Bricks in the Wall -- Story #2

STORY: "The Great Wall of China" by Franz Kafka, translated from German by Willa and Edwin Muir

FROM: METAMORPHOSIS AND OTHER STORIES (Penguin Books, 1961)

BASICALLY: If a Chinese man had actually written this during the construction of the Great Wall, this piece could just be considered an essay on the manner of the wall’s construction, the character of the Chinese empire, and a few philosophical explorations. But it was written by a German man in 1917.

And that German man, Franz Kafka — author of such uplifting and optimistic works as The Trial and Metamorphosis — chose to write about the wall as if he were an aging man in ancient China, reflecting on paper about how exactly he had helped to build it. The piece could have just as easily, with some minor omissions, been a readable, apparently factual article about the origins of the Great Wall of China. With the deletion of the rare first-person-voice appearances, it could have been a speculative historical essay. But as it is it’s a story. A genre-bending one, bringing to mind Robbe-Grillet’s plotless and purely descriptive story “The Escalator,” but a story nonetheless, and one with a lot going on in it.

But the story of what? The main character talks about why it was that the wall was built in sections, for the first half of the essay, and that’s something worth noting, because this story is built in sections too. Just as, as Herodotus said, “Character is fate,” who we are dictates in large part what will happen to us, so too is the subject of this story also its structure, its form, and its thematic content.

After a time, the story digresses from its previous exploration to daydream a bit about a theoretical emperor who sends a herald to give a message to you—yes, the second-person POV comes into play here, in an interesting way—but that messenger can never reach you, because he is much like Zeno’s arrow in the famous paradox, which every time it has traveled half the total distance, it will have to travel half of what’s left, and of what’s then left, and so on ad infinitum.

The messenger started off at once, a powerful, tireless man. Sticking one arm out and then another, he makes his way through the crowd. If he runs into resistance, he points to his breast where there is a sign of the sun. So he moves forwards easily, unlike anyone else. But the crowd is so huge; its dwelling places are infinite. If there were an open field, how he would fly along, and soon you would hear the marvelous pounding of his fist on your door. But instead of that, how futile are all his efforts. He is still forcing his way through the private rooms of the innermost palace. Never will he win his way through. And if he did manage that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to fight his way down the steps, and, if he managed to do that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to stride through the courtyards, and after the courtyards through the second palace encircling the first, and, then again, through stairs and courtyards, and then, once again, a palace, and so on for thousands of years. And if he finally burst through the outermost door—but that can never, never happen—the royal capital city, the centre of the world, is still there in front of him, piled high and full of sediment. No one pushes his way through here, certainly not someone with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window and dream of that message when evening comes.

It’s all a bit...what’s the word...Kafkaesque? No. Something else. What’s really interesting to me, is that this digression has also been published alone elsewhere as “A Message from the Emperor.” This story is actually an infinite number of stories, an infinite set to be divided infinite times in an infinite number of ways. I thought I was reading one story. It turns out I was reading two. Maybe I was reading a million. Or ten billion.

Hitching to Reality -- Story #1

STORY: "Death in the Desert" by James Agee

FROM: JAMES AGEE: THE COLLECTED SHORT PROSE (Ballantine Books, 1970)

BASICALLY: First published in 1930, this is the story of a hitchhiker with a painful boil in his ear, what happens when a car he is in passes a black man abandoned in the desert, and how the hitchhiker tries to justify not saying anything about it.

James Agee is one of my favorite authors ever. I own a shelf-and-a-half of books by and about him, I’ve read all of his major works—Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, A Death in the Family, The Morning Watch—and many of his minor ones, but until today I had never read either of the two short stories contained in The Collected Short Prose. Agee was an absolute genius of a writer, with an almost Dostevskyan ability to get inside the heads of his characters; an ability to render bit-part characters as three-dimensional, living, breathing, real people with real pasts (an ability that could have made Betty Smith proud); and an ability to capture the tone and the weirdness of this world’s silence and light and human awkwardness that is just about unparalleled.

Still, he wasn’t the most imaginative writer—the guy didn’t do fanciful plots or really anything at all that wasn’t completely grounded in his own life’s experiences—and the story I just read, “Death in the Desert,” is definitely another example of this, based as it is in a seven-week hitchhiking trip he took not long before writing it. (According to Genevieve Moreau’s The Restless Journey of James Agee.)

Written when Agee was only twenty years old—a fact that does not exactly make me feel anything at all approaching “good”—“Death in the Desert” was first published in 1930 in The Harvard Advocate, his then-college’s literary magazine.

The story surprised me, because not only is it by one of my very favorite authors, it happens to be set in and around St. Johns, Arizona, on a highway I’ve hitchhiked myself many times, back when I was living alone in a trailer in the desert about forty miles from there, working on a screenplay. I could visualize the story with added ease because of that—that barren almost-South-Dakota-badland-like stretch of not-rolling-enough desert emptiness, cut only by the two-lane highway and by monstrous crackling powerlines.... Anyway.

The Past We Haven't Met Yet Is Coming - #1

STORY: "Lull" by Kelly Link

FROM: MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS (Harcourt, 2005) - But you are very, very lucky that you can go download this whole book for free at Small Beer Press, founded in 2000 by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant, who I assume must be blisteringly cool people.

BASICALLY: A matryoshka of a tale that's partly about a dissolving marriage, partly about a cheerleader who plays spin the bottle with the Devil, and partly about the erratic passage of time.

I can't think of a better author than Kelly Link to start off a weird and wonderful new year. She really fiddles with your brain. But it's a nearly impossible task I've set myself, trying to pin down a bizarre story that includes a poker game, teenage drug dealers, music that plays both forwards and backwards, screaming peacocks, a masterful storyteller who happens to be a phone sex operator, and a liberal manipulation of the continuity of time, yet (in spite of what I've said above) isn't really about any of those things. With Link, I think you just have to kind of hold your breath and keep reading and allow it to be nonsensical. In the end, it will make a kind of sense that you will not be able to explain, like an amazing dream that sounds flat and vaguely suggestive of Freudian themes when you recount it to the barista at Starbucks.

But I do want to look, at least, at what Link does with the passage of time in this story within a story within a story, because it is a super-cool trick. Not really a trick, even, because she tells you exactly what's up. This part of the story is told by the phone sex operator about a cheerleader:

This is the thing she likes about backwards. You start out with all the answers, and after a while, someone comes along and gives you the questions, but you don't have to answer them. You're already past that part. That was what was so nice about being married. Things got better and better until you hardly even knew each other anymore. And then you said good night and went out on a date, and after that you were just friends. It was easier that way--that's the dear, sweet, backwards way of the world.

So Link tells us outright that time is moving backwards, but that's not enough to really establish it in her story. How does someone portray the reverse passage of time in the forward movement of a story?