.: The Absent Narrative :.

I was already familiar with a number of the world’s mythologies before I first read Gaiman’s Sandman comics as a kid, but the thing Gaiman managed to do was make the characters from myth living and real, still active forces at work in our contemporary skeptical world. In American Gods, he takes this to the next level, telling a story in which all the old gods are still real and now living in America, struggling against the new gods of media and infrastructure to stay relevant and alive. The notion that gods are kept alive and real through belief in them, even just in the casual stories told about them, is I think a rather vital point, with both literary and theological implications far beyond what Gaiman manages to hint at in the novel. On the whole this is a fantastic and necessary work, which moves with the exceptional pacing and detail readers if Gaiman have learned to expect and love (even the sudden twist of the ending makes sense, if you consider the role those gods have played in other Gaiman representations of them).

My biggest problem with the novel however is that the protagonist, essentially the reader’s window into identification with and belief in the imaginary world, is entirely affectless, to the point of unemotionally going along with every absurd event, even his wife’s return from the dead. This might be explained due to the protagonist having been a convict prior to events in the story, but the result is that it makes the events unbelievable, at least in terms of the real human reaction to supernatural occurrences. Actually, the gods are more believable than most of the human characters, which is an amusing angle to take, but doesn’t I feel make for as compelling a literary case for the necessity of continued belief in American culture. Though as numerous characters point out through the book, America is not a good place for Gods (while refraining to really dig into actual native American mythologies or the influence of monotheistic gods on American cultural landscape that might disprove this point).

Now that the semester’s over and I have more time to read, I’m attempting to keep up on writing reviews of all the interesting fiction that crosses my path. As a writer, I try to focus on issues of technique, influence, and the relation of form to content, that you don’t typically find in the typical plot-summary style reviews that populate the internets (casting out dubious shadow-versions of stories without adding much to our understanding or enjoyment of them). That said, here’s my thoughts on three short dark novels: Ernst Jünger’s “The Glass Bees,” Rudolph Wurlitzer’s “Nog,” and Philip K Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle.”

The Glass Bees
This short strange tale follows an ex-cavalry officer trying to get a job at an automaton factory. While other reviews suggest this novel is science fiction (though closer in fact to the fantastic of Hoffman or Felisberto) marred by seemingly pointless autobiographical-style and often Proustian digressions from the narrator, I actually found this conflict of genres to be integral to the tale. Given that its main theme is the conflict between a classical humanistic worldview and an alienated technological futurity (questioning not only the technological methods of war but also of popular entertainment), the interruption of literary modernist type memories into the fantastic events of the novel is the most effective way for the writing style to tie together and perform the theme and content. Though written in the 1960s, this book feels like it was written 50-100 years earlier, like listening to an old man rant about the kids these days and how good it was back then, at least until he finds some missing ears in a truly Lynchian moment.

Nog
If I had to choose two novels as character studies of the ’60s counterculture, one would be Kotzwinkle’s The Fan Man, a playful romp through drug-addeld New York. The second and much darker of the two would be Wurlitzer’s Nog. Set across the beaches, backwoods, crashpads, and communes of California, this tentative story follows the moment to moment desperations of a Manson-like wanderer, who either stole his identity or is trying to not remember it and his previous crimes as he bums around the scene, inevitably getting into some heavy trouble. Many reviews claim this novel is a challenging stream-of-conscious, but that’s not actually the case, as the style does not follow Nog’s internal thoughts as much as his obsessive awareness of the need for and impossibility of external actions, similar in style to Beckett’s prose. In fact, this novel reads like a contemporary adaptation of Beckett’s Murphy, what with the character’s obsessive list making, inability to keep moving, etc (even down to some of Beckett’s key lines). But Wurlitzer pulls this off, in a manner that is actually much more readable, though still very tragi-comic and certainly a cult classic.

The Man in the High Castle
When I first read The Man in the High Castle ten years ago, I was blown away by the sheer daring of someone trying to write an alternative history in which the Axis won WWII, and then making that only the setting or occasion for his tale, though I wasn’t quite sure what to make of all the plotlines about art. Rereading it now, after having read other alternate histories, what strikes me is that the book is important and effective precisely because its alternate history is not the main focus; instead at stake is the question of authenticity, of art, relationships, history, and (in true Dickian fashion) of reality itself. Throughout the novel, each of the characters (who are some of Dick’s most well-developed, bearing in mind that he considered himself more a hack writer than a real literary author) experiences a moment when some integral aspect of their worldview is suddenly shown to be artificial, and though representing the inevitable despair in such revelations, Dick goes further to suggest a real human significance and hope of discovering a more authentic world might actually exist. Many people find the sudden shift of the book’s ending to be baffling, but it fits into this question of looking for what’s behind what we take to be authentic, that even our world itself might be literarily constructed in the same manner as the false relics. Instead of letting down the reader with an "all a dream" moment, I read this to suggest that the only reason the world of the story is one in which the Axis won is only because people capitulate to that fiction, whereas all it takes is authentic human moments, like Juliana being honest with the writer or Tagomi letting Frink go instead of killing himself; these are the moments in which reality is actually made (particularly as these are the moments when the characters stop relying on the oracle of the I Ching for guidance and actually act authentically and from the heart). The irony of course is that the positive alternate world written within the story is written using the I Ching, which was Dick’s own method for deciding how to write the novel, until he later decided the I Ching was a hostile alien intelligence and that we actually are living in an alternate history when in reality the Roman Empire never ended. But that’s a whole other story.

The Hierophany
Flash Fiction by Tait McKenzie Johnson

Friedrich Carter was nearing retirement and he still hadn’t met a god. Not that he ever spoke of it, not in lectures or in private, he was far too serious to say such things out loud, but I could tell by the tone of his voice, the reverence with which he taught ancient mythology, that these stories were true and lived by their tellers, his reverence tinged with a bitter sadness that might taste like asparagus. Carter had a reputation of being a challenging and curmudgeonly professor, though sometimes given to sentimentality in his office hours, which is when I caught up with him. All peoples once told these stories, he told me, office walls lined with the great spiritual texts from all the world’s cultures, and so few now understand their import. He told me that he had studied under the great mythographer Mircea Eliade himself, had traveled to South East Asia to observe and even participate in the funerary rituals of the reclusive Tamil Tigers, before finally settling here, in Pittsburgh, his dead wife’s old hometown, this burnt out steel city, he bemoaned, where, like the rest of America, the only myths left to tell are of incompetent men like the last president, or of the Fountain of Youth ingloriously crammed in a cosmetics jar. But the gods, he taught later, such hymns sung of the divine, to its manifestations in the world, that ultimate and universal force appearing, suggesting itself for just a moment in a rock perhaps, or even this chair, that sense of the deepest significance of reality, which stories of such deities relate to us, only so that now we read them and say, bad science or poetic metaphor, never knowing what our ancestors truly saw in this world around us. Professor? It was one of the underclassmen, a scrawny girl who had absently been staring out the back window, hoping not to be called on to interpret some dead tale, and from the looks of her sudden trembling I could tell she’d never met a god before either. I… I don’t think that’s a metaphor, she pointed. Everyone rushed to look, to the window, out of their schools jobs and houses, onto the streets they rushed, everyone pointing upward, mouths agape in wonder at that light, those eyes, whatever it was it was near indescribable, but very much there. People were falling to their knees, many crying, joyfully despite the terror, that utter ambivalence Friedrich Carter might say Rudolf Otto wrote about, describing the human reaction to the Holy, if Carter wasn’t struck by it himself. He stood at the window, a trembling hand unconsciously at his heart. My God, he whispered, a real hierophany, not just a feeling but this…Eliade had it all wrong, the gods are real! And before I left, and everything faded back to normalcy and the real world again (whatever that’s now becoming), I even saw him break a smile.

The other day for the final in my Lectures in Literature class on adaptation, I wrote an essay that managed to articulate ways in which myths can be lived by the people who tell them. As opposed to someone like Milton, who uses mythological themes and characters in an old way, that is, as historical (albeit spiritual) fact which the author does not participate in except as an interpreter of what has already occurred, Blake casts myth and its contents as something vital and living in the human heart. For Blake, poets are like prophets, they enter into the contents of myth and experience them anew, not only telling new interpretations of myths that vitalize them for the present bye also casting themselves into the story, participating with divine beings and legendary characters in a way that truly keeps the myths alive. Blake literally wrestles with angels, swaps the secret side of stories with demons, and even creates his own archetypal figures to populate the human imagination, transforming the old myths of the Bible into realities and struggles that are still taking place.

Walking home later I continued churning these ideas, and then thought about Doctor Who, which I’ve finally been watching recently, and that the Doctor is quickly becoming a new mythological archetype in that his time-traveling ability allow us to witness and explain any historical or imagined event. Even more, the Doctor is a paragon of positive moral ideals; sympathetic and forgiving, and even more so a champion of humanity’s worth and significance, and that the small man on the edge of events is vitally important to history. Amusingly, I had already been trying to create a character with these attributes for my second novel before even realizing that this archetype already exists and is becoming so important to the contemporary imagination that many people in England now want to make him their nation’s patron saint. Usually fictional characters never reach beyond the covers and credits of their stories, but sometimes, like the Doctor, they speak to us in such a vital way that we need them to become real. England interestingly has a long history of doing this (in a way I’m not sure I’ve seen in other cultures), transforming legends and stories into a national mythological history, whether King Arthur or Big Brother.

Along this line of thought is the relation between adaptation and fan fiction, and that in the later the readers of certain myths become tellers of the myth themselves, and in some cases participate in it, making themselves active characters in the stories. I recall being a kid, reading books and constantly imagining myself as a character in those worlds, a desire that developed into the need to tell stories and thus create my own myths, even if sometimes drawing on pre-established worlds. We see something similar in the Gospels, which are like the ultimate fan fiction, the authors casting themselves and the concerns of their contemporary communities back onto the time and events of their source material. Far from making the Gospels derivative to their oral sources, this fan, literally fanatic, attitude toward the mythological archetype of Jesus is the books’ lasting strength.

The point of all this is that we exist in a tradition of stories and mythic narratives, and authors have two modes of dealing with that (three, if you consider ignoring tradition a worthwhile mode). One, an author can accept the tradition of narratives as history, as stories that once told are set, that can be referenced and adapted but on the whole are dead, that is, the stories never really happened and are just that, stories. This mode still can richly deal with the wealth of human narratives, as T.S. Eliot displays in The Wasteland with his idea of the simultaneity of traditions, in which realities of the present and myths from the past are allowed to co-exist and influence each others’ interpretation. But only on the page, Eliot never enters into that world himself, remaining an objective poet. The other option is in recognizing that this narrative tradition is alive and mutable: all stories told once are still being told, even each time they are read or watched, all characters and events in the stories are real and always in action, in that with each retelling they are cast in the present and speak to us in our present lives. In this view, all stories are unfinished, and the act of adaptation like fan fiction expands and continues the worlds of the stories, enriching their traditions and our engagement with and in them. The extreme Blakean view is that, as these stories are living as they are told, the author does not just retell or make them up, but must actively enter in to their stories, joining the actions and characters as archetypally real, which they are in the imagination.

In the 1940s, when Alejandro Carpentier developed his concept of Marvelous Realism, it was in response to the European Surrealists, who he saw as trying to hold onto an Old World magic that was rapidly vanishing into the logic of modernity. The New World, however, Carpentier felt, was still a fertlie ground for the exploration of the marvelous, which might reside in the confrontation of civilization with its non-rational frontiers. Through the ’60s however, this literary style of representing the marvelous became critically known as Magical Realism, which, instead of birthing New World folklore and myth, instead settled on casting magical occurrences as an everyday part of reality. For those who know how to look, the magical is indeed part of everyday life, but what this style of representing it lost was the true human reaction to experiences outside the realm attributed as real, a reaction not of casual acceptance but of mixed wonder and terror (Rudolf Otto’s Mysterium Tremendum) . Now living in a rationally structured and imaginatively over-saturated world where such frontiers no longer exist, and with them the ability of accepting the validity of the mythological imagination, this response to the marvelous has all but disappeared. Audiences will accept the most fantastic ideas without batting an eye, but without even fully believing that these events could in some sense be really real.

Stepping back over a hundred years before Carpentier, and to a different trend of representing the marvelous, we find Samuel Coleridge and the early Romantic movement. A European concerned precisely with the disappearance of the marvelous in the modern world, and the fear that readers no longer cared to read ghost stories, Coleridge articulate the concept of the suspension of disbelief, suggesting that readers can put aside their logical limits on reality in order to appreciate magical occurrences as a world in themselves. Granted, readers had to put aside such disbelief when fiction first became a genre in the late 18th Century; the earliest novels were marketed as “petite histories,” little histories of made believe worlds, suggesting that even the most realistic fiction requires us to accept the not-real as possibly real. Now of course we grow up in fictionality (particularly in media-rich countries like the United States), we never have to suspend our disbelief because the world around us is as equally fanciful as mundane. The problem once again is that people no loner crave or even believe in the possibility of the truly marvelous; one only has to push a button to be virtually transported into other worlds and centuries, but not really transported, not in the way that requires us to question the boundaries of our real lives, which only reinforces the unreality of the marvelous contrary to both Carpentier and Coleridge’s intentions.

Returning to the middle of last century, we find J.R.R. Tolkien struggling to transform Romanticism into the genre of Fantasy. His challenge seems to be that the marvelous elements of Romantic literature were often read allegorically, that is, referring to the real world without seeming real themselves, whereas Tolkien wanted his made up world to come off as really real, a true petite history, conveying the psychological and socio-political complexities of reality as we know it, albeit set in something like the middle ages. In his essays on the subject, Tolkien suggested that such fantasies can be mythopoetic, real on their own terms, but also real enough to symbolically represent real life concerns through their marvelous setting and content. This worked, at least until the genre became fully conventionalized, and the intention of the authors changed to creating marvelous worlds within the box of the genre rather than break the box to use those worlds to discuss reality. These stories are marvelous, but marvelous behind an even thicker glass than the allegorical mode of Romanticism.

Is it possible then to represent the marvelous in a realistic, believable, and compelling manner? Another early trend, if you’ll allow another leap through time, comes out of the writings of authors like ETA Hoffman or Nérval, and somewhat culminating in Poe, writings that do not have an overarching aesthetic concern but were all grouped together by the structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov under the genre of the Fantastic. What characterizes the representation of the marvelous in fantastic literatures is the moment of hesitation, in both the character and the reader, as to whether the marvelous occurrence actually happened. This hesitation is achieved through techniques of uncertainty or deception: the character (usually first person to attach the reader’s perspective) is either dreaming, mad, on drugs, or is the victim of tricks and illusions. In these stories there is a marvelous event, but there is always a potential rational explanation, though usually the explanation is less believable than that the marvelous is real. Personally I find stories that use a fantastic hesitation to be highly compelling, for, instead of asking us to suspend our disbelief of marvels, they instead ask us to question our belief in reality.

This use of explanation for non-real events is worth looking at further, as it is the root of the genre of Science Fiction. The earliest sci-fi works, such as those of Jules Verne, fall into the genre of the fantastic. Marvelous events occur, and are explained as really possible through the invention of new technologies. Only here does the conflict between the marvelous and rational modernity resolve: the logic of technology and progress allow events seen as fantastically impossible yesterday to become commonplace tomorrow, and, in fact, many new real technologies came about precisely through their sci-fi imagining. As Blake said, “What is now proved was once only imagin’d.” As long as technological progress lies before us, the marvelous potential contained in science fiction have the possibility of becoming real, making it a continually fertile and relevant genre for our age. Of course, science fiction also has the effect of confining marvelous realities to the possibilities and logic of science, which makes it even more difficult to believe in the reality or representation of truly marvelous events, which, throughout time, are most characterized by the impossibility of mediation through any rational explanation.

Just as there are no contemporary genres of revelation (as discussed in my essay on Myths for the Future), so too are there no current modes of representing marvelous occurrences as they really seem to occur. Perhaps the closest genre are the quotidian epiphanies of Raymond Carver, but these are a far, far cry from what I’m trying to get at. There are however antecedents and analogues, perhaps most directly in spiritual and shamanic literatures and accounts of revelation, conversion, and divine visitation. The Bible, for instance, despite one’s beliefs about it, manages to capture something of a realistic response to the marvelous in its insistence that to look on the face of God means death. We find the same kind of ambivalence in true accounts of hierophany, though these might also be subject to the same kind of rational explanations as the Fantastic; William James in “the Varities of Religious Experience” discusses hoe religious experiences often correlate with physiological conditions, illness or madness, but stresses that the content and feeling of the experience goes far beyond any explanation (which is also often the case with certain dreams and drugs, as represented in the novels of Carlos Castaneda).

Interestingly, we find a contemporary analogue to true accounts of spiritual presence in accounts of alien abduction. Far from being explainable through scientific logic, these stories remain inherently baffling, and bring out that mixed response of wonder and terror so pivotal to the experience of the marvelous, that feeling of oh shit oh wow is this really happening? Some science fiction is learning to explore this borderline between the futuristic and spiritual, exploring visions of angels and gods as actually aliens, though this once again draws close to the contemporary sensibility of buying into but not believing anything put in front of us. I instead am trying to get at a mode of representing the marvelous that compels belief precisely despite its unbelievability, by showing the inexplicably marvelous as something that really exists within the real world, but remains hidden through human inattention or inability to recognize it. But as to how this kind of experience would be written, that is a magic I am still learning to spell.