Tales from the Dark Woods

Since 1937, when Disney released their animated version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, children everywhere have been able to grow up believing that fairy tales really do end "happily ever after." It is surprising to many modern readers to find out that even in the earliest Brothers Grimm renditions, things weren't always quite so happy. In fact many folk tales were gruesome or aberrantly sexual. Little Red Riding Hood got naked for the wolf after eating her grandmother's remains, Cinderella didn't loose a glass slipper but a "fur slipper," with all the connotations that phrase contains. If the tone of these five popular fairy tale origins (from cracked.com) isn't convincing, then check out this massive library of online folklore and mythology texts (collected by a professor Ashliman who unfortunately retired from the University of Pittsburgh before I got there), which contains many original and chilling versions of all your favorite fairy tales.



If some of the sexual themes seem enough to have made Freud salivate, keep in mind that his disciple, Géza Róheim, made his career studying folk stories from around the world and not surprisingly was able to interpret every single one as containing themes of regression, Oedipal complexes, etc. But just as these stories might harbor sexual fantasies, they might also hint at social instabilities, or even be the remnants of mythologies when the gods no longer serve a purpose beyond entertaining children. Regardless of their origin or thematic scope, the important thing to keep in mind is that folk tales were passed down orally, in an age when there was little else in the way of entertainment and life was often dark and cruel. There really might be a wolf stalking you when you walk to your grandmother's house and stories might serve as warnings as much as amusement. And there was much less need to sugar-coat the stories we told.

The Stories of Our Lives

Earlier today in my Religion in Asia class we watched a film called "Among White Clouds," about Buddhist monks currently practicing in remote hilltop monasteries in China. While the film itself presented interviews with the monks, skewed through the interpretations of the American filmmaker to an incongruous Western soundtrack, it grabbed me in some way that I haven't felt in some time. Afterwards the teacher asked if any of us were inspired by the film to want to go on a similar hermitage and I realized that I have certainly had that dream, both figuratively and literally, from time to time. I began to feel sad, thinking that while I have certainly chosen the life that I am leading as the best one for me, there are moments when, if I could live in another reality, I would have gone and hermited in a remote monastery.

Later I was sitting in a café reading Joyce's "The Dead," in which a party is held in a Dublin mansion with much dancing and feasting. On the way home in the morning, the main character Gilbert is struck by memories of all the ecstatic times his wife and he had once had together, which makes him desire her as they draw closer to the hotel. Once inside, he is shocked to discover that a song heard at the party sparked reminiscences in her, but of her first lover, a young man who had died for her. At the end, Gilbert looks out the window at a rare snow falling over Ireland, and thinks that it is falling over the living and the dead, as if the climate and culture around them is a great equalizer. I was deeply moved, and putting down the book looked out the window at the snow falling over PIttsburgh, thinking how much we can get caught up in the stories of our memories, our desires, which never seem to match up with the world around us. In a Joycean moment, my reveries were interrupted by a man canvassing for a local political organization, asking if I was registered to vote. Needing to change my address, I stepped outside to fill out the forms and smoke a cigarette, and saw an old lover of mine walking down the street, someone who had been deeply wrapped up in my memories, dreams, and this story I live in not such a pleasant way, though much of that sorrow has only ever been in my head.

Feeling that all this was building towards something, I went to my Short Story in Context class, where we continued our discussion of the stylistic use of language in Joyce's "Dubliners," specifically trying to untangle why many characters are cast in the narrative voice of Arthurian legends. Someone asked if this might be ironic on Joyce's part, and, preempting my teacher's response, I suggested that perhaps Joyce was trying to suggest the way that people use myths and stories in general to frame how they look at and talk about the world, which becomes particularly clear in the rest of Joyce's oeuvre. My teacher went on to posit that our use of stories in this way is what causes the paralysis and unrequited longing suffered by many all of the characters in the volume.

Walking home after school, with the snow falling through patches of setting sunlight, I realized how true this really is. Certainly, from a very young age, I have shaped my life from stories, they fill my dreams, and everything I have done, everything I've wanted, everyone I've loved, has been part of a script that could be traced back to particular literary and cultural narratives. While something like this idea has occurred to me before, I felt for the first time just how trapped we become by the stories we tell ourselves. We weave a reality from words, indeed have nothing else but the constraints of language to articulate existence. I thought back to the Zen retreat I attended years ago, and how I told the master that I often felt that I was living in a dream from which I couldn't wake up. He said, our lives, the work, habits, longings, loves, stories, these are all the dream. The first step of waking up is realizing that this is the case, which makes wanting to go live in a monastery sound quite pleasant, though even the desire to do that is still just another story, another dream. And yet, I realize, it is often not such a bad dream, and as a storyteller there is a certain power, even a responsibility, in trying to weave the kinds of stories that people might want to live in.

The Angel as Absent Narrative: Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire"

Last night Sophie and I watched a movie about an angel that falls in love with a human woman. From the title, "Wings of Desire," I thought that it might be a piece of romantic schlock, but I was quite surprised to watch what is undoubtedly a cinematic masterpiece. Set in Berlin in 1987, this movie is shot in a stark black and white that is reminiscent of early silent films. The "plot" focuses on a group of invisible angels wearing beat up trench coats who live in a public library and spend their time listening in on and sharing with each other the thoughts of the humans around them. One of these angels, in his wanderings around Berlin, discovers a circus and falls in love with the trapeze artist, a woman wearing chicken-feather wings whose thoughts are constantly filled with existential angst, and decides that he wants to become human in order to understand what it is actually like to feel, touch, live. Along the way we meet a comic film star who is an ex-angel, and an archangel who ruminates on the dying art of storytelling while searching for neighborhoods that were destroyed in the war.



Besides these and other revealing scenes, including the final meeting between the angel and the girl at a goth club where Nick Cave and the Badseeds are performing (!), the movie was made more poignant through the director's commentary, which to our delight revealed that the movie was conceived during a period in which Wim Wenders was reading Rilke's poetry every day as the ultimate expression of German Romanticism. What was really interesting though was that the whole movie was shot without a script, using a series of existential monologues, which mirrored one of the primary points of the movie: that the angels were absent from reality and the flow of time. Though they were able to look into the flow of humanity from their eternal vantage point, they could only experience this life second hand, and that in order to be part of the narrative of history they had to enter into time, into human emotions, bodily concerns, etc., raising the question of how much we humans are really a part of our own narratives. Are we responsible for our lives or just living out the stories that have been woven for us in our thoughts?

Beyond Science and Faith

This semester I am taking a class called Problem Solving: How Science Works in order to fulfill my quantitative reasoning credit (I am majoring in creative writing and religious studies), so it was with some interest that I stumbled upon this silly diatribe on the separation of science and faith. I admit that I have occasionally used the argument described in this article to explain why I think a religious or spiritual perspective is still important in modern life. Certainly the scientific method is not based on the same kind of faith with which people claim belief in deities, but I think there still is some point at which we have to trust our senses. As the article states, science makes the one assumption that the Universe has rules (that we can know), and I suspect the assumption made by science rests on the faith that our senses can tell us something accurate or objective about reality. As quantum theory has pointed out, the observer is still a part of the equation, and the language we use to talk about scientific discoveries is intimately shaped by our perspectives as humans. While there still is a broad range of difference between this and dogmatic belief, I personally think that science and religion have a lot in common: they are narratives written by humans in order to understand, explain, and often justify our place in and use of reality.

Certainly there are many problems with having a dogmatic faith in some belief despite evidence to the contrary. Creationism makes for bad science, but on the other hand, big-bangism makes for bad religion, because it refuses to address the question of the relationship humans can or should have to the world we live in. Certainly countless numbers of people have been killed in the name of Jesus, but there have been equally countless living beings killed in the name of science. From animal testing in laboratories to the very real crises of global warming, it often seems that science's only aim is to make more science. Curiosity did indeed kill the cat (and any number of species around the world), but it was not the cat's curiosity. One of the biggest challenges is the amount that scientific study has been progressively tied up in corporate agendas, which care little how their products ultimately affect the world around us. What is missing from science is often an ethical raison de'etre, what has often, for all its evils, been an essential part of religious teachings. What mythology, and faith in these stories, have the possibility of imparting is a moral reason to behave in a certain way in the world, and just as scientific laws and reasoning have made such widespread technology possible today, the philosophical underpinnings of religion have made society possible today.

What I am perhaps most interested in asking is what aspects of the spirit are overlooked by science that are necessary to the human condition? A search for meaning behind the objective numbers, a striving for connection, emotion, expression of something much deeper in reality. How do we fit into all of this? What stories can we tell ourselves now to make sense of quantum mechanics, the death of god, global communication?

The Myth-Killer: Krystian Bala Runs Amok

Last year, Polish writer and intellectual Krystian Bala was convicted of the gruesome murder of a businessman who was found years before tortured and drowned in a river. The primary evidence was Bala's novel "Amok," written two years after the murder, in which a group of Polish intellectuals grow bored with modernity and turn to drugs, sex, and eventually murder, including explicitly detailed descriptions of the crime that apparently could only have been known by the police, or the killer. Other evidence has since surfaced, such as Bala's possession of the victim's cell phone, and the businessman's friendship with Bala's ex-wife.



This may be somewhat old news, but the New Yorker just printed an in-depth article on the case, which goes beyond the details of the murder and trial into Bala's philosophical and creative influences, as well as includes dialogue from an interview conducted by the reporter with Bala in prison. According to this article, Bala leaned on the nihilistic writings of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky as well as the postmodernism of Derrida and Wittgenstein's idea that truth can never ultimately be known. "Bala cast himself as an enfant terrible who sought out what Foucault had called a 'limit-experience': he wanted to push the boundaries of language and human existence, to break free of what he deemed to be the hypocritical and oppressive 'truths' of Western society, including taboos on sex and drugs." Similarly, the interview paints Bala as sadistic and un-remorseful (though the novel is full of guilt and apologies for his sins), and leads the reader to suspect that Bala is much more interested in the narrative surrounding his case than in being innocent.

I want to put aside for a moment the question of whether the truth of Bala's guilt can ever been known, and discuss what that might mean. If Bala were innocent, and his depiction of the murder merely based on faithfully rendered news reports as he argued in his defense, then this whole story ends as a Kafkaesque irony. However, the article suggests that Bala was obsessed with what he called "mytho-creativity," the act of telling stories about oneself that become truth. In this light, the act of killing someone and then writing a novel about it later has the potential to become a legendary questioning of the boundaries between art and "real life." I am also somewhat fascinated by this power of language to shape reality, whether in creating stories of how we want to live our own lives (cf. the hypersigils of Grant Morrison's "The Invisibles"), or how we want others to perceive our lives (cf. the discussion on Proust in Roland Barthe's "Death of the Author"), and the question raised for me is at what point is art just art: a piece of work that can be detached from its creator and moment/method of creation? Can we really write our myths into reality? Of course, the act of killing a man, as art, is perhaps the most perverse and inhuman use of this kind of question, and if Bala had admitted to this crime it would have been little more than a horrendous piece of performance art taken too far. That he refuses to admit guilt suggests to me that he either didn't think he would get caught, is really a sick and twisted man, or actually thinks his work has the potential of raising such startling questions as his philosophy aims at.

Despite Bala's arrest making "Amok" an overnight bestseller in Poland, the final irony may be that any legendary or mythic historicity to be had by the piece relies on whether or not it is actually artistically crafted. Is "Amok" a work of literary importance, or is it merely the savage and shocking hack-job the media is portraying it as, which can only add to the spectacle of postmodern culture? As the book has not yet (if it will ever be) translated into English, I must refrain from likewise making this judgment, but the case is interesting enough that if it was translated I would probably have to read it, at least to see how someone else chose to weave their mythic escape from the "real world." Personally, I'm glad that my own dissatisfaction with postmodernity is tempered by a spiritual upbringing that finds recourse in dreams and the attempt to transcend one's condition, instead of in an abject philosophy that only reaffirms what is most base in life.

Against Genre

In january I read Susanna Clarke's "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell," which was an enjoyable and well-researched tome about two magicians trying to bring magic back to 19th century Britain. While the plot was engaging enough to get me through the roughly thousand pages, the characters weren't terribly original or deep, and when I was done reading it I nodded my head and shelved it in the fantasy section of my library. However, in recent jaunts to the local used bookstores, I've seen copies of this book not in the fant/sci-fi sections, but shelved with the rest of the "literature," which started me really wondering what made that difference. Certainly the ten years worth of research that went into the depiction of the state of English magic in the 19th century pushed this novel a step above your less well thought out hack and slash universe into the realm of historical fiction, but is it possible to write about a theme such as magic in a way that is not immediately branded as "fantasy?" Personally, I considered the Harry Potter series to be more in the Young Adult genre; though magic plays a not inconsiderable role in the plot, the books seemed to be more about the growth and struggles of their teenaged hero. Conversely, I having been working on a short story for my fiction class about a golem hunting down an angel in a modern city, which certainly had fantasy (or at least fantastic) elements for many of my classmates, while I considered it more in the light of urban gothic or modern folktale, and then my teacher asked who exactly would be the intended audience. Presumably people who like reading things that they haven't read before, stories that don't fit into the expected molds and tropes of genre.

This evening I considered my fiction bookshelf, and decided that I was done with genre, shuffling together what had previously been distinct categories of literature, fantasy, horror, sci-fi, children's, etc. These categorical distinctions have been a thorn for some time, as there are just too many books that don't fit into one genre or another, too many sub-sub-genres (magical realism, steam punk), and too many authors who are not content to stay in one mode of writing (George Orwell being the largest frustration of this type for years now, "1984" leans towards sci-fi, but "Down and Out in Paris and London?" Or what to do with Hesse's volume of fairy tales?) I have a similar difficulty with my shelves of poetry, mythology, and philosophy, which I like to keep arranged in a rough chronology. Except that the further back historically you get, these genres all converge towards the same thing: works like the "Bhagavad-Gita" are essentially all three. I feel like the idea of marking off set boundaries on what certain types of literature can or should be ultimately limits the possibilities of the worlds that can be created with language. When it comes down to it, Joyce's "Dubliners" is just as fictional as Tolkien's "The Hobbit." Though one takes place in a world that is at first glance more familiar to us, it was as equally filtered and recreated through the mind of its author. And who's to say that Middle-earth wasn't the more fully thought out, containing the history, customs, and peoples of not just one city but an entire world? Perhaps instead of setting arbitrary boundaries on types of semi-believable realities, a more holistic attitude would be to consider that these are all stories, spanning a spectrum of invented realities from the seemingly mundane to the convincingly fantastic. Which of course leads me to the question of when someone will attempt to write across all of them.

Analyzing the Mystery of Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Analyzing the Mystery of Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Poe’s narrator asserts, somewhat facetiously, that the preface to the short story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” is a series of random observations. A close reading of this discussion of the role of analysis in its relation to the games of chess and whist may, however, reveal precisely those elements of analytical observation that allow the character Dupin to solve the murders in the following narrative.

For Poe’s narrator, analysis is “that moral activity which disentangles” (Poe 141), not the mere calculations that could allow someone to excel in the game of chess, with its rote and arbitrary set of rules, where a single oversight results in as big of a loss as the police later in the story, whose rote problem-solving methods do not allow them to see beyond the closed windows and solve the murders. Instead, analysis is a keenness of observation, which successfully attends to “a comprehension of all the sources whence legitimate advantage may be derived” (Poe 142), even those sources that seem to surpass the average and everyday intellect. To illustrate this, the narrator describes the depth of observations that an analytical whist player might attend to beyond the rules of the game, primarily the expressions and mannerisms of his opponents. It is this keen, analytical observation, both of the expressions of others and of all the sources of advantage, which is attributed to the narrator’s friend, Auguste Dupin.

Prior to the description of the murders from which the tale gets its title, Dupin is described in an anecdotal scene as being able to trace back the narrator’s train of thought, through a series of seemingly random meditations of an “apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal” (Poe 147). The narrator makes clear that this is no mystery or fraud on his friend’s part, but purely the result of an analytical methodology that makes the fullest use of every available observation: the narrator’s stumble on the paving stones, his glance at the constellation Orion, words from a conversation that the characters had previously, these all help Dupin successfully disentangle the direction of the narrator’s thoughts.
While the vision of the police is impaired by “holding the object [of their enquiry] too close” (Poe 156), and thus not sufficiently analytical, Dupin is able to solve the murders in the Rue Morgue by virtue of his own critical observations of several peculiar phenomena connected to the crime. The three biggest challenges faced by the police in solving the murders are the questions of who is the person in the room with the shrill and un-linguistically recognizable voice, how did the supposed murderers escape the seemingly locked room without being discovered, and finally who would have committed such inhumanely brutal and apparently motiveless murders.

Having been given a somewhat detailed account of the testimonies surrounding the murders, which constantly describe which languages the rescue party believe the shrill voice to be in, it shouldn’t be too difficult for the reader to follow Dupin’s analytical accounting of the voice. While the witnesses are in disagreement over the nationality of the voice, Dupin observes that in one regard they do agree: “each one spoke of [the voice] as that of a foreigner” (Poe 160), with an unequal tone devoid of clearly articulated words. While this does not yet tell us who committed the crime, Dupin suggests that it is the peculiarity of this observation that is important, an observation made by disentangling all of the data that had been put before him in the testimonies.

Turning to the question of the culprit’s escape, when the two characters go to look at the house on the Rue Morgue, the narrator notes that Dupin searched the whole premises “with a minuteness of attention for which [the narrator] could see no possible object” (Poe 157). Dupin discovers that the windows are rigged to stay closed, which leads the police to disregard them as a means of departure from the room, but it is precisely this oversight that leads Dupin to believe the windows were used for the escape. Indeed, being of an analytical mindset not closed to all the possibilities of the situation, he soon discovers that one of the nails holding the window shut had been severed, and someone of an almost superhuman strength could have climbed up the drain-pipe outside.

These details of the murder’s peculiar voice and extraordinary strength lend credibility to Dupin’s analysis that the brutal method of the murders, which have occurred despite the victims’ money having not been stolen to account for a motive, may have been done by something which is not human. For, as he suggests, it is the “outré character of its features” (Poe 158) that should make this mystery easy to solve. But it is not a supernatural horror or madman that perpetrated the crime; Dupin goes on to show by his observations of the characteristics of a hair and the size of a handprint left behind, the murderer was in fact an escaped orangutan, which perfectly accounts for all the peculiarities of the evidence.

It would seem, for Poe’s narrator, that in the observational skills of an analytical mind, which pays attention to all the peculiar details of a situation, no problem is too difficult to be solved. As Dupin succinctly puts it, the question that should be asked by such a person is not “what has occurred,” but “what has occurred that has never occurred before” (Poe 159). All answers can be disentangled from that distinction.

Works Cited
Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings. Ed. by David Galloway. New York: Penguin Press, 2003.

The Architect's Brother

Some of the phenomenally dream-like art of Robert ParkHarrison.