Dave’s Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #92: Postmodernism/Love: “Parody.”

from the film Sixth Sense

Ghost stories are usually not very philosophical. They are scary and reach down to touch our primal fear of the undead, of spirits, of ghosts and wraiths. If you saw the film Sixth Sense, you know that ghosts want something. And, of course, this is more or less an assumption lying behind all ghost stories. An spirit returns to earth not because they want to but because something prevents them from achieving rest and peace after they die—usually, some injustice done to them, something that must be corrected, set right, understood, and let go of. In the story “Parody” a ghost appears who cannot rest because something he has done in life is being coopted by what he believes is an invalid form of art based on an invalid philosophy.

Postmodern architecture

It begins when Andrew Halliway, a musician who is starting to make a name for himself in the world of guitar, sees someone standing on the sidewalk in front of his girlfriend Elizabeth’s apartment. He confronts the man, who disappears. Unsettled, he goes to her apartment. Elizabeth is an architect currently working on a project to expand the City Hall. The project has been bedeviled by delays, broken equipment, and other obstacles.

Elizabeth’s mode of architectural design is postmodern. We hear that term today and usually connect it with literary arts. The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a postmodern novel, Shakespeare in Love is a postmodern film. But postmodernism began as an architectural movement. In Italy, designers of buildings began to defy categories (which is what postmodernism essentially is). They mixed up styles that usually stood as monolithic, designing buildings that had gothic arches and modern steel girders, Romanesque towers and glass and steel entry ways, classic Greek pillars and baroque decoration.

And postmodernism engages in parody. It will copy certain art forms, making light of them in one sense but also calling attention to their brilliance. Writer John Fowles once described a certain type of painting as “simultaneously a tribute and a thumbed nose at a very old tradition.” This is often cited as a definition of postmodernism. And, in my story, it is exactly what Elizabeth is doing in her addition to the City Hall. She is copying the old design in a way that calls attention to its eccentricities but at the same time recognizes its genius and beauty.

Elizabeth

They spend the night together. Andrew gets up before her, goes into the living room, and finds a book on architecture. Thumbing through it, he comes across a picture that looks like the man he saw staring up at Elizabeth’s lighted window. She appears at that moment and sits down beside him. He points to the photograph and asks who it is.

She tells him it is Marvin Quinn, a local architect who died some years ago and who designed the original City Hall. She smiles and adds, “He wouldn’t be happy if he knew I was doing a post-modern take on one of his buildings.” When Andrew asks her why she replies: “He hated postmodern architecture—wrote some pretty nasty things about it. He’d roll over in his grave if he knew what I doing with the City Hall project.”  Though Andrew finds the idea impossible he begins to see that Quinn has in fact rolled out of his grave.

Andrew sees more of Quinn. He is watching from a distance when Elizabeth gives the city council a tour of the construction site. He shows up at one of Andrew’s concerts she attends. He confronts the man, who eventually admits he is Quinn returned to life and instructs Andrew to make Elizabeth stop the building project. “Stop her or I will,” he says. A few days later, Elizabeth has a seizure. The doctors tell her it was from overwork. Andrew knows it was Quinn’s doing. Quinn later appears to him and tells him he will not tolerate her postmodern parody of his building and that he willing to “pay the price” to stop her. He doesn’t say what the price is.

Dante's World

Andrew wonders how one fights a ghost. But he also wonders what is preventing Quinn from further harming her; and why Quinn has appeared to him but not to her. The answer comes to him immediately. Elizabeth told him she had been reading Dante’s Divine Comedy in Italian, which she learned while studying architecture there. She mentions the line, The Love which moves the sun and the other stars. He realizes Quinn is hampered by the love he and Elizabeth share. It is hindering and preventing him from going after her. He summons Quinn and asks him to meet him at a local sculpture garden. He promises that if Quinn hears him out, he will try to persuade Elizabeth to abandon her project. Quinn agrees.

DaVinci's Horse, Grand Rapids, Michigan

They meet by the sculpture of Leonardo DaVinci’s horse—a project he designed but never finished. As they stand there Andrew tells him that when a group of artists decided to create the sculpture Leonardo never got to build, they ran into trouble. “… when the artist began the project, she found out the design was imperfect.  Leonardo was not good at drawing animals. The musculature was all wrong; the proportions were off, the perspectives not realistic. Nina Akimo corrected all that. In other words, she kept the general design of DaVinci’s project but improved on it. You might even say Ms. Akimo’s work is a parody of DaVinci’s—one that improved it. Elizabeth is doing the same thing. She isn’t mocking and ridiculing your building, Mr. Quinn. She’s calling attention to its brilliant features.”

Andrew persuades Quinn. He sees what Elizabeth is doing. He only nods and vanishes, but knows the danger is at an end. He calls Elizabeth and she says she slept well and feels fine. She invites him over. A star falls as he leaves the sculpture park. He thinks of the love that moves the sun and all the other stars.

“Parody” appeared in the Australian journal Roar and Thunder, which has ceased publication but maintains an archive. Read it here.

For winter reading get a copy of The Sorceress of Time. Wuxia warrior Jing Lin travels time to understand how to win a battle and how to win the battles she faces in her own life. The key to the future lies in the past.

I would love to hear your comments.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As A Writer #4: Entering Into Paranormal

James Joyce

My writing career had begun. I had published stories, but needed to determine what sort of writer I wanted to be, which brought in the vexing questions of categories of fiction. Traditionally, there is literary fiction, which is considered the best sort of fiction one may write and the only type of fiction that has any real merit. Literary fiction is Charles Dickens, James Joyce, the Brontë sisters, Ernest Hemingway. Literary fiction has the possibility of enduring—of becoming a classic like Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility or F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

Detective story writer Dashiell Hammett

On the other hand, there is genre fiction. Genre fiction falls into several categories:  mystery, romance, horror, adventure and, until recently, was considered inferior to literary fiction. Writers who produced such books might be popular, might be wealthy, and might sell millions of books, but they were not writers of "real" literature. Their work ranked below works of literary fiction.

This outlook reigned—until the 1980s.

In the 1980s a new literary philosophy called postmodernism came along. Postmodernism is complex and has a lot of facets, but one feature of its theoretical base is the elimination of categories. Who, the postmodernists asks, makes categories and says one is superior to the other? By what standard and by what criteria are such judgements made. Often, they theorized, it's simply because a group of people (mostly men) who hold some kind of power in the academic world, get together and decide, often arbitrarily, what is right and wrong, good and bad, worthy and unworthy. The postmodern critics simply asked, Who says? What gives someone the right to say what is literature and what isn't?

So as the years progressed, one began to see the categories dissolve. Suddenly you could teach Steven King in a literature class. Popular themes enter the curriculum.  Suddenly women and other marginalized groups had a voice. Writers whose works had been pushed off the scene by coteries of influential critics re-emerged—Zora Neale Hurston, Kate Chopin, and George Washington Cable are some notable examples. The idea that there was such a thing as literary fiction, intellectually and thematically superior to all other types of books, was challenged.

I began writing after this sea-change had occurred. I had written stories that aimed at the literary fiction category. But after a while I began to wonder about a horror story. I had my on-going character, Sossity Chandler. But did I want to take her into the realm of the supernatural and paranormal? This was a thing I wondered about. I had an idea for a story—one I had thought on even as a teenager growing up in Indiana, where winter is harsh and there's a lot of snow. But I wasn't sure I wanted to go that way as a writer.

One day I came across a statement by Steven King that said it is not true that ghost stories are an offshoot of literary sort stories. Just the opposite, he insisted. Short stories like the ones written by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or Willa Cather are in fact offshoots of ghost stories. The ghost stories people told around campfires and in dark rooms at night began it. And, of course, the inventor of the genre of short story, Edgar Allan Poe, wrote ghost and horror tales. This was good advice from the author who has sold more books than anyone in history.

I decided to go with this and wrote a story called "The Snow Demon."  My ongoing character, Sossity Chandler, is playing a gig out west. She had driven to Wyoming after a painful quarrel with her parents and is in despair. She finds some jobs playing music in a small town and also runs into a college professor doing research on Native American lore. He takes advantage of her lack of funding and of her emotional despair by, respectively, hiring her to do some work for him and seducing her. 

He is interested in the legend of the Snow Demon but finds that the locals don't like to talk about it. Sossity has befriended and helped out the daughter of a local official in the native tribe there. The girl works as an exotic dancer in the club she plays and Sossity gives her a place to sleep and some money and urges her to get help for her drinking problem. By offering a large sum of money to the girl, who has a drinking problem and is destitute, the college professor finds the location of the Snow Demon's lair and pays Sossity to come along with him to view it.

Sossity doesn't like his attitude toward the local tribal peoples and his disrespect toward their customs and religion. On the way there, he desecrates the sacred place of the Demon. Mistake. Soon a ferocious snowstorm begins. Sossity and the professor can't find their way. Wolves show up and attack them. Sossity fears she will die, but the native women, whom Sossity helped, and who knows she is not culpable, rescues her. The college professor is killed. Sossity leaves knowing the legend of the Snow Demon is true but also with some hope that comes from her observation that doing what is right makes matters turn out for the better.

The story was published in a print anthology, no longer available. It began my career as a writer of paranormal fiction. In what direction does writing such fiction take one? More to come on this topic.

For more paranormal reading, check out ShadowCity. Paranormal fantasy.

For more such reads, check out my Writer's Page.

Another great source for good paranormal, my Facebook Page.

I would love to see your questions or comments.