Lost the thread
it's just one damn thing after another
I read the NY Magazine article about Neil Gaiman, and then I listened to the podcast, Master, that preceded it. The specifics of what the women went through don’t bear any superficial resemblance to anything I have been through, but there are underlying things that ring familiar anyway, from being female in the world. There’s a part where a woman named Caroline Wallner, who worked as a caretaker on one of Gaiman’s properties, remembers asking him what people would think if they knew of their “romance.” “Caroline,” he said, “there’s no romance.” And even though he’d been extorting sex from her, holding the threat of eviction over her head if she refused, it was this moment that she reports snapping out of it, coming to, into reality.
Some of the young women, fans of Gaiman’s, met him at book signings and such. He told each of them, separately, things like, “I’ve never done this before. I would never dream of doing this normally. I’m so shy and nervous…” I knew, before they ever said it in their own words, what they would have felt, hearing this. And so I also knew exactly why they then endured months or years of painful, degrading, abusive, or just boring and not-pleasurable sex with him. Or, in several cases, outright rape. There’s a storyline that leads directly there, and we are every one of us susceptible. This is not to blame these women; quite the opposite. It’s to blame him, for knowing enough about women to understand the susceptibility, and caring about them so little he would exploit it.
The same week I read about all this, I also read about the popular frenzy for “romantasy” books, and about how swiftly they are churned out, and how their profoundly unoriginal plotlines collapse into a single one so totally, it becomes hard to tell when an author has stolen another’s idea. In romantasy stories, I learned, the protagonist is often an ordinary-seeming girl who turns out to have extraordinary powers. She may seem utterly mid, a basic bitch, but in fact she’s special, and she is chosen. Partly the specialness is some sort of supernatural gift, but partly it’s also her magnetism and her hold over a man/male creature; she alone can captivate him, she alone makes him feel such frenzied desire, and she alone can tame him. She is not like other girls.
I don’t blame any girl, any woman, for this fantasy. It’s one way the psyche could deal with the world as it is. Why is so much erotica about the ravishment fantasy? Why, some commentators ask, would so many modern, strong, feminist women be fantasizing about being pursued, hunted, seized, overpowered? Who knows/there’s more than one reason, but I think it’s this: in that storyline, she is special, chosen. He must have, not just any woman, but this one, and he will travel any distance and fight through any obstacles to get to her. Male appetites can seem omnivorous, indiscriminate, impersonal in the extreme. One woman is as good as the next, and their particular traits, personalities, personhoods don’t matter. Any woman who will say yes will do, if he’s a decent guy, and even the women who don’t say yes, if he’s a total piece of shit. That is the fear, for women who love and have sex with men: our interchangeability, in their eyes.
The storyline of being chosen, pursued with a predatory hyperfocus, of being the sole object of desire, even as easier targets present themselves, lets a woman believe in her own suchness. The thing is, when that’s the storyline, the sex that happens after that doesn’t even need to be good. In fact, if it’s bad, that’s almost confirmation of how remarkable and powerful she really is. The man/vampire/werewolf/what-have-you seizes in a frenzy, an altered state. The more deranged he is and the less attentive, the more proof of his wild desire, how much he simply must have you. So the woman detaches, inside her mind, as he goes to town on her, and takes up a perch inside herself, knowing the sex is not good, but she watches it happen in satisfied pride and actually a kind of pleasure, at what she was able to induce in him. She will tolerate a great deal of awful treatment in this way. The young women Gaiman misled with his storylines report something very like this. They experienced the sex as utterly without pleasure for themselves, but they were intoxicated by the idea that their particularities had captivated this older man, this idol, this shy and awkward genius storyteller-magician who, he swears, has never felt like this before, never had this response to anyone else this way before. They could not believe this was really happening. He knew precisely what he was doing. That’s the most dangerous kind.
Sean has a podcast where he reads horror/suspense/creepy sorts of stories. Very often, when I listen to them, I have no idea how long they are and so the endings often come (to me) abruptly. He read an Octavia Butler story recently, and I was listening to it while watering my plants, and the story ended and I said out loud to the geranium, “That’s it?” It just seemed arbitrary, where it ended. I got to thinking how often the sense of wrap-up, of narrative arc, is really just down to knowing how many pages are left in a story. The brain starts preparing for the end, and does a bunch of movements, clearing its throat, glancing at the clock, saying, “Wow, would you look at the time!” and we are left thinking, as a result, that the arc completed. When you get no cues, the end just comes right out of nowhere and dumps you out on a curb with a hood over your head wondering what happened.
In Rachel Aviv’s article “You Won’t Get Free of It,” she writes, of Alice Munro:
Alice created a new form for expressing the way that the past, incompletely assimilated, creates the conditions of life in the present. Her stories flash forward and backward by decades, one layer of experience placed at a surprising angle to another. Sometimes there is an insight that feels like a breakthrough, but after enough years pass in a character’s life we realize that the insight was not so important.
People want there to be an arc, a storyline, if not an explanation. If nothing else, then maybe a moral? Non-fiction tends to do that, a little wrap-up ceremony, a “what did it all mean?”, a sense of an ending. Fiction, and life itself, have more of a tendency to just drop you off a cliff. Things don’t have to mean anything, in life anyway. Life is just one damn thing after another. A series of juxtapositions, of this happened, and then this happened. A lot of the time, most of the time, there’s no breakthrough, no epiphany, no catharsis, no deathbed confession or apology. Sometimes it feels freeing to at least consider that life sucks and then you die.
There’s a painting called Ecce Homo, of Jesus before his crucifixion. When people thought it was the work of a little-known student of a little-known painter it was worth like $1800. When people figured out it was a Caravaggio, it was worth millions. This is ridiculous on it’s face, but it’s also absolutely true. Money is not real, and reality is not real. The painting is the same painting the day before and the day after the revelation. It did not become a better painting in that time. It did not become one thousand times more affecting or stirring in that time. It just shifted onto another storyline, and switches flipped in various people’s minds. Just like you find out there was no romance, Caroline, and yes, he has done this before, with very many young women he probably can’t tell apart. It was a Caravaggio all along. Neil Gaiman was wiping himself off on you from the jump, you poor girl.
I’m not criticizing people for picking up the thread of a storyline. It’s common, and normal. Peter Coyote writes, “Once we identify and name something, we no longer have to consider it as deeply again, so it affords us efficiency and saves energy.”
That’s not to say it’s either good or bad. It’s a shortcut, and shortcuts can be useful. They can free you up to do other things, but they can also mean you miss out on some things. You decide what something is, you decide what the storyline is, and you free up some space and energy. You also prune away a whole lot of branches suckering off the side that might have been something, and your vision narrows so you may not see things rustling around in the periphery. You close off a bunch of other possibilities, and other explanations. Some of them might also be true.
I listened to Toni Morrison’s own reading of The Bluest Eye this week, in two big gulps. I couldn’t get enough of either her voice or the story. At the end of the book, she also read her author’s note that went with the 1998 edition. In it, she writes of the fractured storyline structure and the focus that jumps from character to character, “My solution—break the narrative into parts that had to reassembled by the reader—seemed to me a good idea, the execution of which does not satisfy me now. Besides, it didn’t work: many readers remain touched but not moved.”
I don’t quite know what she means, and I wondered if I also had been touched but not moved, finding the language and the story itself brilliant, but if Toni Morrison herself was telling me it didn’t work, then maybe it didn’t work. Maybe it had not worked right in me either. This part made more sense to me:
However, a problem lies in the central chamber of the novel. The shattered world I built (to complement what is happening to Pecola), its pieces held together by seasons in childtime and commenting at every turn on the incompatible and barren white-family primer, does not in its present form handle effectively the silence at its center: the void that is Pecola’s “unbeing.” It should have had a shape—like the emptiness left by a boom or a cry. It required sophistication unavailable to me, and some deft manipulation of the voices around her.
Morrison describes Pecola as the story’s center, but the child as a narrative void, too frail and vulnerable, or broken, to bear the weight of a story. Her vacancy resists story, or did, to Morrison’s mind, when she wrote the book. She judged Pecola to lack main character energy, as the kids say, and later regretted it. She decided that the narrator had to be a sturdier someone, someone more loved than Pecola, so she created Claudia, and her sister Frieda, whose parents cared enough to make them real, who believed their elder daughter when she told them about Mr. Henry, the boarder, and his sexual assault. They believed her so solidly as to fling a tricycle at his head and run him off the property at gunpoint. But not Pecola. No one would listen to her, and if no one would believe her story, then that’s the same as not having one at all. Morrison seemed to recognize this as a failure, later on. Brutality and total disregard might break a psyche apart, to be sure, but not render that psyche incapable of human feeling about it. Besides, it’s fiction. You can write brilliantly about the interior life of characters who themselves utterly lack the capacity to describe their interior lives, a la Olivia Manning in School for Love. You can induce empathy for a character who would never command it if you met them in person. Maybe that’s part of the sophistication that Morrison describes herself as lacking when writing her first book.
It makes me think about a person interviewed by Andrew Solomon in his book Far From the Tree. It’s been many years since I read it, but I remember about an orphan raised without any touch or affection or really even human contact all throughout childhood, and he now suffered from an intractable depression, and had his whole life, and saw suicide as the only solution. Solomon mused that he might be right, and pushed against those who argued back, horrified, that there was always hope, and to give up would be the greatest horror. But at a certain point, we probably need to stop trying to find a redemptive arc, or a moral, or meaning. A child was horrifically abused and neglected. His nervous system never got to wire up right as a result. He judges it to be a permanent and unremitting situation. No one devised it this way, no one meant for it to turn out this way, no one really thought of him much at all, is exactly the problem, and he’d just as soon be done with it all. It’s a sequence, but not a story. Or maybe it’s a story in one sense, but in another, it doesn’t matter because he himself didn’t believe in it. Maybe, for those too beaten down, they lose the sense of themselves as agents, or protagonists. But at the same time, dropping storylines is part of how Buddhists propose that we become liberated, and enlightened.
In her essay On Some Lines from the Venerable Bede, Marguerite Yourcenar writes about the time when “a still almost new Christianity” was struggling to spread north and west through Europe:
Edwin, King of Northumberland, at that time the most powerful prince of the British heptarchy, had recently received a request from a Christian missionary to evangelize in his lands. He summoned a council. As was fitting, the high priest of the local deities, a certain Coifi, was invited to speak first. The language of this divine was more cynical than theological: “To be frank, Your Highness,” he said in effect, “since I have served our gods and presided over our sacrifices, I have been neither happier nor more fortunate than a man who is not devout, and my prayers have rarely been granted. Therefore, I am in favor of welcoming another god who may be better and stronger, if he can be found.”
I laughed at myself, reading this, at my shock that they had no idea who Jesus was, nor what force this was, now only seeping toward them like a gas under a door. Somehow, I’d briefly thought they’d react with all the retrospective knowledge of the 21st century, as to what this Christ figure would come to mean. But none of that had happened yet, and none of it was preordained. It might have been otherwise. Like when I learned how close humans came to extinction: 800,000 or so years ago, there were only about 1,000 of us on the Earth. The tiny band wobbled along at about the size of a large high school for 100,000 or so more years. I cast myself back to these points, think of all the far more numerous species blanketing the Earth, the way those other species in Africa would have looked at these rare, scraggly creatures scraping and clawing their way along. I think about the King of Northumberland deliberating about this “Christ’s” traveling salesmen coming to town. I look at these cases from high above, with a god’s eye, and think of the line from Dylan’s Hurricane: “Had no idea what kinda shit was about to go down.”
The thing is, it might just as easily have gone another way, and not meant anything. Plenty of other species dwindled down to a thousand, then three hundred, then blipped out of existence unremarked as a drowning. Plenty of other gods came and went, were fervently worshiped for a while, and then forgotten. You never know you’re in a storyline while you’re in it, or at what point in the arc. Drama requires an audience, and the audience always knows more than the characters, if not so much as the playwright. What are we trying to be? Main character, playwright, and audience all at once? It’s impossible. Shunryu Suzuki writes, “If you reflect on yourself, that self is not your true self anymore.” Insufferable, smug little monk. But he’s right, you know.