Tag Archives: Noah

Bandits and Opium Sellers

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Kyril Bonfiglioli’s All the Tea in China and Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang are both rollicking adventure stories set in the past when men were men and skullduggery was a rip-roaring adventure rather than disreputable thuggishness.

Bonfiglioli’s hero is Karli Van Cleef, a Dutch Jew who swashes and buckles his way across the eighteenth century, peddling opium, eating prodigiously, and driven about equally by lust for gold and standard issue lust. Carey’s hero is the well-known Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, who has a heart of gold, the soul of a poet, and is persecuted, persecuted (as Karli, who is fond of repetition, might put it.)

Both books are built around the boys’-adventure-generating possibilities of imperialism. Karli can try his fortune thanks to the British empire and its gleeful trade in dangerous drugs (after trying opium himself and being brought to his senses only by a coffee enema, Karli tells his boy that the next time he requests opium, the boy is to hire a burly man to beat him until he falls unconscious. “This will be both cheaper and better for my health.”) Ned, on the other hand, is an Irish subaltern, hounded by the English police into banditry, violence, and murder.

The main difference between the novels is tone — All The Tea in China is a light humor novel; Bonfilioli has often been compared to P.G. Wodehouse. The True History of the Kelly Gang, on the other hand, is a serious work; it won the Booker prize in 2001, and its narration (by Ned Kelly himself) is self-consciously naif-profound in high modernist style — as you can see from the first paragraph.

I lost my father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silence my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contian no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false.

I think the conventional wisdom is that a serious book should have a more, thoughtful, serious take on serious issues. Not in this case, though. Carey’s prose is as graceful as his head is empty. He takes his epigraph from Faulkner, but his heart is with RL Stevenson. You’d think a Big Literary Novel about Ned Kelly might try to puncture the sentimental Robin Hood image, but you’d be wrong. Carey’s Kelly is wartless; a confused kid who only wants to do right for his family and his mum, led astray by both and, ultimately, by poverty and oppression. A multiple murderer, he remains always innocent, that naif prose, so simple and yet so clear, simultaneously absolving and elevating — lack of punctuation as the blood of the lamb.

Karli’s narration, on the other hand, is not only correctly punctuated, but is unfailingly cosmopolitan and witty. Much of it is devoted to describing at length his viands:

There was also a dish of hot buttered parsnips; they were very good. I ate them all, for Mr J. declared they spoiled his appetites for the meats. Then Batsay brought in a dish of things called “Poor Knighs of Windsor”: these were pieces of bread and jam fried. They do not sound good but they are. Mr. Jorrock’s Stilton cheese was even better than Mr. Creed’s; he pretended that it was “so werry frisky that he had to hold it down on the table as I scooped, lest it walk away.

For Carey, experience is an ongoing trauma; for Bonfiglioli, it is an ongoing appetite. Similarly, Carey’s imperialism is a tragedy; Bonfiglioli’s is more in the nature of a joke, as when the native Dutchman quips that Ireland is “an island off the coast of England, just as England is an island off the coast of Holland.”

It’s not that Bonfiglioli downplays the cost of oppression, exactly. One of the more shocking moments in the book occurs when Karli’s faithful child servant is dragged away by a lion…and Karli’s girlfriend, Blanche, tries to comfort him by reassuring him that she’ll wash his linen. It’s not that she’s a cruel person; it’s just that the boy is lower class, and for her that means he’s not really a human being. In Carey, oppression often seems to be a function of direct sadism. That happens in Bonfiglioli as well — but more often, hierarchies are perpetuated by a combination of thoughtlessness and self-absorption.

Karli is actually affected by his servant’s death. He sees him as human…perhaps in part because he is himself socially marginal in certain ways. As a Dutchman and a Jew, he’s not on the bottom rung of the class ladder the way Ned Kelly is, but he’s not exactly on the top either. From his anomalous perspective, the Chinese aren’t any more mysterious than the British — both, in fact, seem motivated mostly by naked self-interest and duplicity. The British sell the Chinese opium; the Chinese trade for the opium with stores of fresh water which turn out to be contaminated and undrinkable. Everyone fucks over everyone else to the best of their ability — which doesn’t make imperialism okay so much as it makes the Chinese (and other subalterns) able to get back a little of their own.

Carey’s earnestness and sentimentality means that Ned Kelly is defined by his victimhood; all his evil misdeeds, all his violence, is essentially blamed on his wounds. He’s a creature of his persecution. Bonfiglioli’s humor and cynicism, on the other hand, allows him to present the oppressed as genuinely wicked and amoral in their own right — which is a great relief. Ned Kelly dies a little inside every time he performs a dastardly act; Karli, on the other hand, is full of good cheer when he lies to the ship’s Captain about his religion in order to be accepted for passage. Being a Jew doesn’t make him a victim; it makes him a money-grubbing, intellectual sneak; an exotic daredevil who will deflower your women with his circumcised bits.

Of course, the flip side of this is that Bonfiglioli does make imperialism seem like rollicking good fun. Opium selling is obviously bad — but there are so many opportunities for riches! Kelly and Kiril encapsulate, perhaps, the difficulty in writing about oppression. Carey makes Kelly’s oppression so dire and all-consuming that it robs him of freedom of will — even his act of rebellion seems like a dour imposition from his masters. On the other hand, Bonfiglioli makes turning the oppressors tools against them seem like such a blast that it validates the system itself. Even the satirical moments (like the boy’s fate) seem like ratifying larks. It would be a shame to not have servants if that meant we couldn’t have jokes about them dying by lion.

So…witty heartlessness? Or lugubrious pathos? The Booker has already chosen the second, so I will take the first, thanks.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #25

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The Marston/Peter Wonder Woman #24 was mediocre enough that it’s taken me more than 6 months to pick up number 25. And…yeah.

Witness Harry Peter phoning it in. Wonder Woman sitting looking at mug shots, oblivious to the baddies behind…Marston didn’t approve that shit. In the first place, it’s boring. Wonder Woman doesn’t just sit there; she chases villains across bizarre cosmic bridges or battles Brobdinagian pirates. And, in addition, it makes WW look like a fool; the villains are tricking her.

Of course, Marston probably didn’t approve the cover; he was dead by the time this went to print. Peter’s doing the best he can…and the best he can includes drawing some delightfully expressive collar bones and some lovely black and white artwork on those mug shots. But it doesn’t include figuring out something to draw that would be fun and heroic and an inspiration to little girls and boys who wanted to be little girls everywhere. Figuring that out was, I suspect, Marston’s job. And no one else at DC, apparently, was up for it.

When I talked about issue 24 (and some of the earlier issues as well) I speculated that the stories weren’t by Marston (some possibilities include DC editor Sheldon Mayer and Marston’s assistant Joyce Murchinson.) I have some doubts about these as well. The second story especially…

is all about a mischievous little orphan boy named Teasy with a heart of gold and oh will he ever find a mother to call his own? Marston cared about mothers, of course, but he really didn’t care about orphan boys on the entirely reasonable grounds that they were not girls. It’s true that WW does get tied up by an evil villainess, which I’m sure Marston would have appreciated. But I’m convinced he would have found whole pages devoted to Teasy’s big adventure as tedious as I did (albeit perhaps for slightly different reasons.)

The other two stories seem like they might be Marston. The third features WW and the Holiday girls fighting a purple goddess who uses purple gas to control others’ wills.

Which…okay, that’s kinky. But the story as a whole doesn’t fit together; the first panels reference a backstory that we don’t get to see, as if part of the story has been left out. Moreover, at the end, the likable but not very effective indigenous male ruler…is still in charge. If this was by Marston, he must have been feeling awfully ill if he didn’t have it in him to establish a matriarchy at the story’s conclusion.

The first story is the one that is closest to having the old pizzazz:

Yeah, you’ve got that right. That’s evil alien corn. Peter is thoroughly enjoying himself drawing both the cartoon corn men and the cornfields with all those lovely undulating ears. Plus…sky kangas chasing balloons!

And there’s also some great gratuitous mother/daughter bonding:

WW wearing that giant obtrusive hat, then kissing her mother and handing over said hat as Hippolyta blesses her daughter in the name of the uber-matriarch — it’s just a nice encapsulation of Marston’s ideas about why women should rule. Power and love aren’t in competition. Instead, love is power — the point of the crown is not to wear it and rule, but to take it off and submit with a kiss.

Also…check out Hippolyta’s shoulders. That’s one tough mother!

Despite moments like those, and despite the fun of fighting corn (with a giant corn harvester, naturally), the story still feels slight, though. The evil corn is fun, but it’s never really integrated into Marston’s obsessions the way the seal men were (for example.) The corn appears to be male (not to mention phallic) but there’s no contrasting female corn to be liberated. WW’s victory, then, ends up just being a vicotry; there’s no particular feminist message to it. Nor, despite the occasional inadvertent hilarious blooper:

are Marston’s fetishes much on display. Oh, sure, the Holiday girls get tied up…but as Marston scripts go, that barely registers. This isn’t a fever dream; it’s a cartoon goof. It’s funny and weird, but no more so than, say, a good classic Flash or Plastic Man story. And good Flash and Plastic Man stories are fine in their way, but I expect more from Marston/Peter.
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So we’ve got three more now. If 26 and 27 are similar to this one I may combine them…or maybe even combine them with 28 for a final post? The issue by issue thing just seems more and more superfluous. Marston’s creative oversight is clearly gone at this point. Without him at the helm, as six decades and innumerable creators have demonstrated, WW just isn’t all that interesting

13 Assassins

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This first ran at Splice Today.
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13 Assassins, directed by Takashi Miike, is a samurai movie dedicated to giving you what you expect in a samurai movie. Disturbing scenes of hari kari? Check. Old sparring partners reunited on opposite sides of an apocalyptic showdown? Check. Intense discussions of honor, honor, and also honor? Yes. Final endless battle scene between a very few and a whole bunch? Of course!

In addition, the film also has a truly dastardly villain: Lord Naritsugu Matsudaira (Gorô Inagaki). Naritsugu is brother to the shogun, and he uses his high standing to be extraordinarily unpleasant. How unpleasant you say? Well, of course, he rapes defenseless women. And then kills their husbands. While staying as a guest in the home of the guy’s father!

For most purposes, that would establish Naritsugu as a villainous villain and worth getting rid of. But! This movie is not sure that you are convinced, so it has him cut off a woman’s limbs and her tongue and then use her as a sex slave… and even that’s not enough. As a bonus, we get to watch him tie children up and make them watch their parents die before he shoots arrows into them.

The idea here, presumably, is to make Naritsugu’s crimes so heinous that eliminating him justifies virtually any amount of carnage. And diagetically, it works—cutting off an innocent girl’s legs and arms and tongue is pretty impressively vile even in the jaundiced post-Saw filmoverse. I was convinced that Naritsugu was a really bad guy, and that letting him get anywhere near the throne was a bad idea. If the shogun won’t act against his brother, somebody in authority should commission as many assassins as possible (sure, 13, if that’s all that’s available) to bring the bastard down. So good for the writers. They have achieved buy in.

Still, as the film rolled along towards its inevitable giant pile of stinking corpses, I couldn’t help but notice some… uncomfortable facts about our arch-nemesis. Specifically, Naritsugu isn’t a standard issue power-mad, scheming kind of villain. He doesn’t need to scheme for power, after all; he just needs to sit around and wait to inherit. He’s not Machiavellian. He just, as one character mentions, has a taste for “flesh.” He’s a dissipated sadist. He likes to hurt people because it gives him sensual pleasure.

As the film moves along, Naritsugu’s decadent sadist starts to drive the plot. Of course, as I’ve already noted, his evil nastiness sets the plot in motion in the first place. But at a couple of points he stops being merely the instigator of the carnage, and starts to actively push it along. His chief bodyguard, Hanbei Kitou (Masachika Ichimura), for example, urges Naritsugu to take the threat from the 13 assassins more seriously. But Naritsugu is having none of it… in part for reasons of honor, but mostly just because he thinks it would be fun to have a big battle. Do the “foolish” thing, he urges Hanbei, who looks as if he’s just been asked to swallow his elaborate hat.

Even in the final battle, Naritsugu behaves less like a man in danger and more like a man… well, like a man watching a movie. As his soldiers die around him, he declares the spectacle “magnificent”—which there’s no doubt it is, visually—and muses on how wonderful the days of war must have been before the shogun established the peace. He tells Hanbei, with an air of dreamy enthusiasm, that when he’s on the shogun’s council he’ll bring those days back. And when the fight is over and he finally realizes things may not turn out all that well, Naritsugu is still enthusiastic about the spectacle. “Of all the days of my life,” he declares to his conqueror as he bloodily expires, “this has been the most exciting.”

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Naritsugu is more than just the villain of the piece. He’s also the audience surrogate. Like the audience, Naritsugu is deliciously entertained by blood, sadism, and death. Like the audience, Naritsugu anticipates and yearns for the apocalyptic final battle. Like the audience, he is swept away by the glorious reconstruction of the days of war. And, like them, he would like to see those days reenacted again and again.

Perhaps most importantly, Naritsugu is like the audience in enjoying the pageantry of honor while being utterly without honor himself. He is happy to deal death, but faced with death himself he screams and whines—which I presume is what most of my fellow audience members and I would do in his place.

I doubt Takashi Miike necessarily intended Naritsugu to be a portrait of his public—or of himself for that matter. It seems like it’s just an unavoidable structural serendipity. The audience of a war film wants to see war, and is, indeed, the reason the war is being staged. That aligns the viewers with the bad guys; the ones causing the trouble. It’s for our amusement that people get their limbs hacked off and the noble die terrible (but honorable!) deaths. All in make believe, of course. We’re not really as bad as Naritsugu. If we could bring back the age of war, we wouldn’t. Which is why, naturally, we are not fighting any wars at the moment.

Utilitarian Review 11/12/11

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On HU

Featured archive post: Lilli Carré’s animation for a Wallace Stevens poem.

Dan Kois on Lynda Barry’s pedagogy.

Marguerite Van Cook talks about comic book crowd scenes and the Kantian sublime.

Caroline Small on comics, writing, and reading.

Joy DeLyria on reboots and retrogarde representations of women, looking especially at Star Trek and Nolan’s Batman.

I talk about natural creativity and wearing your mother’s skin.

I talk briefly about Wonder Woman’s new origin. Extra fun: see me get slapped about in comments.

Richard Cook on Argento’s Deep Red.

I review an anthology of stories in Kafka’s spirit which for that reason aren’t really in Kafka’s spirit.

Vom Marlowe talks about the ALA and rubber chickens.
 
 

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I argue that Khruschev was more honorable and courageous than Obama.
 
 
Other Links

Laurie Penny talks about harrassment of women on the internet.

Why Andy Rooney is an idiot.

Goodbye to the Giant Squid.

Matthias Wivel on the crisis at L’Association.

Eric Berlatsky reviews the new anthology of Charles Schulz’s prose.

Anja Flower pointed me in the direction of this pretty great essay by Susan Stryker about Frankenstein and transgender people.

James Romberger interviews Gary Groth about the new Fanta collection of Barks comics.

 

Unkafkaesque

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This piece first ran on Splice Today.
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Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” is about an artist/performer who starves himself for the amusement of the public. Alas, his artistry and dedication are unappreciated, and so he dwindles to nothing alone in a corner of a dirty cage.

The tale is the first selection in Kafkaesque, a new anthology of stories inspired by Kafka and edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly. The choice to open with “A Hunger Artist” seems a deliberate tug at the well-read reader’s heart. Kafka, after all, may have thought he would vanish, but instead, here he is, more robust than ever, inspiring anthologies full of followers. Kafka now seems less like the hunger artist who died alone and unmourned in the straw, and more like the panther who replaces him as an exhibition, a personality so magnetic that “the spectators crowded around the cage, and did not ever want to move away.”

It’s a poignant irony—and as such, it’s very un-Kafkaesque. Kafka’s stories are certainly filled with irony, but those ironies aren’t sweet or comforting or triumphant. They’re baffling and , disappearing into themselves much as the hunger artist collapses into his skin. Kafka wasn’t sentimental, not so much because he looked at the world with cold dispassion as because his creations were so intensely narrow. It’s hard to be sentimental when everyone, even yourself, is just a thing in an ever-shrinking and dreamer-less dream.

Kafkaesque is then a contradiction in itself—it implies a communal experience where there is not even any identity. The stories in the volume most consistently betray Kafka’s spirit when they insist—helplessly, inevitably—that that spirit exists. Paul Di Filippo imagines Kafka as a superhero fighting crime in New York; Jonathan Lethem and Carl Scholz imagine him as a writer for Frank Capra in Hollywood; Philip Roth has him as an aging Hebrew school instructor; Tamar Yellin has him as a cute old man with a terrier in Wales; Carter Scholz (again) puts him in a hotel with Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives. It all has a bravura pomo smugness; Gregor Samsa awaking suddenly to find himself on This American Life. The point of each of these stories is that the author knows Kafka and can send him where the author wills. The point of Kafka’s stories were always the exact opposite.

The selections that don’t feature Kafka as a character often work better, but still encounter similar problems. Eileen Gun recasts “The Metamorphosis” in a corporate office… with a more upbeat ending. T. Coraghessan Boyle recasts The Trial in a service garage… with a more upbeat ending. Indeed, “The Hunger Artist” is alone in the collection in the sordid, insignificant manner in which it offs its protagonist. If anything’s Kafkaesque, it’s having your hero shot at the end “like a dog,” but nobody here has the stomach for it. Instead, the writers prefer more congenial strategies, whether ambivalent personal epiphany (Tamar Yellin, Michael Blumlein); ambivalent apocalypse (Theodora Goss.); or ambivalent anti-climactic domestic mundanity (Jeffrey Ford.)

The best stories, though, are the ones that not only don’t feature Kafka, but don’t even seem particularly inspired by him. J. G. Ballard’s “The Drowned Giant,” Borges’ “The Lottery in Babylon,” and Damon Knight’s “The Handler” are all sideways parables, but there is nothing in any of them that seems to especially demand Kafka as a predecessor. In fact, all seem closer to each other than any of them do to K.

Specifically, Kafka is obsessed with parables of the pains of failure and diminishment. Ballard, Borges, and Knight give us, instead, parables of the pains of success, or at least expansion. Knight’s effort is about a boisterous, beloved life-of-the-party who is actually (to everyone’s embarrassment) a suit worn by a diminutive, boring, sweaty square. Ballard tells about a giant swept up onto the beach whose body parts live on as Brobdinagian mementos spread throughout the city. And Borges’ “The Lottery in Babylon” is about how a mysterious company institutes a lottery which becomes so popular that eventually everyone and everything bows to its totalitarian regime of chance.

Kafka may be the one who was adjectivized, but Borges seems like the more influential writer, both in general and in this anthology specifically. Theodora Goss’ “The Rapid Advance of Sorrow” is self-consciously “magical” and profound in a way that’s much closer to bad Borges than to bad Kafka. It’s Borges’ daemon, not Kafka’s, which is responsible for all those Kafka’s of infinite alternate earths. And the proliferating parts of Ballard’s giant insistently echo the mysterious diffusions of Borges’ “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”

Borges multiplies and insinuates and conquers, then, rather like the lottery he writes about. Not coincidentally, “The Lottery of Babylon” can be read as a metaphor for the sinister exhilaration of capitalism, Babylon’s “infinite game of chance”—with everything, even the omnipotent corporation, dissolving into a rage for randomness—seems like the perfect Libertarian wet dream.

Capitalism is totalizing and expansive; it crosses borders to turn everything into itself. Borges didn’t exactly approve, but he understood. So does Boyle, whose protagonist is trapped in the garage until he figures out that he has no choice but to buy a crappy car from the proprietor. So does Michael Blumlein, whose fashion designer finds odd inspiration in a giant wasp, a winged avatar of success that flies away at the last minute. Endings open out into irony or nothing, but they do open, in thrall to the lottery and its ominously friable possibilities.

Kafka didn’t see things that way. He wasn’t a world-builder or a world-solver, displaying his parables like coins for some secret slot machine. His stories have no possibilities, ominous or otherwise. As the Hunger Artist is dying, he explains that he only starved himself because he had no choice; he could never find what he wanted to eat. He’s a failed consumer, left out of the rat race not because he lost, but because he couldn’t figure out how to play. Nothing absurd or unexpected happened to him; his life just narrowed and narrowed until, off to the side of desire, it guttered out. No wonder everyone prefers the panther, which knows what it likes to eat and exudes the crude virility of wanting from behind its bars. It, not Kafka, paces through these pages. Kafka’s dead.

Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle: Who’s Your Daddy?

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Alyssa Rosenberg had a post yesterday about the Azzarello/Chiang Wonder Woman reboot. For those not in the know, the new (new!) WW is no longer a clay statue come to life; instead she’s the illegitimate daughter of Zeus. Alyssa expressed some skepticism:

Similarly, in their quest for specificity, I wonder if Azzarello and Chiang are reducing Wonder Woman a bit. Her original story may not be plausible, or gritty, but it is about an expression of female will and independence. Not everything needs to be grounded in social realism. Some things can just be mysterious and strange. It’s yet another reason we’re far too consumed with origin stories. Trying to come up with a psychologically plausible explanation for the divine, or near-so, is a bit of a contradiction in terms.

Several commenters though were more positive about the Azzarello/Chiang version. Joe Pettinati, for example, said:

I think this origin story sounds way better and I disagree with your assertion about trying to come up with a psychological explanation for the divine. All Greek myths, including Zeus, are about putting human faces to divine phenomena in our world. Even Wonder Woman’s original origin story (which I confess I’ve never heard) speaks about the human desire for children, presumably when natural methods are not an option. The problem I have with that origin story is that it says a lot more about Aphrodite and Hippolyta then it does about Wonder Woman. Okay, this woman is brought to life, but why does she become a super hero?

Of course, I’m in Marston/Peter’s corner:

The original Marston/Peter Wonder Woman origin story is beautiful and weird and kind of makes me tear up. I compared it to the Winter’s Tale in that link, and I’ll stand by that. And I think your argument about a psychological explanation for the divine is right on the money; Marston and Peter had a divine that was actually mysterious and powerful, not just a bunch of ultra superhumans running around bashing each other.

I haven’t read the Azzarello/Chiang issues. They’re both competent creators, and I suspect they can tell a decent pulp adventure story. But the Marston/Peter WW was one of the great artistic achievements of comics, IMO. And it was ideologically committed to feminism — in the case of the origin story, specifically to the idea of the power of female creation and mother/daughter bonds — in a way that is very, very rare, in comics or in other art forms or anywhere.

Oh…and to Joe, who asks why WW becomes a superhero. She becomes a superhero basically because she’s strong and curious and courageous and wants to help people. Marston didn’t feel that you needed a tragic or sordid backstory to make you a hero. He thought strength comes out of being loved and happy, not out of being wounded. More power to him.

I just wanted to add…the Azzarello/Chiang version is of course an improvement…if you’re demographic is mostly adult men. If that’s the case, the illegitimate-daughter-of-Zeus is clearly superior; it’s got sex, conflict, and the possibility of lots of gratuitous angsting. On the other hand, if your audience is 8-10 year old girls and boys, an origin all about who slept with whom and strained family dynamics is probably going to have less appeal. Instead, you probably want something with room for magic and courage and adventure and love and giant kangaroos.

Myself, I am old, old, and in my second childhood, so I’m all for the magic and love and giant kangaroos…though angsting and sex and strained family dynamics can be okay too, in their place. Why exactly you would want talented creators like Azzarello and Chiang to take the magic and love and kangaroos of the 8 year olds and turn them into the sex and angst and family dynamics for the thirty year olds is, of course, an open question. I’ve discussed some answers elsewhere, and won’t repeat it here except to note that Marston/Peter’s Wonder Woman was by far the most popular iteration of the character, and to express my doubts that Azzarello/Chiang’s version will change that, whatever it’s other successes.

Update: The argument in the last part of this post is shredded, torn apart, and stomped upon by commenters. The Percy Jackson series and the Prydain chronicles are cited as painfully telling counter-examples.

Mamaskin

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I published this in Poor Mojo’s Almanac a while back. I was thinking about it again in the context of our ongoing discussion of comics, reading, Lynda Barry, and pedagogy (parts of said conversation being here and here and here. Anyway, I thought I’d reprint it, and then talk a little about how I wrote it and (generalizing wildly) about how people create.
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Once upon a time there was a beautiful girl named Lorna, who lived with her mother in a house in the woods. Lorna was so beautiful that everyone who saw her fell in love with her. This was a nuisance; she couldn’t go to the stream to get a drink of water without getting twenty marriage proposals, and it was hard to feed the hens when the lawn was covered with young men kneeling and weeping. Lorna got so fed up that she didn’t even want to leave the house, and when she did leave it she’d have to put a bag over her head, which made it hard to see. Her mother, who was old and wrinkled and had an odd sense of humor, would giggle when she saw Lorna walking around and bumping into things. But she did love her daughter, and she knew this sort of thing wouldn’t do for the long term. So she told Lorna, “When I die, and you must seek your fortune, take my skin and wear it to disguise your beauty.”

Eventually, Lorna’s mother died. Lorna did as she’d been told; she took her mother’s skin, clothed herself in it, and went off to seek her fortune. She enjoyed walking through the fields without a bag over her head and without having to dodge love-sick suitors, even though having to wear her mother’s skin was a little icky. Finally, after a long trek, Lorna reached a large castle. She knocked and the Prince who owned the castle came to the door. As it happened, he needed someone to watch his geese. Lorna took the job.

Lorna moved into a little hut near the castle. She might have lived happily ever after there tending the geese, except that her mother’s skin didn’t fit exactly right. During the day it was okay, but at night when she was trying to sleep it pinched and itched, and she discovered that if she wanted any sleep at all she had to remove it. So she put it at the foot of her bed. And in the morning the geese would poke their heads into her hut, and see her sleeping in her natural form. Then they’d fly into the air singing, “Honk! Lorna’s prettier than you think! Honk! Honk!”

One day the Prince happened to be up early wandering out in the fields. He heard the geese honking about Lorna, and he was curious. So he walked over to Lorna’s hut and saw her through the window just as she was about to put on her mother’s skin. “Oh, drat!” said Lorna. “Does this mean you’re going to fall in love with me now?” And of course it did. But the Prince was fairly handsome himself, and, to tell the truth, Lorna was tired of geese and of dead skin. So she married him, and after a while, as she got older, she grew less pretty, and started to look rather like her mother even without the skin. Eventually only the prince and the geese and her children loved her, and all the young men fell in love with somebody else. Which was perfectly all right with her.
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So…like I said, I wrote this a while back. It was originally supposed to be part of a Composition and Grammar textbook I was working on for high school students taking courses by correspondence. I was doing a unit on narrative and was having students do writing based on fairy tales. I would give them a bare bones outline of the fairy tale plot (one or two sentences), and then tell them to expand the story (into three or four paragraphs). I provided several examples of expanded narratives, and the story above was one such. (I think we didn’t use it because my boss at the time felt the whole mother’s skin thing was too creepy…and maybe she had a point.)

Anyway. Thinking about writing this, and the exercise it was a part of, made me think of this comment by Dan Kois about Lynda Barry’s pedagogy:

As I mention in passing in the article, Lynda makes the case in her class that narrative structure — that is, one major component of the craft of storytelling — is a natural muscle that most humans have. The example she gives is the way you tell a story depending on whether you have one minute to tell it or ten minutes to tell it; she points out that it’s a natural tendency to construct the details of a story in a manner appropriate for the space that one has to fill.

The exercise I was doing — asking students to expand a fairy tale — is basically an exercise that Barry says is unnecessary, if I understand Dan correctly. Barry’s saying that people naturally know how to tell a story in the time (or space) allotted. It’s not an issue of craft (that is, learned ability) because it’s natural, like falling in a lake. If you have ten minutes to tell a story, you tell it in ten minutes. Simple as that.

So were all my efforts superfluous? I didn’t think so then…and now that I have a son, and am subjected to his narrative efforts all the time, I’m even less convinced. If you listen to small kids tell stories, the thing you notice is that they don’t know how to do it. There was a horrible period there, for example, where my son was obsessed with Garfield. He wanted the strips read to him all the time (which was bad enough), but he also wanted to explain and relay the strips to others. And he just couldn’t do it. He could see the strip in his mind, and he generally got the words right, but he couldn’t figure out what needed to be told when and how to a person who hadn’t seen the strip. The narrative would start and stutter and stop and go back again, and miss the joke and then he’d start over and you just wanted to claw your eyes out and curse the name of Garfield forevermore.

My son’s much, much better at narrative now…but it’s not because he got in touch with his natural essence. It’s because he’s read a lot more, and listened to people talk a lot more, and has internalized (some of) the rules and codes for creating stories. And it really is often “rules and codes” — he and his friends tell stories to each other, and they are obsessive about breaking their stories into chapters…and almost as obsessive about repeating the same story in the same way as it was originally told to them. And…my son actually explained to me at length at one point how he was going to write the back cover blurb for his book. Which maybe means he’s being corrupted by corporate culture, but as a doting father, I prefer to believe that his command of point-of-purchase advertising is instead a sign of increased narrative mastery.

Be that as it may…I think my version of the “Mamaskin” story itself also suggests that narrative is less a natural reflex than an acquired skill. Specifically, the story is put together from other stories. The basic plot, as I said, is taken from a folk tale. My retelling is also informed, obviously, by my generalized knowledge of folk tales, and of folk tale adaptations. Specifically, it’s probably more than a little touched by Patricia Wrede’s YA feminist Enchanted Forest series, with the smart, capable Princess Cimorene, who starts young but as the series goes along gets older and wiser.

The end of the my story, though, comes from here:

He, the one they recognised, no longer thought–his mind being so occupied–that love might still exist. With all that was happening at the time it’s understandable that the only thing they would tell of later was what he did, the incredible action he performed, which no one had seen before: the gesture of supplication, in which he threw himself down before them, imploring them not to show love. Alarmed by this and shaking they raised him to his feet. They interpreted his
impulsive behaviour in their own way, while at the same time forgiving him. He must have found it indescribably liberating to find that they’d all misunderstood him, despite his desperately explicit manner.

It was likely they’d let him stay. As the days passed he came to see more clearly that the love they were so vain about and which they secretly encouraged in one another did not affect him. He almost had to smile at the trouble they took and it became obvious that their concern for him could not amount to much.

What did they know about who he was? He was now so terribly difficult to love, and he felt there was only the One who was capable of it. But He was not yet willing.

That’s the conclusion of Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and one of my favorite passages in all of literature. And since I liked it so much, I stole it, which is more or less what writers do. (I also was thinking of this line from slightly earlier in Rilke’s narrative: ” The simple love of his sheep didn’t affect him; like light falling through clouds, it was scattered all about him and shimmered softly upon the meadows.” I love that.)

I’m not denying that there’s a personal element in my version of “Mamaskin” as well. Like Lorna (and lots of other people), I found marriage rather a relief. But I’d argue that (like Lorna’s again) the relief is itself a narrative one. When you’re in the story of romance, you’re in the story of romance; getting out of that is figuring a way to tell a different tale, which is closely related to living a different life.

Barry’s certainly right, then, that narrative is natural in the sense that it’s tied up with and into human lives. But the thing is that human lives aren’t very natural; we’re weird alien things, narratives grafted onto dyring animals. Figuring out what to do with this narrative that’s in us isn’t something you find naturally the way a bee locates a flower. It’s something you acquire like a baby learns to speak. That is, with a certain amount of struggle and tears, and with varying proficiency depending on numerous factors, including the quality of your teachers. Speech is a technology and a craft, and so, surely, is writing. And, as is generally the case with a craft, you get better at it by imitating models, practicing, and sometimes taking advice. There’s not any particular magic to it, except maybe the magic of not having any magic except the skins our parents have left us.