Why we don't write about work - or do we?

Started Brian Loory's story "TV" in The New Yorker, didn't finish - I know, it's a very short story, but I got home really late and the Red Sox were playing the Yankees... Anyway, story is about a guy who stays home from work and turns on the TV and watches a guy sitting at his desk in an office and gradually realizes he is watching himself at work. Over time, he continues to watch the show, but his "self" moves around the channels onto several other shows: watches himself perform heart surgery on a medical show (then has sex with the prettiest nurse - best sex he'd had in years, the unnamed protagonist notes), break up a drug ring on a cop show, etc. In some ways this is a sharp commentary on how we watch media, how we live vicariously through it. In other ways, it's about the thin membrane that separates so-called reality TV from dramatic television. It's also about the alienation of office life - a subject that has been treated comically both on TV (The Office) and film (Office Space), though less so in fiction. I saw an essay recently, somewhere, wondering why it is that most people spend most of their lives at work but there is relatively little fiction about work (maybe because most writers don't spend most of their lives at work, in a conventional sense?). There are some exceptions, though, from Heller and Yates to more recent books like I think it's called Then We Came to the End, The Bug (about Silicon Valley work) - and that doesn't count the many newspaper novels (typical work for many writers such as this one). So I think it's a false premise, there are a lot of novels about work, but not so many about office work other than novels of comic high anxiety.

Here's another twist on the ghost story: the benevolent spirit, as evidenced in the somewhat slight but innovative "The Shell of Sense" (?)in the Library of America "American Fantastic Tales." This story narrated from the POV of the ghost of spirit; it begins in the bedroom, the spirit (a woman) looking on, finding the room slightly changed, different than she would have left it. Obviously, from the context - this anthology made up mostly of ghost/vampire/madness stories - we know pretty quickly that the narrator is a dead woman. Might have been more effective to come across the story in a magazine and be left puzzled for a few pages. Once we get our bearings in the story, it's pretty straightforward - she makes her presence known - a cold, misty fog it seems - to her sister and her widowed husband, and gently brings them together, finding some kind of peace for herself. Sweet. The story doesn't dwell or really explore the potential darker aspects: would have been a much harder-edged story if the spirit felt anger or jealousy or pain, for example, or if her haunting had inadvertently driven the couple apart. This trope of benevolent spirits has appeare a lot in recent books and, especially films (Spoiler alert here!), such as the terrific Sixth Sense (will Shmaylyan ever make another good movie?), the Lovely Bones, all the Twilight movies, Ghost, et al. Still, benevolent ghost stories remain a subgenre, a palliative for kids scared in the night. If ghosts were good we wouldn't read about them.

Ghosts and Vampires - anywhere but here!

Posted yesterday that ghost (and vampire) stories seem a little more Old World, less American - and a sequence of three early-20th century stories in "American Fantastic Tales" (Library of America) bears this out (I know I'm generalizing from a small sample): three stories set in Iceland, remote part of Italy, Africa. It's as if the exotic setting were necessary to make the ghost or vampire story credible: these things happen elsewhere, not here in America. Why is that? Is there something about ghosts and vampires that seems intrinsically antidemocratic, linked to old notions of social class and the linkage of church and state? Later in the 20th century, of course, ghosts and vampires were well integrated into American popular literature (and film); as noted in previous post, Stephen King led the way in showing how horror can be much more frightening in an unexpected setting, just as Hitchcock showed that an open space (a cornfield) can be a scarier place that a dark alley. Each of these foreign-setting ghost stories is quite good, by the way - I could picture any of them as a good short film or even a feature. The African-set story, about African magic/witch doctors, owes an obvious debt to Conrad: his method of narration, a bunch of old gents gathered in a club, or on ship deck, or wherever, and one launches into a long that he claims hardly to believe himself - the frame builds credibility for the story. An Ambrose Bierce story is also quite good, and shows some imaginative narrative technique, three sections, each for the POV of a different character - it's not exactly Rashomon, but you need all three sections to comprehend the full story.

Are ghosts unAmerican?

Who knew Frank Norris would be in "Fantastic American Tales" (Library of America)? Isn't he the muckracker who wrote The Octopus and McTeague? Started reading his "fantastic tale" last night, strangely it's set in Iceland of all places, about a guy who hires a shepherd, a big burly man who frightens others in the village because he has no faith. One winter night - during a storm, I think - the shepherd disappears. An expedition follows the footprints through the snow, up a mountain, following some kind of inhuman tracks. They find the frozen corpse of the shepherd, with the inhuman tracks leading farther up the mountain. When they come back for the corpse later, it's gone. Then the ghost of the shepherd appears in the window one night! Ghost stories - the heart and soul of the fantastic, but in a sense they're more imbued in the European (and Asian?) tradition, we don't see as many among the American writers. Not sure why that is. And even this ghost story is placed in a northern-European setting. Are ghosts unAmerican? Do you need to be part of a long tradition of religious faith for ghosts completely to resonate? I know that there are exceptions, that no doubt there are plenty of American ghost stories, but it seems from the selection in this anthology that Americans are more drawn to stories of madness, of haunted places, of curses, of visions - and less so to visitations. Will finish the story (rather long) tonight I hope (also, opening day against the Yankees, plus Easter...) - wondering if I will finish the anthology. Though you can learn a lot about reading through an entire seletion, it also feels, at times, like the Twilight Zone marathon weekend, in which the uncanny gradually becomes "canny" and less affecting.

Haunting can happen anywhere

Well, shouldn't read when I'm too tired to remember what I've read, and have to say that the stories in "American Fantastic Tales" (Library of America) begin to blend together (are they supposed to? is that the point of an anthology? to create from many pieces a single composition, like a mosaic? or should each piece remain distinct and unique?). But one other "trope" emerged from last night's reading, from the somewhat disjointed story "The Itinerant House" - the theme of the haunted house (or place). At least on evidence of this anthology, this trope did not emerge till near the 20th century, but we're very familiar with it today, as a haunted location works very well on film, better than in print maybe. The Itinerant House combines the haunted locale with the idea of a curse through the generations (as in the earlier In Olde New England), as well as the theme of the mad scientist/experimenter. A woman, jilted in love, dies; a mad scientist/lodger brings her back to life (using electricity - you can see the early 20th-century fascination with that technology, as we today would write mind control through wireless communication and the like). She doesn't want to live, utters a curse, and the house remains haunted, bringing death on many future inhabitants, and so on. All rather preposterous of course - but it began a cascade of writers trying to outdo one another creating creepy gothic manses inhabited by ghosts and ghouls and other spirits. Until Stephen King turned it all on its head and showed that it's even scarier for these visitations to take place in an ordinary suburban setting. Haunting can happen anywhere - that's what makes it really frightening.

Dreams, Delusions, & Madness: Can you tell the difference?

Two types of "fantastic" stories: you/the narrator are totally insane and everybody knows it but you! Or: you/the narrator, are completely sane and have seen or experienced something uncanny, and everybody thinks you're nuts! These two tropes seemed to be really popular in the late 19th century, at least judging by the selections in the Library of America "American Fantastic Tales." The Repairer of Reputations (Campbell?) is a pretty good example of the first, as the narrator believes he's a king, has a crown that he keeps in a vault, etc., but from a few hints, such as comments other characters make to him, we know that he's in a complete fantasy world. This story isn't great, but it's quite unsettling in some ways (set in the future, which then was 1920, he imagines a public-works program in which suicide pavilions are set up in city parks. hmm) The most interest concept in the story is imagining a play in verse called The Yellow King that disturbs the mind of all who read it. (Apparently, this was a connecting link through a whole book of stories.) This clearly is the precursor to some recent Japanese horror films and American remakes. As to the other type of story, another selection in this anthology, The Dead Valley, is a decent example: young man goes for long hike with pet dog, finds himself in a horrible wasteland, wakes in bed suffering from a brain fever, nobody believes he went, so he retraces his steps, finds the skeleton of the dog. It really happened! This kind of story is much simpler, very often shows up in high-school lit magazines - and in The Twilight Zone and all its imitations. Seems there was endless fascination in the 1890s with the worlds of dreams and of madness: is it real? Or all in your imagination? And what's the difference?

A mysterious stranger can be good...or evil

"Thurlo's Christmas Story," by ? Bangs, makes a good contrast with the powerful, feminist Yellow Wallpaper, this one about a man going mad, primarily from the stress of his work (he's a writer). Thurlo has to write an xmas story by an October 5th deadline for his magazine editor. He's unable to do so; his words seem to break apart on the page. He writes a long "letter" (i.e., the story we are reading) to his editor explaining his failure: he's been going mad, seeing his "double" as a version of all the evil thoughts within in, an evil twin. Oddly, as he is trying to write, an "elderly" (50 years old, yikes!) man rings his bell - introduces himself as a great fan. They talk, the mysterious stranger leaves a manuscript of a story, says Thurlo can submit it; it's a masterpiece. After trepidation, Thurlo sends it in; the editor responds that he received 24 blank pages, and Thurlo writes the story we're reading as an explanation. Last paragraphs: editor responds that the explanation itself is the best thing Thurlo has ever written. A touch of postmodernist whimsy here, well before its time - as on another level of cognition this story by the obscure Bangs (an editor himself his day, according to Straub's notes in the Library of America "Fantastic American Tales," is no doubt the best story Bangs ever wrote. The mysterious stranger is another kind of trope in "fantastic" fiction, sometimes benevolent and sometimes not. This story has both. Next story in the anthology is futurist story, written ca 1890 set in 1920! He didn't get much right; I'm still reading it and trying to make sense of it.