The Runt was envious.
“I got to go to the bathroom,” said the Runt. “Is there somewhere around here?”
Dearly thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t do that stuff anymore. There are a few outhouses still standing, but they may not be safe. Best just to do it in the woods.”
“Like a bear,” said the Runt.
He went out the back, into the woods which pushed up against the wall of the cottage, and went behind a tree. He’d never done that before, in the open air. He felt like a wild animal. When he was done he wiped himself with fallen leaves. Then he went back out the front. Dearly was sitting in a pool of moonlight, waiting for him.
“How did you die?” asked the Runt.
“I got sick,” said Dearly. “My maw cried and carried on something fierce. Then I died.”
“If I stayed here with you,” said the Runt, “would I have to be dead too?”
“Maybe,” said Dearly. “Well, yeah. I guess.”
“What’s it like? Being dead.”
“I don’t mind it,” admitted Dearly. “Worst thing is not having anyone to play with.”
“But there must be lots of people up in that meadow,” said the Runt. “Don’t they ever play with you?”
“Nope,” said Dearly. “Mostly, they sleep. And even when they walk, they can’t be bothered to just go and see stuff and do things. They can’t be bothered with me. You see that tree?”
It was a beech tree, its smooth gray bark cracked with age. It sat in what must once have been the town square, ninety years before.
“Yeah,” said the Runt.
“You want to climb it?”
“It looks kind of high.”
“It is. Real high. But it’s easy to climb. I’ll show you.”
It was easy to climb. There were handholds in the bark, and the boys went up the big beech tree like a couple of monkeys, like pirates, like warriors. From the top of the tree one could see the whole world. The sky was starting to lighten, just a hair, in the east.
Everything waited. The night was ending. The world was holding its breath, preparing to begin again.
“This was the best day I ever had,” said the Runt.
“Me too,” said Dearly. “What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know,” said the Runt.
He imagined himself going on, walking across the world, all the way to the sea. He imagined himself growing up and growing older, bringing himself up by his bootstraps. Somewhere in there he would become fabulously wealthy. And then he would go back to the house with the twins in it, and he would drive up to their door in his wonderful car, or perhaps he would turn up at a football game (in his imagination the twins had neither aged nor grown) and look down at them, in a kindly way. He would buy them all—the twins, his parents—a meal at the finest restaurant in the city, and they would tell him how badly they had misunderstood him and mistreated him. They would apologize and weep, and through it all he would say nothing. He would let their apologies wash over him. And then he would give each of them a gift, and afterward he would leave their lives once more, this time for good.
It was a fine dream.
In reality, he knew, he would keep walking, and be found tomorrow, or the day after that, and go home and be yelled at and everything would be the same as it ever was, and day after day, hour after hour, until the end of time he’d still be the Runt, only they’d be mad at him for leaving.
“I have to go to bed soon,” said Dearly. He started to climb down the big beech tree.
Climbing down the tree was harder, the Runt found. You couldn’t see where you were putting your feet, and had to feel around for somewhere to put them. Several times he slipped and slid, but Dearly went down ahead of him, and would say things like “Just a little to the right now,” and they both made it down just fine.
The sky continued to lighten, and the moon was fading, and it was harder to see. They clambered back through the gully. Sometimes the Runt wasn’t sure that Dearly was there at all, but when he got to the top, he saw the boy waiting for him.
They didn’t say much as they walked up to the meadow filled with stones. The Runt put his arm over Dearly’s shoulder, and they walked in step up the hill.
“Well,” said Dearly. “Thanks for stopping by.”
“I had a good time,” said the Runt.
“Yeah,” said Dearly. “Me too.”
Down in the woods somewhere a bird began to sing.
“If I wanted to stay—?” said the Runt, all in a burst. Then he stopped. I might never get another chance to change it, thought the Runt. He’d never get to the sea. They’d never let him.
Dearly didn’t say anything, not for a long time. The world was gray. More birds joined the first.
“I can’t do it,” said Dearly eventually. “But they might.”
“Who?”
“The ones in there.” The fair boy pointed up the slope to the tumbledown farmhouse with the jagged broken windows, silhouetted against the dawn. The gray light had not changed it.
The Runt shivered. “There’s people in there?” he said. “I thought you said it was empty.”
“It ain’t empty,” said Dearly. “I said nobody lives there. Different things.” He looked up at the sky. “I got to go now,” he added. He squeezed the Runt’s hand. And then he just wasn’t there any longer.
The Runt stood in the little graveyard all on his own, listening to the birdsong on the morning air. Then he made his way up the hill. It was harder by himself.
He picked up his schoolbag from the place he had left it. He ate his last Milky Way and stared at the tumbledown building. The empty windows of the farmhouse were like eyes, watching him.
It was darker inside there. Darker than anything.
He pushed his way through the weed-choked yard. The door to the farmhouse was mostly crumbled away. He stopped at the doorway, hesitating, wondering if this was wise. He could smell damp, and rot, and something else underneath. He thought he heard something move, deep in the house, in the cellar, maybe, or the attic. A shuffle, maybe. Or a hop. It was hard to tell.
Eventually, he went inside.
Nobody said anything. October filled his wooden mug with apple cider when he was done, and drained it, and filled it again.
“It was a story,” said December. “I’ll say that for it.” He rubbed his pale blue eyes with a fist. The fire was almost out.
“What happened next?” asked June nervously. “After he went into the house?”
May, sitting next to her, put her hand on June’s arm. “Better not to think about it,” she said.
“Anyone else want a turn?” asked August. There was no reply. “Then I think we’re done.”
“That needs to be an official motion,” pointed out February.
“All in favor?” said October. There was a chorus of “Ayes.” “All against?” Silence. “Then I declare this meeting adjourned.”
They got up from the fireside, stretching and yawning, and walked away into the wood, in ones and twos and threes, until only October and his neighbor remained.
“Your turn in the chair next time,” said October.
“I know,” said November. He was pale, and thin lipped. He helped October out of the wooden chair. “I like your stories. Mine are always too dark.”
“I don’t think so,” said October. “It’s just that your nights are longer. And you aren’t as warm.”
“Put it like that,” said November, “and I feel better. I suppose we can’t help who we are.”
“That’s the spirit,” said his brother. And they touched hands as they walked away from the fire’s orange embers, taking their stories with them back into the dark.
Malebolge, Or the Ordnance of Genre
Gary K. Wolfe
NOT ALL POPULAR GENRES are meant to blow up. We pretty much expect from mysteries today something of the same thrill that readers expected a century ago; tempestuous romances only seem to get more tempest
uous; and the western long ago quietly faded away into elegiac ghost towns waiting for the likes of Cormac McCarthy to turn up with fresh ammo. But the fantastic genres of horror, science fiction, and fantasy have been unstable literary isotopes virtually since their evolution into identifiable narrative modes, or at least into identifiable market categories, a process which began a century or more ago and has not entirely worked itself through even yet. Although at times they have seemed in such bondage to formula and convention that they were in danger of fossilization, these genres are in fact wired more like those ticking, blinking time bombs which, in the final moments of bad suspense movies, must be disarmed by cutting either the red wire or the green wire: make the wrong choice and the movie inadvertently gets a better ending, as its fundamental assumptions are shot to hell and what had seemed one thing is now another. (Never mind, for the moment, that bad movies never actually end this way. We are discussing fiction here, and one of the curses visited upon such fiction is that it is too often and too easily confused with the film genres of the same names.)
A good deal of cavalier wire-cutting is going on these days among writers using the resources of what were once fairly clearly delineated genres, and for the most part this is a salutary and exhilarating development, bringing with it a sense of breached ramparts and undiscovered terrain. What had seemed to be one thing is becoming another. But in order to fully understand the implications of this shift, this new superposition of fictional states, we have to understand a bit about how the bomb got in the basement in the first place, and what its components are. An important key to this understanding, I would argue, involves revisiting not only what is written under the various rubrics of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, but what is read, and how it is read, and how certain selective vacancies of sensibility have distorted our capacity to receive the fantastic as a viable mode of literary exploration. In particular, what I hope to do here is trace, in broad outline, an account of how over nearly two centuries we unlearned to read fantastic stories, of what became of such stories as a result, and of how the fantastic has begun to reemerge in varying ways in recent decades from the cauldron to which it was once consigned, bringing with it distinctive modes of apprehension and style.
This brief history might as well begin with a real-life anecdote. Toward the end of my graduate studies at the University of Chicago, a number of students who had participated in a Theory of Fiction seminar launched into a rambling coffeehouse debate that lasted most of the academic year, turning on the question of what formally constituted a novel. After a raft of theoretical models had been considered and ultimately rejected, after principles of exclusion had been refined and multiplied in what we might now recognize as a fractal pattern of growth, several members of the group—perhaps even the entire group, I don’t remember—arrived at a consensus: the formal novel, they decided, the properly formal novel, meaning one that satisfied all the rules of exclusion, consisted of a set that included Middlemarch and excluded everything else. Whatever simple delights might have been offered by earlier narratives, these were invariably contaminated by the viruses of romance, Gothicism, sensation, satire, social documentarianism, allegory, and even myth. At their best, they only represented the forward slope of this peak experience, this Überroman, while subsequent efforts represented only refinements of style, form, and structure, if not outright abandonment of the ideal in the guise of Modernism and all that came after. At that time, I counted myself as much an admirer of Middlemarch as anyone in the room, but at the same time I knew that I’d derived substantial degrees of pleasure and discovery from stories that not only demonstrated no effort whatsoever to look like Middlemarch, but that seemed to be part of another, more distant mountain range altogether. I was also aware that Eliot herself had written such a story in “The Lifted Veil” (1859), one of the more compelling psychic fantasy tales to emerge from Victorian literature.
More than thirty years later, I received an e-mail from the daughter of a close friend, who had enrolled in another literary theory seminar, this one at Oberlin College. The text which had come up for discussion was Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot, and the immediate cause of the e-mail was a discussion during which one of her classmates had dismissed the novel as “meaningless pleasure” and the rest had more or less agreed that the book’s genre origins, along with its manifest intent to entertain, all but precluded any further discussion of it in aesthetic terms. In what amounted to a kind of discovery brief, my friend’s daughter e-mailed a number of writers and critics familiar with genre fiction (including King himself) to seek refutations of this argument—or at least to expose the subtext of passionately held but unexamined assumptions which, as is often the case in undergraduate English courses, had passed for literary debate in her class. Had it been possible, through some time warp, for these Oberlin students to get together with my own University of Chicago classmates from three decades earlier, they might well have voted ’Salem’s Lot a good candidate for the Anti-Middlemarch, a work so steeped in sensation and story that it more closely echoed the primitive thrills of a lesser age than the psychological subtleties of high Victorian domestic realism. (It’s not, to my mind, one of King’s most compelling works, but that’s beside our immediate point.)
To the best of my knowledge, none of the participants in my Middlemarch discussion, most of whom later became professors of English, ever published a version of their argument (though the Oberlin student, Emma Straub, did publish the responses to her survey in an online magazine called the Spook), but they didn’t need to: the fundamental assumptions that powered this debate had been laid out more than a century earlier, among Victorian critics and essayists who sought evidence that literature, like technology and industry, could be measured according to the forward thrust of evolutionary progress. “A scientific, and somewhat skeptical age,” wrote an essayist in the Westminster Review in 1853, “has no longer the power of believing in the marvels which delighted our ruder ancestors,” just as it might prosecute a necromancer for “obtaining money under false pretenses” or a showman for “exhibiting a giant at a fair.” “Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult,” added Eliot herself in Adam Bede (1859, the same year as “The Lifted Veil”). “The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin—the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvelous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion.” Both Emma Straub, who had grown up in a house frequented by genre writers of every stripe, and I, who had spent many years enjoying science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction, had found ourselves deposited, Oz-like, in the realm of the unexaggerated lion. It’s a familiar story to many, and as Emma’s case illustrates, it’s far from closed.
At first blush, comments such as Eliot’s might simply seem to be fanfares for the rise of domestic realism as a dominant aesthetic for the Victorian novel, or the literary equivalent of Herbert Butterfield’s Whig fallacy of history, but the groundwork being laid here also helped set the terms of discourse concerning fantastic literature in all its forms for the next century and a half. Prior to the rise of this characteristically Victorian aesthetic, the fantastic had gained sufficient prominence in Romantic-era criticism and art as to virtually constitute an alternate mode of seeing. In 1741, Johann Jakob Bodmer, a German philologist and translator, claimed of the imagination that it “not only places the real before our eyes in a vivid image and makes distant things present, but also, with a power more potent than that of magic, it draws that which does not exist out of the state of potentiality, gives it a semblance of reality and makes us see, hear, and feel these new creations.” More than a century and a half later, when Joseph Conrad invoked similar terms while articulating his artistic goal in his famous preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus—“to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see”—he was referring not to “new creations” but to the representation of the simple efforts of a laborer
in a nearby field. What had happened? How had the skills of evocation become so circumscribed?
Between 1798 and 1800 in Germany, the brothers A. W. and Friedrich Schlegel devoted a good deal of space in their journal Das Athenaeum to debates over the rules of fairy tales and other forms of fantastic literature, a debate eventually joined by such then-prominent fantasists as Novalis, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Ludwig Tieck (whose three-volume 1844 collection Phantasus is given a frame story in which characters also debate the aesthetics of Märchen); one recurring tenet of these debates was that the fantastic might well demand a separate mode of understanding from more clearly representational forms of narrative, as well as from homilies and allegories (which instantly subvert their own fantastic elements by reminding us, for example, that a talking fox is not a talking fox, but a lesson). William Blake, in “A Vision of the Last Judgment,” set imagination or “visionary fancy” apart from the cruder modes of fable or allegory—a distinction that would remain crucial in discussions of fantasy for decades to come—and, most famously, Samuel Taylor Coleridge offered his argument, in the early chapters of Biographia Literaria, that “fancy and imagination were two distinct and widely different faculties.” Fancy, for Coleridge, was “no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space”—much as Blake disdained fable and allegory as “daughters of Memory”—whereas imagination was “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception.”
Within decades, such notions had come to be regarded largely as peculiar artifacts of Romanticism, even though versions of them continued to be argued by novelists and critics such as George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, E. M. Forster, and eventually, of course, by more nearly contemporary and contemporary writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Ursula K. Le Guin. For the most part, however—as these examples attest—the articulation of the fantastic as a mode of storytelling became the province of the storytellers themselves rather than of the critics. The critics, for the most part, were elsewhere. By the end of the century, the notion of fantastic or dreamlike narratives as remnants of a more primitive consciousness even gained something of the patina of scientific authority, as Freud’s description of what he called “primary process” thinking (in The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900) made it clear that this was something of far more importance to small children and savages than to more rational adults, who wisely banished it to the unconscious and went about their business guided by the logic and causality of secondary process thinking. (It wasn’t really until the 1960s, under the influence of Pinchas Moy and others, that analytic theory began to recognize “primary process” as an important component of the sense of selfhood.)
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