Asked to define her personal aesthetic as a writer here at WFR some time ago, Womack pithily responded that “Beauty is complicated.” An epigraph to “Orange Dogs”, the first story in Lost Objects, develops this sentiment further. It is ostensibly a quotation from an old German treatise on butterflies, and it reads “Sie warnen vor Giftigkeit”, or “They warn that they are poisonous.” For Monarchs and Pipevine Swallowtails, this is true. Beauty is complicated; so too are poisons, butterflies, the world. Womack attempts to shoulder that terrible awareness of apocalypse across this assembly of short stories. Some succeed; others, ambitious, stumble. On balance, they offer much to a generous reader. In the effort, they continue the response that weird fiction shapes to the question of the Anthropocene (Capitalocene? Chthulucene?), even while they broaden the ambit of weird fiction by introducing new spaces and settings for creative imaginations.

Womack is an Andalusian writer, graduate of the Clarion Creative Writing program, frequent editor, and co-founder of Ediciones Nevsky / Nevsky Books. These many filiations with the literary world yield a crop of diverse settings and characters in her stories. She cut her teeth in translating core texts of modern weird fiction from English into Spanish, including Karen Tidbeck’s Jagannath and Amatka, as well as the classics of gothic fiction from Mary Shelley and Charles Dickens to Lord Dunsany, and you can trace those influences in surprising fashion across the offerings here. The settings of Lost Objects range from an eerie Eastern Europe to a genetically-reinvented Scotland, and from a Thatcher-esque world of English mining to a frozen world of ice and storms. Her protagonists are intellectually curious but socially-marginal characters, children and librarians, old scientists and regretful scroungers. For a debut, Lost Objects looks to a great range of sources and shoulders an immense weight.

***

Lost Objects is divided into two sections. The first offers a number of shorter stories, of which one of the best is “Black Isle”, a story set in Scotland that concerns the generic reconstruction of entire species and biospheres. Other stand-outs are the mysterious “Marvels Do Not Oftimes Occur” and “Orange Dogs”, mentioned above. (You can also read “Orange Dogs” here on Weird Fiction Review if you are so inclined.) Across these stories, apocalypse and survival take on many faces, while human desires—and regrets—take flight in lyric moments of the imagination. Over and over again, the things humans make that will exist into the future are put in jeopardy. For example, “Black Isle” posits a mysterious company whose re-envisioning of the genetic sequence has allowed for massive changes to the ecological life and animal composition of the world after the sudden vanishing of birds and other animals. “Neo-Bio” has made artificial creatures such as blue bears and orange lizards possible—and also necessitates the laws against these aesthetic disasters. To the dismay of the scientists at the forefront of this change, however, all is not as it seems, and the recreation of the world according to XenoLab may not be as sustainable as claimed.

In contrast to the semi-recognizable corporate earth of “Black Isle”, “Orange Dogs” foresees a broken, limping world of scarcity wherein knowledge of the old world is rare and parcelled out, and where creatures that we may be familiar with have transformed beyond comprehension. What were once butterflies are now hunters that use venom, giant insects roam the world, seasons have changed, and floods have reworked the distribution of lands, cities, of lives. Anxieties over children and progeny of various kinds, natural or unnatural, recur in these stories, as do concerns with fraught relationships in the decay of social networks. Crucially, in these short stories, as in another of the more evocative tales, “Little Red Drops”, guilt and regret shadow each of the major characters. So too do acute if slightly akimbo one liners lodge themselves in the imagination. For example, see the one-line self-reflection provided by Olga, the narrator of the latter story: “What a fierce thing was she, a jilted woman.”

From the evidence provided, Womack prefers to frustrate resolution and the narrative impulse to tie up loose ends. Closure is clearly a relic of the past and can no longer anchor the lives of the people in her tales. Instead, climaxes frequently bring readers to a transformative awareness wherein the world itself—or at least the guilty, haunted visions of that we see through the eyes of Womack’s protagonists—seems to change. The first section of Lost Objects comes to a close with the book’s most intense effort to pay witness to change in its moment of world-altering gravity, “Marvels Do Not Ofttimes Occur”. Here, a “celestial phenomenon” leaves its prospective early modern viewer (placed in Nuremberg, 1561) astonished and alarmed. The pious recorder’s voice is particularly striking and plaintive—as poignant as a story of death, destruction, and disappearance can be. As the recorder writes there, “For all that we have suffered, and have deserved to suffer, may God grant us his help. I put my hand to this true account, at Nuremburg, the third anniversary of the death of Doctor Johannes Bugenhagen of Wollin. What would he have made of it I wonder.”

The second section of Lost Objects primarily consists of “Kingfisher”, a short story about a librarian whose relationship with birds, beauty, work, writing, and her husband result in a delirious turn of affairs. The beginning of this story is a blurred boundary between an initially recognizable world and a later turn toward something much weirder. Take this early passage, for instance. It in, the narrator-writer reflects on her sleepy life in a small village:

I was getting bored by then. Of the friendly faces, the easiness of it all. I started fantasising that I needed to deal with some obstacles in order to produce good material. That I needed to be a little bit uncomfortable, a little bit cold, a little bit unhappy. An excuse as good or as bad as any other, designed to clear my mind of the real fear: that I would never write again. My fellow classmates from the writing class I had attended were doing very well for themselves; some were doing incredibly well for themselves. I was ashamed of how jealous this made me: until then I had always thought I was a good person. I felt happy for them, but I also kept wondering why I could not be as successful as they were.

Given what follows, this passage suggests an uncanniness to the story in the sense that Tzvetan Todorov discussed years ago in The Fantastic. Its prosaic elements anchor the story in a world much like ours, one nervously familiar to that produced by the news headlines and deep-seated anxieties we all know too well. So too are the protagonist’s deep concerns with her employment and employability. The expensive education she has received has not prepared her for a living in a small village where fishing, farming, and small-holding are primary sources of economic and household sustenance.

Like those protagonists in the shorter stories, the narrator of “Kingfisher” feels intense regret when she reflects on the past. As she admits, “sometimes it felt as if all the sacrifices that my parents had made to provide me with a better future had been for nothing.” If the world of the past is one of capitalist expansion and sacrifice, one that foresaw only better tomorrows while it devoured the bone marrow of today, the new world is smaller and much reduced in ambition.

Possibilities that had been obvious to our parents even one generation back were now impossible dreams. Housing was unaffordable, so we would never own a place of our own, although at the same time there were hundreds, thousands, of houses and rooms empty up and down the country. They were just owned by other people, not us: banks and companies and trusts and corporations. […]  There were not many cars anymore, no air travel, although I was secretly happy about this. I remember flying once, when I was very little, how frightening it was, how miraculous it felt. But the wrong kind of miracle, like black magic. […] This brave new world was about wanting fewer things, not more things. There were no more certainties.

The disappearances that mark “Kingfisher” include those of animals and even children. Without tracing the story too closely, and following its dreams and nightmares, the revelations of the story yield perhaps less than the fact of the complex network that it is trying to harness into a coherent individual’s story during such transformative change. Womack’s book does not end there, however, but with the fleeting and yet majestic “A Place for Wild Beasts”. It might be the sequencing of the collection, but the opposition of the long and sometimes laborious “Kingfisher” with the brilliant snippet of “A Place for Wild Beasts” suggests that the best passages in Lost Objects are those in which the lyrical imagination is given room enough to take flight, at which point it—quicksilver—vanishes.

***

The contemporary imagination faces a plethora of near-unimaginable forces about which just enough is known for the mind to shy away in horror or disbelief. Among her inspirations from the gothic traditions of Spain and England, Womack cites newspaper material concerning climate change, social inequity, and the new Gilded Age culture. These things beggar the imagination, even as they are the creations of ordinary forces and human acts. Perhaps the most significant indication of this transformation is that the current geological epoch is named after human activity. In the time of the Anthropocene, telling stories about the future is fraught with anxiety. Merely imagining what a future might be like is difficult, both materially and emotionally. Historians Christophe Bonduel and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argue in their recent study The Shock of the Anthropocene that Anthropocentric imaginations must accept a “double reality”:

On the one hand, the Earth has seen other epochs in the last 4.5 billion years, and life will continue in one form or another with or without humans. But the new status that we are launching the Earth into will bring with them a disorder, penury and violence that will render it less readily habitable by humans.

Can this knowledge be incorporated into the vision of world-historical time that supplies literary fiction its material? Lost Objects suggests that it might be possible—maybe—in weird fiction. The multiple reductions and disappearances within Womack’s stories hint at what many people already know: society is unsustainable. As Andreas Malm notes with understated severity in The Progress of This Storm, “Expect more gifts of history to be withdrawn, one after the other, primarily from those who never received very many of them in the first place.” There is always more to consider. What is to be done when the intimate and everyday nature of work—its precarity for some and its meaninglessness for others—is “a scar across our collective soul”, in the words of anthropologist David Graeber. Perhaps, as the protagonist of “Kingfisher” wonders, our imaginations must catch up with our needs and desires, which must themselves freshly confront the world. As the editors of the recent book Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet point out, “Life has been monstrous almost from its beginnings.”

What a world. There will always be fiction to offer an interpretive lens, a prophetic augury. With the publication of Lost Objects, Marian Womack rises to the challenge. She offers stories of crisis wherein the nature of human work and our capacity to prepare for and live within the future as we understand it are put to the question. They bear that weight about as well as can be expected. Cumulatively, they suggest than that the human ability to create a future is failing, and that the “lost objects” of the title are the dreamt-of lives that would—that could—exist however many years from now. Whatever form they take, the prediction that Womack makes with certainty is always this: they will be almost unrecognizable.

The post Review: “Lost Objects: Stories” by Marian Womack appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Today, the revival of interest in Anna Kavan is ongoing. The first Anna Kavan Symposium was held at the Institute of English Studies in London in 2014 and, in 2017, a Kavan-dedicated special issue of the journal Women: A Cultural Review followed. We now have Penguin Classics’ new edition of Ice. This revival is well-timed; Kavan’s unflinching vision still has great power. More and more, the world as we know it is ending; to some degree, it looks like this is our fault. In Kavan’s last novel, Ice, the apocalypse isn’t ecological—it is psychosocial, a premonition of the emotional actions that lead to a world’s end.

Kavan knew much from the painful and passionate events that punctuated her life. She knew solace too, of a kind; in the 1930s, Kavan took up a lifelong addiction to heroin accompanied by a syringe she called Bazooka. A lurking danger of weird fiction is the frequency with which its writers’ psychological distress can be championed in and of itself. What this tendency fails to attend to is the critical charge that attends the revelation of that distress as a product of repression or alienation. Kavan’s heroin addiction and psychological turmoil resembles the schizophrenia of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus insofar as the need to discern symptoms from subjects (or causes from corrosions) is not always undertaken with care. As Carole Sweeney suggests in her article “Keeping the Ruins Private”, heroin was not a crucial element of Kavan’s writing even if it may have been “essential” to her life. Insisting that Ice be read only through the lens of heroin addiction not only denigrates its author. It also misses the evidence provided by the novel itself. Nevertheless, and however it is read, this dark allure helps to draw Kavan’s texts into the terrain of the weird.

Along a different line of thinking, much can be made from Kavan’s decision to take up the name of one of her characters. She made this decision upon leaving a sanatorium in which she had been coping with the dissolution of her second marriage and a failed suicide attempt. Her name was legally changed in 1939. This act of auto-deictic fixation overwrites her societal identity with that of literary fiction. Yet to read her work following this act as complete auto-fictionalization is to miss the point she made in her destruction of all her journals and personal diaries before her death.

Kavan’s texts are a compound act of self-creation. They are replete with the tropes and entrapments of the written word but entirely composed as an ever-changing monument to the self-in-danger. As Kate Zambreno puts it, Kavan wrote as if looking in a mirror. She rearranged the usual divisions between subject and object, writer and character. This allowed her to see more clearly, to write more clinically. Or, as Jonathan Lethem puts it in his new introduction to this edition, “one feels at the mercy of an absolutely precise and merciless prose machine, one simply uninterested in producing the illusion of cause and effect” (ix). This machine is as capable of destruction as it is of creation. Both are subsumed under the general power of fiction which is not to make things happen but instead to make things seem and appear.

This writing strategy calls for a tactical reading of the novel’s agile code-switching where things are and are not as they are presented. The effect is much stronger than in literary realism’s tired gambit of the untrustworthy narrator. For Kavan, the structures on which common visions of the world are based are understood as already deceptive. What emerges is a whirlwind of symbols, a torrent of affective structures that parade, narrate, detonate. In a directly related effort, and much like surrealists as different as André Breton and Leonora Carrington, Kavan devotes herself to a vision of the female body as a contested site subject to patriarchal control, as Nathalie Ferris argues in her 2017 article “The Double Play of Mirrors”. The gambit of code-switching is perhaps nowhere as frequently evidenced as in the play of meaning attributed to women’s bodies from all directions. Ice examines the violence that women are subjected to from its most direct source: the male gaze.

There is more. In Kavan’s novels, much as in her life, people and characters travel without end. As Zambreno argues, major characters in her novels ceaselessly travel only to “stop in small, indiscriminate towns where rows of faceless houses are as closed-off as their inhabitants; finding strange faces and obstacles everywhere, the landscape one of silent hostility.” This is true for Kavan’s last novel, Ice. First published by Peter Owen in 1967, Ice has now been issued in a new edition by Penguin Classics.

Ice

The novel begins with a man driving along a dark road. It ends with the same man still driving, but now accompanied. Along the way, the man’s travels (no characters are named) take him from ship to plane across battlefields and over mountains, through networks of shadowy resistance fighters and into the ceremonial banquets of military overlords. In this world, society is ending, fragmenting as mysterious walls of ice encroach on human habitations and prise apart political and personal relationships. There are stranger things too: mutants, dragons, sacrifices. Amid all the action, it is difficult to tell what is real and what is otherwise.

Most apparent is the traveler’s obsessive need to control a woman with extraordinarily pale hair and a damaged past. At one point, the traveler had been “infatuated” with her, he admits. He was—is—drawn to her fragility and psychological damage. These are the residue of a sadistic mother but also, one suspects, the way she has been treated by her husband, briefly shown in the first chapter as an arrogant and controlling partner. She is described as glass-like. Think: brittle bones, shockingly white hair, and intense eyes. Think: someone you can see right through. Most strikingly, she rarely speaks. Celine Magot in a 2016 article for Miranda argues that she is a “voiceless body, the summation of external pressuring voices.” The woman tends to confuse the man, as if she were phantasmagoric, or perhaps a host of women or just an illusion born of fever, desire, and sadism. He confesses that “at times she hardly seemed real.” This ethereal transparency lends her image to a host of other women in the novel and whips the traveler on in his obsession to find her and, maybe, to protect her. Or perhaps to be the force of destruction in her life.

The man’s obsession drives his fantastical travels across war-torn countries and beats as the psychotic heart of his relationships with others. This is most true for his relations with other men who seem the caretakers of the woman as she herself flees, travels, and hides. She recognizes this strange conspiracy and, at one point, accuses the men of being “in league together.” The truth is nowhere near that simple. At another moment, he examines another man and sees almost a mirror of himself:

It was clear that he regarded her as his property. I considered that she belonged to me. Between the two of us she was reduced to nothing; her only function might have been to link us together. His face wore the look of extreme arrogance which always repelled me. Yet I suddenly felt an indescribable affinity with him, a sort of blood-contract, generating confusion, so that I began to wonder if there were two of us…

Over the course of the novel, the traveler’s major antagonist is another man known simply as the Warden with whom he feels kin and who early in the novel is shown in a sexually abusive relationship with the girl that verges on coercive incarceration. It is this spiraling proliferation of relationships between abusive and arrogant men contracted across the perceived possession of a tortured woman that the novel’s tracks move on, ceaselessly and patiently propelling itself into new variations that never propose an escape from this damaged cycle of relationships.

The man proves unable to tell hallucination and dream from his surroundings. At one point, the narrative admits that “the hallucination of one moment did not fit the reality of the next.” Some readers may find this frustrating; others, may find that, despite the horrors on display, the greater danger may be the unspoken gaps between recorded events. The protagonist realizes a strange syncopation between his fragmenting world and himself: “In a peculiar way, the unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind.” His search for the girl is cast into relief by these moments of apparent clarity, and he even calls this mad obsession a “senseless, frustrating pursuit.” He is put on trial—perhaps real, perhaps an elaborate and theatrical court of the mind—where he is called “a psychopath” and deemed “totally unreliable.” But at no point does this resolve substantially interrupt the novel’s tracking of the man’s obsession; his relentless pursuit is never truly threatened. This failure indicates something perverse in these moments of clarity. They may be acts of self-deception, mock resistance thrown up in ironic despair. Nothing successfully stops the man’s quest for long.

Ice is sometimes called science fiction or slipstream, given its premise of the collapse of society and the oncoming encroachment of ice. Yet the novel’s propulsive relationships take centre stage. In a weird light this apocalyptic vision becomes existential, epiphenomenal, and almost beautiful. Kavan’s writing is a howling Arctic wind. Her prose possesses a surgical precision that exposes both care and catastrophe, as in this passage that mixes urgency and obsession with a high imaginative capacity:

I should have to start searching for her all over again. The repetition was like a curse. I thought of placid blue seas, tranquil islands, far away from war. I thought of the Indris, those happy creatures, symbols of life in peace, on a higher plane. I could clear out, go to them. No, that was impossible. I was tied to her. I thought of the ice moving across the world, casting its shadow of creeping death. Ice cliffs boomed in my dreams, indescribable explosions thundered and boomed, icebergs crashed, hurled huge boulders into the sky like rockets. Dazzling ice stars bombarded the world with rays, which splintered and penetrated the earth, filling earth’s core with their deadly coldness, reinforcing the cold of the advancing sea. And always, on the surface, the indestructible ice-mass was moving forward, implacably destroying all life. I felt a fearful sense of pressure and urgency, there was no time to lose, I was wasting time; it was a race between me and the ice. Her albino hair illuminated my dreams, shining brighter than moonlight. I saw the dead moon dance over the icebergs, as it would at the end of our world, while she watched from the tent of her glittering hair.

Across its glittering, cool intelligence, this book remains a viscerally disturbing. It casually, almost repulsively knocks aside the usual notions that many modern readers hold regarding sympathetic characters, linear narrative plots, and liberal norms. Instead, it dedicates itself to confronting psychological violence and the heritage of trauma. Reading it, I often thought about how the video game Bloodborne carries a similarly disdainful, hideously compelling charge. In playing that game—if you are successful—you forcefully enact terrible and increasingly grotesque acts of violence that transform your own perception of the world. In this, the game shows its most genuinely brilliant and troubling feature: the consumer vicariously, viciously participates in the assault upon their sensual conception of the world. Likewise in Ice, where the protagonist’s unrelenting quest for the girl of his imagination calls upon the reader to inhabit that protagonist’s world and choices.

The comparison with Bloodborne is worth concluding. Where Bloodborne refers to a cosmic horror tradition descending from the Lovecraftian weird, Kavan’s Ice refers instead to a Freudian tradition of psychological childhood and early adulthood damage. In this latter case, a child’s upbringing sows the seeds from which the adult identity develops and flourishes. Thus, where Lovecraft imagines a perception of the universe exploding upon one’s realization of cosmic others, Kavan’s weird imagination destroys the coherence of the world the more one comes to understand the epistemological force of gendered violence and traumatically disturbed upbringings and intimate relationships. In addition to this difference, the two also differ in form. In a video game such as Bloodborne, the player vicariously commands the acts of their avatar; it therefore offers players an act of becoming. In a novel such as Ice, the reader constructively co-creates the world of the text’s progressive narration; it therefore offers readers an act of imagining.

Ice throws its creative reader to the brutal black dogs of masculine violence, again and again. It can be called weird or slipstream, apocalyptic or perhaps dystopian. All can be true. But for us, for now, it is also an act of illuminating brilliant, of devastating horror. Kavan is ruthless. That is her gift, for in it there is a deep emotional clarity that rejects easy depictions of violence and of victims and victimizers. Ice confronts its reader with the insidious violence that masculinity channels through the men whose travels perforate the world as they obsess over women in dangerous conditions. Kavan’s cool gaze reveals that the costs of violence are exacted on men and women: not equally, but associated, and in some ways alike. Reading Ice is to be thrown into the unblinking miasma of loneliness and confusion that abuse requires for its domination.

Thinking about contemporary gender politics and the way that Ice reads today in its new issue, I find myself returning to observations made by bell hooks in her book The Will to Change (2004). Here, hooks describes men very much like Kavan’s unnamed narrator and her violent icicle, the Warden. The narrator’s ambiguous fascination with the woman’s thin wrists—delicate, beautiful, and easily broken—recalled for me the following passage: “The fact that men often mix being caring and being violent has made it hard for everyone in our culture to face the extent to which male violence stands in the way of males’ giving and receiving love.” Men in Ice fixate on their shared need to control the girl and bypass any and every moment of potential real engagement or possibility of mutual care, which the novel indicates is improbable, if not impossible. There are clear connections to be drawn with today’s gender politics, without question.

As hooks goes on, in a frequently quoted passage, “the first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.” Ice pushes this theme further and makes a prediction of its diagnosis, thus showing the way best not taken, the world best not lived, the cost exacted by cruel, demeaning obsession. This is a point made also by Leigh Wilson: Anna Kavan’s fiction does not deny the existence of cruelty, obsession, and abuse; instead, it asks “whether they are inevitable, what the nature of their existence is, and what the possibilities for change are.” It is never crass but instead possesses a dangerous weight, the way a beautiful glacier looms above. Ice follows to conclusion its protagonist’s obsession and gender-based violence as a desire—not for sexual fulfilment—but for control, possession, domination.

Anna Kavan’s imagination finds a home in the weird. The traveler finds himself mirrored in other men. More urgently but never explicitly, his behaviour is compared to the crushing, alienating ice that destroys society and ruptures relationships at a global level. Foregrounded by Penguin’s choice of cover artwork, the woman appears and disappears from scrutiny. There is no hiding it: Ice is a difficult and demanding book. And yet it may be a necessary one, insofar as it leaves behind it a sense of quickened life and a powerful case to diverge from the dark course charted by its characters.

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Karin Tidbeck. Photo by Charlotte Frantzdatter.

Weird fiction is increasingly international even as it returns to traditional themes and concerns. It was not so long ago that Finnish fiction from authors such as Leena Krohn, Johanna Sinisalo, and Jyrki Vainonen became prominent in English-language discussions of the weird. WorldCon 75 is being held this August in Helsinki. There exists a palpable sense of excitement about the Nordic twist on weird writing. As Sinisalo wrote here at the WFR in 2012, where others might see and write about the world in straight lines, the Finnish weird is premised on “diagonal” relationships. In the hands of writers such as Sinisalo, fiction’s promise to readers is that, “when they open the book, anything could happen.”

At just about the same time as Sinisalo was advocating the diagonal properties of the Finnish weird, Karin Tidbeck’s startling and highly original collection of short stories Jagganath (Cheeky Frawg, 2012) emerged in English translation. The stories in Jagganath mark out Swedish territory in the Nordic weird tradition. Wintry and wise, they incorporate myths, mysteries, and familial histories. The recent English translation of Amatka follows on this early promise, although Swedish readers will know that Amatka was in fact released in its original language in 2012. Anglophone readers have had to wait some time for this book.

The novel we know of as Amatka originated as a shifting possibility of genres as long ago as 2007. At first it was a group of poems. Then it was a set of dream notes, a collection of flash fiction, and, finally, a long-form narrative. A set of simple yet profound questions oriented the novel’s transformation during its composition: “What is a world like that is ruled by language? How does a society survive in such a world? And what happens to the individual people who live in it?” Here, language holds a premier relationship with the construction of social, political, and individual visions of the world. Consequent on this contention is the power that something might have if it does not have a name.

In philosophy, a long tradition of investigating the central powers of language exists. Most recently, philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben or Daniel Heller-Roazen have forwarded similar constructivist theses about language in texts such as The Fire and the Tale (Stanford 2017) or No One’s Ways (MIT 2017). In Tidbeck’s Amakta, however, the thesis is posed in the sinuous shape of fiction’s eternal question to its reader. Language is gradually, unsettlingly slanted, made diagonal, and put to question. Reading the novel is a remarkable exercise in which the borders of perception and communication fluctuate and bend.

***

Like so many other weird stories, Amatka begins with its central character on a train to the unknown. Commercial researcher Brilars’ Vanja Essre Two, or Vanja for short, has been tasked with travel to an agricultural commune to do research about hygiene product. The novel presents its grey world as a desolate and repressive place. A centralized committee governs most social arrangements, relationships seem secondary to productive work assignments, and goods are generally rationed. The known world is made up of four specialized colonial settlements: one for administration, another for science, a third for industrial production and the fourth, Amatka, for agriculture. It only gradually becomes apparent that not much exists other than the colonists, their settlements, and the mushrooms from which most goods are made.

Once Vanja is in Amatka, many of the colonists find her research risible. Inevitably, however, the inquiry into hygiene becomes only the tip of the investigation in which Vanja finds herself engaged. Cunningly, the investigation is doubled: while Vanja is discovering truths about the community of Amatka, her world’s history, and herself, readers are learning the ostensible and strange facts of Vanja’s world. As it turns out, much of what the world is made of is not as substantial as it first appears.

Throughout the novel, readers are limited to seeing Amatka’s strange world through Vanja’s increasingly disillusioned but also tremulously uncomprehending eyes. While this makes for a gradual reveal of the lurking strangeness that anchors the plot’s explosive final turns, it also leaves gaps in the conceptual origins of how things came to be. The novel never reveals much information about the old world; nor is it clear how the colonists’ arrived in the timeless nowhere of their new world where few crops grow and animals are nowhere to be seen. Some hushed secrets remain unanswered by the novel’s end, including that of the collapse of a fifth. For these reasons, and given the spare prose that conveys mysteries as efficiently as it does information, the novel at times resembles a parable like those of Franz Kafka.

At the same time, weird elements make the story something much more unsettling than a straightforward fable or dystopia. One of the signature behaviors of characters is the activity of “marking”: most items seem to be labelled with their name. At first, this does not seem odd: items on the train are marked as “washbasin, pantry, table.” Society itself is set up to reinforce these markings, with a song sung by children and adults alike to remind them of the importance and implementation of such a textual inscription on the world. This naming of the world’s things even takes precedence over the regulated social relationships between people. For instance, at one point two girls sing “Bed! Chair! Cabinet! Lamp!” to themselves, even as their parents worry that the children may have forgotten them in the social housing that they required to live in.

Not all objects are created equal. Readers discover that “real” objects such as paper taken from the old world do not need to be marked. Those items remain themselves without repeated linguistic prompting. Other objects, however, dissolve into a viscous material that horrifies the colonists with its abject strangeness. Leaving an old suitcase too long turns it to a contagious unknown, a material with disquieting fluidity that Vanja describes as “whitish gloop” and a substance that may “spread to other objects if she didn’t ask fast.” Yet everything else is made from the same material—including the hygiene products Vanja means to catalogue and herself use. Ulla, an older woman whose presence is predictably catalytic for some of the story’s stranger turns, comments on this cognitive dissonance. Ulla’s words trigger Vanja’s perception of the world to mimic the discussion “almost as though the shape of the cup was starting to melt, as though the table was suddenly sagging.” Do words follow or proceed the illusion of material dissolution? And is it in fact an illusion only, this linguistic force?

***

In a radical charge, Amatka speculates on two distinct ways that language might construct the world: as an ossified and necessarily limited bureaucratic operation of textual power or, more speculatively, as a fluid and perhaps even disturbing interchange of desire and material. The more that the fundamental relationship between language and materiality becomes a pronounced element of Amatka’s world, the more strange and self-possessed that world becomes, both narratively and in terms of its own fulfillment. Much of the story’s intensity is generated by the affective relationship that this material possesses and from the sparks that fly from characters’ changing understandings sludge. Everything seems to be made from this abject ooze. The full extent of this “everything” develop a line of speculative horror as its characters dance with understanding, sanity, and social acceptance. The commune’s political organization is not only material but epistemological as well.

In general, one of Amatka’s most impressive features is how it melds social relationships, political organization, and the formative powers of linguistic making and unmaking. Tidbeck’s world depends on no outright forces of evil, no external animosities or sources of clear certainty for characters. Instead, the narrative treats the things that disturb it with complexity and thoughtfulness about how the ties that bind people together may be both more and less than they are thought to be. In an interesting strand of the story, Vanja sometimes finds poetry from a disappeared dissident named Berols’ Anna whose words seem to most beautifully give shape to reality. One private, handwritten fragment reads

we speak          of new worlds
we speak          of new lives
we speak          to give ourselves
to become

Simple and yet eerily profound in the context of the novel’s vision of power and transformation, the novel’s use of poetry makes efficient use of its particular linguistic intensity.

If there is one area where the novel is not always convincing, however, it is in the characters’ fullness. Nina, Ivar, Ulla, and Evgen, the most prominent of the Amatka residents, have specific relationships with the plot and with Vanja. They do not always emerge from the shadows of their roles. This holds true for minor characters as well, but the effect is more muted in their cases. The novel’s fabulist qualities in part militate against the “thickness” of character absent that is largely absent here. It is equally possible that something else is in play, more deftly associated with how possibilities of the un-named and the unknown play out emotionally. Connections between characters are clear but emotionally restrained

Readers will have to evaluate for themselves the novel’s final twists that depend on almost inhuman sympathies. If humanity is in part defined as the capacity for language, a “speaking animal,” Amatka generates its peculiar sense of deep disquiet as it questions the power and limitations of that definition.

***

There are significant precedents for the kind of story that Tidbeck is telling here. Such novels that delve into language are often the best that science fiction, fantasy, and weird fiction has to offer. At times, I was reminded by the linguistic focus of China Miéville’s Embassytown (2011). Further back in the speculative tradition, the arid commune of Amatka and Vanja’s spare use of language reminded me of a strange half-dream of Anarres in The Dispossessed if Ged from the Earthsea novels somehow stumbled into that failing communal society. (Those novels too obsess over the political and existential elements of communication.) Samuel Delany’s Babel-17 (1966) pursued something similar in militarized space. These comparisons of fiction after the linguistic turn are only partially relevant, of course, and other influences could be discerned. It is unsurprising that Tidbeck has written about how LARPing was formative to her writing habits – in this kind of role playing, language most nakedly argues for its ability to transform the world.

Ultimately unique to itself, Amatka builds of its central fascination with the powers of language a world in which things are exactly as they seem. In its most cunning twist of all, the horror with which characters register the “sludge” from which their worlds are built reveals itself as an antagonistic relationship with the pure elements of material potential. But such antagonism is not necessary; it is consequent on the social traditions that shape the colonists’ perceptions of their environments. Language exerts an inhuman machinic force. The colonists have constructed homes in more than just the material world.

Stripped of language, the world’s constitutive things may be too abject to consider—or, just maybe, they might not. Perception is a fickle space in which to construct relationships, concepts, homes. The degree to which a reader may enjoy Amatka depends on their desire to speculate on linguistic power, to read in the textual capacity to create and hold intensities across the shape of the world—and the desire to decreate and permit those intensities to alleviate and disappear. Amatka possesses the qualities of a fable and the febrile brilliance of weird fiction at its most inventive and self-questioning. The novel reminds readers of Karin Tidbeck’s powers just as it marks out further ground in the Nordic Weird.

The post Dystopic Nordic Weird: Review of “Amatka” by Karin Tidbeck appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Suitably impressed by the dark tenor of this subversive aesthetic—the book’s “handshake” becomes a tender skin-graft, if you allow the metaphor—I was unprepared for the subtle humour that permeates these stories. In Devlin’s tales, a generous spirit busily hums under the threnody for a dying world.

Given the broad remit of weird fiction, the ten stories collected in You Will Grow Into Them exemplify diversity. They range from the short and scary to the more unsettling or darkly fantastical. I advise reading them in the order they are published, simply because—for me, anyway—it worked nicely. Some may be familiar to Interzone readers, or from elsewhere, but many are fresh to this collection.

A word about Unsung Stories, the publisher of You Will Grow Into Them. Under the “What We Do” section of their website, they list a simple mandate: “Weird stories, beautifully told.” Judging from their website, they have a small staff and a brisk catalogue of thirteen titles. You Will Grow Into Them is their most recent publication. New publishers of the weird are always a welcome sight.

***

One of Devlin’s primary occupations here is a general vision of organic decrepitude and the strange regrowth of new kinds of life. The volume’s fascination with despoliation and fungal blossomings yields a rich discourse on the mushrooming afterlife that springs up after the worst that can happen actually happens. Uncanny and deeply weird, these new lives are ambivalent at best. In this regard, it finds an unlikely fellow-traveler of these weird, resilient trails in Anna Tsing’s academic study The Mushroom at the End of the World.

As “Two Brothers” suggests, for instance, decay is possibly only the hidden face of how people are “made” in a time of increasingly technocratic modernity. The story condemns authoritarian patriarchy by way of examining the bodies and emotional states that are cast out or disallowed for its better functioning. By multiplying human bodies, “Two Brothers” edges carefully toward a vision that sees how human frailty disappears at the mark of a triumphant inhuman carapace. What is weird in this tale is not the father’s behaviour; it is fact that something skeletal and human still lives in the trees and the mud, no matter its distance from recognizable society.

Many references take up an English world. This goes far beyond the invocation of Saki’s decaying aristocracy in “Two Brothers”. In fact, if a person were interested, they could draw connections from across the canon of weird fiction. “The Last Meal He Ate Before She Killed Him” reads as a Wellsian dystopic take on a John Collier story. “Passion Play” is a deliciously religious story of failure in the vein of M.R. James. “The Bridge” miniaturizes the spiky delusion of Synecdoche, New York with an eye to Robert Aickman’s creeping mysteries, while “The End of Hope Street” extends the unplaceable dread of Julio Cortazar’s “House Taken Over” over time. Even the fictional history proposed by “Songs Like They Used to Play” settles itself in the apparently mundane world that is a bed and breakfast in contemporary York.

Of the many stories here in which human forms decompose and reform (or are transformed), the body’s new life is highly ambiguous. Unlike the visceral shudder of watching masculinity disintegrate in “Two Brothers”, “Her First Harvest” treats its subject with ephemeral delicacy. Here, the weird grounds itself in a generous posthuman ecology where “Everything that used to be alive now makes this a richer world.” Theorists of degrowth and readers of deterioration, rejoice! Elsewhere, the oddly-claustrophobic “We All Need Somewhere to Hide” similarly finds the changeability of forms to be a liberating and not entirely devastating possibility. Not incidentally, like “Two Brothers”, “Her First Harvest” is a “coming of age” narrative that demonstrates an awareness of gendered identities and of the forces at work in shaping them. This same awareness illuminates many of Devlin’s other stories.

There are peaks and valleys, naturally, and some stories yield an occasional rough edge. “Dogsbody”, for instance, is an interesting concept but largely without the conceptual richness apparent elsewhere. That said, its concerns about economic deskilling in an increasingly abstract world of financial speculation do feel quite timely. In this wolfish world, the modern economy’s gloomy “deskilling” effects are accompanied by an unexplained plague of strange transformations.

Presenting a somewhat contrary situation, “Her First Harvest” revels in a suggestive world-building imagination but does not travel very far, contenting itself with a dance of posthuman possibilities. This story cultivates a freshly imagined post-apocalyptic ecology through the stately arrangements of a pre-Darcy Elizabeth Bennett who has just been left in the dirt a little too long—not a sentence that I’d have anticipated writing before picking up this book. These are enjoyable stories, but they are not the best this collection has to offer.

In contrast to the narrative directness of many of the other stories, “Breadcrumbs” and “Passion Play” distinguish themselves through complex reflections on characters who themselves tell stories and whose activities license a sophisticated play of represented action and aesthetic richness. In “Passion Play”, the collection’s first story, the unnamed narrator retraces the steps of her friend Cathy as she thinks herself backward, into the past, even as her footsteps carry her forward. A religious element is added to this temporal juxtaposition as this progress becomes an unholy or uncanny version of the Stations of the Cross, with the difference here that reflections are organized around the disappearance of a young girl and the strange, Jamesian ghost story of the “cross-hatch man”, a figure marked by his specific elision from religious iconography. The mysteriousness of this tale is bolstered and not undercut by the simultaneous admission of a domestic situation that may or may not explain Cathy’s disappearance.

While the dense Catholic skin and mysterious climax of “Passion Play” indulge in weird fiction’s common reference points, the remarkable “Breadcrumbs” stands independently of any such comparison, although it gnaws away at fairytale commonalities with glee. A paean to the dream of ecological rebirth edged in fanged versions of fairy-tale transformations (think Disney, red in tooth and claw and hung, screaming from the ceiling), this unpredictable gem busies itself in the vivid fantasies and weirder fate of a fourteen-year-old girl, Ellie. “Breadcrumbs” draws copious from stereotypical images only to transcend them all in its final images of the courage rooted in patience and dreams that helps her to sever her past from her future. There is much here for a weird fiction reader; suitable, in fact, for a girl whose “mother once fed her worlds.”

With a name like You Will Grow Into Them, readers could confidently expect a focus on the organic processes of transformation. From the fungal dirt to the dreamy trees, these stories rehabilitate thoughts of posthuman growth, often with an eye dead-set on the mechanical inhumanity of redundancies and blind repetition.

***

Weird literature’s associations with terrifying knives in the dark or the inarticulate horror at the cosmic sublime are familiar—perhaps too much so. Deeper than these signs is weird literature’s characterization that “its interior is less repressed than unrecognized”, as China Miéville writes in his “Afterweird” to The Weird. Dodging typicality, Malcolm Devlin’s stories spin webs of hospitable darkness and thoughtful involution into the darkness of the unrecognized.

In You Will Grow Into Them, transformations are painful and strange, yet they also extend the hope of liberation. Fiction takes its readers up to the moment of vision and no further; it implies consequences and causal logics. Stories like “Dogsbody” and “The End of Hope Street” suggest that the bitter resistance to change may engineer fates that might be worse than death: to live uncharitably and ungenerously, selfishly cloistered in a shell of one’s own mundane devising. At their most extreme, Devlin’s stories glimpse the failing wills or the fractures of escape that mark the ends and beginnings of any given transformation.

In “Passion Play”, despite all her patient mimicry of a lurid type of weird fate, the unnamed protagonist remains trapped in the lurking horror of reality itself. The story ends with a common refrain on the inability of people to understand what lies directly in front of them, as the young girl sees “Faces that have witnessed everything and seen nothing at all.” At the other end of the collection, “The End of Hope Street” plays with mysteries of space and compression. In one of its many powerful images, “The End of Hope Street” leaves readers by picking out a character whose self-delusions leaves him isolated and without refuge. This almost-Nietzschean last man cleans out his house to paint everything a blinding white: “Layer after layer after layer, he painted, as though he might ward off the darkness by making the whole house shine.” Here, as elsewhere, strict moral associations between light and dark, good and bad, are traversed and interwoven. While hospitality’s invitation toward transformation is refused, isolation becomes the grim death of nihilistic purity.

On the whole, however, Devlin’s stories are characterized by their absence of fear in the face of strange changes. They oppose the grim stupidity of the horrific sublime with the quiet ironies of consciousness and the inexplicable flights of fate. It is a mark of distinction that, here as in much of the weird, visions of the world are made unstable and porous, even as they reveal how dangerous life has always been. Cracks emerge. Inevitably, bodies start to pile up. Almost worse, bodies begin to go missing. Who knows what will appear in their place? Generosity is not softness; darkness may be more comforting than any light. You Will Grow Into Them promises much, namely, a fate of incorporation into forming uncertainty. It delivers gleefully, warmly, and well—with a distressingly strange and inexorable smile.

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Weird Fiction Review / Schenstead-Harris: Thank you for agreeing to this interview. It is a thrilling chance for us at Weird Fiction Review to have access to your thoughts, and we appreciate your generosity in these busy times.

I’ve recently had the opportunity to read Binti, Binti: Home, and Lagoon back to back, and I was struck by the way in which you narrate relationships between humans and different kinds of life. Can I ask right from the start about the jellyfish from the United Arab Emirates? That is a beautiful dedication. Is there a story there?

Photo by Nnedi Okorafor

Nnedi Okorafor: There’s always a story. Everything I write is connected in some way to my own life. Binti has many beginnings. I was writing this novella series before I knew I was writing it. One of those beginnings was in the UAE. My trip there with my daughter was the first of many…adventures. I had three book festival/events in a row on three continents within 12 days. I come from a very tight knit Nigerian American family. All of my immediate family is in the Chicago area. When I told them I was taking my then ten-year-old daughter with my on a 12 day trip that jumped from Brasilia, Brazil, to Atlanta, Georgia (North America) to Sharjah, the United Arab Emirates, everyone freaked out. In the end, I had to sneak to the airport with her and call them just before the plane took off (yes, I felt horribly guilty).

This trip turned out to be one of the greatest adventures, ever (so far). But by the time I arrived in the UAE with Anya, I was changed. When you jump from a place like Brazil where people are very free with their bodies to the Middle East, where everyone is covered up, and in between you spend time with a huge group of Octavia Butler scholars and fans at a historical African American college (Spelman College) doing a reading in a room full of Hoodoo, you can’t help but be affected. From a Portuguese speaking country, to an English speaking one, to a Arabic speaking one. This was my state of mind when I was walking around the Khalid Lagoon with Anya beneath the 100-degree Middle Eastern sun.

All around me was the futuristic, but still deeply ancient city of Sharjah. I stepped up to the water and looked down. And there, pumping away like it had very important things to do, was the very first live jellyfish I’d ever seen in the wild (I’d seen a man-o-war in Trinidad, but it was dead). It was blue, strong, alien and in my state of mind at the time, utterly beautiful.

In that moment, I knew I’d write about it.

WFR: Binti’s hair, or her tentacle-like okuoko almost becomes a character in its own right. It’s striking that this kind of physical transformation is both by choice but also not by choice; it reflects the physical difference with which Binti already marks herself through her otjize. There are so many layers of cultural and biological meaning wrapped up in Binti’s hair alone. Can you talk a little about this part of the story?

NO: The theme of choice and the power of culture pops up in my stories often. Before Binti, the biggest example of this is in Who Fears Death when Onyesonwu must face the decision of whether or not to go through a ceremony that required cutting off her clitoris. To many readers, the fact that she even has to think about whether or not to do this is shocking. It’s not shocking to me at all, coming from the culture that I come from where the individual is often secondary to the community. I may have been born and raised in the United States, but there are significant parts of me that are VERY Igbo (Nigerian) and I am often in conflict with these parts. This is the plight of many Nigerian Americans. And this is the root of my deep understanding about and experience of African cultures.

The same goes for Binti. Binti is a Himba girl of the future and though many things about her ethnic group change, some things stay the same. Some of those things include a strict adherence to community and culture, and the practice of applying otjize. Culture is very deep, it can’t just be shed just as you can’t shed what is part of your DNA. But culture is also alive and can incorporate things, it blend, shifts…and there are always consequences to change.

WFR: The University is a powerful society in Binti but also in our world. What does it mean for you to be an academic as well as a writer? Have your experiences in academia informed Binti?

NO: I have a bachelor’s, two master’s and a PhD. I’ve been a full-time professor since 2008 and have just gone from “associate” to “full-professor” status. Before this, I was a graduate student instructor. The university has been a part of my life for over half my life, now. Being the type of writer whose life constantly blends with her stories, the university is bound to be a significant part of my work.

What I love about academia is you get to be around super-smart, inquisitive, argumentative, observant, obsessed people. Students in universities have dedicated years of their life to the pursuit of learning. Professors have dedicated their lives to research and teaching. It’s inspiring to be in this type of environment. At a university, sometimes you can just glance into a room you are passing by and see or hear something mind-blowing. The libraries are full of mysteries. People from all over the world come to universities to learn. And universities attract brilliant minds and are often places where resistance to the problems of the world are spawned.

I’m able to channel a lot of this into Oomza University layered with my own ideas of what it is to be non-human and human. Oomza University is not just a metaphor for a university. It’s truly me trying to imagine a university of People (by “People” I mean sentient individuals from all over the galaxy).

WFR: Binti constantly has to face questions about cultural transformation, rather like Onyesonwu in Who Fears Death. Both characters experience the difficulties of young women placed in what sometimes seem like impossible situations where familial values conflict with the knowledge of other kinds of cultural knowledge; you narrate such cultural aporias with a great deal of subtlety. Are there difficult topics that you’d like to address in a similar manner but which just haven’t taken narrative shape yet?

NO: I’ve grown bold in facing things that I fear…in literature, at least. So I can’t think of any topic that I am avoiding.  However, there are some things I’m currently writing about where I can feel my discomfort and yet I still barrel forth. Some of those are in Binti 3.

WFR: In the past, I’ve taught Who Fears Death along with K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents to conclude a course in postcolonial and diasporic contemporary African literature. I also know people who have taught Akata Witch. Which of your novels would you like to see taught most—and what would you pair it with?

NO: Honestly, I think all my novels are “university ready”. Each of them are thematically complex in ways where professors can easily connect them to the past, present and the future. The Binti novellas work well in classes because they are one story sectioned off naturally in a way that is easy for professors to assign, plus they are relatively inexpensive. Akata Witch is a fun read but also a great way to discuss African spirituality, colonialism and the push pull between Africans and African Americans. The Book of Phoenix is a great way to discuss the African Diaspora, identity, the very form of literature, colonialism, Henrietta Lacks, so much! The same with Who Fears Death. Kabu Kabu is a collection of short stories that would be great for a creative writing class because the stories are all so diverse and use so many different storytelling techniques.

If I had to choose one, I’d chose Lagoon and pair it with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Both are First Contact/ Alien Invasion narratives. And both are directly connected to our world. Plus, Lagoon has so many real world references a professor could show the class (for example, the Youtube video on “witch slapping” and articles about how the Nigerian president really was missing in 2009) that students will be intrigued and disturbed…which is much better than bored.

WFR: Can we talk about your relationship with Amos Tutuola’s work? Still on the subject of Who Fears Death: in that novel, you invoke Tutuola’s Palm Wine Drinkard as part of the “Great Book” that characters know speaks of earlier times, and in The Book of Phoenix there’s a brief mention of palm wine tapping too among the fleshing out of the origin story provided by the Great Book. You’ve also spoken in praise of Don’t Pay Bad for Bad. Here at WFR, we emphasize the compelling strangeness of Tutuola’s work—we love its thrilling weirdness. Personally, I’ve always been struck by how Tutuola’s narrative structures unfold with this gorgeous simplicity, as if their emotional intricacy was plotted against a direct appeal to their reader. How would you characterize Tutuola’s legacy to writers today? And, turning to readers, if people have already encountered Palm Wine Drinkard, which books would you advise that they read next?

NO: I really enjoyed The Palm Wine Drinkard, though I don’t like the way it’s written. I don’t see it as a style, I see it as Tutualo’s English not being strong (it wasn’t his first language) and him needing an editor.  I wonder about the intent behind not cleaning up and unravelling the prose, especially at the time.  I’m just going to be up front with that, and I know that many will disagree with me. Whole essays have been written on this issue. But this is my own opinion on the matter.

Tutuola was one of the first Nigerian fantasy writers. D.O. Fagunwa was another, he wrote Forest of a Thousand Daemons, which was translated by Wole Soyinka. Both men were translating Yoruba folktales into prose, they were fleshing out thin yet potent stories and I loved that about them and I wanted to pay homage to that in my own work. After The Palm Wine Drinkard, I’d recommend Pauper, Brawler and Slanderer. I really enjoyed that one.

WFR: You’re a guest of honour at this year’s NecronomiCon, a celebration of weird fiction. What does that position mean to you? Do you think that the definition of whose work “counts” in weird fiction is changing?

NO: When I got the invitation, I’ll admit, I paused. I paused for a long long time. I asked people in my inner circle about it and I had mixed reactions. Some said, “Hell no. They’re just going to set upon you when you arrive. Decline!” Other said, “Sounds intriguing, why not?!” I personally say it as sort of an olive branch after all that has happened around the issue of Lovecraft. The invitation was really heart felt and I remember it giving me the warm fuzzies, so that played a big, role, too. I’m always ready to make peace and connect with those with whom I’ve had some sort of disagreement or misunderstanding. That’s the Binti in me.

Do I think the definition of weird fiction is changing? I leave such things up to others. I don’t really spend time contemplating what things are called. I prefer to spend time creating things.

WFR: It’s difficult to talk about something called “Necronomicon” without thinking about Lovecraft. In 2011, after winning the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, you wrote that you’d like to “to face the history of this leg of literature rather than put it aside or bury it.” Have your feelings about Lovecraft changed in the intervening time?

NO: Not at all.

WFR: You are also a keynote speaker at the 2017 conference of the Marxist Reading Group this March! I would love to hear more about that from you!

NO: Like Necronomicon, this is another group of people who have a certain ideology that I can learn from and absorb and experience. I’m really interested in hearing what this group has to say about the state of American politics and society today. It’s an honour to be invited to be their keynote.

WFR: On the subject of weird literature, I love that your work does not necessarily take up the lineaments of the British-American tradition of “the weird” fostered by Lovecraft. Instead, you arrive at the weird’s startling juxtaposition of knowledges through a path charted between conventional perspectives on reality and features of belief or mysticism drawn from African cultures. You have also made it clear that you treat questions of epistemology with great respect. I’m thinking now about Binti’s role in translating types of knowledge and culture between the University, the Meduse, her family, and the Enyi Zinariya, but also about the emphasis on Saeed and the complexity of Arabic elements in the Great Book in The Book of Phoenix. It’s clear too that in contemporary global relationships, the work of cultural translation and transmission is a terribly pressing and difficult responsibility. What are your thoughts about “the weird”? Do you find that its possibly plural traditions make it a good container for this kind of work? 

NO: I don’t think about what I write and the way I write as “containers”, nor do I think about what others will see it as. I just write it. I know that I am deeply interested in post-humanism and how our pasts connect with our futures and present. I’m interested in African and Arab cultures and how they both battle and blend and I’m coming at this not as a researcher, but as a participant. I’m interested in technology and spirituality and how they blend and what happens when they blend. I think that my interests and the results of them in my stories lead to very “weird” fiction. Just as science fiction isn’t necessarily rooted in past Western traditions, the same goes with “the weird” not necessarily having a Lovecraftian foundation.

WFR: If we can close by talking about current affairs for a minute: among your writing honours, in 2008 you received the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa and you’ve talked in interviews before about how important Soyinka’s example is to you. Recently, Soyinka tore up his green card and left the United States in protest at Donald Trump’s election. As I write these words, an executive order has gone into effect that bans refugees and some visa-holders from entering the US. It is a very confusing and difficult time in the US for everyone—perhaps those are understatements. What are your feelings about the present political environment in America? Does it influence your work as a writer and teacher?

NO: These are issues that I’m passionate about and that affect my family directly in many ways. On top of this, I’m a very empathic person. To me, Trump and those he surrounds himself with are a destructive, uncaring, malicious force hellbent on serving themselves. I’ve always been distrustful of politicians, but these individuals have taken it to a new level. They remind me of the seven multi-billionaire blood-drinking men at the center of things in The Book of Phoenix.

I’m teaching science fiction and creative writing this semester, both subjects that can be very emotional and politically charged. I welcome and look forward to all perspectives in discussions.

WFR: Thank you so much for agreeing to this conversation, Nnedi! We greatly appreciate your time and thoughts.

____

[i] Interview questions have been slightly edited but not substantially changed.

The post Interview: A Conversation with Nnedi Okorafor appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886–1942) was a Japanese writer known primarily as one of the foremost poets of the Taisho and early Showa periods, movements substantially influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, and others within the Decadent and Symbolist movements. Hagiwara also published criticism and aphorisms, co-founded multiple magazines, and created a mandolin orchestra after having received one of the instruments from his parents in his teens. Many of these avenues came about against the context of struggling in and dropping out of university, as well as battling ill health and alcoholism.

The 1917 publication of his poetry collection, Tsuki ni hoeru (Howling at the Moon), is considered by critics to have broken ground for new, freer forms by using language that had a notable contrast to the intellectual, traditionally structured verse that dominated Japanese poetry. Hagiwara published numerous other collections of poetry and criticism until his last major collection in 1934, after which followed ‘The Town of Cats” (1935), his only short story. He taught at Meiji University from this period until his death in 1942 of “acute pneumonia,” which, however, may have been misdiagnosed lung cancer.

With ‘The Town of Cats,’ Hagiwara examines disorientation and the illusory nature of reality, an intersection of related topics that he explored throughout his career. Madness, hallucinations, obsession, and abnormal psychology often figure in his works, and he conveyed these themes using techniques he’d pioneered in his poetry: a rejection of naturalism, colloquial language, impressionistic images, a sense of personal intimacy, and subject matter contemporary to the time period. The concepts and problems that drove much of Hagiwara’s writing continue to resonate with today’s readers and writers, such as Thomas Ligotti, who has cited ‘The Town of Cats’ as among his favorite stories.

— Christopher Burke, editor of 101 Weird Writers

It’s a landscape as melancholy as a cat
a lonely balloon rises straight up
and see, there’s a flicker of personages wearing linen.
Already for quite a long while
nobody thinks about a wharf like this.
And from the sea-corner with stunned cranes
many various organism-consciousnesses have faded
    away.
Besides, the sailing ship gets loaded with cotton
and it’s in the offing fluffy and plump thinking isn’t it.
These are all indescribable
memories that make your hair stand on end   give you
    gooseflesh.
Ah God   there’s no way of getting it back anymore
and for worm-eaten recollection like this   I’ll always
    be weeping like an infant.

Hagiwara Sakutarō, “A Melancholy Landscape” (Trans. Hiroaki Sato)

Welcome to Japanese writer, poet, and critic Hagiwara Sakutarō’s cat-prowled grounds. Today we circle the Weird-collected tale of “Cat Town”. Hagiwara’s literary world is an assortment of marginal places, “a landscape as melancholy as a cat.” But this isn’t a kind of anthropomorphic feline world enmeshed within everyday human affairs such as Sōseki Natsume’s I Am a Cat (1905–6) or E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr (1819–1821). Nor is it akin to the viral web media popularizing Japanese “cat islands” Tashirojima and Aoshima. Such spaces displace the human from socio-political vision; they certainly seem like fascinatingly inhuman communities. However, “cat islands” are no posthuman utopia, just as Hagiwara’s “Cat Town” is no fable for the future. In any case, technocultural utopias are too sleekly silvered for the weirdly inclined. Give us the blood’s recoil, the ineffable terror, the cat’s piercing eyes.^[1] Unlike these places and tales, “Cat Town” conjures up a history of weird displacement in which the Anthropocene finds its conceptual feet by confronting an abyss of the real. As it does so, it offers a way for us to see the constructed symbolism of the contemporary world: a world of cats!

Written after a prolific career in which he published many books of poetry and criticism, “Cat Town” is Hagiwara’s only short story. His vision of a world inhabited by cats reveals something other than clickbait-chum. Here are some lines from his earlier poem, “Blue Cat”:

What’s asleep in this large city night
is the shadow of a single blue cat
the shadow of a cat that speaks of the sad history of mankind. (Sato 75)

The cat’s shadow displaces specifics of urban colors and forms but also “speaks” of history. What lurks in a cat’s shadow? What is “the sad history of mankind”? To begin answering these questions, this instalment of the Weird Fiction Review’s 101 Weird Writers series will examine Hagiwara’s “Cat Town” and its later echo in Haruki Murakami’s “Town of Cats”. To complement these sites of prose exploration, I will also look at Hagiwara’s poetry and criticism. A modern city’s nightmares yield strange sights. Cats, squids, and even a dog will appear as we travel through Hagiwara’s melancholic landscape.

Weird literature and poetry’s febrile expression often react in a crucible shaped by madness and illness. Intense periods of mental disorder interrupted Hagiwara’s writing, most evidently from 1913–1915 in the years immediately before his first book of poetry was published in 1917. He even attempted suicide during this time. “I clearly see and hear with indescribable terrible memories the lips of a faintly white woman who laughed after copulation and my abominable act and language that I uttered while drunk,” Hagiwara wrote to a close friend in 1915. He continues, “each time I have the terrible pain that seems to tear up my nerves, because I dashed my head against a column many times yesterday it still hurts this morning, I even thought I was going mad” (qtd. in Rothenberg and Joris 159). Parsing the images of reality become nearly impossible when everything seems too real—hyperreal. Perhaps this “terrible pain” sensitized Hagiwara to the “metaphysical problem” that his protagonist in “Cat Town” later describes, namely, “that a given phenomenon can possess a ‘secret, hidden side’” (Angles 235)? Tracing the disappearing edge of the chasm between images reveals the fracture that the weird often takes as its familiar guise.

The conspiracy between madness and the weird invokes a history of art’s opposition to reason. Names such as Cervantes, Bosch, and Bruegel should provide sufficient evidence. But this is also a very modern relationship that continues to influence contemporary ideas about identity and subjectivity. In many ways, the modern person continues to be a Romantic subject, someone thought of as individual, emotional, and confessional but also as an ill or ailing body. Susan Sontag points out that, for the German Romantics in whose time this tendency became apparent, “[s]ickness was a way of making people ‘interesting’—which is how ‘romantic’ was originally defined” (35). Think Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin, or even Rainer Maria Rilke, whose work upholds an “extreme and passionate defense of the romantic image of the creative soul as a thing apart, a solitary, suffering, and preternaturally sensitive organism” (Scott 75).

Without question, Hagiwara’s poems are written in the shadow of a past that was, as their author writes in the preface to his first collection Howling at the Moon, “a painful memory […] an ominous nightmare of frustrations, inaction, and a suffering body and flesh” (1917 [Tsuki ni hoeru], Sato 7). Wilson links German Romanticism with Hagiwara by observing that the Japanese poet’s work demonstrates a similarly “pure but desperate lyricism” (16–17). How to then proceed? When the narrator in “Cat Town” asks readers for their trust, we can recognize that he, like his author, knows his hallucinations. Illness has given him insight. The story is no delirium; it is something else—something more real. That’s why it’s so weird.

We must be careful not to fetishize madness, especially since, when it comes to weird fiction, the parallel discourses of weird aesthetics and biographical madness or illness are often accompanied by patronizing assumptions of literary training and merit. Japanese poet Hinatsu Kōnosuke, for instance, observed that “Hagiwara has no literary training, that’s the fellow’s strength more than anything else” (qtd. Sato xxi).^[2] To say that an author’s work is powerful because it is the product of madness, illness, or idiot savantism debilitates critic and author alike, but we can certainly recognize the influence of madness. Along these lines, more generously than Hinatsu, Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Loris observe that while “poetry & illness were not the same for [Hagiwara], there was a constant interplay between them [in his work]”, lending his language a jagged immediacy and vivid power of imagistic fervor (159).

I leave for another time the topic of how weird writers negotiate their literary territory against the mental and physical illnesses that sometimes mark their lives—we could discuss Leonora Carrington, H.P. Lovecraft, or Unica Zürn.^[3] At present, it is enough to say that, when words such as “hallucinatory” are applied to Hagiwara’s work, readers recognize not only how he keenly understood reason and hallucination, but also that he aimed for more than symmetrical alternations between the two. In Howling at the Moon, Hagiwara wrote that the “purpose of poetic expression is not simply to express an atmosphere for the sake of atmosphere […] Nor is it to describe a hallucination for the sake of hallucination” (2014: 3). At its best, the weird dispenses with an alternating play of realist description and fevered hallucination.

Before we look directly at the material, a brief note on translations is necessary. In addition to Jeffrey Angles’s translation of “Cat Town” in The Weird, I am aware of two major translations of Hagiwara into English. Most recently, Hiroaki Sato has revisited Hagiwara’s work for the New York Review Books Poets series (Cat Town, 2014) and New Directions (The Iceland [Hyōtō], 2014). Graeme Wilson’s adaptations for the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works in 1969 remain the volume that introduced Hagiwara to many English readers.^[4] Below, I cite Sato when referring to his NYRB translation, Wilson when referring to his UNESCO translation, and Angles when quoting The Weird. Poems will occasionally be given in each translation so that readers can draw their own conclusions.

“Cat Town” to “Town of Cats”: Travelers in the Modern City

Hagiwara’s world is riddled with the decisions of urban travel—crossroads, intersections, meeting places, and so on (Sugimoto 31). It is also suffused with the ghosts and hauntings that constitute modern life and in their own right “make up the strange and immense silent vitality of an urban symbolics,” to quote French theorist Michel de Certeau (137). So, with the narrator of “Cat Town”, let’s get lost. In the forbiddingly massive Tokyo, arranged in compact units interpenetrated by mass and individual transit with competing “big picture” strategies for getting around, navigation becomes a challenge. But travel offers a way to perceptually map our surroundings and helps us understand the world in which we live. Walkers in the modern city observe and define its practical existence. As de Certeau elaborates in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), walking around a neighborhood allows a person to read the symbols of urban culture from the ground up. If you become dislocated in networks of urban disarray while walking, you might see something new—perhaps something disconcertingly different to what the normal, everyday world usually offers. You might see something irreducible to reason.

Artificial aids have long offered the ability to redefine existence through “trips.” The narrator of “Cat Town” knows well the travels induced by drug-induced hallucinations. “As for the countries I traveled in the ecstatic dreams induced by narcotics, I don’t have enough room to detail them here,” he says, sounding much like a fellow flâneur, French poet Charles Baudelaire. (Baudelaire’s chosen drugs included opium, hashish, and wine; Hagiwara reputedly loved beer.) The narrator lingers on well-travelled dreams: “Even after returning to normal, I would cling to those visions and relive them again and again in the world of reality” (Angles 234). But be on guard for the explanations that return even courageous thinkers to normative life. William Tyler argues that Hagiwara’s narrator numbers among a turn of the century series of Japanese figures all “seduced by visual illusions” and “intrigued by tricks created by prisms, binoculars, mirages, illusions, and hallucinations” (328). If you need an escape hatch, this is it: morphine flashbacks cause the strange sights in “Cat Town”. Nothing weird to see here. Move on.

Such an escape does “Cat Town” an injustice, however. Hagiwara’s story describes the lived perception of urban spaces with great psychological clarity. For instance, the first half of “Cat Town” exemplifies the phenomenon of jamais vu, the eerie sense of seeing a familiar situation as so completely new that nothing can be recognized. When this happens in language, it is called “semantic satiation” or word collapse: all you can see are strange letters that look weird or wrong. Accordingly, linguistic stability dissolves when symbols become “hyperreal” and dislocated from their usual symbolic coordinates. Have you ever walked into your home and thought “this isn’t where I live at all”? In jamais vu, familiar perceptual reference points are lost and, as a result, you see something as if you’ve never seen it before. No hallucination necessary.

The phenomenon extends to navigation within the city. It starts with getting lost. The narrator explains that, while “walking through the usual area around my home, […] I slipped into an unfamiliar alley, and going the wrong way, I lost all sense of direction” (Angles 234). The result of becoming lost? He sees a neighborhood of dreamlike beauty. There are two easy explanations for this vision. First, the narrator writes, “a fox must have bewitched me”; or, second, he may have fallen prey to “a disturbance of the inner ear” that disrupted his “sensing direction” (Angles 234). Jamais vu produces at first mystery—an unexpected vision—and then a sudden deflation. Unpredictably dislocated by the hyperreal, the vision known as “real life” reasserts itself with disappointing regularity.

The narrator’s first loss of perceptual control functions as an interpretive prophylactic. Once his mistake is realized, he shows himself capable of discerning his own fallibility. “The mysterious and magical transformation of this place into a beautiful town had occurred simply because I had mixed up my directions”, he admits (Angles 234). This realization normalizes the story. Strategic ideas about how to operate in the modern city are deconstructed when ground level tactics reveal unexpected sights, but the normal way of seeing things feels “natural.” Even the clearest maps may be turned upside down to look utterly bizarre. But few would keep them so inverted and, thus, in a transformational flourish, those alternate worldviews disappear. Similarly, “[t]he mysterious neighborhood that I had seen a moment before existed in some universe of opposite space where the compass was reversed” (Angles 235). Only after deflating estranged possibilities and reminding readers of his ability to discern between hallucination and the modern world will the narrator’s second and much more dramatic episode ring with enough truth to be truly weird.

The second spectacular episode in “Cat Town” deserves to be encountered in all its glory. The narrator loses his way on a “narrow road [that] continued for some time, then disappeared into the depths of the woods” (Angles 237). Be careful when walking into an unknown forest, especially when you’ve warned of nearby “possessed villages” (Angles 236)! Having become dislocated, the narrator finds himself in what seems the usual situation—an urban landscape too spectacular to be true. Knowing the alarming precarity of such visions, he tellingly describes the city as “a perilously fragile structure of thin crystal” (Angles 238). “This realization suddenly made me extremely anxious,” he remembers. Everyone is suddenly tense. “The air surrounding me was electrically charged, and in it I felt the anguish of the inhabitants’ nerves stretched to the breaking point” (Angles 238). A calm. Someone falls. Cue the explosion.

Terror’s revelation erupts with sublime thunder. Just like a joke, the timing of terror is crucial. In the fracture between a spectacular, beautiful vision and a recognizably dour urban modernity rushes the violence of the weird, a perceptual fissure that consumes the eye and the mind with its irreparable incongruity. “My senses had lost their balance. The universe was collapsing around me” (238). This dislocating revelation is neither jamais vu nor déjà vu, neither never seen nor already seen. Between the two opens an abyss: a sight of something more real than “reality.”

And also, for some reason, cats.

The curious are encouraged to see for themselves. Hagiwara’s narrator defends his story in the same way Hagiwara defends his own poetry. “People smile coldly at my tale. They say it is the demented illness of a poet or a nonsensical hallucination born of absentminded daydreaming” (240). He can only defend himself through testimony. I was there. I saw. I know madness, but this is different. Believe me. Fantasy often offers some elfin token for the traveler as “proof” of other realities; the weird is not so easily sated.

Let us turn to another modern traveler and another cat-ridden town. In Haruki Murakami’s “Town of Cats” (2009), a stand-alone excerpt from 1Q84 (2011) published in the New Yorker, narrator Tengo Kawana is another urban navigator. Like Hagiwara’s narrator and many of Murakami’s other protagonists, Tengo travels through Tokyo as if unconsciously. In general, “Town of Cats” revolves around alienated travel. Tengo’s father resides in a sanitarium, his vitality apparently drained through long employment for a Japanese transportation agency in addition to the severe disinterest of his own son, Tengo.

In turn, Tengo loves abstractions like language and math, which he compares to “a magnificent imaginary building.” He most prefers the “vast magical forest” of literature. Abstractions offer him a refuge; more than that, words have less structure and fewer solutions than mathematical theories. Literature allows him the belief that his “real father” might be different from the man he will visit in the sanitarium. It is disappointing that the virtual play of literary possibilities is constrained in an old Victorian straightjacket of inheritances and hidden orphans, but there it is.

Each character in “Town of Cats” is lost in a labyrinth of dislocations. While speaking with his father (in what might be code or madness) at the sanitarium, Tengo remembers a story called “Town of Cats” that Murakami describes as a “fantastical piece by a German writer”. In this remembered tale, a traveler gets lost in a town where cats emerge once the sun is down. Sound familiar? There’s a twist: although the traveler of “Town of Cats” is at first upset, he realizes that this is “the place where he is meant to be lost.” The thought is reassuring for Tengo in Murakami’s own “Town of Cats”, as he is desperate to settle the question of his paternal filiation. A similar revelation would suggest that his Sunday travels were “meant” for him to discover that his father is not his father, as he has believed all along. When Tengo and his father do talk, however, the mise-en-abymes of nothingness and vacuums occupies them. Questioning why the urban landscape of the remembered “Town of Cats” is populated by cats, his father says, “If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.” The story becomes its own cipher encoded in Oedipal handwriting.

What is most interesting about “Town of Cats” is that it redirects its affiliations with Hagiwara’s “Cat Town” through a purportedly German predecessor. Sure, Tengo could be misremembering the origin of his “Town of Cats”, but Murakami’s purposeful distance from Japanese antecedents is complicated by the remarkably strong precedent of “Cat Town.” Murakami walks us around but does not open the most interesting cryptic image: why cats, specifically? Once more: “If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.”

To move us to the next section of this argument, it is merely necessary to say that Hagiwara’s “Cat Town” is designated not a “short story” but instead a “Roman in the Style of a Prose Poem.” What kind of poetry is this?

Poetries of the Weird: Hagiwara’s Modanizumu Images

Hagiwara’s work is renowned for its role in modanizumu, the period of cultural activity in Japan between 1913 and 1938. In a statement that readers of “Cat Town” could attest extends to Hagiwara’s prose as well, critics argue that Hagiwara “invent[ed] a vernacular lyricism appropriate for a modern world filled with skyscrapers, consumer goods, mass culture—the new urban setting of Tokyo”—and to which the poet then applied the panacea of illness as a “remedy” to modernization’s many forms of alienation (Sugimoto 20–21). Cities are planned with a certain kind of rational urban symbolism that enumerates, commodifies and alienates individuals with nightmarish results. In this space, writing offers a potential tactic for liberation—or at least the recognition and abandonment of these late capitalist strategies as “occupied places” (de Certeau 196). For Hagiwara, poetry is a “heresy of the modern, a kind of corrupting illness” or, succinctly, “a symptom of madness in modernity” (Sugimoto 23, 25). Of the genres of writing, poetry’s affinity for madness allows it to challenge modern theories of Enlightenment rationalism and the oppressive real hierarchies that historically accompany them.

Poetry might be just the tonic needed, for it sharpens the pharmakon of writing: poetry’s subtle knife mixes the otherwise incompatible elements of poison and remedy, madness and rationality. In “Cat Town”, the narrator observes that the “universe that lies beyond common sense and logic—the universe that is known intuitively to the poet—belongs to the metaphysical” (236). It is difficult to argue with the material force of consumer culture and brutal skyscraper architecture, not to mention the violence of major urban highways, but the refuge of linguistic abstraction offers a tactical realignment and a new way of seeing things. Allow me to extrapolate from Hagiwara’s narrator’s observation: in narrative prose, traditionally anchored by realist discourses, the weird arrives to depart in an imagistic flash—a moment when the bottom drops out of your world. In poetry, however, an image can be held through an intensity of thought that extends the space of perception. An abyss may disclose a face for its subject.

At which point you might want to know about the specific kind of weirdness that Hagiwara’s poetry brings forth. One answer involves cats. Try Hagiwara’s “The Lonely Blue Cat” in Sato’s recent translation:

Here’s a blue cat. And a willow is being blown in the
wind, and over the graveyard the moon is up.

This is the weird with a finger to its lips: caution. However, This modern tanka’s brief lines unfold with images at once innocuous and uncanny, rational and mad. What moon is this? What willow, what wind? There’s a cat again, disappearing into the graveyard’s dark shadow.

Of course, reading in translated English is a problem. Comparing the work of Wilson and Sato reveals insoluble interpretive quandaries. Take Hagiwara’s “Green Flute”.

Wilson’s earlier adaptation of 1969 strongly emphasizes rhyme and image, while Sato’s later translation modulates its images with quieter language. Words such as “stagger,” “ghostliness,” or “death’s menagerie” become mannered: “lumbering,” “elephants,” and “an illusion.” What similarities exist seem cut from the same cloth as “The Lonely Blue Cat”. Each poem focuses on a graveyard in which its speaker wonders about tarrying too long; in each looms a cat’s inhuman presence. Look too close and a mirage will vanish, or you may see more than you bargained for—you may see something “more nasty as it nears.” Hagiwara’s images are decidedly weird.

To his contemporaries, Hagiwara disrupted formal shapes and sounded very modern. As a result, much criticism on Hagiwara (as well as his own critical writings) emphasizes the historical reception of European influences by Japanese writers during modanizumu. What is missing from this exemplary critical conversation? A new vision of Hagiwara’s work is as simple as wondering about poetic images—Hagiwara’s most exquisite delight and poison.

In this regard, weird thinking also profits from examining the criticism that Hagiwara himself wrote. Take, for example, the following passage, which Sato cites as proof of Hagiwara’s critical acumen. In it, Hagiwara reads a haiku by Japanese poet Yosa Buson (1716–1784):

Buson:
A squid-shaped kite: where yesterday’s sky used to be

Commentary: In the wintry sky where a northerly wind blows, a kite is up. In the same wintry sky, yesterday, too, it was up. The dreary season of winter. The wind blowing through a frozen dull sunlight, screaming sadly. The glassy cold blue sky. Up in that blue sky was a lonely kite yesterday, as it is today. Buzzing nonchalantly, boundlessly high, sorrowing in the globular sky, there’s always a single distant memory drifting!

In the poesy of this haiku is revealed the most Buson-like nostalgia and romance. Pay attention to the fact that all the poetic qualities are contained in the deep emotion of the expression “where yesterday’s sky used to be.” Yesterday’s sky is no longer today’s sky. Yet in that different sky the same kite is up, as always. In other words, in the space always changing, in the time always passing, a single kite—an image of memory—exists in the globular sky constantly, sadly, desolately. Viewed in this haiku, philosophically representing Buson’s leitmotif as it does, contrasts with Bashō’s famous “An old pond.”

I should add that attention should also be paid to the fact that the locution, “where yesterday’s sky used to be,” is wholly a symbolist technique shared by the poetry of modern Europe and that it is a distinct feature with no precedent in the Japanese literature of the past. Buson’s mastery is that he, like today’s poets, had a European lyrical method, born though he was in the Edo period when there was no intercourse with foreign countries. (trans. and qtd. in Sato xviii-xix)

Hagiwara’s rhapsody is a marvel of intense reading; it sustains the poem’s attention on images with logico-hallucinatory precision, teasing and pulling from the haiku’s density a world of complex emotion and literary tradition. The dangers that run like a live current throughout weird literature enliven this “image of memory”—remember that, for Hagiwara, “the past” rings with pain, and it is therefore not surprising when the wind blowing through frozen sunlight is “screaming sadly.” His finger still covers his lips, however, guarding his weirdest secret: the squid-shaped kite. A squid! Even if a common shape for kites in Buson’s or Hagiwara’s time, this apparition from the deep water reminds us that mysteries are aloft above. It is Lovecraftian, perhaps, but also a nostalgic, mannered return to a subject of shunga erotica, such as Hokusai Katsushika’s woodcut series Kinoe no Komatsu, or The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (1814).

As a kite, the shunga image (if that is what it resembles, a squid or an octopus) has lost its titillating, educational cache, but it has retained the sensuality of its original, namely its qualities of “unrestrained imagination, but humor too, and refinement” (Baucheron 99).

Things of the sea, extra-terraceous by definition, look odd in the sky but also along the shoreline where nebulous sea-bodies wash up to deflate and rot. Translating Hagiwara’s “Song of a Hermit Crab”, Sato gives us the following line: “it’s a cloud-like image   a lonely hermit crab’s ghost, / you see” (97). The mesh of images grows discomforting and timeless, lost in ever-fluctuating immensities. Reminders too rise up of Hagiwara’s “Moonlight and Jellyfish” in Wilson’s adaptation, where the titular jellyfish reflects itself as “A thing transparent, a chilly thing, / [that] Flows in the water, knows no end …” (69). The sea offers many such strange inhuman things. Another is the titular “thing most cold” in “Sea Shell” whose “teeth / Flow in the water, and its hands / Flow in the water underneath / Things colder than it understands” (Wilson 70). And then there is the shellfish of “Enchanted Graveyard” that appears alongside other weird creatures—a cat, a ghost—as the “common kindred of this sullen coast” (Wilson 62). Along this coast, assumedly, is the subject of another of Hagiwara’s poems, “Rotten Clam”, left on the beach flats “where sadness broods, / From entrails on the rot / The putrid breath protrudes, / Flickeringly” (Wilson 44). Not a pleasant place, these shores of shifting time. They collapse fate in space to leave revealed to sight things slimy, rotted, and weird. For Hagiwara’s poetry, shore and air alike are possible extensions of the abyss that “Cat Town” sees in urban and feline figures.

To search for the power of the weird is to discern in normal forms and images things unexpected and surprising. Examining signs and symbols for guidance, like the narrator of “Cat Town”, we sneak around the obstinacy of the work of art and modern life, using one to answer the other, asking questions, stealing glances, getting caught seeing images. Weird reading may not ascertain the whole picture. Should it? What is “whole” can only be individuated because it has been cut from the cloth of things with ration’s shears. “Cat Town” poses the weird as a dividing line-become-abyss plucked from a momentary sight, a descending bottomless image that, if examined too long, could cause a madness like and yet utterly distinct from hallucination or illness.

I want to return to cats but with a new twist, because figures can change in the night: they might be dogs. Is this portrait, an image of marginal life enters through our window. Should we look?

Concluding Thoughts: Toward A Weird Poetry

To my knowledge, there is no widely recognized tradition of contemporary poetry within genres such as fantasy, horror, or science fiction. Granted, contemporary awards and individuals are seeking to change this situation; examples include the Rhysling Award, Eric Basso, and, as Desirina Boskovich recently pointed out, Nancy Hightower. But it has been a long time since the enormously popular allegories of Edmund Spenser and Christina Rossetti. These are prose genres, no question. They unspool social philosophies and construct to examine scintillating structures of the mind and imagination. Thus does the weird Roman of “Cat Town” become Murakami’s “Town of Cats”: what is first a tale of dislocation’s hyperreal shock settles into a tale of comfortably dreamlike prose structures.

In contrast, the evanescent music of lyric poetry opens wounds in human subjectivity. Poetry’s concision grants its a song a sharp edge with which it allows us to keen. Such a statement sound romantic, even wistful, as indeed may the poetry it seeks to evaluate. But when it comes to a writer such as Hagiwara we can recognize a sharp insight into the hyperreal in his work, however depreciating its author might have been. “Someone like me is no more than a miserable blue cat’s nightmare,” Hagiwara wrote in his Preface to Blue Cat (1923 [Aoneko]). In the same Preface, Hagiwara observed that his poetry’s “essence […] lies in the pitifulness of yearnings with no apparent cause for the world of reality. Thus I breathe into the fife’s mouth hole, trying to play a mysterious and sensuous life” (Sato 63, 61). We don’t talk much about poetry and the weird because the language of poetry is already so unfamiliar and intense.

Prefacing his earliest poems, Hagiwara speaks to the desire to use language as a tactic for survival within a nightmarish world where late capitalist structures dominate urban life and push to the margins its shores and graveyards, its animals and alienated peoples.^[5] (Although “Cat Town” is weird, cat cafes, catering to urban bourgeoisie, are becoming de rigeur. All things can be sold.) For Hagiwara, language offers a way to pinpoint so as better to see and to escape the shadows that haunt him. “I want to nail my own gloomy shadow into the moonlit earth,” he wrote; “Lest the shadow follow me forever” (Sato 7). Affiliating himself with the nightmare of a blue cat and, before that, with a howling dog that sees its own shadow, Hagiwara’s images offer powerful and sensuous dislocations of identity wrenched from its human mask. All of which raises a last question: what do we look stripped of our symbols?

In Hagiwara’s literary remains we have a marvelous weapon that might shear humanity from its mad rationalisms, but also a flute that plays to the heart of a most surprising genre: a poetry of the weird. “Cat Town” exposes the hyperreal fracture between jamais vu and déjà vu; it cuts our eyes open with the same suddenness as a glass shatters. An image from the nightmare of an abyss explodes into view. In the debris, we see the ground on which strategic maps of the world are built. Nothing after is the same. At times the image, that thing looks like an animal: now a cat, now a dog. Now only a face.

Works Cited

Baucheron, Éléa and Diane Routex. The Museum of Scandals: Art that Shocked the World. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2013. Print.

Breton, André. What is Surrealism? Selected Writings. Ed. Franklin Rosemont. New York: Pathfinder, 2002. Print.

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Print.

Lippit, Noriko Mizuta. “Tanika and Poe: The Grotesque and the Quest for Supernal Beauty.” Comparative Literature 29.3 (1977): 221–40. Print.

Murakami, Haruki. “Town of Cats.” The New Yorker. Trans. Jay Rubin. 5 Sept. 2001. Web. 3 Apr. 2016.

Nadeau, Maurice. The History of Surrealism. 1964. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: 1965. Print.

Norfield, Tony. The City: London and the Global Power of Finance. London: Verso, 2016. Print.

Rothenberg, Jerome and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the Millennium: Volume One, From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Print.

Sato, Hiroaki, trans. Cat Town. Sakutarō Hagiwara. New York: New York Review Books, 2014. Print.

Scott, A.O. Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth. New York: Penguin, 2016. Print.

Sontag, Susan. “Melancholy Objects.” On Photography. New York: Anchor, 1973. Print.

Sugimoto, Mike. “The Illness of Prose: Hagiwara Sakutarō and the Status of Poetry in the Modern.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 4.1 (2002): 20–37. Print.

Tyler, William J. Introduction to Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913–1938. Ed. William J. Tyler. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008. Print.

Wilson, Graeme, Trans. Face at the Bottom of the World and Other Poems. Sakutarō Hagiwara. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1969. Print.

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[1] Cats, Japan, and weird fiction: it is worth noting that Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” (1843) was quite popular in Japan. Poe’s influence extends to Natsume Sōseki, Ueda Bin, Iwano Homei, Baba Kocho, Hirata Toboku, Tayama Katai, and Nagai Kafu, all stemming from Aeba Kōson’s translation of the story in the November 1888 issue of Yomiuri Shimbun (Lippin 221). Hagiwara acknowledged a debt to Poe, as did Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, whose 1918 “The Hell Screen” also appears in The Weird, albeit with caveats for both writers (Lippit 223).

[2] Many critics objected to Hagiwara’s work with thinly-disguised prejudice. Wilson summarizes these criticisms: “the startling originality of its themes and imagery is no more than a direct reflection of the poet’s persistent physical ill-health and of his spiritual and intellectual neurasthenia. His poetry’s consequent aura of irremediable malaise, the argument continues, inevitably appeals to our own distempered times but it disqualifies Hagiwara from a major place in any healthy tradition” (26). However Wilson too wonders whether Hagiwara lost his edge through excessive alcoholic drinking. For a parallel case, see the slighted reputation of Irish writer Flann O’Brien. If weird criticism can make progress on this state of affairs, it must refuse to oppose the “healthy tradition” of normative health with the aesthetic fascination with the sickened, ill, or mad—the two are two faces of the same flipping coin. Instead, weird approaches put the coin on its edge; they make it disappear, mutter about old gods, and slip into shadows. (Your coin is a dream.)

[3] We could also refer to the Surrealists for whom, as André Breton and Louis Aragon wrote in La Révolution surréaliste, mental crises such as hysteria could “be considered a supreme form of expression” (qtd. in Breton 321). In his The History of Surrealism (1964), Maurice Nadeau argues that, with their poetry especially, Surrealists sought to prove “[t]hat there exists no barrier between the normal man and the so-called ‘ab-normal’ man; that there exists no state starting from which one can be certain that this man is mad and another rational” (188). The effort continues.

[4] Sato’s and Wilson’s versions read very differently. Such friction between translations recalls the twentieth-century English literary tradition’s fraught early relationship with translated East Asian literatures. W.B. Yeats’s creative adumbration of Japanese Nō drama and Ezra Pound’s appropriative usurpation of Ernest Fenollosa’s translations of Chinese poetry for his own Cathay (1915) represent warnings and seductions alike, proof of the alluring power of adaptive cross-cultural distortions.

[5] Ascertaining the role of finance in contemporary global capitalism and asking both “what kind of world works like this?” and “[w]hy should the lives of millions of people be influenced by the vagaries of financial market prices?”, Tony Norfield answers with the same logic that drives the nightmare of Hagiwara’s skyscraper-defined, consumer-driven modernist city: “This only looks normal, rather than weird, because we are used to it” (8).

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Let us say that you saw something strange, just for a second. What do you do? You might have a chance to turn and regard the creature for an instant before it vanishes into the air. There it will remain a tantalizing reminder. But if that weird thing is archived or fossilized, hidden in the rocky heritage of terra firma, then you may be able to come to grips with this strangeness. Michael Reynier’s Horthólary: Tales from Montagascony tells four stories of the eldritch compact between these weirding elements; to do so, Reynier’s stories tell of one man’s struggle to understand and, if possible, master them. Meet the natural historian and investigator of the weird, Professor Summanus Florant Horthólary.

Let us get properly introduced. Horthólary contains four stories that tell of strange events in the good professor’s life and span his childhood to old age. These stories partially follow from Reynier’s previous book, Five Degrees of Latitude (2011), also published by Tartarus Press, but read excellently to the newcomer in their own right. Along with Professor Horthólary, readers meet his lifelong friend Jean Gélis and the devilish priest Philippe Rapin, as well as the many other figures who populate Montagascony, a fictionalized rendition of mid-eighteenth century France. Each tale teasingly unravels its own weird thread and these, in turn, the book weaves into a unified iridescent fabric of narrative conception. The book is thus neither a collection nor a novel but something much more interesting: a hybrid narrative that engineers its successes through creative innovation and revisiting traditional tropes in equal measures.

Each tale employs familiar scenes of historical fiction: towns divided between rival families or industrial and pastoral roots, churches and priories witness to corrupt clergy and earnest monastic brethren, menacing castles and ominous woods, and the seemingly unchanging provincial style of life lived alongside that of the mysterious Romany, or gypsies, whose wanderings occasionally cross the lives of village folk and clergy alike. Yet other mysterious elements darken each tale with an uncanny lustre. Taken as a whole, Horthólary’s tales juxtapose the air as a space of generative, if capricious, weirdness and the earth as the stolid repository of the weird. Asteroids crash from the heavens to bury themselves in the ground. The skies send a swirling wind to open devilish pits below. Those who stand taller than is natural or those who wish for flight find themselves at risk, and only the earth’s bones might witness their passage. Darkness may ripple the many-coloured fabric of Reynier’s imagination but it seems to be woven from a single cloth. However familiar the stories’ weird elements might be for readers, in Reynier’s tales they are presented with thrilling freshness.

In addition to an alluring and vivacious textual world, readers of Horthólary are treated to images and maps which elucidate the mysteries and punctuate the tales. While I reviewed an electronic copy of the text where these images were expandable and fascinating, I can only imagine that in the hardback edition these images and maps would draw the eye to even better effect.

Horthólary’s major attraction is its narrative alchemy of what could be called the “antiquarian weird,” a faux-documentarian’s style of rustic narrative that adopts conventions of realist prose, antiquarian mystery, and regional detection. The antiquarian’s voice is nothing new. M.R. James’s example is perhaps the most pronounced, but H.P. Lovecraft and E.F. Benson before him partook as well, to name only a few prominent weird writers. To the antiquarian’s measured and detailed fictions Reynier adds the premise, well-known in today’s stories of detectives on television and in literature, of the patient investigator faced with a regional mystery almost beyond comprehension. In this predominantly masculine tradition, Arthur Conan Doyle’s distant semblance can be seen. But so too are figures more similar to Horthólary’s professor, including G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder or David Lynch’s FBI Agent Dale Cooper. Only occasionally, as in the first tale, “The Angel of Pessane,” does Horthólary read as an Holmesian homage. By the time of the second and third tales such familiarity recedes to allow the grand happenings of the “Landscape of Events,” as the professor himself calls it, to take its deserved centrality.

Even among such an established company, Professor Horthólary stands on his own, in part because of his deep roots in the spiritual milieu of Montagascony, but also because the good professor of anatomy is a devotee of Natural History and the empirical method. Unlike those detectives who use intuition, religion, or noir-esque conventions to conduct their adventures, Horthólary uses his powers of observation and study. Like his readers, Horthólary traces the outside sphere of the tales’ events and has only his eyes to trust when confronted with the unknown. Unlike us, however, he can intervene in a crisis, and with him readers peer into dark depths confident that they are in good hands. Narratively speaking, Horthólary’s travels serve as a convenient excuse to experience the creeping strangenesses of Reynier’s antiquarian weird.

Horthólary’s lineaments of plot are often traditional, such as the familial conflict between Lienards and Poquelins in “Dii Nixi” that conjures up names such as “Montague” and “Capulet.” Yet in this case Reynier takes more than plot from Romeo and Juliet. He also takes drama’s perhaps counter-intuitive ability to sketch well-realized characters through action and setting. Even better, he takes the old bard’s ability to surround borrowed plotlines with characters, events, and other plots that reinvent the familiar with great pleasure. Likewise, in the same story, a reference to H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds cleverly pulls an inverted page from that master of ingenious narrative. The more time spent with Reynier’s tales, the more their traditional elements feel natural to the gorgeously detailed tapestry of Montagascony and environs.

Taken as a whole, the tales gather accretionary power as their unfurling world becomes first subtler and then more vivid. Fossils, archival documents, and stories of infamous characters precipitate swelling mysteries that are redeemed through dramatic dénouements; in turn, each offers tantalizing hints of other mysteries. Wisely, Reynier is parsimonious with details and careful to delay crucial revelations until sufficient dramatic interest exists. Such delays rarely feel coy but are, to their author’s credit, mannered and weighted. Throughout his tales Reynier twists the lemon-squeeze of the uncanny with the judicious eye of a master. In Horthólary the weird is rarely spliced into the world with ungainly violence (until the very climax of the work). Instead, events beyond the pale are calmly introduced in the very concepts that undergird its characters’ narrative world so that they too feel oddly real and pressing.

While canny readers will see some narrative twists before they arrive, their pleasure is not diminished by any anticipation. Cumulatively, the effect is like a series of small but precisely controlled detonations (or, at times, expositions) that shuttle readers from one dramatic moment to the next. It nicely complements Horthólary’s occasional pulpy trick of dialogue in which sudden pronouncements shock readerly complacency. Take, for example, the following passage:

Jean Gélis holds the other at arm’s length, his face suddenly severe. “…I fear I have stumbled upon something awry, Summanus; something strange and dreadful!”

Enjoyment here is contingent on reading such exclamations with an appropriate sense of drama.

More broadly, Reynier’s fluid control over dramatic sequences and world-building descriptions is considerable. Most impressive is his talent for transforming details of colour, shape, and smell into minor scenes of narrative import that give depth to Montagascony’s ecological and social realities. An archeologist’s keen eye for sedimentary detail is represented well in these tales and counterweighs the dialogue’s at-times archaic or formal speech. In particular, “The Nephilim” stands out for its blend of ancient creatures, guardian monastic brethren, and mysterious artefacts alongside sophisticated description of objects and a palpable sense of historical gravity.

My most serious criticism of Horthólary is its implied gendering of values and perspectives. With one notable exception, most speaking and perspectival characters are men. It is not unusual to hear these characters describe female characters with coarse language that emphasizes women’s sexual value and promiscuity. In one egregious passage, a young girl’s uncle describes his niece by saying that “I wouldn’t dip my wick in that one, I might not get it back again!” As a comment on the strangeness of the girl, the sentiment exposes an alarmingly sexualized vision of youthful female identity; when it is applied to a character who stands as a rare example of a realized woman, it detracts from the vision of human identity expressed by the tales. Equally troubling is the unfortunate commentary that one of the tales, “Dii Nixi,” propounds, as it draws an ingenious parallel between a pool’s infestation and a woman’s pregnancy. In the rousing action of this tale, a toothed worm and a new child seem rough cognates. While dramatically convenient and thoughtfully composed, the comparison is ugly in its extension–especially when contextualized by the sensitive intelligence in Reynier’s portrayals of many male characters as well as the romantic heroism ascribed to characters such as André de Gubernatis and Rémi Cassadó.

In James, Lovecraft, Doyle, or Chesterton an imbalanced gendered perspective could be accounted as historically regrettable. A contemporary work has no such luxury. As close as Montagascony comes is the witch-woman Clotilde Lefrebre of “Nemestrinus,” or, as she is known, Gylou, a “female devil.” Unfortunately, when readers meet her, Clotilde is dead through the darkest means, violently and startlingly disassembled. The potential perspective she offers is limited in its remit; Clotilde has “allowed [magic] to devour her,” Horthólary fastidiously observes. Too often women in these tales prove devices for narrative progression more than they are able to proffer perspectives on their world’s events. The lack of women in perspectival or heroic roles is striking; their almost uniformly sexualized roles serves as cause for discontent.

Aside from the question of gendered perspectives, it is a pleasure to note that other idiosyncrasies are extremely rare. When “kowtow” humorously becomes the idiomatic “cow-tow” at one point, it is notable only because the text is otherwise meticulously detailed and presented, inventive in its regional customs for the Montagasconaise and attentive to a more recognizable history as well.

In closing, a confession is due: despite their recent quarter century anniversary, previously to reading Michael Reynier’s Horthólary I had only heard of Tartarus Press in passing. Their print runs are small and superbly made, a practice admirable to the collector but one that makes it difficult for a general audience to access Tartarus’ truly impressive roster of classic and contemporary authors (seeing Walter de la Mare and Edith Wharton gave me a particular thrill). Happily, like many of their other books Horthólary is available in electronic format. E‑books lack the heft and craftsmanship of a well-made hardback and yet the prices are eminently reasonable in comparison and have the additional benefit of being widely available.

With the quality of Reynier’s Horthólary so well established, I see no reason why he or Tartarus should not gain popularity in coming years. Indeed, both deserve it.

The post Review: “Horthólary: Tales from Montagascony” by Michael Reynier appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

This post is part of an ongoing series on 101 weird writers featured in The Weird compendium, the anthology that serves as the inspiration for this site. There is no ranking system; the order is determined by the schedule of posts.

Leonora Carrington (1912 — 2011) was a British-born Mexican surrealist painter. In addition to being an artist, she also wrote several novels and short stories. Her work was influenced by Max Ernst, who she met in 1937 and began living with in Paris. Ernst was arrested soon after the Nazi occupation of France as his art was deemed “degenerate”. Carrington fled to Spain and then later to New York. In 1941, while in New York City she published “White Rabbits” which was later included in The Weird.

After being granted asylum in Mexico, she resumed her work as a surrealist painter and writer. In 1963, she created a mural called El Mundo Magico de los Mayas, which, like much of her art, was influenced by local folk stories. It resides today at the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City. Carrington passed away in 2011 in Mexico City at the age of 94.

—David Davis

That’s my principal message to writers: for God’s sake, keep your eyes open.
William S. Burroughs, 1965

Metaphysics – I – The Surreal Image

Leonor Fini, La Gardienne des Sources (1967). Oil on canvas. Fig. 1.

What would you do if your eye was cut open? And what if your organ of sight, split in two, could still see – what if the first thing you saw was your eye’s distressing division? In surrealist art and literature, as in weird fiction more generally, the eye is a privileged site of conflict. The narrator of Leonora Carrington’s “White Rabbits” tells us that she can see anything in the gloom of Pest Street, the neighbourhood in which she lives. As she explains, “my eyes have always been excellent.”^[1] But the sights she sees are bewildering: tiny white teeth tearing apart rotting flesh; the human body, cloistered away and subject to leprosy; and then, in the story’s last, beautiful image, an apparition of a woman waving her hand over a gloomy balcony: “and as she waved it, her fingers fell off and dropped to the ground like shooting stars.”^[2] This is an important and transformative image. To recognize it as such, we will need to examine a brief history of ideas of severance and sight, and especially of how a perceived fissure or disconnection with the world one sees can prompt a reinvigorated sense of agency. Severance and sight are our guides to “White Rabbits” and to Carrington’s surrealist artist and metaphysical thinking.

Leonor Fini, Self Portrait (1968). Oil on canvas. Fig. 2.

Artistic representations of sight in traditions associated with surrealism are often startling. Just look at the work of Leonor Fini (1907–1996), the Argentine-born Italian feminist whose adolescent years were spent with her eyes wounded and bandaged, and whose friendship with Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst in the late 1930s was influential and important to all three artists. Spending her teenage years severed from the possibility of sight prepared Fini for an aesthetic that channels vision through blindness, which is to say that her art declares its interest in the insights of closed eyes and the declarative statements made by open sight, all of which are refracted through an erotic charge and a compelling palette of colours.

Following this interest, look at the eyes in Fini’s self-portrait, La Gardienne des Sources (1967) [Fig. 1]. These eyes meet those of the viewer in a direct line of sight. Despite their position at the side of the painting, they are bold black spaces in the painting’s otherwise rampaging colour. Equally startling are the eyes in Fini’s very similar Self-Portrait (1968) [Fig. 2].

Leonor Fini, L’Entre Deux (1967). Oil on canvas. Fig. 3.

Unlike the painter’s earlier L’Entre Deux (1967) [Fig. 3], a canvas that pays lush homage to the style of Gustav Klimt and, importantly, a painting in which all its subjects’ eyes are closed and relaxed, the boldly open eyes of La Gardienne and Self-Portrait make for startling viewing: proclaiming themselves, open eyes direct the attention; closed eyes, meanwhile, invite speculation about what imaginative proceedings are happening behind shut eyelids. Open eyes are risks represented in a mirrored ocular faculty and investments in the trade of direct vision for blindness and insight: so often twin stars in the same system.

Photographer unknown, “Les deux Leonor “surréalisent” (1952). Black and white photograph. Fig. 4.

Leonor Fini and Leonora Carrington were friends in the period directly before the Second World War. At that time, Carrington was living in Europe and Surrealist art was at its cultural ascendancy, but even then life was not easy. In a famous photograph of Fini and Carrington from 1952 [Fig. 4], the two stare directly at the camera. It is a dare: armoured resistance against easy interpretations and assumptions. Not for nothing did Fini paint representations of herself with armour, as in The Ceremony (1939), and of Carrington with knight’s garb in The Alcove: An Interior with Three Women (1939). Herself wary of labels, Fini was never comfortable with the mostly male Surrealist movement and preferred instead to call Carrington a revolutionary. Neither she nor Carrington quite saw eye to eye with Surrealists of their time. Some protection was necessary.

René Magritte, “Je ne vois pas la [femme] cachée dans la forêt” in La Révolution surréaliste (1929). Photomontage. Fig. 5.

That said, Carrington’s acceptance within Surrealist circles was a result of genuine hospitality, and her story, “The Debutante”, stands as one of two contributions by women to André Breton’s influential and immediately-banned Anthology of Black Humour (1940), a book dedicated to exploring what Breton conceived of as one of Surrealism’s central tenets. For Carrington and Fini, however, art also served as a defense and a challenge to the growing violence of Second World War-era Europe. Art extended the possibility to see things clearly amid fragmenting visions of society and situations that were directly, materially hostile.^[5] Possibilities for sight were vexed (and vexing) when split or closed.

Still from Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (1929). Film. Fig. 6.

Be alert to art that places itself along the path of eyesight. The surrealist tradition of the cut-up eye and severed line of sight inevitably returns with an almost gravitational pull to a foundational image, specifically, an important superimposition of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s film Un Chien Andalou (1929) [Fig. 6].^[6] This film began to cut open its viewer’s minds with an image that slices through conventional and settled views on the real and that proceeds from an almost-ironic title card familiar to any fable (or act of fabulation): “Il était une fois / Once upon a time.” In the film, a calf’s tears of vitreous humour fall to anxious unease, while Simone Mareuil’s face – her left eye held open with soft but firm force traceable through the lines of her skin – lingers in the mind. What does the surrealist image ask us to see? Why is the cut made to a woman’s eye? With the frictional power of a natural pair violently divided, the two eyes of Un Chien Andalou express very different possibilities. With cynical power, one keeps itself slitted; the other, subject to medical power, discomfortingly opens beyond its control. Mareuil’s subjectivity splits before the brandished razor. Did you flinch?

Leonora Carrington, “Portrait of Dr Morales” (c. 1943). Drawing on paper. Fig. 7.

Let me rephrase the question in order to refocus our attention on Carrington’s work. A young English woman of Irish descent, she lived with German Surrealist Max Ernst in Saint Martin d’Ardeche, France for some time in the late 1930s. After Ernst was interned at Largentière, then in Loriol and in the Camp des Milles during World War II, Carrington fled. Her estranged, mistrustful family had her committed to a Spanish mental asylum in Santander, where she was treated with Cardiazol, described today as “a violent thunderstorm” of a drug for its intense similarity to electroshock therapy. Cardiazol split her vision, for sure, and as such it was the realized nightmare for Carrington, whose antipathy to normal class, gender, and social roles was deeply entrenched.^[7] Years later, Dr Luis Morales, the Spanish doctor who treated her at Santander expressed some doubt about the veracity of Carrington’s initial diagnosis by other, more conventional Catholic doctors: more likely that, in 1941 and given the collapse of both personal and public structures, her surrealist philosophies were a sane way to adapt to violence in society, he believed [Fig. 7].^[8] For Morales, hindsight proved clearest.

Fortunately, Carrington escaped from asylum and her family’s clutches through clever thinking and an arranged marriage to Picasso’s friend, the Mexican diplomat Renato Leduc. With Leduc she fled to New York where so many other Surrealist artists at the time also lived. It was at this period in her life, adrift on a new continent and torn between her new husband and her old lover Max Ernst, also in New York but in a relationship with Peggy Guggenheim, that Carrington published “White Rabbits,” in an American journal, View (Dec. 1941/ Jan. 1942). The city was not enough, and from New York, she left with Leduc to Mexico. There, eventually, they divorced, although she lived there until repressive governmental violence in 1968 forced her back to America for a time.

Carrington’s life was a series of dislocations, some violent, some chosen. How can a person cope with the violence of a fissure that suddenly makes what you see an untrustworthy guide to the nature of the things around you? What can you do when epistemology and ontology are so greatly opposed? The answer provided by Carrington’s work of images and language is that of a rich play of metaphysics in art: transformations and metamorphic drifts that work to process the happenings of life into explanatory models made from symbols and images. The philosophy of metaphysics addresses itself to “first” concepts such as “being” and “the world.” Yet metaphysics is so slippery that, for some, it is in disrepute entirely, while for others it serves as a preeminent site of thought about life.^[9] The abstract certainty of metaphysical pronouncements makes it attractive for artists, writers, and spiritualists, as well as for the Surrealists proper. In the twentieth century, Italians Giorgio De Chirico’s and Carlo Carrà’s “metaphysical art” wagered that nothing less than reality itself must be liberated from the “real.” Metaphysical thought applies itself to very broad circumstances.

Playing with metaphysics can be dangerous and banal in turns, as today’s new age movements illustrate, but it is often necessary in desperate or critical situations. The Surrealists turn to metaphysics in order to reveal a vision of reality liberated from what they saw as the disturbing fictions that distort modern life. For Carrington, the Second World War and ongoing frictions in gender and history, on the one hand, and Surrealist adoptions of old languages of magic and superstition on the other challenged her vision of the world through both microscopic and macroscopic lenses. In consequence, art permitted Carrington space and time for understanding these influences. She defines surrealism as “an approach to a reality that we do not understand yet.”^[10] Compare her father’s definition of art. For him, a successful businessman of the time, painting was “horrible and idiotic” and “you didn’t do art; if you did, you were either poor or homosexual, which were more or less the same sort of crime.”^[11] Contrary to her father’s beliefs, the things Carrington saw and the world’s changing faces demanded an explanation which, for her, took the form of art: the work of metaphysics. And yet where metaphysics promises to explain, it often succeeds only at making matters inscrutable or, at best, arcane. Apuleius, whose Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass stands as a particularly clear instance of the metaphysical art of understanding the world, offers a warning: “I have told you things of which, although you have heard them you cannot know the meaning,” he says.^[12] In the best scenario, metaphysical art distributes the work of understanding among cultural traditions and symbolic systems, and it is along these lines that Carrington’s work has been described as a productive combination of Mexican, Egyptian, Hebrew, Celtic, Greek, and Mesopotamian elements. Her paintings, plays, and stories mix the symbols of alchemy, astrology, Tarot, herbalism, magic, witchcraft, and a personal iconography.^[13]

Xul Solar, Jefa (1923). Watercolour on paper, set on cardboard. Fig. 8.

Such bewilderingly syncretic systems held under fluid control resemble the otherworldly aesthetic of Argentine artist Xul Solar (1887–1963), friend to Jorge Luis Borges and devoted esoteric thinker. Jefa (1923) [Fig. 8], for example, shows the play of one of Solar’s invented cosmic languages across a female patroness’ face. In this fantastic fusion of elements designed to make sense of things by focusing on the creative, the esoteric, and the numinal, we find weird fiction and mid-twentieth-century painting hand in hand. Another of Xul Solar’s paintings, The Aleph (1930) [Fig. 9], prompted Borges’ story of the same name published some fifteen years later (Andrew Hurley’s classic translation is collected in The Weird). Whereas Xul Solar went east from Argentina only to return to the Americas, however, Carrington eventually went west from Europe for good. Each artist’s work draws from the surrealism of aesthetic metaphysics in response to severed systems of sight and dislocation. For Solar and Borges, in the pre-war sun, vision was compromised as well, and the draw on metaphysics and “the languages of the Southern Hemisphere of Tlön” make for strange thinking.^[14] For each artist, the dizzying play of metaphysical explanations bridges cultural systems of representation and belief.

Xul Solar, The Aleph (1930). Oil, minerals, and metals on canvas. Fig. 9.

Why is this so? Because metaphysics speculate and express not just ways of seeing the world, the space of epistemology, but more acutely the ways in which people justify existence. And within every appropriation of the real—the “this is how things are done” mentality—is an element of fantasy, a reminder of its ultimately metaphysical lineage in something beyond the visible and the real. Guyanese writer Wilson Harris speculates that even within a text of “so-called realism” exist elements of “curiously subversive fantasy,” so that, as readers, we can “perceive realism and fantasy as a threshold into evolution and alchemy.” “That threshold,” Harris writes, “is a component of the ‘mental bridge’ within and across cultures.”^[15] In 1935, Bronislow Malinowski, one of the twentieth century’s ground-breaking anthropologists, considered magical words in the hospitable space of ethnographic theory. He argued that cross-cultural communication operates along a “coefficient of weirdness” opposed to a “coefficient of reality”^[16]—optimally, the two will work in tandem. However, as Surrealist and metaphysical art suggests, when distorted and ideological impressions of reality become oppressive and overbearing, a surge of weirdness might answer the impending disaster of a world grown grey, pinched, and purchasable.

We can thus explain the observations of Edward James (1907–1984), the incredibly rich art patron, critic, and writer, who wrote that to him Carrington’s paintings “are not merely painted, they are brewed. They sometimes seem to have materialized in a cauldron at the stroke of midnight, yet for all this they are no mere illustrations of fairy tales.”^[17] The Surrealist precedent of the severed eye of Un Chien Andalou is no fable. While the image of “White Rabbits”—severed fingers, seen falling—does resemble the fabulous, or the fantastic, something has changed. Carrington has drawn her audience close: not to the comforts of the fantastic, but to something more, something that might express how vision is bifurcated and unsettled, and must come to terms with strange images. As it is with her paintings, so too her prose. For the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, Carrington’s artistic works offer “a gay, diabolical and persistent struggle against orthodoxy, which Leonora conquers and disperses with imagination, always multiple and singular, an imagination which she communicates with loving pride.”^[18] Ample material to provoke a reader of the weird, whether one looks to images or to words while addressing the unquenchable thirst for the metaphysical justification served by art.

Leonora Carrington, The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg) (1947). Tempura on wood panel. Fig. 10.

Carrington works as a metaphysical engineer whose structures blend human forms with animal shapes, and whose images occupy the ever-transforming threshold of the grand philosophical statement. In her The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg) (c.1947) [Fig. 10], the most famous of her works, Carrington’s play of evolution and alchemy takes audiences out of their comfort zone and into a place of colours and darkness; her work confronts an audience’s blindnesses with visions hitherto unthinkable. But like the distortions of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), itself a text of vision and visions, the scale is always subject to revision and (with a threat of violence) further justification (can you see the dull blades of the tiny haters trying to cut down the spiritual giant?).^[19] This is the prerogative and risk of metaphysics which appear graceful but conceal great violence. Explanations are weird, for they draw neither from sight nor facts but instead operate along another principle to pronounce upon the other two. Never fear them. Never trust them either, for there are jagged jaws, tiny knives, and little teeth in the darkness, waiting for the giant edifice of the human to fall to ground in rapture, astonishment, ignorance, or simply sleep. Something might eat you while you’re wondering at clouds and colours, sheltering what is precious to you all the while. “White Rabbits” indeed. We can now ask: what else runs into the underground with us—chasing Alices to find alluring rabbits in some darkened and lost-looking glass world—only just ahead?

Gently Falling Fingers – II – Never Enough “White Rabbits”

At this point, it should be noted that for the Weird Fiction Review this story is familiar territory. In a tour de force of interpretation, S.J. Chambers describes “White Rabbits” using an admirably visual explanatory model. Therefore, it would not do to dwell on Carrington’s story along the same lines. But another look at the story seems earned for the 101 Weird Writers series. What follows will engage with the story as a peculiar textual affair lodged in the chasm between seeing and its objects of sight. The events discussed occur under the oddly hostile sign of New York, where the narrator is and where Carrington was when writing the story. The city is described as “so hot that I got palpitations when I ventured out into the streets, so I sat and considered the house opposite and occasionally bathed my sweating face.”^[20] In this sweltering heat, vision changes and falls subject to mirage.

“The time has come that I must tell the events which began in 40 Pest Street,” our story begins. While the narrator’s reason for telling her story is obscure, her voyeurism is clear. She sees strange things in the house opposite hers and gets too involved, bringing rotting meat to the neighbour’s door. Disconcertingly, on encountering the physical object of her gaze she feels the house itself recoil from her fingers. The door is violently hidden under a sudden “cascade of something,” then implodes at her touch, its bell ringer falling to the ground when, subject to her “angry push,” the door “caved inwards, admitting a ghastly smell of putrid meat.”^[21] The smell is what she’s brought, stinking and decomposed: “flesh meat.” She has brought it for the house’s inhabitants, Ethel and Lazarus, who live a strange life. There are the rabbits, for a start, and then there is Ethel’s dead white skin, speckled with what look like stars.

First the rabbits. So many rabbits. A hundred rabbits, all with unblinking large pink eyes. What is their role in this story, these strange interlopers? Animals remind us of the strangeness of flesh before the fact of death when they exist in such close proximity to the human body—when, as in Carrington’s paintings, the human and the animal are bands along the spectrum of living shapes that blend or shift before your eyes. Comparing the similar situations of human beings and animals, Carrington argues that “We both live the best we can and then we die, and we don’t know anything about what happens after death, maybe nothing. […] We are in the same situation as animals.”^[22] Perhaps the more pressing question is this: why do they eat rotting meat? Rabbits are herbivores, but these ones emerging from the dark corners of this almost-abandoned, disappearing house have changed without explanation. We know only the sudden clutch of fear and the desire “to get out and away from these terrible silver people and the white carnivorous rabbits.”^[23] What happens when you see something that challenges your instruments of vision? You run. What if that sight is a woman turning to stars and a horde of animals setting to an unnatural feast? The order of things differs from what it was thought to be; her gift of dead animal flesh leads her to the task of making new metaphysical concepts that might explain what was previously hidden from her.

Against the beastly play of collapsing logical syllogisms and frail-to-breaking metaphysics, Carrington’s figures dance, sometimes with great visceral joy in matters of the flesh but, more often, with weird and unsettling pain or sometimes, increasingly, with a fragile beauty. Let us return to hands—a magician or sleight-of-hand artist knows that the gestures traced by a hand lead the eye to belief. That’s how they trick you. Look again at these hands, delicate and celestial, and see behind them how Ethel’s green silk dress pales against her “dead white” skin that “glittered as if speckled with thousands of minute stars.” Is there a universe within her? A “whole world,” as they say? If you don’t run when seeing such a sight, you might remain to face the mystery. “Do you not want to stay and become like us?” the woman asks. “In seven years your skin will be like stars, in seven little years you will have the holy disease of the Bible, leprosy!”^[24] Biblical references and the seven years of famed magical property: an esoteric language is being called to account for the fullness of human life, having been dismissed by others out of hand.

Leonora Carrington, detail from Samain (c. 1951). Oil on canvas. Fig. 11.

There are other hands in Carrington’s universe. See, for instance, Samain (c.1951) [Fig. 11]. Look at the delicately tapered white hands of the feminine figure in the bottom right of the painting. They trace an absent egg, perhaps the one seemingly dropped to the figure’s lower left… hand, where a foot might be. Incidentally, for a connection between eyes and eggs, look no further than Georges Bataille’s Story of An Eye (1928), where Simone muses on the similarity between the two: egg reminds her of a calf’s eye, she says, “because the white of the egg was the white of the eye, and the yolk the eyeball.” Only shortly after, Simone speaks “about broken eggs, and then broken eyes.”^[25] The parallel seems exact. In Carrington’s Samain, having seemingly dropped the egg, the figure’s hands are still holding something immaterial, still making the gesture. Fingers are how hands hold objects, make gestures, and interact with the world in general—they are the tactile method through which we shape the meaning of what we say. This is how “White Rabbits” ends, with the vision of Ethel’s hand above a balcony, “and as she waved it, her fingers fell off and dropped to the ground like shooting stars.” What do you see? A declension of stars? A text somehow celestial? The flesh leprous and translucent? What kind of sight is offered? An otherworldly image where, catalyzed by a gift of rotting meat, the hidden things of the world are quietly separating into a metaphysical opposition of bodies heavenly and beastly.

Leonora Carrington’s “White Rabbits” is an entry in a Surrealist ledger of works that inscribe visions of a fractured world within a singular point of view engaged in clear metaphysical labour. The story returns its audience to a conception of literary reading itself wherein symbols and signs mean exactly more and less than they appear: where the ocular vision of a reader is split between the meaning of a word and the graphical shape of ink on the page, in other words. As Peter Mendelsund argues, both the “notion that readers are ‘see-ers’” and the conventions used to describe reading are derived from metaphysical traditions of “visitation, annunciation, dream vision, prophecy, and other manifestations of religious or mystical epiphany.”^[26] Carrington’s stories, like her paintings brewed on an alchemical crucible, suggest that a divided vision might arrive at new ways of seeing things: not as they are, but as they might mean. Symbols are made to betray the mystic operation of their signification.

It is thus that the distended and broken parts of the human body fall to the ground as shooting stars surrounded by hordes of brilliantly uncanny white rabbits—white rabbits that, as we know, eat rotting flesh such as that of the woman whose delicate, disintegrating hands prove so alluring to the narrator’s eye. If the image of an eye severed is surrealism’s gift to our aesthetic consciousness, then Carrington’s image of a body turned to stars falling among red-mouthed rabbits must also be accorded its place in a surreal sequence of remarkable images.

One more thing. After an eye reassembles its vision, it confronts a harsh truth of the world—transitory beauty will be eaten and consumed by beasts that fit no rational order. Like the narrator of “White Rabbits,” we will run from both beasts and beauty. In the end, Carrington’s fateful image raises another question: what if it isn’t just the eye that is cut? What if one’s fingers themselves are severed?

Every time I see the eye cut open—its vitreous humours spurting—I flinch. What should I expect? The sight is the painful afterimage of a wound: a wounded vision of the real. An intensity of feeling occupies the place of meaning or message. When I read about those falling fingers, it’s beautiful, but also oh-so-achingly weird.

_____

^[1] Leonora Carrington, “White Rabbits,” 1941/1942, in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, eds. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, New York: Tor, 2011: 277.

^[2] Carrington, “White Rabbits”: 277.

^[3] This gendered twist is common: Luce Irigaray, for example, remarks that “‘femininity is a role, an image, a value, imposed upon women by male systems of representation. In this masquerade of femininity, the woman loses herself, and loses herself by playing on her femininity,” The Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985: 84.

^[4] See a full discussion of this image in Rudolf E. Kuenzli’s “Surrealism and Misogyny,” Surrealism and Women, eds. Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, and Gwen Raaberg, Cambridge: MIT, 1991: 17–18.

^[5] Alyce Mahon, “She Who Revealed: The Celtic Goddess in the Art of Leonora Carrington,” in Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist, ed. Seán Kissane, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2013: 132–33.

^[6] In a garrulous story, Alejandro Jodorosky describes the only time Carrington and Luis Buñuel met. While I take the liberty to quote the story, I retain reservations as to its authenticity: “She had a mythic reputation among Mexican painters; she was an incarnation of the most extreme surrealism. During a party, Luis Buñuel, seduced by Carrington’s beauty and emboldened by the notion that she had transcended all bourgeois morality, proposed (with his characteristic bluntness) that she become his mistress. Without even waiting for her answer, he gave her the key to the secret studio that he used as a love nest and told her to meet him at three o’clock the next afternoon. Early the next morning, Leonora went to visit the place alone. She found it tasteless: It looked exactly like a motel room. Taking advantage of the fact that she was in her menstrual period, she covered her hands with blood and used them to make bloody handprints all over the walls in order to provide a bit of decoration for that anonymous, impersonal room. Buñuel never spoke to her again,” Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky: The Creator of El Topo [Mu: Le maître et les magiciennes], 2005, trans. Joseph Rowe. Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2008: 25–26. The relationship between the Chilean filmmaker and Carrington (he staged her play Penelope in 1957, for instance) is described with such verve and invention that all readers of the weird are directed to Jodorosky’s work for more.

^[7] N. McCrae, “‘A Violent Thunderstorm’: Cardiazol Treatment in British Mental Hospitals,” Historical Psychiatry 17 (2006): 67–90. Here is Carrington’s description of what Cardiazol induces, and what she called “the Great Epileptic Ailment”: I learned later that my condition had lasted for ten minutes; I was convulsed, pitiably hideous, I grimaced and my grimaces were repeated all over my body.” In “Down Below,” The House of Fear, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1988: 192.

^[8] Susan L. Aberth, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy, and Art, Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2004: 46.

^[9] Those interested are directed to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s page on “Metaphysics”: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/metaphysics/.

^[10] Leonora Carrington, Interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, “An Approach to a Reality That We Do Not Yet Understand,” in Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist, ed. Seán Kissane, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2013: 165.

^[11] Quoted in Aberth, 20.

^[12] This citation from Apuleius is quoted in the foreword of Gerald Gardner’s Witchcraft Today (1954), a text which Carrington appreciatively read. See also Teresa Arcq, “A World Made of Magic,” trans. Jonathan Brennan, in Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist, ed. Seán Kissane, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2013: 32.

^[13] Arcq, 19.

^[14] For more in whimsical but very accurate analysis, see Maria Bustillos, “Lot 51: Borges, Xul Solar, and the Occult,” Paris Review 18 June (2015): http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/06/18/lot-51/.

^[15] Wilson Harris, The Womb of Space, Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1983: 69–70; see also Steven Slemon, “Magical Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

^[16] Bronislaw Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic Vol. 2, London: Unwin Brothers, 1935.

^[17] Edward James, “Leonora Carrington,” in Leonora Carrington: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculptures 1940–1990, ed. Andrea Schlieker, London: Serpentine Gallery, 38. For Carrington, the question of alchemy opens to political structures. As she described the Irish Sidhe, in words told to her by her grandmother with clear parallels to Ireland under English rule, there are “descendants of that ancient race that magically started to live underground when their land was taken by invaders with different political and religious ideas. They preferred to retire underground where they are dedicated to magic and alchemy, knowing how to change gold,” from an interview with Mexican journalist Manuel Avila Camacho López in “Max Ernst me enseño nueva forma de vivir,’ Excélsior, 10 February 1974, and quoted in Aberth: 12. Aberth also points out that, for Carrington, alchemy was connected to Herbert Read’s Surrealism (1937) and the artistic education she received while 19 at Ozenfant Academy. Cf. Aberth 22–23. It must be regarded as a principle irony of the artist’s life that her artistic investment in a transformative and theoretical prosecution of alchemy parallels the occupation of her estranged and even hostile father, Harold Wilde Carrington, a principle shareholder of Imperial Chemicals Industries (ICI). The line between alchemy and chemistry, aesthetics and commerce, runs like a finely sharpened knife within the Carrington family.

^[18] Carlos Fuentes, “Leonora Carrington, or Ironical Sorcery,” in Leonora Carrington: Exposición de óleos, gouaches, dibujos y tapices, Mexcio City: Instituto Anglo-Mexicano de Cultura, 1965.

^[19] For connections between Carrington and Swift, see Kissane 61–69.

^[20] Carrington, “White Rabbits”: 227.

^[21] Carrington, “White Rabbits”: 278.

^[22] Leonora Carrington and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, “An Approach to a Reality that We Do Not Yet Understand [Interview],” Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist, ed. Seán Kissane, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2013: 160.

^[23] Carrington, “White Rabbits”: 279.

^[24] Carrington, “White Rabbits”: 279.

^[25] Georges Bataille, L’histoire de l’oeil [Story of the Eye], trans. Joachim Neugroschel, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987: 38–39.

^[26] Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read, New York: Vintage, 2014: 350.

The post 101 Weird Writers #38 — Leonora Carrington appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Hector Hugh Munro, better known by his nom de plume Saki, was a British writer known for his macabre stories that sometimes satirized the Edwardian society to which he belonged. Munro was born in British-controlled Burma to a father who served as Inspector General for the Indian Imperial Police. Munro followed his father into the Indian Imperial Police but after contracting malaria, returned home to England where he began a career in journalism and writing. Munro is considered to be a master of the short story having influenced diverse authors from A. A. Milne to P. G. Wodehouse. Munro died in battle during the First World War.

– David Davis, editor of 101 Weird Writers

***

This moral mystery seemed too much for the company until Mr. Hubble tersely solved it by saying, “Naterally wicious.” Everybody then murmured “True!”

– Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)

Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), pen name Saki, was no stranger to disorientation. Born in Akyab, Burma to a family serving imperial British interests in Southeast Asia, he was only two years old when his mother, Mary Frances Mercer, died from complications related to a miscarriage caused by a runaway cow in Devon, England.

Studies of Saki often repeat this odd story as an introduction to the writer’s sometimes strange works, but – as readers of the weird will know – oddness is often no cause for levity and death no simple matter. The immediate consequences of his mother’s odd demise were hardly humorous for Munro. He and his fellow bereaved siblings were taken from Burma and left to the cruelties of the British school system by their father. “What bearing this tragedy had on her son’s later preoccupation with animals that attack women we can only surmise,” John Carey offers in a recent introduction to Saki’s work – “but it can hardly have been insignificant” (ix). In his stories that would follow, guardians and women must always be aware.

Wrested from colonial exoticism into the hellish grasp of boarding school and suddenly bereft of his mother through a strange accident, Munro was, it is fair to conclude, permanently affected by childhood events. He had his share of complications as an adult, perhaps more. Biographers make much of signs of ambiguous sexuality in his life, for instance. But in some things he was very straightforward, and much like his contemporary, Rudyard Kipling (who also shared his occasional proclivity for ghost stories and the weird), Munro believed deeply in the dangerous myths of nation and empire. A dedication to these values led Moore to enlist as an overage soldier in World War I. Refusing easy postings, Munro bravely insisted on joining the infantry. It was a fateful decision. In November 1916, he died in the trenches near Beaumont-Hamel on the Somme.

Before his death in war, Munro was a police officer in India, satirist, occasional historian and, most pertinent to our purposes, a writer under the pen-name of “Saki.” The pseudonym is less a name and more properly a designation. Assumedly, Munro took it from Edward FitzGerald’s 1859 translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It refers to a boy who serves wine and, for Munro, seemed most compelling as a symbol for a spiritual guide (Gibson 11; cf. Carey xiv). Of Munro’s writing, of which there is much – journalism, satire, and humour in nonfiction, plays, and short stories – only the fiction bears the name of Saki. The impression of the strange is indelibly cut, however. Sandie Byrne judges that Saki’s stories show a bracing “lack of sentimentality about children, animals, or anything else.” A flair for cruelty and an ugly antipathy toward other cultures, especially Jewish and Slavic peoples, and the working classes grievously mar Saki’s work (Byrne 11).

A chasm separates Saki’s fiction from Munro’s biography, and contradictions between the two abound. To Brian Gibson’s eye, “Saki satirizes the urban bourgeois world which the gentleman, journalist, and soldier Munro inhabited, addressed in his articles, and fought for” (17). Despite the difference in attributions, both endeavours issued from the same man. The tormented relationship between Saki’s targets of satire – British politicians, strong women, and Edwardian society more generally – and his strong belief in Queen and country goes some way toward explaining moments of conflicted cruelty. So too we might account for his turn toward animals and children as figures of moral superiority. Saki’s children are often valorized just as the stupidity of adults is exposed. The three major themes that occupied his writing are 1) the myth of England, 2) the British Empire, and 3) “the feral ephebe, the sleek young male killer in his several forms” (Byrne 15). It is the third that most concerns readers of The Weird, and so it is to the devilish triangle of knowledge, secrecy, and children that we must turn, for biography can only take us so far.

The Secret Arts of Knowing Children § An Open Window, A Cage

Contemporary readers may be most familiar with Saki by way of his anti-ghost story “The Open Window” (1914) The delight of this story, in which a nervy young man (Framton Nuttel) is played like a fiddle by a teenage girl named Vera’s cunning lies, is the way in which it tells you from the beginning that its operations will be more than transparent. Better than a pane of glass, materially resistant to its illusory translucency, vision through an open window will be entirely unobstructed. So too the ghost story, where the ghosts are entirely see-through, which is to say that they are the bodies of the living: no ghosts at all! So too the story exposes the fiction of narrative. Vera’s ghost story is a spectacular lie, the story tells us, and therefore one should not trust stories, but only take pleasure in them (as the reader of “The Open Window” does). Unlike poor Framton, ostensibly the protagonist at the story’s beginning, in this fiction of anti-fiction readers are more aligned with Vera, a “very self-possessed young lady of fifteen” (102, my emphasis) with a penchant for cruel and inventive storytelling. Not insignificantly, Saki repeats the description of Vera as self-possessed on the next page. Only when making her deadly emotional ploy to Framton does Vera’s voice “los[e] its self-possessed note and become falteringly human” (103). Could the self-possessed child in control of narrative manipulations be somehow inhuman – perhaps another uncanny face of the weird?

Named for speaking truth (Saki’s game is satire, never forget), Vera plays on the feelings of the adults who listen to her tales spun from ghosts, cemeteries, and the grotesque. The person closest to knowledge seems to be the person whose lies manipulate the too-gullible adults surrounding her. To be self-possessed is to embody a knowledge not shared with others. In this, Vera, like many other children, is a gothic child who “knows too much,” as Steven Bruhm writes, an observation made acute when he notes that the self-possessed child’s “knowledge makes us more than a little nervous” (103). The most haunting thing about Saki’s “The Open Window” is the power of the young to dance a sharp knife along the exposed nerves of adults. Inventive, keen-witted, and cruel, the young simply know more than their more aged competitors. More than this, they have the will to play. The theme is at the heart of a long line of fictional treatments surrounding a central object: the ambiguously knowing child.

Before turning to Saki’s brilliantly brief “Sredni Vashtar” (1912) I want to briefly recall another short story published just prior to Saki’s work, Henry James’s “In the Cage” (1898). The pairing is odd but fruitful. James was no stranger to stories of distressingly strange children who know exactly too much or who seem to know something, at least. This is clear in What Maisie Knew (1897), for example, but also in the archetypical ghost story The Turn of the Screw (1898), in which an ambiguously motivated governess comes to grief in the service of two children who seem to know something she does not. Or perhaps the children, normal and knowing nothing extraordinary, are terrorized by their paranoid governess. A ghost story refuses simple readings. This is also the time of Sigmund Freud, for whom, as Bruhm suggests, “the child is always defined by conflicts, desires, and aggressions, instinctual drives he located in the human being’s animalistic ‘id’” (99). In these and other stories, the Victorian child’s seeming innocence rapidly gave way to gothic or macabre reminders served by children such as Vera (or our Conradin). Not only “naterally wicious,” as Dickens’s Great Expectations suggested, disturbingly knowing children are possessed of some kind of secret – perhaps the secret.

Henry James’s “In the Cage” describes a telegrapher who stumbles on a secret which, for a brief window of time, dispossesses her: an affair between two of her aristocratic customers, Lady Bradeen and Captain Everard. Fascinated by the secret, the telegraphist puts her own impending marriage to a grocer, Mr. Mudge, on hold as she begins observation of Everard. In the end, it is the telegraphist to whom Everard will turn when he worries about a wire from Bradeen that might have compromised the two. Could their coded letters have betrayed their secret? But no, they are safe, the telegraphist confirms. All parties never see each other again. The telegraphist will marry Mudge. Back to reality – or so it seems.

James’s short story is comprehensively riddled by what Thomas Laughlin calls “James’s phantom signifiers—his undisclosed secrets, mystifying enigmas, and transient ghosts” (155). In their famous reading of “In the Cage,” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari linger over the uncanny moment of telling that betrays to the listener or reader what Deleuze and Guattari call “the form of the secret” (196): not the secret itself, nor the matter of the secret, nor even the fact that secrecy exists, but a certain knowingness that disrupts structures and the foreseen. The moment in which the form of the secret is revealed is an epistemological change that happens when the London telegraphist, reading a coded telegraph, “ended up knowing so much that she could no longer interpret anything. There were no longer shadows to help her see more clearly, only glare” (qtd. in Deleuze and Guattari 197).^[1] “You cannot go further in life than this sentence by James,” the French theorists argue. Operations of the self-possessed unknown in texts devoid of inherent meaning are signified by failures of interpretation. In turn, these failures and lacunae make visible the shape of untraceable secrets. “As Kierkegaard says,” Deleuze and Guattari conclude, “nothing distinguishes the knight of the faith from a bourgeois German going home or to the post office: he sends off no special telegraphic sign … yet he is already moving on a line no one even suspects” (197). The moral of the story is this: to be self-possessed is to know secrets, and the most others might gain from observation is to understand not secrets themselves but how to discern the form of the secret.

Our detour through “The Open Window” and “In the Cage” should remind us that prose is a mysterious thing. Words and the images they conjure are certainly not straightforward; neither are matters of knowledge and interpretation. Beyond the figural knowing children and oblivious adults who appear in the spectralized stories, prose is a matter of paths to understanding, of secrets and of the forms and bodies that hold them. Turning to the weird, it will be a matter of guarding ourselves, as readers, from the strange device in play, for we as adults might find ourselves open and vulnerable to the story at hand if we seek out only secrets and not their forms. What does weird fiction know that we do not? The je ne sais quoi of art?

To discover what someone knows we must evaluate how the fact of their experiences and knowledge are presented to us. How does knowledge testify? The knowingness of our little Conradin precedes that of Stella Gibbons’s Ada Doom in the faux-gothic Cold Comfort Farm (1932). As a child, Doom infamously saw “something nasty in the woodshed.” Unlike Gibbons’s child, who comes face to face with her horror and is destroyed by it, Conradin and the reader of “Sredni Vashtar” are anchored to the window and see nothing of the events that transpire inside. In this, he is more like Ian McEwan’s Briony Tallis of Atonement, who watches over without seeing a scene of her own fervid imaginings come to life in horrific fashion. Like the weird, Conradin straddles worlds, piercing borders with transgressive unconcern. He is fateful and strange, true, but he is more like us than we may care to admit. He may pray to the polecat-ferret Sredni Vashtar, but this devotion to the unknown and the inhuman resembles more and more readerly devotion to the text, especially that use of a text that asks for knowledge. A text is an assemblage of signs and pages, after all. Don’t get bitten looking for secrets.

Sredni Vashtar in the Woodshed § What the Weird Knows

About “Sredni Vashtar” I will say comparatively little and leave the reading for readers. It is a classic. Charles H. Gillen observes that this blinking-short story is one of Saki’s most frequently reprinted tales, and that, “because of its balefulness and horror, it stays in a reader’s memory ever afterward” (87). What more can be said? Better question: what is the worst that can happen?

Only remember this: Conradin is a knowing child, one of the devilishly dreadful who observe few social niceties. Sredni Vashtar went forth. A child will use you just like a spiritualist medium would at a séance. You won’t even know you’re being exploited for an other’s ends. His thoughts were red thoughts and his teeth were white. But you might feel a little weird. After all, reading the story re-enlivens Conradin’s chant, “the hymn of his threatened idol” (55). His enemies called for peace, but he brought them death. While the reader recites the chant something is happening in the little shed, out of sight but not out of mind. Does Conradin know what is going to happen? Does he hope against hope, praying to his demigod for the devil to deliver himself? Even the child fears the polecat-ferret whom he worships – and for good reason. Devotion betrays its object of worship. It is in fact Conradin’s visitations with red offerings (red flowers, scarlet berries) that clues in his guardian, Mrs. De Ropp, and leads to the removal of Conradin’s beloved hen. De Ropp’s blind act blithely violates Conradin’s only object of affection and leaves him the sole consolation of Sredni Vashtar – “his most treasured possession”, but also a beast he little understands (54). From that moment, all Conradin’s faint knowledge flies out the window in the form of a yearning prayer. “Do one thing for me, Sredni Vashtar,” he pleads. Show a sign. Signify yourself.

For us, watching the mouth of the shed with Conradin, Sredni Vashtar’s passing can be followed only by mundanities and mysteries. Taste “the slow enjoyment” of eating toast, for instance, one of Conradin’s near-forbidden pleasures. Or hear the “quick spasms” of noise outside the dining-room door. Footsteps, entreaties, cries, voices, an unmysterious “heavy burden,” but also, as anyone who enjoys toast will know, the soft crunch of buttered bread. As the story tells it, then, the body’s burden is a wyrd knowledge predicated on the sight of nothing and a false prayer to animals cast as demigods, but it has not let go of toast and our own recognizable reality. To read of Conradin is to know this and to see it, not in sordid little details, but in form alone. Some secrets are not worth telling. In this case, the weird knows feeling. We proceed to the last question: of what destiny or fate does Saki’s wyrd tell?

If you do find something strange about Saki’s “Sredni Vashtar,” you’re one of the lucky ones, for its pages host the weird in its feral self-possession. As Ann and Jeff VanderMeer write of the weird: “I know it when I feel it” (xvi). The good thing is this: you can still feel. Otherwise you might be an insensate body. Worse, you might be asleep, dispossessed of feeling and possessed of an insensate or distracted mind ready to accept whatever comes. If you’re not feeling a little odd, you might find yourself unpleasantly surprised. Taken by ferrets even, or by the baleful misogyny of a knowing child. In a blink of the eye you too might have to be carried inside.

Conradin may not be right about everything, and his little god may have run off, but don’t tell him about the body. He knows. Sredni Vashtar, the Beautiful. The weird, red in tooth and claw.

Works Cited

Bruhm, Steven. “Nightmare on Sesame Street: or, The Self-Possessed Child.” Gothic Studies 8.2 (2006): 98–113. Print.

Byrne, Sandie. The Unbearable Saki: The Work of H.H. Munro. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.

Carey, John. Introduction to Short Stories and The Unbearable Bassington. Saki. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. vii-xxiv. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [Mille Plateaux]. 1987. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 2003. Print.

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. London: Chapman and Hall, 1861. Print.

Gibbons, Stella. Cold Comfort Farm. London: Longmans, 1932. Print.

Gibson, Brian. Reading Saki: The Fiction of H.H. Munro. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. Print.

Gillen, Charles H. H.H. Munro (Saki). New York: Twayne, 1969. Print.

James, Henry. “In the Cage.” 1898. Collected Stories Vol. 2. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. 787–940. Print.

Laughlin, Thomas A. “The Double Life in the Cage: The Queering of the Social in Henry James’s Late Short Fiction.” Henry James Review 31.2 (2010): 154–168. Print.

Ross, Shawna. “‘You cannot go further in life than this sentence:’ Deleuze, Guattari, Henry James.” Modern Languages Association Conference, Los Angeles, 2011. Academia.edu. 2011. Internet. 25 June 2015.

Saki [H.H. Munro]. The Best of Saki. London: Bodley Head, 1952. Print.

      . “Sredni Vashtar.” 1912. The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. Eds. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. New York: Tor, 2012. 53–55. Print.

VanderMeer, Ann and Jeff. Introduction to The Weird. Eds. VanderMeer. xv-xx.

____

[1] Ross points out that this line is multiply distorted, first by Deleuze and Guattari, who are quoting a 1925 French translation of James’s text, and then by Brian Massumi, the English translator of Mille plateaux, whose revised version again fails to include crucial words that the French translators had in the first place picked up on. With four versions of these two absolutely crucial lines – James’s original, the 1925 translation, Massumi’s version into English, and Massumi’s erroneous repetition of the original – we arrive at a situation where “Each time we turn to the Jamesian text, we return to it through a text […] that exists virtually, not on the line of hard segmentarity but in the micropolitics of Jamesian style, in the molecular currents of “In the Cage,” whose use for Deleuze and Guattari is to give a model for abstraction that abandons interpretation and stratification in favor of a productive eternal return” (Ross).

The post 101 Weird Writers #36 — Saki appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Gabriel García Márquez

“The world had been sad since Tuesday.”

Reading the stories of Gabriel García Márquez reveals that we have been incomplete all this time. A delirious current of imagination and critique runs like live electricity through the masterful Colombian writer’s prose, and his stories envelop readers in a sensual and richly affective world where all stray details, all passing observations, and all chance descriptions contribute to something generous, wise, and powerfully weird. His is a world where the stray, the passing, and the chance take centre stage. (Cue our bedraggled old man with sorry wings.) My advice to approaching such richness is to be aware of critical appellations, but also to engage with the stories on their own terms. Magic realism, the term most often used to describe García Márquez, has many definitions. We should at least know that the Colombian’s penchant for blending fabulous and fantastical with the heartrendingly real can be traced to the children’s stories his grandmother would tell him when he was young. That disclaimer made, allow me to present you with today’s offering by way of a wish to have it included in the weird fiction canon: “Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes” / “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” (in Gregory Rabassa’s translation).

What we have is a children’s story about a place warped by sadness and visited by a distressed, lost Daedalus. It bears comparison with Franz Kafka’s best fables, Herman Melville’s shortest stories, and Angela Carter’s dangerous fantasies (or, equally as good, those of Silvina Ocampo). Yet its vibrant colour is all its own. It is – and I’m looking at you, weird reader – a story deeply imbricated in the febrile plenitude of fiction’s constitutive strangeness and in the complex relationship we as humans have with ambiguity and with each other. That sounds like a tall order but it’s a very simple draw. Like so much of García Márquez’s writing the story aches with a luxurious language of sadness and beauty. Let me rephrase my sales pitch, then. The story is a marvel and a wonder.

“Against the judgement of the wise neighbor woman, for whom angels in those times were the fugitive survivors of a celestial conspiracy, they did not have the heart to club him to death.”

To begin, who is our eponymous figure? An angel? An old man? A movie star or a dramatic actor? (Let’s not get distracted by the adaptations of this tale in film, in 1988, and on the stage, in 2002 and then in 2005.) He’s got wings but little will to use them. Perhaps he is Daedalus, the great artificer who flew with his son Icarus on self-devised wings – the father who saw his son fall to sea and drown in the same wings he made. The old man speaks neither Latin nor Spanish but some “hermetic” tongue. (Although I silently implore Father Gonzaga to address him in Greek, the meddlesome priest does not even oblige a response.) Perhaps the old man is the angel of death, as the neighbor suggests, his wings the ragged remnants of heavenly garb. He is – this is certain – the narrative pretext for the villagers’ actions: his aberrant nature and abrupt presence precipitate events of passing strangeness. Answers are not forthcoming from the story itself. Readers must draw their own conclusions.

“The simplest among them thought that he should be named mayor of the world.”

Never mistake the simpleminded for silliness. There have been worse politicians than incomprehensible foreigners. To be led by signs or ciphers – our angel raving in a sailor’s voice – is the fate of all readers. If there is in our old man a sign mistaken for a wonder, then, as his changing fortunes demonstrate, the villagers bear him little allegiance. (Beware the competing spectacle of a spider woman!) The story raises a question: to what degree are people led by the spectacular and the strange, only to capriciously and suddenly shift their allegiances and interest? You would not be mistaken to hear faint if distorted echoes of Guy Debord. What should our relationship with the clearly inexplicable be? This is the territory speculative fiction charts; in it, the weird overlaps with magical realism to create a magnetic, alluring relationship asking us to evaluate our perspective on things we don’t understand. An old man with enormous wings is a thing to be seen, but is he a sign of political allegiances? Is he something less than that? Something more? Perhaps he is just an old man with wings.

“The curious came from far away.”

Readers and not critics are the best agent provocateurs of recalcitrant fantasies, just as those interested in the old man and his wings come from great distances to get a look for themselves. We all need physical immediacy to gawk and marvel. It’s worth taking a minute to understand where we’ve come to, however, and place the story in its moment of origin.“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” was first published in the pages of the New American Review (1955), much before the majority of his work and twelve years before One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), probably the most familiar of his stories. Some critics point to La Violencia, a tumultuously violent time in Colombian history, as the key to understanding the actions of the community composed of Pelayo, Elisenda, Father Gonzago, and the rest of the vaguely cruel villagers. Thus, as John Goodwin argues in Explicator (2006), the story reflects the influence of religion and political instability in social crises.

García Márquez wrote “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” long before his Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), itself a novel which exposes the pathology and fascism of tyranny in its centroamericano or suramericano guises (norteamericanos do tyranny differently). Nonetheless, the endeavours have a certain resonance. Quoting from the United States Government Printing Office’s Area Handbook for El Salvador in her own Salvador (1982/3), Joan Didion provides some illuminating passages about General Maximiliano Hermández Martínez, El Salvador’s tyrant from 1931 to 1944 and an inspiration for Autumn of the Patriarch. “He kept bottles of colored water that he dispensed as cures for almost any disease, including cancer and heart trouble, and relied on complex magical formulas for the solution of national problems,” one sample goes. Another: “During an epidemic of smallpox in the capital, he attempted to halt its spread by stringing the city with a web of colored lights.” Any magic realism or weird fiction does not far diverge from the Colombian writer’s chosen antagonist: political reality. As Didion concludes in Salvador, “I began to see Gabriel García Márquez in a new light, as a social realist” (59). It is for this reason that, in his 1982 essay “The Critic and Society,” Wole Soyinka describes García Márquez’s work as a “haunting fusion of magic and revolutionary history.” We would not be far off to read this early story along similar lines.

And yet the story is not as simple as mere political allegory. Look at the brilliant lines of feverish dream with which the angel’s entrance changes the villagers’ lives. Remember the airs and sounds of the sea; remember Pelayo and his many dead crabs. Magical realism – the weirdness in which García Márquez’s story is deeply imbued – disrupts the political intractability of fiction’s traditional relationship with its social origins, but that disruption retains and even clarifies a hard nub of political violence and communal ethics. Weird fiction sets itself out against a particular milieu of social, literary, and political influences but does not cut its ties to the world as we know it.

“The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act.”

The mystery of the old man with enormous wings remains intact. Our be-winged Bartleby is no allegory; Gabriel García Márquez is no John Bunyan. Remember if you will, and only briefly, Melville’s great character Bartleby from “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853). (The continental affiliations between these two American literary giants are powerful.) In that story, a man whose only forlorn utterance is the inimical “I would prefer not to” moves from a dead letter office to an early grave in a mental hospital. Along the way he betrays deep philosophical differences with the milieu in which he is placed and with the literary carriage that carries him. At one point many commentators read Bartleby as a clinically depressed man, but nothing could be further from the truth, as readers attuned to the weird should see clearly. Bartleby is strange. Better yet he is estranged. His refusal of the demands to which his interlocutors attempt to interpellate him delineates a clear space of non-possibility, a space of freedom in an age whose possibilities have been thoroughly colonized by the Wall Street of Melville’s short story. So too does our old man with wings refuse the explanatory allure of allegory. He proves utterly unreadable and alien to the villagers who at one point, with the pointless violence of those easily bored and lacking any critical conscience, cruelly brand his side. (Knock on the glass at the zoo, kid; wake that snake up from its sleep.) Like Bartleby, the old man with wings is weirdly different. He is of and only himself.

“His only supernatural virtue seemed to be patience.”

These introductory remarks must draw to a close. The old man waits, lending his body to the townspeople’s amusements and depredations in what García Márquez describes as “a cataclysm in repose.” Our story patiently waits to bear meaning for its interpreters. The parallels hold but should not frighten us. Daedalus gave Ariadne the key to the maze he had created; before that, he built for her a dancing floor. García Márquez has given us something elusive and ethereal, but its brief and elusive reading has a strength which novels and epics would strain to match. Like the old man the story can give us much, if we give it mind. Draw your own interpretations. García Márquez’s world is vast. I invite you to enter in, once again.

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