Starlight

For this post, I have decided to upload another short story. Like 69, it was written about a year ago and was also long-listed for the Fish Competition. I could probably do with revision it but I have decided to include it as it is. Interestingly, one of the few who have read it said it gave her nightmares. This certainly wasn't my intention when I wrote it but, perhaps, there is a kind of subterranean nightmarish quality to it. As I said about 69, if you wish to apply my interpretive theory to it, you are most welcome to try.

                                              Starlight

Lentils for dinner again. Always fucking lentils. We keep a sack of them in the cobwebbed storeroom beside another one of Agria potatoes and a barrel of rice. It’s not, to be clear, that I have a gargantuan issue with lentils, but, you know, you have to ask sometimes, is it strictly necessary to have them every other fucking night? It’s Dave’s job to sortie out into the outside world once a month, driving three hours into the town to buy them from a wholesaler there. When Dave carries out his monthly excursion, he does so on a Monday.

            The recipe for dhal is simple. Boil the lentils with turmeric and sometimes tomato and then mix in a fried garnish at the end: cumin or chilli with fried onions, ginger and garlic. We cook in teams of three and, even so, it’s a major fucking effort preparing a meal for thirty people. Sometimes I’ve tried to vary the outcome in different impromptu ways by throwing in other spices – coriander, cinnamon sticks, whatever’s at hand, more or less at random. My culinary experiments tend usually to be abject failures. I’ve discussed with the other members of the house the soul-killing monotony of eating lentils every other night, suggesting we leaven the diet with chickpeas or kidney beans, just for a change, but my requests only ever fall on deaf ears. I have cravings sometimes for steak. Steak with fried egg. Steak with fried onion and mushrooms like I’d once cook and wolf down at the kitchen bench in my flat after getting back from a bender at two in the morning back when I lived in the city, but that, of course, is an impossibility here. The House has its Rules and one of its central commandments is, “Thou shalt not eat the flesh of any animal.” So dhal for dinner every other fucking night is just something we just have to deal with.

            We hold the weekly House meeting in the living room, a big draughty space large enough to accommodate all thirty of the commune’s inhabitants plus a patched and frayed pool table. The seats, arranged in a rough circle, comprise holed sofas, worn leather recliners donated by past inhabitants, wooden dining room chairs, stools and a couple of bean bags. The thirty of us assemble to negotiate responsibilities and fine-tune the logistics of running the place. The weekly House meeting is the fundamental ritual in which the House engages, the pivot around which our diurnal rhythms revolve. A commune is a world unto itself with its own laws, its own social structure and its own internal politics; if you want to live here, you have to renounce all ties to a previous life lived among shallow materialists, a bit like you would if you took vows in a monastery. On the wall hangs a black and white photograph of the twenty odd pioneers who established the House in the first place, back in the early ‘seventies. The commune’s principal founder, long-haired and full bearded, stands in the centre of the group in a striped kaftan radiating optimistic idealism out at his future followers; like Baxter a Catholic, John McNeish had originally envisaged that his community would be dedicated to spiritual, ascetic values, modelling his dream a little after Parihaka, but during the last thirty years the religious patina of the House has worn away and an adherence to Maori religious values is now considered not nearly so essential  to its members ­– although we still attract quite a few flaky, unreconstructed hippies with New Age belief systems. Despite the ever-increasing secularisation of the commune, McNeish’s spirit, and his vision of an alternative society based around principles of collectivism, community and self-sufficiency, continues to hover over the house as both inspiration and moral exemplar.

             At this week’s meeting, we begin by renegotiating the chores. The Swedish couple want, interestingly enough, to build an apiary. Lars and Puck appeared on the scene about a year ago, driving down the long dirt track that leads to the House through dairy country in a beat-up second hand yellow van with which they’d been touring New Zealand and asking us out of the blue if they could pitch their tent in the paddock for a fortnight; they’d heard about the House somehow from some other backpackers and imagined that we would be cool about such a suggestion. Of course, a cool acceptance of the randomness of life is pretty much what we’re all about and we obliged. Pretty soon a fortnight had turned into a couple of months and, three months in and after a couple of residents had dropped out, they dismantled the tent and moved their few possessions into a bedroom in the House. 

            “If we had a few of our own beehives on site,” says Lars, “we could make our own honey and whatever we have left over we could sell at the Farmers’ Market in town.”

            Spirited discussion ensues. Topics range from the possible impact of the Varoa mite on honey production to the politics of subsistence living; eventually however the Swedes are given permission to implement their scheme as long as they pay for it out of their own pocket. It is a curious aspect of House meetings that we require total consensus to take action in any way about anything at all; consequently meetings can drag on for hours and some issues never get finally resolved. There is a kind of conservatism to the House, a sort of institutional inertia that slows down the adoption of new ideas - but this matter at least is sorted out fairly quickly.

            The discussion turns to the next topic on the agenda. One of our newer residents has been failing to perform his assigned chores that include vacuuming and cleaning the second floor. When Gareth, who is twenty-five and has been living in the House for six weeks (having been vouched for by his sister who also lives here), first moved into one of the upstairs bedrooms he had made at least a half-arsed effort at participating in our shared work load but recently he has stopped even pretending to give a shit about the rest of us, showing interest only in the cultivation and pruning of the cannabis patch we keep covertly a little way from the House, out in the bush. It seems to me that pretty much all Gareth does is lounge around on the back veranda picking out blues riffs on his acoustic guitar. There is talk of applying a censure. Typically, this would be being given the job of dealing the latrine. The jade patu that we use as a talking-stick and which was left by a prior tenant is passed from person to person so that everyone can express an opinion. Personally, Gareth fucking pisses me off and, when I get a chance to handle the patu, I say so. Gareth, who, typically, has not even bothered to show up himself to the meeting, is defended by his sister and by Neil, his mate with whom he sits on the roof every morning and evening rolling and smoking  ‘special’ cigarettes; it soon becomes apparent that neither is going to yield to others’ opinions and so, rather than talk all night, we reach a compromise. Neil will have a word with Gareth and persuade him to pull finger and start doing his assigned duties.

             One of the constant vexations of my life here in the House is sexual frustration. Now, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m a sex-maniac or a pervert or anything but I think that there’s something about living in close physical proximity to a whole lot of other young people your own age that can throw a person’s hormonal balance out of kilter. Thoughts of sex occupy a disproportionate amount of my mental life. Unfortunately, there are eighteen men and only twelve women living here so, if a man wants to get his end away, he has to compete with a whole bunch of other guys intent on the same objective. Actually, the odds are worse than that because six of the men and six of the women are coupled off, so the ratio is more like twelve to six. One day, I am out watering the lettuce bed when Jasmine approaches carrying a basket full of eggs from the hen house. She is wearing a short floral dress and her unwashed hair is a mass of dirty blonde curls that catch the sunlight and create the illusion that she has a golden halo. The summer sun is high overhead. I ask her if the hens are laying.

            “You know,” she says, standing with her bare feet planted about a meter apart and ignoring the question, “I’ve been thinking. I believe that we’re all part of the same cosmic life force. There’s an energy that comes from the sun that gets into the plants and the chickens eat the plants and then we eat the eggs, so, when we eat the eggs, we’re eating concentrated sunlight. Our bodies are made all out of photons. The life force connects us, surrounds us, penetrates us. We all glow in the dark.”

            There is something about a dirty girl in a short floral dress and probably no underwear discoursing about being “penetrated” by the cosmic life force that is almost unbearably sexy. I wonder if she is familiar with Wilhelm Reich’s theory of Orgone and ask her if she is.

            “Wilhelm Reich?” she replies. “Who’s he?  Was he a Nazi?”

            At this week’s House meeting, the topic of Gareth’s non-compliance with House rules is again on the agenda. Once again Gareth himself is conspicuous by his absence. The jade patu passes from person to person until it arrives in the hands of Thomas. Thomas has a braided grey beard and alert blue eyes; he has been living in the House for fifteen years, a good ten years longer than anyone else, and the rest of the house tend to defer to his superior wisdom and experience.

            “The whole thing’s gone on long enough. We’ve given him enough time to get his shit together. He’s letting the whole House down. I think we should have him evicted.”

            Thomas’s hard eyed stare is met with a barrage of protest from Gareth’s sister and Neil, cries of opposition and urgent hand-waving. I might digress to make an observation. Although hippies have a reputation for being all sweetness and light I can assure you that this is a misconception. Some of the most intolerant people I’ve ever met have been hippies. The ones I am thinking of look down on carnivores, despise capitalists, loath intellectuals. They leap to judgement and nurture grudges. There’s a kind of blinkered self-righteousness to many hippies, a narrowness of perspective that verges on anal retention. Trust me, I’ve seen it. Fortunately for Gareth, however, the present composition of the House is tilted more towards travellers and dropouts than zealots with ideological axes to grind. We decide to give Gareth a little more time to get his act together and if he’s still not pulling his weight in a week’s time… well, let’s just say that the wheels of the House grind slow but grind fine.

            The other day I’m walking across the back-deck into the House to fix myself a lunch of home-baked pita bread with bean sprouts and fried onions when Neil, who is lying on the hammock smoking, waves me over.

            “I’ll tell you something you didn’t know,” he says, taking a lazy drag.

            Now the thing about Neil is that he only ever talks about one of two things – Bruce Lee or Che Guevara. These are his two core obsessions and, when he wants to deliver a lecture about something, the only uncertainty in the listener’s mind is on which of these two subjects he is going expatiate. It is as though Neil flips a coin in his head and bases his theme on the result.

            “You know, back when he was still living in Hong Kong, the dude was the local Cha Cha champion. That’s part of the reason he had such good coordination.”

            “I’m assuming you’re talking about Bruce Lee.”

            “Mind over matter, bro. Did you know Bruce could pull off moves so fast that the camera couldn’t catch them?”

            Neil, who was a Sociology student at Uni in a previous incarnation, washed up here on the stoop of the House about a year and half ago. Apparently his parents are big-wig lawyers back in the city but Neil’s only life-goals seem to be getting wasted and getting laid as often as possible. At a recent party in fact he hooked up with Samantha and they have been seeing each other since, a fact that fills me with belly-cramping envy but about which I can do nothing. At least, unlike his mate Gareth, Neil does his fair share around the House so I can’t fault him for that.

            The stories Neil has just told me about Bruce Lee are ones he has shared with me before but I decide to just let this pass without comment.

            “Who do you think would win in a fight? Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris?”

            Neil takes another lazy drag on his cigarette and pretends to deliberate. The smell of nutmeg drifts over.

            “Oh, Bruce definitely bro. Chuck’s good but Bruce was the master. Bruce was the guy who actually taught Chuck Norris how to do Kung Fu in the first place you know? Serious.”

            At the next House meeting, Gareth is once more on the agenda. Neil and Deborah put up a little lacklustre resistance, but its obvious to everyone that they have lost the battle. After a little talk, we reach a final consensus.  The House has spoken. If Gareth doesn’t pull his head out of arse this week, he’s history.

            One morning a little after this meeting, Chris and Jasmine are standing on the front deck, sanding the railing preparatory to repainting it, when they see a car driving down the dirt road. It’s a cop car. The cop car pulls to a stop just behind Thomas’s pickup truck in front of the House and two uniformed bobbies in blue caps, a man and a woman, get out and approach the front door. Naturally, the presence of uniformed constabulary puts both my Housemates on edge. The cops enquire as to the address, seeking confirmation that they have arrived at the right destination. My housemates reply in the affirmative and ask what it’s all about.

            “We’re looking for Gareth Davies,” says the male cop.

            Samantha opens her mouth to reply but Chris, quicker on the uptake, cuts in before she can breathe a word.

            “What do you need him for?” he asks.

            “His name has come up in relation to some burglaries and we thought he could help us with our enquiries. We have information that his sister lives at this residence and we believe it possible he might be here.”

            Samantha shuts her mouth with an audible clap.

            “No,” says Chris carefully. “There’s no one called Gareth staying on the property. Yeah, we have a girl with that surname staying in the House but she’s never mentioned a brother.”

            Samantha excuses herself, saying that she needs to use the bathroom, and heads rapidly inside.

            “So,” the cop says to Chris, “if you’ve got nothing to hide, you won’t mind if we have a look around the place and maybe have a word with the sister.”

            Samantha has run upstairs to the third floor to hammer on Gareth’s door. Gareth opens it, bleary-eyed in underwear and tie-dyed shirt.

            “Gareth! The police are here looking for you.”

            “The police?” he replies. “What should I do?”

            “Go hide somewhere. Use the fire escape and go hide on the roof. Quick!”

            Gareth quickly shuts the door. The fire escape is just outside his bedroom window.

            Back on the ground floor, Chris leads the cops into the kitchen. A bunch of us are standing around discussing the Swedes’ apiary but, when we see the pigs in their blue caps, we fall silent.

            “These guys are looking for Gareth Davies,” says Chris. “Apparently he’s Deborah’s brother. I was just explaining to them that no one by that name lives here.”

            “I’m Deborah,” says Debby, walking round the kitchen bench towards them. “He’d be my brother. Why do you want to talk to him?”

            The cops explain again that he is wanted in relation to some burglaries in Auckland. They ask her if she has heard from him at all recently and if she has any idea at all where he might be. Debby tells them that she has had no contact with Gareth for a number of months and has no idea where he’s gone. Helpfully she mentions that Gareth has some friends in Masterton and gives them an address and some phone numbers. During all this, he rest of us keep schtum. After about twenty minutes, the police give up on their interrogation. I suspect that they guess we might hiding something but I surmise also that they can’t be sure if our attitude is indicative of conspiracy or simply the instinctive guardedness all hippies display around people in uniforms.

At any rate, they leave the House shortly without any leads for their investigation.

            A couple of nights later, a bunch of us are sitting around a table we’ve set up in the back yard. It is very dark out, our only source of illumination being a small tealight in a glass jar placed at the centre of the table. There are about seven or eight of us sitting around it. Lars is playing the guitar and Puck is accompanying him on the bongo. Neil is showing Samantha how to roll nutmeg cigarettes. Gareth is cleaning up the kitchen after dinner and so is consequently not present, something we’re accustomed to now anyway. After his close brush with the law, Gareth presumably feels pathetically grateful to the rest of the House and has started not only doing his own assigned chores but volunteering to do others’. Obviously, we are now harbouring a fugitive and this is a new issue to discuss at the next House meeting but, for now, having finally pulled finger, Gareth’s future occupancy is no longer in question. I am feeling cheerful because, for once, people have acquiesced to my pleas and let me cook kidney beans for dinner instead of dhal.

            The thousand thousand stars, far more than you can ever possibly see in the city, are scattered across the dome of the sky. I can understand tonight why the ancients used to speak of the ‘firmament’: it is as though our little gathering is situated at the precise centre of the universe, as though the stars are small glittering gems set in an encompassing mortar, and this beaded sphere has the candle flame at the centre of our table as its precise focus. The stars scintillate benevolently down on us like attendant angels. I move over next to Jasmine and pour her a glass of the House homebrew. We talk, this time not about cosmic energies and trophic levels, but about her childhood growing up in a farm outside Napier and about her family. After a little while, I borrow the guitar from Lars and play her Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want by the Smiths.

            “We should set up a House band,” says Jasmine enthusiastically when I’ve finished. “We should discuss it at the next meeting.”

            Tonight the constellations are lined up in their most propitious positions. Tonight all is well with the world. When everyone falls silent for a moment, we hear the cry of morpork drift over from the stand of cabbage trees at the edge of the yard. Perhaps he envies our conviviality and wishes to participate.

Life here is good. I would never live anywhere else.

69

To take a break from critical analyses, I thought I would upload a short story I wrote about a year ago. It was long-listed for the annual Fish Competition in Ireland. If you want to apply my narrative theory to it, you can certainly try.

[Note: I have edited it slightly. It probably should be edited more. The style is odd: it's as though a Victorian writer had turned his attention to a brothel. Perhaps that's part of it's charm?}

                                                                        69

            The spark seemed to have gone out of the Jane’s and Clare’s love life and, despite their best efforts, they couldn’t seem to rekindle the flame of old. The two of them had tried to spice things up in a number of different ways – strap-on dildos, marijuana, role-playing games in which Clare played a female cop arresting a recalcitrant traffic offender; they had experimented with sex in public places (a brief, unsatisfactory romp on a beach near Leigh that had been interrupted by a gaggle of Japanese tourists); they had tried moving the TV to the bedroom and watching lesbian porn to get them in the mood. Nothing seemed to work and the couple despaired of ever regaining the passion they had felt at the beginning of their relationship.

            One evening, they were sitting on the couch watching Game of Thrones when Jane decided to propose an idea that she had been mulling over for a little while. The irony hadn’t escaped her. There they were, creatures of habit, sitting watching TV together like an old married couple when once they would have been out attending gigs by punk-rocker friends or screwing on the kitchen table. Monotony, Jane reflected morbidly, was ever the price of monogamy.

            “I’ve been thinking,” said Jane carefully, “perhaps we could make sex more interesting by getting a third party involved.”

            “Briony might be interested, I suppose.”

            “I wasn’t thinking of another woman. I thought we could arrange to involve a man.”

            Clare took a moment to digest this novel suggestion.

            “Who were you thinking of?”

            “Aldous.”

            Jane had known Aldous since University, having had an adjacent room to his in the same hall of residence. Back then, he had been notorious for the number of clubs to which he belonged: not only to both the Young Greens and the Hiking Club but also to the Dungeons and Dragons Club and the Mediaeval Society. For a time, he had been both president and sole member of the Klingon Language and Culture Appreciation Society, a club that only ever attracted one other recruit. It was characteristic of Aldous that he took the failure of this club in his stride and reacted to its collapse by immediately joining two new ones. Aldous now had a respectable job, managing the website for an online store, but he still retained a strong enthusiasm for all things Geek, collecting Lord of the Rings memorabilia and first edition Sandman comics as a hobby. After graduation, Jane had remained in contact with Aldous, catching up with him irregularly for lunch. Aldous was then, and still was now, slightly chubby and freckled with unruly red hair and pale blue eyes.

            “Well, if it’s going to be anyone, it might as well be Aldous,” said Clare.

            In fact, Clare took a little longer to come around completely to Jane’s suggestion than this suggests but, at last, she agreed that the idea might be worth pursuing and they decided to pitch the suggestion to Aldous over dinner. The two of them took Aldous out to an Indonesian restaurant where they ordered Burbur Manado and Beef Rendang. Aldous had just recently returned from the San Diego Comic-Con and chattered about it cheerfully for a solid half-hour. He was still sunburnt from the Californian sun. For three days, he had wandered blissfully around the convention centre, dressed as Boba Fett, playing newly released computer games and bartering for old comics at the various stalls. The highlight of the trip had been an encounter with Patrick Stewart sitting behind an autograph desk, and the signed photo he had given Aldous with the inscription, “Make it so!”.  The experience had been virtually life changing.

            “Captain Picard patted me on the arm! I’ll remember that touch for the rest of my life!”

            Eventually, Jane came to the point.

            “Aldous,” she said, “we have a proposition and, we know it comes a bit out of the blue, but we wondered if, maybe, perhaps, you might be interested in a ménage a trois.”

            “What’s that?” asked Aldous blithely. “Some kind of Indonesian dessert?”

            “It’s a threesome,” said Clare. “Jane is asking if you want to have a threesome. With us two.”

            “A threesome?” repeated Aldous, astonished. “With you two? Uhh…”

            Trying to cover for his momentary loss of composure, Aldous reached for his wine glass, upset it and spilled red wine across the table. A moment of commotion followed while they soaked up the spill with their napkins. Clare and Jane returned to the proposal. Unable to know what else to say, Aldous told them “I’ll have to think about it,” and returned home from that dinner in a state of stunned bewilderment.

            The next day, Aldous mentioned the proposal to a friend of his from the company.

            “I have a couple of lesbian friends who want me to have a threesome with them,” he said.

            “Are you going to do it?”

            “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to imagine the logistics of sex with two women at once and I don’t see how in the world it can possibly work.”

            Aldous was on his lunch-break and he and his colleague were walking to a nearby café to grab something to eat.

            “You have to do it. Do you know how many guys would kill for the chance to sleep with two women at once? If you do it, you’ll be a hero in the eyes of men everywhere. You’ll be a God. It’s a male fantasy to sleep with two women at once.”

            “There’s a bit of a difference between fantasy and reality, I think,” said Aldous uncertainly.

            “Don’t do it for yourself,” said David firmly. “Do it for every other red-blooded male in the world.”

            Bearing in mind David’s encouragement, Aldous phoned Jane and they arranged for him to come over on Friday. When he arrived, Jane poured them all glasses of Chardonnay. Jane wanted them to get down to it straight away but Aldous, who was subject to panic attacks from time to time, didn’t want to venture into the unknown without a map. What he wanted was step-by-step instructions on how to comport himself, preferably with diagrams. The three of them sat down in the kitchen to discuss the evening’s arrangements. Of the two women, Clare was more of the butch dyke: she kept her hair cut short and wore baggy men’s jeans and a belt adorned with an insignia of crossed lightning bolts. She had, Aldous couldn’t help noticing as if for the first time, quite big breasts; he found the mixed signals she communicated in terms of gender exciting and disturbing in equal measure. Jane was more of a femme dyke and was wearing a low cut red dress and pink lipstick.

            “So how do we do it?” Aldous enquired nervously. “Do you two start first and then I get involved part way through? Or do you just want me around for the first part?” Aldous experienced a moment of dizziness. He felt like Napoleon consulting with his generals about the best way to invade Russia.

            Jane frowned. “Why don’t we just get into it and see what develops naturally?”

            The three of them retired to the bedroom and Jane and Clare lay down on the bed where they started kissing and making out. Aldous stood in the doorway awaiting a prompt. After a couple of minutes, Jane cast him a significant glance. Taking this as his cue, Aldous dropped his trousers around his ankles, tried to take a step towards them, tripped and fell, smacking his head on the bedside table on the way down.

            Jane leant over the bed.

            “Are you alright down there?”

            “I’m bleeding all over the carpet.”

            Clare went to the bathroom and hurried back with bandages and tissues to staunch the bleeding but it soon became apparent that Aldous’s injuries required the ministrations of people more professional. They drove him to hospital. In this way, Aldous’s first foray into the wild world of group sex concluded in a trip to A & E and six stitches.

            A week later, they made another attempt. The three decided to have dinner together before embarking on the main event. Aldous came over at seven. Jane worked in the Women’s Bookshop and the house was full of books – Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch, A.M. Homes, even, oddly enough, a book by Aldous’s namesake Huxley (specifically, “The Doors of Perception”). Aldous had a nosey through the bookshelves before sitting down to eat. For her part, Clare worked for Corrections as a security guard at a Women’s Facility and kept her uniform slung over a chair in the kitchen. Over dinner, they this time deliberately steered clear of talking about the evening’s intentions, instead making light chat about politics and movies. Clare had cooked Pasta Carbonara and Aldous complimented her on it.

            After dinner, the three of them decamped to the living room and sat together on the couch. Aldous, fortified by white wine and a Valium, made the bold move of putting his arm around Jane’s shoulders. Clare, who was sitting on the other side of Jane, also put her arm around Jane’s shoulders. Aldous removed his arm and instead laid his hand on Jane’s thigh. Clare also removed her arm and laid her hand on Jane’s other thigh. Jane put her arms around both of them.

            “Isn’t this fun?” she said gaily,

            Aldous tipped Jane’s head towards his and kissed her on the cheek. Not to be out-maneuvered Clare reached over, took Jane’s chin, turned Jane’s face towards hers and kissed her on the lips. Aldous put his hand up Jane’s dress and felt her left breast. Clare reached into her dress and put her hand on Jane’ other breast. It occurred to Aldous that he should try to shake things up, vary things a little. He reached past Jane to fondle Clare’s breasts instead. Clare stiffened.

            “What the hell are you doing?” she asked quietly, her voice icy.

            Aldous quickly withdrew his hand.

            “Uuuh…”

            Clare sprang to her feet.

            “If I wanted you to grope me, I’d have asked!”

            “Sorry,” said Aldous, feeling simultaneously both guilty and put-upon. “But I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be doing here. What my role is, I mean. Aren’t we supposed to be having a ménage a trois? Doesn’t that mean we should all be messing around with each other?”

            “Well – yes – but…” stammered Clare. She felt rattled and defensive.

            “Aldous has a point, Clare,” said Jane. “The whole purpose of the exercise is to let go off our inhibitions.”

            Clare felt that the other two were ganging up on her.

            “I don’t have anything to let go of! I’m not inhibited!”

            “If you don’t want Aldous to touch you, we can work around that,” said Jane, trying to be reassuring “If you have issues with it, that is.”

            “I don’t have issues with anything!” said Clare. “I’m completely fine! I tell you what – if I give Aldous a blow-job, will that prove that I’m not inhibited?”

            “Well, yes, maybe…” said Jane startled.

            Having made up her mind, Clare immediately set to work turning intention into actualiity. She knelt in front of Aldous and unbuttoned his fly. Aldous felt a growing sense of alarm.

            “You know you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” he told her rapidly.

            “Of course I want to. I’ve always meant to give a man a blow-job do at least once in my life. This is my idea of the perfect evening in..”

            Clare liberated Aldous’s member from his pants and took it in her mouth. Within moments she was bobbing her head up and down, only occasionally surfacing long enough to make remarks like, “This is great fun” and “I’m enjoying myself immensely”. Aldous felt weirdly disassociated from the situation. It was as though not he, but someone else, was receiving a blow-job. The part in Clare’s hair had become oddly hypnotic. Given the circumstances, it was a miracle that he could get it up at all but it seemed as though his penis had a brain of its own.

            “This is the trippiest thing that has ever happened to me,” he said.

            Jane smiled. Things were going well. Reaching over, she tousled Aldous’s hair and, leaning down, kissed Clare on the cheek. Clare abruptly disengaged and stood up.

            “I can’t deal with this,” she cried out, stepping back and tripping over the coffee table. There was a crash. Clare yelled and grasped her leg.

            In this way, their second foray into the wild world of group sex also concluded with a trip to hospital although, this time, it was Clare not Aldous who required medical attention.

            A week later, Clare and Jane were sitting on the sofa watching True Blood. Clare was sitting with her foot raised up on a stool: she had sprained her ankle. Jane was sipping a glass of Reisling. In the commercial break, Jane decided to bring up the subject of Aldous once more.

            “I think we should have another go involving Aldous in our love life again,” she said.

            “Do you really want to?” asked Clare reluctantly. “He hasn’t worked out very well so far. I think we should consider the whole thing a failed experiment”

            “We’ll just give it one more attempt. If it doesn’t work out this time, we’ll abandon the whole idea.”

            Jane invited Aldous over again and, this time, things went much better. In fact, things went so well that Jane started inviting Aldous over a couple of times a week and he became a regular fixture in their lives. The three of them would have dinner together and then decamp to the bedroom to perform indecent acts on each other. Over the next month, the trio experimented with deviant sex in a number of different settings and in a variety of different positions – daisy-chains, top-and-tails, sandwich arrangements with Jane as the filling, imaginative variations of doggy-style. It was all very depraved. They spelled out the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet on the bed. True, Clare didn’t particularly like penetrative intercourse but the other two found ingenious ways to navigate around this peccadillo. All in all, the three of them decided to rate the arrangement a success.

              A side effect of his newfound intimacy with the couple was that Aldous felt comfortable enough to call around spontaneously. Regular sex had vastly bolstered his confidence and his panic attacks had reduced in both severity and frequency. One Sunday, he showed up at the door of their villa unannounced and, finding the door unlocked, let himself in. Jane was vacuuming the house. Aldous asked her where Clare was.

            “She’s visiting her brother in Howick.”

            “What are you doing? Up to anything much?”

            “Not much. Why do you ask?”

            “How about we go grab some lunch somewhere? Something ethnic. If you’re not doing anything else that is.”

            They drove to Dominion Road and went to a Chinese restaurant. Aldous ordered won-tons and Jane spicy noodles. The restaurant was full of authentic Chinese, a sure sign of quality. Over cups of green tea, the two of them reminisced about the period after they had first met, that first year in University, ten years ago – about their mutual friends, about the parties that they had attended, about the stunts they had pulled. Sometimes Aldous lost his train of thought gazing at her. Without her make-up, Jane was pale, her blond hair washed out, but was still very pretty in a fragile kind of way. Divested of her makeup, she seemed almost like an ordinary girl, no different from any other. Aldous couldn’t help but reflect on how much he had liked her when they had first met ­– he might have even been in love with her a little back then during that first year but, after she had first told him she was gay, he had quietly shuffled her into the ‘just friends’ compartment of his mind. It seemed a little unfair, somehow.

              “You know,” he said, “there have actually been a couple of queer superheroes down the years. There was this one comic book character called Northstar who came out in the early nineties. I read about it the other day.”

            “Gay comic book characters!” said Jane. “It’s the end of Western Civilization.”

            “Exactly. That’s what I think too. It’s all part of the liberal campaign to brainwash the minds of children with homosexual propaganda. Exhibit A: Sponge Bob Square-Pants. Exhibit B: Tinky-Winky –“

            “Bert and Ernie,” said Jane laughing.

            “Yeah… Hey did you hear?” said Aldous, changing the subject slightly. “They want to make Preacher into a TV series. I don’t see how in the world they can possibly do it.”

            After they had finished eating, they set off back towards the car. On the way they passed an indoor rock climbing facility, the Clip’n’Climb. Aldous paused.

            “Why don’t we go in and have a climb?”

            “I’ve never done it before. I don’t think I’d know how.”

            “It’s easy enough to learn. Come on – you said yourself you’ve got no plans for the day. Why not us give it a go?”

            They went inside and paid admission in the foyer. The foyer opened onto a large room which contained a number of brightly coloured vertical surfaces, walls, in blue and pink and purple, adorned with plastic handholds and other structures to be used for purchase or as obstacles to be navigated around. Children were flying about in all directions. Presumably, there was a birthday party in progress. All through the space, pre-adolescent boys and girls were skipping about, whooping and laughing, spreadeagled limpet-like on the walls or descending gently, like parachutists, on ropes to the floor. Activity and commotion surrounded them on all sides. Aldous led Jane over to one of the walls. An attendant approached to help with the harness but Aldous shooed him away.

            “I can do it,” he said.

            Aldous helped Jane put on the harness, explaining as he did so how the various clasps worked and how the whole thing was totally safe.

            “You’ve obviously done this a couple of times before,” she said.

            “I’m actually a member of the Auckland Indoor Rock Climbing Association.”

            “Of course, you are.”

            They approached one of the walls and Aldous attached her to the safety rope. Jane grabbed onto the plastic grips and hoisted herself off the floor. She reached for the next grip and, stretching out her foot, found another clamp. Aldous remained on the ground below her, partly to offer encouragement and partly for the clandestine reason that it gave him the opportunity to look up her skirt. After a minute or so, Jane had ascended some three or four metres. A little breathless, she called out to Aldous below. “Thank you for suggesting this! I would never have thought of it myself.”

            “What do you and Clare do for fun?” Aldous called back. “You’ve never told me.”

            “Well… we go to the art gallery sometimes.”

            Jane continued climbing. After a while she fell into the rhythm of it. Stretch for the next handhold, pause, lift a foot to the next hold and then rest again. Occasionally she would pause and look around, astonished by the altitude she had reached. The milling children seemed very far below. Then she would turn back to the wall and resume her ascent. Suddenly there were no more holds above her. She had reached the top of the climbing wall, some twenty metres up.

            “What do I do now?” she shouted down to Aldous.

            “Just let go!”

            “I don’t think I can. I’m too scared!”

            “You’ll be fine. You’ll just drop gently to the ground!”

            Jane hesitated. She would remember this moment later, the evening she told Clare that she wanted to break up with her in order to be with Aldous instead, and would cling to it while she endured Clare’s reaction, a storm of tears and unending terrible desperate entreaties to stay. But at this moment that scene was still a month away. Jane let go. She thought she would plummet to the floor but the rope supported her, gently, as she parachuted down. The sensation was exhilarating. It felt as though she was flying. 

Exhuming James Joyce’s “The Dead”

To recycle an idea from a previous posting, common practice among literary critics is the reduction of a work to a word, say ‘jealousy’ in the case of Othello or ‘ambition’ in the case of Macbeth. If I was going to carry out the same reductio on “The Dead” by Joyce, the word I would choose is ‘vanity’.  This story describes a psychological attitude I believe is near universal. “The Dead”, the most famous short story by perhaps the greatest writer of the twentieth century, is wonderful and so I hope my readers will forgive me for going all high-culture for a bit and critiquing it.  To employ my favourite terms ‘thesis’ and ‘antithesis’, I would propose that the antithesis asserted by “The Dead” is ‘Vanity is a insupportable pretence that can only make one a fool in the eyes of others”. The thesis is “Vanity is necessary for life”.

“The Dead” is set, mostly, at “the Misses Morkan’s annual dance” that they hold in their “dark gaunt house in Usher’s Island”; the story’s protagonist is Gabriel Conroy, the nephew of the three spinsters who host the party, and it is his vanity that the story principally describes. Gabriel’s vanity is a kind of self-importance, an almost unshakeable belief that he is of more significance to others than he actually is, that he is the centre of the world. His vanity expresses itself in self-consciousness and a panicky fear that he might make or have made a mistake and have put his foot in it – a natural consequence of his feeling that his actions have more consequence than they actually do. The circumstances of the party only serve to aggrandize his vanity: he is adored by his aunts and entrusted by them with tasks such as bringing the boozed Freddy Malins upstairs. It is Gabriel who carves and serves the goose and Gabriel who delivers the after-dinner speech, the centrepiece of the evening. Gabriel is (at least in his own eyes) the star of the night.

Joyce was a master of narrative voice, usually credited with inventing stream-of-consciousness in Ulysses, and in “The Dead”, performs a small miracle, writing a third person subjective account that almost passes for third person objective. Despite appearances, aside from the very beginning, the whole story is tinted by Gabriel’s consciousness. Early on, when Gabriel feels he has accidentally affronted Lily the housemaid, Joyce writes of Gabriel “He coloured as if he had made a mistake” (italics mine). A little later, Joyce says “Gabriel knitted his brows as said, as if he were slightly angered…” (italics again mine). The effect of such slight equivocations, which reoccur throughout the story, is to create a gap between the real Gabriel and his performance. Not only does this lend an air of mystery to Gabriel and create interest in him and suspense, it serves to suggest Gabriel’s perspective on the world. We are seeing the world as Gabriel sees it and Gabriel is continually trying to see himself as others see him.

The key idea is performance. The whole party is a kind of a performance. “Never once had it fallen flat. For years and years it had gone off in splendid style as long as anyone could remember.” The three aunts are singers and piano teachers and perform pieces to the crowd (some of who fake their appreciation); among the guests is a tenor Bartell D’Arcy and a discussion ensues at one point about the relative merits of various opera singers from the past and whether the contemporary pack are as good as their predecessors. All of the guests are performing, performing when they try to crack jokes or recount stories, and performing with varying degrees of success. More often than not they fail.

The consummate performer, though, is Gabriel. The secret to his performance is the gap between the authentic Gabriel (if it exists) and the role he plays. After he delivers his speech, ostensibly in praise of his aunts for their hospitality and grace but really an excuse for pompous self-aggrandizement, the guests sing “For they are jolly gay fellows” with the key refrain, “Unless he [Gabriel] tells a lie”. Is Gabriel lying or not? Such vanity, such self-consciousness, can be a burden. After he has carved and served the goose, Gabriel says, “Kindly forget my existence, ladies and gentlemen, for a few minutes” - a joke, to him, because, of course, how could they? On occasion, Gabriel longs to be outside in the snow. This reflects a kind of death-wish, to relinquish his “thought-tormented” vanity and stop playing to the audience.

To fail in one’s performance is a wound to one’s vanity, an indication that one is not the centre of the world. A number of the guests are far less concerned with how others see them than Gabriel – or are rendered incapable of making a good impression by prejudgements. Such a one is Freddy Malins, an inveterate drunk introduced, not coincidentally, at the same time as Gabriel. The word Joyce uses for Freddy’s compulsive habits such as eye-rubbing is “mechanical” – having no say in how others see him has reduced him to the status of an automaton. Freddy’s opinions at least have the ring of authenticity (there is no reason for him to lie) but no one takes him seriously. In a way, Freddy is all performance – there is no other hidden self behind it. In a way, Freddy is dead.

Gabriel’s vanity is founded on successfully performing his role. It is also highly ego-centric. The idea that others might have secret selves he knows nothing about and which do not concern him is a threat to his self-centredness. The minor incident between Gabriel and Lily at the beginning is the result of her hint that she has a romantic life to which Gabriel is not privy. Later Gabriel dances with Miss Ivors, a staunch Irish nationalist who exposes Gabriel as a “West Briton”. To be confronted by someone who is both authentic and utterly Other to him distresses Gabriel. “She had tried to make him ridiculous before people, heckling him and staring at him with her rabbit eyes.” Gabriel’s reaction to this existential threat is to deprive her, in his mind, of a true self – “Was she sincere? Had she really any life of her own behind all her propagandism?” Later, Miss Ivors leaves early. “Gabriel asked himself was he the cause of her abrupt departure. But she did not seem to be in an ill humour: she had gone away laughing. He stared blankly down the staircase.” When trying to understand situations that don’t directly relate to him, for someone so ostensibly smart Gabriel can be very stupid.

These encounters with women foreshadow the last part of the story, which deals with the relationship between Gabriel and his wife Gretta. At the party, Gabriel may be anxious and self-conscious but, with his wife he can ‘be himself’, secure in the knowledge that he is the centre of her world and that she has no secrets from him. Before they leave the party, Gabriel sees her standing listening to music and imagines himself painting a picture of her in that posture. Paintings are all surface, they have no hidden depth; the artist’s prerogative is always to play God. On the way home, enflamed by desire, Gabriel recalls their shared past. “Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.” His desire for her is captured in images of flame. But when they get home she seems “abstracted” and yet “He longed to be master of her strange mood”. Then something entirely unexpected happens ­– she reveals herself to be thinking of something that has nothing to do with him at all, the song to which she was listening, and bursts into tears. “As [Gabriel] passed in the way of the cheval glass he caught sight of himself in full length, his broad, wellfilled shirtfront, the face whose expression always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror and his glimmering giltrimmed eyeglasses.” At this vital crux, the self-consciousness he felt at the party has reappeared.

Gretta tells him about a boy who was in love with her, who had died of consumption perhaps because of her. At first Gabriel’s reaction is a sense of failure: “A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous wellmeaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror.” For a moment, Gabriel has been made acutely aware of his own vanity – an insight stung into being by a realization that his own wife had a life of her own before she met him. Even if no one else knew, Gabriel knows that his performance that night had been a failure.

And yet… Soon enough, Gabriel’s essential vanity reasserts himself. “So she had had that romance in her life. A man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life.” Self-pity is also a form of vanity. “Better” Gabriel thinks “to pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and with dismally with age.” This is Gabriel’s epiphany – that everyone dies in the end. But it is a false epiphany because it is a way of evading the central problem, the Otherness of other people.

I read somewhere that Joyce was inspired to write “The Dead” because his wife Nora Barnacle had similarly told him about a past love. Is it so far fetched to say that, by writing this story, he was exorcising that demon and finding a way to reinforce his own vanity, the vanity any ambitious writer needs? Perhaps, right? Perhaps not?

On my Influences

In academic writing, it is normal practice to exhaustively reference all the sources of the ideas in an essay or treatise. Partly this is to create the impression that the work is engaged in dialogue with other scholars who have written on the same subject; partly it demonstrates that the writer has done his research and that his opinions are credible. The main reason for this practice, though, is simply to avoid plagiarism. One should not appropriate another’s idea without attribution, as if it is his or her own, because to do so is a kind of theft. It is, in a way, an issue of intellectual property. There may well be an undergraduate in the US somewhere who is reading my blog and passing my ideas off as his or her own – I can do little about that. But what I can do is describe from whence I got my own ideas.

When I was an undergraduate and graduate student in the early 2000s, I spent a lot of time in the library reading critical writing about literature and film. I can no longer remember precisely what I read except that my reading was highly eclectic. Some scholars seem to have perfect recall not only of everything they’ve read but also where they read it. - I am currently digesting Year 501 by Noam Chomsky and he certainly gives this impression. Unfortunately, my memory is not so good and it is conceivable that I may accidentally borrow another’s idea without intending to. I don’t think I have done so so far.

Philosophically, my favourite thinkers are Nietzsche and Foucault, although I cannot pretend to be an expert on either. Oddly enough, Nietzsche often described himself more as a psychologist than as a philosopher and Foucault is usually considered more a kind of social historian; nevertheless, both presented perspectives that bear on fundamental problems of ontology and ethics. Like these two thinkers, I try to adopt an attitude of what Robert Anton Wilson in his book The New Inquisition describes as ‘radical agnosticism’ – radical because one should doubt everything, including the received truths of science. Another philosopher I like is John Searle. His theory of speech-acts provides a bridge between what Saussure calls parole and langue – Searle’s theory is a theory about how words can change the world. The theory of speech-acts is central to my theory of literature. Most philosophers I don’t have much time for, however. Although I think the methodology of ‘phenomenology’ developed by Husserl is interesting and important, I find the phenomenologically inspired philosophers that followed him unconvincing. I have read a little Heidigger, a little Satre and a little Levinas and was dissatisfied with all three. These philosophers tend to present subjective impressions as objective fact and do so without evidence to support their claims. It is though they are inspired by special revelation. This methodology is different from mine. My work is not phenomenological: when one is elaborating a theory of narrative, as I am doing, one can adduce actual narratives as proof.

Closer to home, my theory of literature, the one that I proposed in my first posting the Preamble, is especially influenced by two writers. Both writers approach the issue of literary texts from a writer-ly rather than a reader-ly perspective. The first writer is Lajos Egri. It seems, having just now had a peruse of his wikipedia page, that my theory is closer to Egri’s than I realized when I wrote the Preamble – Egri himself used the terms ‘thesis’ and ‘antithesis’ in his major work The Art of Dramatic Writing (1927) and presented the idea of a literary text as a kind of argument. Nevertheless my theory differs from Egri’s in two key respects. The first is that, in my view, a literary text presents two opposing propositions at the same time and is essentially ambiguous - it arises from and explores the liminal space between two opposing world-views; Egri believes, in contrast, that what he terms the ‘thesis’ and the ‘antithesis’ are subservient to what he terms a ‘premise’ – a thematic truth such as ‘stinginess leads to ruin’, a thematic or moral truth that precedes and engenders the story. (What Egi calls the ‘premise’, I call the ‘thesis.) The second respect in which my theory differs from Egri’s is that I believe that a story should best be understood as a kind of rhetoric in favour of some necessary fiction– I am far more sceptical about the nature of truth than Egri was.

The second writer that I should cite (and who I have actually properly read) is Robert McKee. McKee is, I believe, one of the more influential screenplay-consultants working in Hollywood and many consider his book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting an essential resource. McKee’s notion of ‘the controlling idea’ influenced my notion of the ‘thesis’, and itself must be derived from Egri’s concept of ‘the premise’ (although McKee does not acknowledge Egri’s influence); to the notion of ‘the controlling idea’ McKee adds the notion of the ‘counter idea’, something that may or may not be original with him. In my own theory I call the counter-idea the antithesis.

Although McKee has influenced me to some extent, I find his main hypothesis unconvincing to say the least. McKee proposes that narratives should all be construed as kinds of quests – in this he is probably inspired by Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) ­– although McKee again fails to acknowledge the influence. McKee puts desire at the heart of all stories. I think McKee is completely wrong and wrongheaded about this but right now is not the moment to try to refute him. I shall leave that to a later instalment of this blog.

In a way, this post is a kind of house-cleaning. I shall return to Egri and McKee some time in the future. I may also have to deal with the vexed issue of deconstruction because I believe Derrida may bear on the narrative theory I am trying to elaborate. But this I shall also leave for a later time.

“Fate up against your will”: Donnie Darko’s terrible lesson.

The song played during the opening sequence of the film Donnie Darko, is “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen: “Fate up against your will, though thick and thin, he will wait until you give yourself to him.” This song does not just function ornamentally: it provides an important clue to the film’s underlying themes. We know the song selection is intentional because Donnie’s imaginary friend Frank is himself a kind of grotesque bunnyman (as well as being an allusion to the much gentler film Harvey). The song acts as a kind of key. The fundamental opposition in both song and film is between ‘fate’ and ‘will’. Can one repudiate one’s own destiny? Is life a choice between love and fear? In the character of Donnie, we are presented with a protagonist who attempts to oppose or refuse his fated end but, by the finish of the film, finally accepts that he needs to die to save others, those he loves and even those he doesn't. (There is a second reason why the song is important that I shall discuss this later.)

Donnie Darko is a film that is often misunderstood. To state quite baldly the most obvious and salient point about it: Donnie is schizophrenic. He takes medication, hallucinates glowing tubes emerging from people’s chests and has a malign imaginary friend who encourages him to vandalize the school and burn down Patrick Swayze’s house. It amazes me how few people notice that Donnie is schizophrenic. (In my local video store the film is filed under science-fiction). Yet it describes a common aspect of the psychotic experience - the feeling that one’s life is not under one’s own control, that one is in the grip of outside powers. When Donnie wrecks the school, he spray paints “They made me do it” on the school forecourt: the common excuse schizophrenics always give when they do something terrible.

The key moment in the film occurs right at the beginning. An airplane turbine falls from the sky into Donnie’s room. This is the film’s inciting incident. Donnie escapes death because Frank has lured him outside to inform Donnie that he has only a month left before the end of the world. Donnie has fluked his way out of catastrophe. Later, in the hotel, Donnie’s father thinks of a school acquaintance who died on his way to the prom. “He said he was doomed. Jesus. That could have been Donnie.”

In fact, it genuinely was Donnie's doom to die that night. One way of interpreting the film is to suppose that Frank is granting Donnie a month-long glimpse of what his life could have been like if he had survived.  (In this respect, most of the film could be viewed as a dream, reminiscent in this respect of Mulholland Drive.) I am not going to give a full synopsis of the film – it suffices to say that the most important thing that happens to Donnie during the month he has been allotted is that he meets a girl, falls in love and, the night before the end of the world, sleeps with her. The other thing that occurs is that his condition worsens. The glowing tubes that he sees emerging from people’s chests represent their destinies, either by fate or choice– the film equivocates about this. The night before he burns down the house belonging to self-help guru Jim Cunningham he exits from a cinema screening “The Last Temptation of Christ”. Like Christ in that film, he is being tempted by the possibility of disavowing his own fate.

During this month Donnie becomes obsessed with time-travel. He discusses it with his science teacher. “If God controls time, all time is pre-decided […] Every living thing follows along a set path and if you could see your path or channel you could see into the future, that’s a form of time travel.” The teacher replies, “You’re contradicting yourself Donnie. If we could see our destinies manifest themselves visually than we would be given a choice to betray our chosen destiny, and the fact of the choice would make all pre-formed destiny come to an end.” “Not,” Donnie says, “if you travel within God’s channel.”

This scene is a fairly blatant description of the idea at the heart of the film. Donnie has, temporarily at least, betrayed his chosen destiny. The result of this choice is the end of the world: at the conclusion of the month, his girlfriend, mother and the unfortunate Frank are all killed. Donnie is in eminent danger of being discovered as the arsonist who burnt down Cunningham's house. As his therapist tells Donnie, “If the sky were to suddenly open up, there would be no law, there would be no rule, there would only be you and your memories, the choices you’ve made and the people you’ve touched. If this world were to end there would only be you and him [Frank] and no-one else.” In the end, Donnie chooses to save the people he has touched by accepting his destiny, time-travelling back to the moment the jet engine fell and accepting his death.

Donnie Darko concerns a struggle between fate and free-will. There is another perspective on this conflict. Throughout the film, we are presented scenes in which Jim Cunningham and his acolytes expound their self-help philosophy: that life is a choice between love and fear. Donnie despises this philosophy as overly simplistic and despises Cunningham because he senses that Cunningham is a fraud. Nevertheless Cunningham is actually right: his world-view is the fundamental thesis of the film. When Donnie confronts Cunningham in the auditorium, attacking both him and his pop-psychology, the soundtrack indicates that Donnie is fighting on the wrong side. Narratives are often founded on ironies and the chief irony of the film is that the people who openly espouse Cunningham’s philosophy are idiots and hypocrites and yet, in the end, Donnie embraces this world-view himself, choosing love over fear. This is why he dies laughing.

So what does Donny gain from his month-long excursion into an alternate reality? The principal thing is the girlfriend. Donnie is as obsessed by sex as any other adolescent male and, at the end of the month, he gets to get laid by the girl he loves. Donnie Darko,  in its most emotionally resonant sequences, is a love-story and Donnie dies for love, for love of Gretchen and for his mother. The film, particularly because of its musical score, is very romantic, treading that fine line between a fundamentalist Christian notion of ‘no sex before marriage’ and the crude notion of sex for the sake of sex popularized by films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High.  This is the other reason “The Killing Moon” is the key to the movie.  Donnie Darko is a film that suggests that sex is something that shouldn’t be trivialized.

To conclude with an anecdote, this interpretation of Donnie Darko occurred to me a couple of years ago. At the time I was halfway through writing a film about a girl I’d known and had just received a shock from reading on the Internet a poem she’d composed. The insight about Donnie Darko came to me in the swimming pool. I decided (perhaps wrongly) to accept the lesson, to choose love over fear and finish the script. On the way home I experienced a reappearance of psychotic symptoms that I hadn’t had for a number of years: I heard voices telling me to ‘turn left’ and ‘turn right’ which I blindly obeyed. I was making a decision when I wasn’t in possession of all the facts. It was an important moment for me. Perhaps there is such a thing as fate and perhaps there is no way to escape it.

   

On Metaphor and Interpretation

When tackling the project of devising a new literary theory, particularly one, if I say so myself, as bold and revolutionary as the one I am proposing, it is necessary to engage with the problem of metaphor at some point. This is obligatory. Literary texts, and I include films in this category, are built entirely out of metaphors, out of signs and symbols, out of rhetorical tropes. One cannot understand stories without understanding metaphors. Consequently, one requires a good theory of figurative language to make headway. Multiple theories of metaphor vie for supremacy in the critical ball-park but the one I shall employ here is the simplest: a metaphor is built out of two parts, a tenor and vehicle. “*The tenor is the subject to which attributes are ascribed. The vehicle is the object whose attributes are  borrowed.” (Wikipedia). An example of a metaphor is the line from Romeo and Juliet, “What light through yonder window breaks! It is the East and Juliet is the sun.” Juliet is the tenor and the sun is the vehicle; the attributes ‘Juliet’ borrows from ‘the sun’ are brilliance and importance. She is the centre of Romeo’s solar system.

The issue with literary texts is that we are frequently presented with vehicles without tenors. It is the job of interpretation to determine the meaning hidden beneath the filigreed surface. Consider the following poem, “The Rose” by William Blake.

           

            Oh Rose, thou art sick!

            The invisible worm,

            That flies in the night

            In the howling storm,

            Has sought out the bed

            Of crimson joy

            And his dark secret love

            Does thy life destroy.

Now, if one wanted, one could view this poem literally as concerning a flower infested by a parasite. But this simple interpretation seems to diminish the poem somehow. Maybe it has a Freudian subtext? Perhaps The Rose is ‘really’ about sexually transmitted diseases – certainly it seems to be equating love with death. There is no way to know for sure.

And this is the problem with literary criticism – there is never any way to know for sure. This does not stop scholars from making the attempt. The typical move of interpretation is not from the abstract to the particular but from the particular to the abstract. Othello is about jealousy; Macbeth is about ambition. The great modern traditions of literary criticism –psychoanalytic, Marxist, structuralist (in the Levi-Strauss school), post-colonial, etc – are based on grand abstract schemas of society and psychology, totalizing meta-narratives. Hamlet simply must be depicting the Oedipal complex because, in the end, everything is Oedipal (we know this because Freud said so); The Metamorphesis by Kafka simply must be a Marxist parable because all real literature is concerned with economic relationships and class struggle. The advantage of these sweeping theories of everything is that, when faced with a text that obviously must mean more than it says, one can use them as a kind of Enigma machine to decipher the secret message that must be hidden behind it. They are keys to the semiotics of literature.

Included in the Bible that I keep in the hall is The Song of Soloman. This book is quite simply a beautifully romantic and sensual love-poem addressed by a young woman to her paramour– how it ended up in the Old Testament is a mystery to me. It must have mystified the Church Fathers as well because each chapter begins with an exegetical note explaining the proper, religious interpretation of the narrative. The woman is a metaphor for the Church and her beloved a metaphor for Christ. Consider this passage from the fifth chapter:

3. I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of night.

4. I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet; how shall I defile them?

5. I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hand dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet smelling myth, upon the handles of the lock.

6. I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him but he gave no answer.

This chapter begins with the explanatory gloss: “”1. Christ awaketh the church with his calling. 2. The church having a taste of Christ’s love is sick of love”. The exegesis is a tortuous example of the power of the Christian meta-narrative: everything in the Bible, including in the Old Testament, must be made to revolve around Christ because Christ, in the end, is the centre of everything.

The whole history of literary interpretation is founded on a surface-depth model of culture and society. Literary texts are cloaked messengers bearing, in encrypted form to be sure, the profoundest truths about life, love, death and morality. How can we carry out literary interpretation if we abandon our belief in depth? How seek out hidden truths when we no longer believe in truth? In the Preamble to this blog, which contains my most important ideas, I made two statements that may now seem contradictory. The first of these was: “The characters, locales, actions and other components of a literary text have double functions: as particular concrete instances and as representatives of more abstract ideas.” The other statement was, “In the realm of the soul, there is no truth – only what people believe.” How can we pursue literary interpretation and look for the abstract idea concealed behind the metaphor if we lack some notion of Truth as guarantor? How can I argue, as I did in the previous posting, that the monstrous dogs in Ghostbusters are symbols for the libido if I am unsure that Freud really had it right? It seems we have reached an impasse.

There are two possible ways to resolve this dilemma, different but perhaps complimentary. The first is to admit that the interpretations of literary texts, like the literary texts themselves, are essentially rhetorical. They do not disclose the meanings hidden in poems and stories; rather they are arguments in favour of particular world-views. They are exercises in persuasion (perhaps even in propaganda). This first solution seems cynical but is probably realistic. The second possible solution involves some residual faith in the notion of Truth. When decoding a metaphor in which the vehicle is present but the tenor unknown, we can look for contextual clues, in the text itself or in the outside culture. We do not need to appeal to transcendental apodictic meta-narratives revealed, perhaps, via special revelation to justify our interpretation. Literary texts are not produced out of a vacuum; they emerge from a culture and speak back to it, sometimes changing it. And the culture is the sum total of the texts that comprise it.

Dissecting "Ghostbusters"

In the preamble to this blog, I proposed that the essence of a narrative is a thesis and an antithesis. Both can be expressed as simple propositions. Of course, I do not want to be too simplistic: a story can be dedicated to more than one thesis - although, as a general rule, all stories have a central thesis to which the other themes are subordinate. A good example of a film with more than one thesis is Ghostbusters. Like many kids’ films, Ghostbusters has a thesis aimed at adults and another aimed at children and different audiences will take different lessons from the same film. In this posting, I shall discuss the film from the adults’ perspective first and then the children’s.

Ghostbusters obviously features ghosts; ghost stories are an established genre in literature and in the general culture. The typical ghost story features haunted houses in which solitary people are witness to eerie and inexplicable occurrences, immaterial visitations and bumps in the night. Ghosts are an integral part of childhood nightmares and of fear of the dark. One example, among many, of the ghost story genre is The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. Sometimes featuring in ghost stories are the people who try to vanquish the ghosts through magic or prayer, such as the catholic priest Lankester in The Exorcist (although of course this film should more rightly be classified as a story of demonic possession than ghost story) or the paranormal investigators of Poltergeist. Typically, in these narratives, the combatants fight the supernatural on its own terms, in ways magical and irrational. There are exceptions. One of the things that sets Ghostbusters apart from the tradition of supernatural narratives is that the ghostbusters fight the ghosts with science.

The beginning of the film gestures toward the traditional idea of what constitutes a ghost story. Floating books and flying catalogue cards spook a middle aged bespectacled lady in the basement of a library. The library’s manager brings in our heroes to deal with it, a bunch of academics with an interest in the paranormal. When confronted by a genuine ghost, they have no idea what to do. One of them, Ray, says, “Catch it!” This plan fails miserably when the ghost turns on them and, panicked, they flee the building. Shortly thereafter the three academics, Venkman, Ray and Egon, are laid off by the university. They are left at loose ends. Ray points out to Venkman that he has no experience “of working in the private industry” and that he has “no idea what it is like”. Despite Ray’s misgivings, Venkman suggests that nothing happens without a reason and that being thrown out of the university serves a higher purpose. “What?” says Ray. “So we can go into business for ourselves,” replies Venkman.

This is the hook of the film, what McKee calls ‘the inciting incident’, the concept that makes this story unique. The three academics are going to go into business ‘busting’ ghosts. The trio pay for equipment, renovate a fire station, hire a receptionist and set up a company as professional ghost eradicators, all paid for by Ray getting a second mortgage. Before long they are advertising their services on television. The whole scenario is a metaphor for entrepreneurial capitalism. The three men have turned their backs on academia to become blue-collar workers, self-employed small business operators. In their overalls, they resemble tradespeople, builders and plumbers. At one point, during their first job, Venkman facetiously tells someone that they are pest exterminators. The trio, soon joined by a fourth who when hired says, “If there’s a steady pay cheque in it, I’ll believe anything you say” are symbols of New York ingenuity and entrepreneurial-ship, of big-city savvy. They fight and defeat government bureaucracy in the form of a spiteful official from the Environmental Protection Agency, are endorsed by the mayor and end the film as the heroes who saved New York. All in all, from an adults’ perspective, the film is a panegyric to the municipal workers, trades-people and small-time business owners who keep New York running.

The thesis of the film could well be expressed as “New York pragmatism can triumph over anything, even an evil Sumerian god from another dimension bent on world destruction”. It is a victory of science and common sense over the supernatural. However, this interpretation does not do the film justice and, to get a fuller appreciation of the film, we need to look at it from another perspective. We need to look a bit deeper. Ghostbusters is more a kids’ film than an adults’ film and like many other kids’ films it is really an exercise in defusing anxiety about passage into the adult world, particularly with respect to sex.  Such films teach prepubescent children that sexual feelings are natural and not something to be afraid of.

This theme is explored principally through a kind of sub-plot. One of the first characters who contacts the Ghostbusters is Dana, a woman who lives in an apartment building at the epicentre of the spectral epidemic. She is the love interest not only for Venkman but for Louis Tulley who lives on the same floor. Louis is a poster-child for arrested development and is frequently depicted early on in the film locked out of his apartment and yelling, “Let me in!” Later, when pursued by a demonic wolf, he runs into Central Park and is shown pressed against the window of a pavilion again crying “Let me in!” Rather than being admitted into the adult world inside, he is attacked and possessed by the supernatural entity represented by the canine.

The monstrous dogs that attack and possess both Louis and Dana seem to me likely to be symbols for the libidinal changes that occur at puberty. When Venkman visits Dana later that evening he finds her now possessed by an evil spirit and in highly amorous mood; she asks him if he is the “key-master” and when he says yes she says “Take me now” and “I want you inside me”. Venkman refuses to take advantage of Dana, telling her that she obviously already has someone inside of her. Louis meanwhile has found his way to the ghostbusters’ premises. Louis and Dana have both become vessels for immoderate sexual desire; he is the “key-master” and she is the “gate-keeper”; the Freudian connotations of these titles are too patent to require clarification. Separated by circumstances, Louis and Dana are drawn together later, kiss, and (perhaps) have sex. This carnal act is the trigger that brings Gozer the Destroyer into the world.

In this way, the film associates sexual desire with the malign supernatural. It falls to the ghostbusters to tame the frightening aspects of sex on behalf of their audience; it is inevitable, therefore, that when the four men confront Gozer, Gozer takes the form of a woman. How can one overcome one’s own squeamishness about sex? One way is to retreat from the situation into the false security of childhood. Temporarily dematerialised, Gozer asks the boys what form their destruction should take. Ray thinks of the Stay-Puff Marshmallow man. His explanation runs as follows: “I tried to think of the most harmless thing, something I loved from childhood, something that could never ever possibly destroy us. The Stay-Puff Marshmallow man.”

The Stay-Puff Marshmallow man appears and sets about destroying the city. Apparently retreating from the adult world into the comforting illusions of childhood is not the right strategy. Ghostbusters is precisely about the need to reject childhood with its fear of the dark and things that go bump in the night in favour of adulthood; the right approach to take is to just ‘fuck it’. The four men aim their positron cannons at the portal through which Gozer has arrived and “cross the beams”. I know this seems a stretch but I believe this scene to be a metaphor for sex - the energy bolts phallic symbols and the portal a metaphor for the vagina. (It is interesting to note here that male sexuality is constructed in mimetic terms – you do what the other boys are doing.)

Ghostbusters is principally a kids’ film and a male film at that. Rhetorically it is, at its deepest level, trying to persuade preadolescent boys that sex is not something to be afraid of. Of the two men who desire Dana, one, Louis, is excluded from the adult world by his neuroses but the other, Veckman, is presented throughout as being very sex-positive - and it is Veckman with whom the film is asking the audience to identify. This theme of confronting and exterminating sexual squeamishness was, by the way, quite common in the ‘eighties (in films such as Weird Science and Labyrinth) but it may interesting to observe that it is not common now.

To sum up, Ghostbusters can be viewed in two ways. From the first perspective, it is an encomium to small-time capitalism. Small business owners can beat anything, even government bureaucrats. But at a deeper level, it is telling its audience that the childhood fears can be overcome and that the adult world is not so frightening. Ghostbusters was an important film to me as a child, as it was for many who grew up in the ‘eighties, and it was important for a reason.