            

 I dodged by reflex. There were three of them, so stones buzzed by incessantly. Then, still by reflex, I caught one. I don’t know why, but it didn’t hurt my hand at all.  They were a long way away from me, and somewhat above because of how the ground sloped down toward the river, but I managed to hit the road sign right next to Mike’s head. The sound startled them, giving me time to scurry under the bridge. I was safe there, but trapped.  They dropped stones down every time I stepped out from cover.

             

But now I was armed. Rocks covered the river’s bottom. I threw a few small ones up, then lofted a rock the size of a fist.  In response, several chunks of watermelon rind splashed into the water.

I thought that was odd. I knew that they couldn’t have depleted their supply of stones.  I’d thrown blindly, though, and couldn’t really tell what was going on. I did remember that Mike had been wearing one of the watermelon helmets.

When no more rocks fell, I stepped out from cover and took a look upward. I saw Mike, bereft of helmet, holding his head. His eyes were wide, he stood right at the edge of the bridge, and he was laughing. It was a dazed laugh, one not entirely associated with the here and now. David and Chris pointed at him, mouths agape.

The next morning, Chris had his brush with the infinite. Much of the trip we spent at the campground’s playground. The swings, teeter-totter, and merry-go-round formed a circle around a large, wooden horse. The horse was made of five logs that had been nailed together to resemble something equine. Its head sat probably six or seven feet off the ground, and its long log of a body was about a quarter lower. We sat on that horse a lot.  It was near the bathrooms.

As the rest of us perched on the wooden horse that Sunday morning, Chris emerged from the bathroom.  He stood for a moment on the sidewalk before attempting to climb over the three-foot tall split-rail fence that separated the sidewalk from the playground. To scale this obstacle, Chris put one foot on the bottom log. He then began to throw his other leg over the top log, but the bottom one spun around in its rest. He toppled forward, smacking his forehead on the ground.

The ground, having been compacted by the tread of many feet, was hard. Not as hard as the concrete, but hard enough to make his forehead good and red for a few minutes.

Perhaps I hyperbolize when I write of near death experiences. Perhaps not.  If I’d been at all injured by that fall I could have drowned.  In some head-wounded haze, Mike could have feasibly stumbled off the bridge. The river was mere inches deep at that point.  Chris could have landed on a rusty nail.

           

Yet we all agreed that it was the best trip we’d taken. There was danger, and that meant excitement. The pain wasn’t bad; it let us know we were alive.

             

It’s best summed up by an event later in the Saturday of our trip. The three of us were running through the woods to meet some girls we’d met as they returned from a canoe trip. In our path lay a huge, fallen tree, maybe four feet in girth. I was third in our line, and saw the first two leap to the top of the tree and then back to the ground. As I hit the top of the tree, I decided to leap and grab a younger tree that grew nearby. With images of daring swashbucklers in my head, I intended to swing around that tree and land back on the trail. But I’m no swashbuckler, so all I did was crash into the smaller tree head first. The others came running back.

             

“Are you hurt, Dan?”

             

“Yeah, I’m hurt,” I said.  “But it’s a good hurt.”

The Lone Woman

One thing that bugs me about a lot of movies is that there's only one woman in them. When people start talking about the scarcity of roles for women, this is what I think about. Ocean's 11 is perhaps the easiest example to demonstrate the point: 13 primary characters (Ocean, the people on his team, the guy they're trying to rob, the love interest) and only one is a woman. Avengers is basically the same. Hulk, Thor, Captain America, Hawkeye, Iron Man, Coulson, Nick Fury, and one woman. Sure, she's got some stuff to do (unlike Julia Roberts in Ocean's 11), but not really. And Maria Hill didn't really have a role in that movie.

The comic book version wasn't much different when the Avengers debuted. Thor, Iron Man, Hulk, Ant Man, and the Wasp. One woman. X-Men: just the one teenage girl at first. Fantastic Four? 25% female. These things have changed a bit in the comics and movies. There were several women in the X-Men films, and the Avengers in the comics have added lots of women to their roster. But those things took a long time.

One reason I liked the movie A Knight's Tale was that it had a woman as part of the group (also the use of David Bowie's "Golden Years"). The blacksmith. She didn't have any romantic attachment to any of the men. The role might've been written for a man and simply given to a woman. I think it works well that way--since there's no attention drawn to her femininity, the story just proceeds. I'm reminded of this woman reading The Hobbit to her daughter, who insists that Bilbo is a girl:

And you know what? The switch was easy. Bilbo, it turns out, makes a terrific heroine. She’s tough, resourceful, humble, funny, and uses her wits to make off with a spectacular piece of jewelry. Perhaps most importantly, she never makes an issue of her gender—and neither does anyone else.

 See also this.

It happens in all sorts of genres. I remember The Departed. One woman character.

One genre that doesn't happen in? Horror. There are usually several female characters in horror movies. Sure, most of them die. And Carol Clover has pointed out the ambiguous gender traits of the final girl. But at least the women are present.

There are lots of exceptions to this patter, but it's awfully common. Even changing Bilbo to a woman still only puts one female character in the book. Things might be changing. Let's hope they do, and let's change them when we get the chance.

Quotations: Out of Control

In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.

Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, X

 

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.  Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

George Orwell, “Why I Write”

 

The story is primitive, it reaches back to the origins of literature, before reading was discovered, and   That is why we are so unreasonable over the stories we like, and so ready to bully those who like something else.

it appeals to what is primitive in us.

E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 41

 

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can’t help it.

Leo Rosten

 

In a sense, writers don’t get ideas: ideas get writers.  They happen to us.  If we don’t submit to their power, we lose them; so by trying to control or censor them we make the negative choice of encouraging them to leave us alone. But we can never force ourselves to be truly creative. The best we can do is to teach ourselves receptiveness—and trust that ideas will come.

Stephen R. Donaldson, Afterward to The Real Story