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STORY: "Who Knows What's Up in the Attic?" by Jean Rhys
FROM: THE COLLECTED SHORT STORIES (Norton, 1987)
BASICALLY: An older English woman receives an unexpected visit from a handsome Dutch acquaintance and for a little while, feels something like hope. Then the relationship breaks apart--or she sees it for what it really is--and the world closes in on her again. Like most Rhys stories, the whole thing is subtle, despairing, and at least partially autobiographical.
If you are the kind of person who wants her characters described and their motivations explained and the action to be grandiose, then Jean Rhys is not for you. As for me, I think she's marvelous. (And if you're a writer, you should read her anyway, just to see how she does what she does.)
Subtlety is Rhys's game. She wields spare dialogue to create emotional flux, but she never spells anything out. In this exchange, for example, the unnamed female protagonist is getting to know a slight acquaintance, a Dutchman named Jan, who has come for an unexpected visit.
"You know," he said, "I admire my uncle. When I was quite a little boy and my mother died he really brought me up. That was in Indonesia. My father is an artist. I have some pictures of his that I like very much and I like him. But he is too – too soft. That is not a good thing."
"I suppose not."
"My uncle is not so." He took a case from his pocket and handed her a small photograph. "That is my uncle."
The uncle looked a bit on the sly side to her.
"I see what you mean," she said.
"And this is my father."
"You are like him."
"Yes I know. And I am fond of him. I feel affection for him but he is not – how do you say – forcible enough."
What actually happens during this dialogue? Not much. On the surface, we learn a little bit about the man from Holland, and that's about it. But there's still a tautness between the short lines that creates tension. The woman tells him he's like his father (or looks like him) just after Jan disparages his father as "soft." She thinks of the uncle as looking "sly," a highly specific term that nonetheless has a certain ambiguity—but she doesn't say anything about her thoughts to Jan. Ideas are being presented, displayed, admired; Jan and the protagonist are engaged in some kind of dance. And then a little later, this:
At the door he turned. "We recognized each other, didn't we?"
She didn't answer. She thought: yes, I recognized you almost at once. But I never imagined that you recognized me.
The consciousness Rhys creates is composed almost entirely of incompletion, of things asserted only in thought or only in speech but never in both—always there's a silent gulf between the two. It is only natural, then, that the characters in Rhys's story should also break apart as they become aware of the divide that looms between them.
STORY: "The Pi Man" by Alfred Bester
FROM: VIRTUAL UNREALITIES: THE SHORT FICTION OF ALFRED BESTER (Vintage, 1997)
BASICALLY: First-person account of a man who must compulsively provide balance to the universe's continuously evolving pattern (though even he doesn't understand it). His unique ability has brought him enormous wealth (thanks to his sensitivity to financial patterns) but has also left him isolated from his fellow humans, whom he must sometimes hurt in order to create that balance. But one woman tries to prove that her love is stronger than any pattern.
Did you notice the thematic confluence? Monday 3/14 was Pi Day! Yay! But I was writing a Spanish paper and didn't have a chance to tell you about this cool story. Boo! So I hope your mathematically-inclined celebrations will continue throughout the week at least.
Alfred Bester's "The Pi Man" is a strange amalgamation of sophisticated experimental literature and pulpy genre conventions. The latter kind of undercuts the former and closes the piece on a mediocre note, but I still heartily recommend this fun, odd tale. Bester began writing science fiction during its Golden Age, but he didn't fit so neatly into the genre box as some of his contemporaries, like Isaac Asimov or Robert A. Heinlein. This 1959 Hugo-nominated story shows how versatile and creative his prose could be.
(When I was googling Bester, I ran across this great little review of "The Pi Man" that rates the story on a scale of its "hardness." As in, Is it hard sci-fi, or not hard sci-fi? Which I think is adorable. What other genre do we measure by its "hardness" in that sense? There's no Hard Literary Fiction breakout, or Hard Romance [unless you have a filthy, filthy mind]. A "hard-boiled" mystery might be the closest comparison. …But hey, genre breakdowns! These are just some of the excruciatingly geeky things that interest me!)
So, anyway. The story. The first thing that slaps you in the face is the narrator's voice. Almost simultaneously, you try to take in the unconventional formatting of some of the words and sentences. Is it a robot speaking? A lunatic? Impossible to tell. The story basically zooms off in high gear from the initial plunge—though no real action yet, just the jumbled musings of this narrator whose English is a bit off. He's forcefully, fervidly trying to convey something magnetic and significant and unusual, but whatever it is it resists immediate understanding.
Interestingly, the narrator does explain, almost right off, what's going on—but I noticed it only after I went back and reread. Everything at the beginning is careening so weirdly and stylistically that the explanation gains real sense only in hindsight:
Confusion result of biological compensator born into my body which I hate. Yes, birds and beasts have biological clock built in, and so navigate home from a thousand miles away. I have biological compensator, equalizer, responder to unknown stresses and strains. I relate, compensate, make and shape patterns, adjust rhythms, like a gridiron pendulum in a clock, but this is an unknown clock, and I do not know what time it keeps. Nevertheless I must. I am force. Have no control over self, speech, love, fate. Only to compensate.
What I dislike, though, is that Bester later offers up a bald-faced, straightforward explanation of the same phenomenon. The narrator identifies himself to an FBI interrogator as Peter Marko and explains to the agent everything he knows about himself and his function as a compensator. Argh. Way to wreck your aura of mystery, dude.
The story, then, is divided into two parts. The first half shows a cryptic, sphinxlike Marko in action. His work in arbitrage puts him "ahead by $57,075.94 by half-past noon…57075 makes a nice pattern but that 94¢! Iych! Ugly. Symmetry above all else. Alas, only 24¢ hard money in my pockets. Called the secretary, borrowed 70¢ from her, and threw sum total out window." He is forced by the same compulsions to beat up an elderly clerk at City Hall, and then to anonymously send the guy $1000 in cash afterwards. Stakes are significant and Bester does a great job at building suspense.
But the second half of the story devolves very suddenly. Marko gets picked up by the FBI, but isn't worried about what will happen because apparently this is a commonplace occurrence for him. Pesky government agencies are always mistaking him and his "signal jamming" equipment for an espionage operation. Marko explains who and what he is to the agent, how he operates in the world, and then he's let go. His former secretary, Jemmy Thompson, has fallen in love with him, and he tries to resist her charms because he knows his abilities make him sometimes do terrible things to the people he cares about—in fact, are very likely to do so: "I make one last effort to save her. 'I love you, paleface, and you know what that can mean. When the patterns turn cruel, you may be the sacrifice.'" But she coos something about love making patterns, too, clinging sexily to him, and that's it.
If I were forced to defend this story in a debate, I might claim that the weak and cliché-ridden second half balances out its literary, artful first half, thus illustrating its theme of the need for universal balance. But I don't really buy that. I think Bester wrote himself into a corner and had to fall back on conventional storytelling tropes to end the thing.
To my mind, Bester could have fixed "The Pi Man" in one of two ways. Either he could have developed Jemmy into a more interesting character in her own right, rather than just a smidge better than a girly type, and so made the romance that flourishes between her and Peter Marko into something nuanced. Or he could have dispensed with the silly romance altogether and given Peter something genuinely interesting to do with his unusual power/curse, something that might have real implications. Maybe it would have worked better in a novel, where a cheesy, pulp-style romance could have crept into the background as set furniture and allowed a thrilling plot to rocket out of Bester's fantastic premise.
The moral of today's write-up is, I'd say, that your story has to live up to the expectations it sets at the beginning. If "The Pi Man" had been pulpy and conventional from the get-go, its ending wouldn't have disappointed. But Bester went out on a limb and did something truly interesting with his opening that, unfortunately, he wasn't able to deliver on. Still, I think it's a great story to learn from, so check it out and see what you think.
And here's a gratuitous picture of my parents' dog, Cody. He is not so into this reading thing.
STORY: "Catch That Rabbit" by Isaac Asimov
FROM: THE COMPLETE ROBOT (Granada, 1982)
BASICALLY: From their outpost on an ore-rich asteroid, two guys working for US Robots had better figure out why the team of mining robots they're testing keeps returning empty-handed. JOBS are at STAKE.
I would now quite delightedly like to present you, dear Reader, with a story about ROBOTS. Cool, right? (YES. The answer is YES. Robots are cool.) I've never read an Asimov novel, but his short stories, with their rules and their scientists and their "Dammit, Jim!"-style ejaculations just delight me. But the whys and wherefores of this phenomenon are elusive. Everyone knows Asimov is basically a hack. I read real literature, you know. I know what's good, and, spoiler, it's not Asimov. So what on earth explains this affinity?
It's not the characterization or the dialogue. One of the guys in "Catch That Rabbit" is named Mike Donovan and the other is Gregory Powell. (Ho-hum.) The narrator (limited third-person) refers to each one by his last name, while the characters refer to each other by their first names. Combine this with the fact that, although one is apparently the disdainful supervisor of the other, they talk and act and think in almost identical ways, and then add a distinct paucity of dialogue tags—and basically I had very little idea of who was actually talking at any given point. But Asimov doesn't use conversation to tell you anything about the characters, silly goose. Characters serve to verbalize the competing sides of a given conflict. A problem is volleyed back and forth in a series of exchanges, thus communicating the precise nature of the issue to the reader and hashing out the rules which happen to govern it.
Aloud he said, "You're as lucid as Euclid with everything except the facts. You've watched that robot group for three shifts, you redhead, and they did their work perfectly. You said so yourself. What else can we do?"
"Find out what's wrong, that's what we can do. So they did work perfectly when I watched them. But on three different occasions when I didn't watch them, they didn't bring in any ore. They didn't even come back on schedule. I had to go after them.
"And was anything wrong?"
"Not a thing. Not a thing. Everything was perfect. Smooth and perfect as the luminiferous ether. Only one little insignificant detail disturbed me – there was no ore."
Oh, and check out the pointless sarcasm! It's a classic, really. A reliable go-to. If you want your characters to seem clever, but you wouldn't know clever if it hit you over the head, just have them exchange sarcastic barbs. Now, obviously, I'm a big fan of sarcasm (helloooo, are you reading this?), but when it's coming out of a character's mouth, it really ought to give you a better idea of who that character is, and it especially ought to distinguish one character from another. In Asimov's fumbly mitts, it does neither.
It's not the plot, either. I mean, there are Asimov plots that are more interesting than this one, which has the emotional resonance of an accountant being unable to get her copy of Quickbooks to load, but the main issue is that for Asimov, plot construction seems to involve going down a checklist. Problem – new-model ore-mining robots won't mine ore – check. Stakes/Motivation/Ticking Clock – if engineers can't get the robots to pass performance tests, they'll lose their jobs – check. Complication – problem only happens when no one is watching, and the robots themselves have no helpful information – check. Asimov sets them up and knocks them down with a completely transparent consistency. This story was written pretty early in Asimov's career, and he got better with age, but I can still never get away from the feeling that Asimov approached writing a story like constructing an electric circuit—as a fundamentally mechanical undertaking that allows for some creativity and reshuffling within a very strict set of known parameters.
It all sounds like a big mess, right? So why do I even like this crap? (But come on, I'm being coy. I don't just like Asimov's robot short stories, I adore them.) The reasons aren't always logical or widely-applicable, but hey, they are my reasons:
1. Technical gobbledygook YUM!
Asimov often populates his stories with people who not only interact with robots, but who actually understand how they work. Here it's engineers, elsewhere it's roboticists, and sometimes it's just suspiciously tech-savvy plebians. These people always have a mouthful to say about how robots are designed and constructed and why they do what they do. Either Mike or Greg, for example, it really doesn't matter which, says,
"Don't rush me. Let me work this out. There's still the possibility of a mechanical breakdown in the body. That leaves about fifteen hundred condensers, twenty thousand individual electric circuits, five hundred vacuum cells, a thousand relays, and upty-ump thousand other individual pieces of complexity that can be wrong. And these mysterious positronic fields no one knows anything about."
This story was first published in 1944. Lots of Asimov's jargon has an absolutely delicious retro-futuristic vibe to it, combining vacuum tubes with "the Multivac-complex" with a "definite mathematical relationship that governs such things and failure to conform would indicate marked abnormality in the positronic brain" across all his stories. And what's so interesting to me is that it doesn't matter when the vocabulary becomes outdated, because language like this functions essentially as a magical incantation. What's important is not what the words themselves say, but the power they have to invoke the particularly non-human mindset of manmade non-men.
2. Delirious, irrational confidence. This is harder to pin down to any one thing. Asimov just seems so sure of himself. His stories are replete with mediocre technique and uninspiring prose, but they have a relentless forward momentum. You always know that he's going somewhere with all of this, and so you overlook the imperfections. I'll take Asimov's verve and nerve over artful, poetic prose that fails to tell me something worth knowing, any day.
3. ROBOTS. Hells yeah! Robots are just the best. Doesn't everybody feel this way about them? If not, they should. Robots are the great, mysterious Other onto which we project our own fears and dreams. They are the technology that seemed right around the corner, about to change everything, on the very cusp of bringing humanity into the glittering future, and yet somehow they remain out of our grasp. Even with all the really cool advances being made in robotics, they remain at their heart a fantasy. Isaac Asimov's robot stories are all about humanity's ragged edges, our trembling grasp on what it means to live in a disheveled clockwork universe.
And now, enjoy some robots dancing.
