In the Labyrinth

The Novels of Mythic and Perilous Travel Across Borders

"Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”  --Cesare Pavese

Here is a short list of my favorite novels that I have reviewed over the last ten years that in many ways embody the sensibilities of Pavese's brilliant observation:

 

Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera is an amazing and haunting work. Makina is given a note from her mother to take to an older brother who has disappeared into the North. Along the way, Makina encounters ambiguous  helpers: the thug who mysteriously owes her mother, the trading of favors with a coyote, the strangers who pull her along the road, the rivers, and mountain passes, and then the cities themselves, full of mazes, flags, and shops until she arrives at a place to discover her brother, changed utterly.   Read more > >

 

 

Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, opens with a spare compelling prose, like a darkly lived fairy tale, hinting at the ghostly journey to come in an altered landscape. In late August Juan travels to Comala, a town so hot and dry, popular myth has it that "when people die and go to hell, they return for a blanket." Juan is greeted by Eduviges Dyada, an old friend of his mother's, and quickly learns that Pedro Páramo, the father he is seeking, is long dead. But the conversation takes an odd turn, as Eduviges tells Juan that his mother had told her just that day to expect him. When Juan tells her his mother is dead, Eduviges shrugs and responds, "So that was why her voice was so weak." Read more > >

 

 

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obrecht is an astonishing novel, set in what was once Yugoslavia over the course of WWI, WWII, and the recent wars that resulted in its dissection into new territories. War forms an continuous backdrop throughout the novel, often as a distant but deeply felt anxiety and sometimes exploding on the community. Tavelling is a hazard as boundaries shift with the conflicts and "our city," or "our fields" abruptly become someone else's property. Identities shift too as the long married wife whose origin, faith, or language suddenly mark her as an enemy to the new state. Nadia, the novel's protagonist, is a young pediatrician who sets out on a perilous journey, crossing newly minted borders to understand the reasons for her beloved grandfather's strange disappearance and his death alone in a remote village. Read more > >

Katherine Ace: The Open Ended Metaphor

I am bringing an old post back because I wanted to review again the fabulous discussion on women's art, especially the work of Katherine Ace and the events that surround and shape the directions of women's lives. And re-reading it again, I still find it as fascinating and with much to offer as when we first tackled the subject. Please feel free to join in with this ongoing discussion in the comments below. 

 

The structure of fairy tales and traditional folklore rests on the use of repetition to pattern the images into metaphors providing an emotional experience of transformation for the audience in the oral traditions as well as for the reader following them in print. Story tellers use repetition to shape the story and for emphasis on important details in each section of the tale. It begins with an interdiction at the home of birth, a repeated request to do or not to do something which usually by the third time is ignored. The middle section is a stripping away of identity and connection to the human world, the protagonist becoming lost in the woods, the veld, the sky, the sea. Swallowed up and sometimes ingested by the elements of nature and the fantastic.

Repetition helps to parallel the experience of the two separate moments: the repeated interdiction of "don't " becomes a new list in the middle of what must be done to survive. Feed the cat, oil the gate, clean the eyes of an old woman. But a price is paid, sometimes even a temporary death, as the old identity is stripped, and a new one is reformed in the fantastic world.  And the last section, becomes the return home, often perilous, success dependent on how well nature has communicated the rules of survival and how well they are followed. If in accordance with nature, the protagonist returns, restored to a new identity, a new status, and new purpose.

Each section of the narrative -- separation, initiation, return-- is patterned in a parallel fashion to the other. As in metaphor, there is a delightful tension between where it begins, where it meets with the impossible, and where it sublates the changes to become something new and unique. The dialectical journey in rites of passage, the death of the old identity, the reforming and re-emergence of a new identity, are combined into a single metaphor of transformation, revealed through images from the human world, the fantastic world, and the cache of inherited cultural archetypes in the narrative performance. 

All this is to explain, why I am so taken by the fairy tale art of Katherine Ace, who expresses her work with fairy tales in a very similar fashion -- painting the narrative with a series of visual metaphors folding in on themselves to express the unstable identities of the tales. She says this in her artist's statement: 

"The intersection of contraries fascinates me: ecstasy and agony; humor and tragedy; natural and constructed realities; experience and news. I find that I'm curious about the struggles of diversity vs. unity in human, animal and plant societies. I am captivated by complex issues that we all face, and yet experience personally, intimately. I am interested in the role of dark feelings, thoughts and states of mind in the process of transformation, l am drawn to fire beneath reserve."

And again here when she considers the evocative imagery in fairy tales that fuels her ideas as an artist:

"I am interested in complex story telling using cultural myths and histories that reach back into our collective and personal pasts. Figures and still life figures evolve as open ended metaphors for concepts and environments that are themselves also metaphors, and therefore fold - like fabric, time, or paint - back in on themselves. Like a poem, a painting is a surface. The depth is in the surface (oddly). It sort of dawns on you - like the way one remembers a dream sometimes, in fragments that float up all through the day, assembling themselves oddly, disturbingly..."

I find this description compelling -- for it is in the story tellers performance, or the writer of fairy tales to create the same tension between the surface of the tale, and the dream-like, metaphorical journeys as real and fantastic collide in the stories, and that it is the experience itself -- dreamlike and disturbing that holds our fascination with the tales. 

 The paintings from top to bottom: "The Juniper Tree," "The Frog King," "The Handless Maiden,"  "Six Swans," and "Many Furs."  (All my favorite tales!) For more information on Katherine Ace please visit her website.

I also found the collection of Sicilian Folktales collected by Laura Gonzenbach, translated into English. They are amazing and she was quite interesting.  

The Spine of a Novel That Tends to the Eternal

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”  --Cesare Pavese

The above is one of my favorite quotes as it seems to suggest to me not only the physical journey but the deeper emotional well of any good narrative of self-discovery. It's the foundation or backbone on which so many wonderful novels I have read over the years seem to rest. I am drawn to them because such a structure is how I tend to think when constructing the shape of a story or novel; our separation from the familiar, our trust in strangers, the off-balance, the journeying, the transformations and the leaning into all things eternal.

Here is a short list of my favorite novels that I have reviewed over the years that I feel in many ways embody the sensibilities of Pavese's brilliant observation:

 

 

Pedro Paramo by Mexican author Juan Rulfo' opens with a spare compelling prose, like a darkly lived fairy tale, hinting at the ghostly journey to come in an altered landscape. In late August Juan travels to Comala, a town so hot and dry, popular myth has it that "when people die and go to hell, they return for a blanket." Juan is greeted by Eduviges Dyada, an old friend of his mother's, and quickly learns that Pedro Páramo, the father he is seeking, is long dead. But the conversation takes an odd turn, as Eduviges tells Juan that his mother had told her just that day to expect him. When Juan tells his mother is dead, Eduviges merely shrugs and responds, "So that was why her voice was so weak." Read more > >

 

 

 Thaliad by Marly Youmans , both novelist and poets composes her story in free verse reminiscent of heroic epics (a sort of Homer meets Gerald Manley Hopkins), Thaliad recounts the aftermath of a fiery apocalypse and the perilous journey of a band of children led by a girl whose prophetic visions are guiding them. They seek a mystical a sanctuary on the edge of a lake where, even as children, they must confront the challenges of re-creating a world illuminated by hope and love. In this stunning narrative the eternal is always close at hand in both violent and transfigurative  powers.  Read more >>

 

 

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obrecht is an astonishing novel, set in what was once Yugoslavia over the course of WWI, WWII, and the recent wars that resulted in its dissection into new territories. War forms an continuous backdrop throughout the novel, often as a distant but deeply felt anxiety and sometimes exploding on the community. Travelling is a hazard as boundaries shift with the conflicts and "our city," or "our fields" abruptly become someone else's property. Identities shift too as the long married wife whose origin, faith, or language suddenly mark her as an enemy to the new state. Nadia, the novel's protagonist, is a young pediatrician who sets out on a perilous journey, crossing newly minted borders to understand the reasons for her beloved grandfather's strange disappearance and his death alone in a remote village. Read more > >

Plank'd and Research

Perhaps one of the greatest pleasures is reading Sicilian folktales in the midday while getting drunk on Plank'd, a dense-full-bodied-beer (16.2 percent) produced locally in Boulder. Like the beer, the stories are rowdy, naughty, mythic and full of gullible and wise fools who make donkeys appear to shit gold, drive menial men to do self destructive things, and conspire to make foolish heroes into better men as they chase after fantastic brides. Can there be any better way to spend a Sunday than drunk researching for the new novel?

Working on the Reissue of The Flight of Michael McBride.

As the work on Hannah's Garden is getting finalized this month for release in November, I have also begun the work of re-issuing The Flight of Michael Michael, which will be published by Leaping Hart Press. Set in the late 1870s, the novel is an unusual pairing of Irish fantasy and and the iconic American cattle ride. What better way for a not yet hero to undergo a rite of passage? Here's an excerpt from the novel, where Michael discovers that he sees more things in the world than an ordinary man...terrifying creatures hunting him for reasons he doesn't understand. Here's an excerpt from Chapter Three:

"...There was no carriage standing before him, but as he turned to look behind him, Michael tensed. There, waiting on a black horse, was the man in the red cap. Only now Michael saw it wasn’t a cap, but long red hair slicked down close to the sides of the man’s narrow face. Surrounding the man were other mounted horsemen spread across the street, their spears and axes held upright. On the pommels of their saddles were skulls tied together, festooned with red and green ribbons and the glint of twirling gold coins. In the shadows of the building, the horsemen’s faces were a deep mottled brown, their bodies thick and strong like carved oak. But in the open street, the sunlight drenched the armor and the warriors shone transparent as a sheet of gold rain. They were attended by wraiths whose pale gray faces wore masks of misery and who stared at Michael out of haunted eyes. Hands soft as dust clung to the bridles and held the mounts steady. Shadowed substance and shining light, they appeared to Michael at once solid and threatening as a closing storm and as vaporous as a misty dream. The man with the long red hair nodded at Michael.

"Red Cap. That’s what the tiny stick creatures had called him. And Michael recognized him at once. The man was hunting him, and this time he’d brought an army.

"A crow cawed loudly overhead and the horsemen shifted in their saddles, their eyes trained upward toward the sound. Out of the blue sky, a huge black crow flapped wide her wings, driving a black shadow over the street beneath her gliding body. The horsemen stirred, clutching the reigns as their mounts became restive. The wraiths bowed their heads into the deep valleys of their bony shoulders. Red Cap broke away from the line of waiting horsemen to confront the crow. He pulled his long bow from a case in his saddle and knocked a long arrow of yew, its red fletch a streak of blood."

When Struck by Fear of Writing, Refer To The Masters For Help

In anxious moments while working on the current novel, I turn for assistance to a 1968 Paris Review interview with the great Canadian author Robertson Davies where he describes his writing process, a laborious and methodical investigation long before the narrative is written.

"I am at the moment winding up to write another novel, and when I say “winding up” I mean I am making notes and plans and perpetually building up what I will eventually write; that is the way I work. I make very, very careful plans and a great many notes—so many notes indeed that sometimes they are as long or longer than the eventual book. And sketches of characters and suggestions and references to things that will be useful. All that takes a long time. Getting to work on a new novel is a dismal business, for the beginnings never seem to get any easier with the passing of time. I toil like a swimmer who feels himself about to sink beneath the waves at any moment. Like all my novels, this one began with quite a simple idea, but as I work on it a mass of complexities assert themselves, and I have to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by extraneous detail. But then—at least the way I work—when you begin to write, you can write quite briskly because you have done all the preparatory work beforehand. I hope it turns out well. But with novels, like cakes, you never know. Even when I finish a book, I’m never sure whether it is good or rubbish."

So, I am making furious notes, plotting, character studies, and the rest -- and I pray the cake will hold. And that will be good. And can I just add, that I love even more that Davies used a food analogy -- another habit of my family when talking about literature that is close to my heart.

The Menacing Virgins: The Commodification of Marriage and Birth II

Here is an interesting perspective on the complexities of transforming a virtuous maiden into a chaste, but sexually productive matron. "How does a maiden make the shift from bride to matron and"pay the marital debt?" Cristelle Baskins asks in her article "Il Trionfo della Pudicizia" (The Triumph of Modesty), a fascinating study of the economic exchanges negotiated before and after marriage. Baskins also examines the type pf goods provided in the exchange that sought to educate the couple on their marital proper roles and reinforce the marital bond through art.

"In those negotiations concerning marital chastity, Elizabeth Cohen reminds us, the language of debt, payment, and exchange makes virginity a commodity. Fifteenth and sixteenth wedding furniture, including elaborately painted and historiated lettucci (beds), cassoni (dowry chests), and spalliere (wains-coating), is a domestic commodity employed in conspicuous consumption; it also offers an opportunity to examine Renaissance marriage ideology through the visual imagery geared for the primary spectatorship of brides and grooms." (118)

Among the upper classes, it was expected that husbands would demonstrate their status and wealth through the purchase of elaborately painted wedding furniture, commission religious paintings and sculpture, and deschi da parto, (birthing trays) which were also painted and given as a gift for a new mother. It would also launch the future husband as a cultured man, purchasing expensive art. The subject matter of the art would have been carefully selected to reflect both the couples' status as well as "aimed to edify by means of example and perhaps even more concretely to inspire the conception of children and thus the expansion of the patriline. The most popular choice of art it seems was a reproduction of the Triumph of Modesty, a poem cycle written by Francesco Petrarca in the 1340s -- describing Cupid/Love being vanquished by Laura/Chastity and often appeared in horizontal panels on a cassoni.  

"A fifteenth century Florentine bride would have viewed Petrachan Trionfi on painted wedding furniture with a particular set of expectations and associations; her own temporary triumph in the form a bridal procession prefaced the conquest of her virginity and her transformation into a sexually active spouse...the Petrachan Trionfi trace a development from physical, sexual love to the renunciation of Cupid...For them (the brides) the state of chastity must be overcome but only by a chastened disciplined conjugal love, not by the irresponsible, unpredictable passion inspired by Cupid." The art on the furniture was meant to "conceal the lack of fit between occasion and subject and thus, to blur the distinction between compliment and coercion...the pictures must simultaneously encourage the bride to abandon her fiercely maintained chastity to the needs of the patriline and yet, renounce illicit, physical passion."

But, just to make sure the bride could be gently enticed, there was also an abundance of cassoni which while it showed marriage events on the outside (and sometimes martial battles,) under the lid were erotic paintings of men and women nude doing the things married couples generally do when trying to create the next generation. More on the cassoni coming up with the next post (along with more on the art of the battle between Cupid and Chastity, cassoni, and birthing trays. 

"Il Trionfo della Pudicizia: Menacing Virgins in the Italian Renaissance Domestic Painting" by Christelle L. Baskins in Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, by Marilyn Migiel (Editor), Juliana Schiesari (Editor)