by Nancy Kress
“Just read that,” he said, still with the same casual, remote smile. “Go ahead, read it, skip the rest and start there.” Jameson was given to parenthetical clauses. His dense, twisty sentences snaked themselves at me from the page:
But all these esoteric theories, fascinating sport though their intellectual gymnastics may provide, reduce in the end to a theory so old that it is embarrassing to realize by how many centuries we may have been anticipated. Two books, independently written, yet identical in character and incident and theme and, above all, in emotional impact, in the images evoked in that older brain that lies below the one usually concerned with words. Identical, and both brilliant, with the brilliance of a perfect object illuminated in firelight. And here it all comes together.
We have always assumed human experience to be too varied for meaningful, exact duplication. We have always supposed that how an artist “handled” a theme—as though love, death, and whatever were so many unbroken colts—was more important than the theme itself. We have always supposed that a talented writer need give only a “fresh reworking” to an archetypal experience, and the result was a new and separate work of art.
But what if we were wrong? What if the number of real, deep experiences open to man is actually small? Or, more accurately put, what if the number of resonances, of ways that seemingly varied experiences strike the human subconscious and set up answering echoes so that experience becomes meaningful, is small? And, furthermore, what if the multiplicity of presentations of these experiences, the endless boy-meets-then-loses-girl books and plays and poems from Romeo and Juliet to True Romances, were valued only because the isolated individual writer had no way to come closer to a complete rendering of what that complete archetypal ideal would feel like within the human brain?
It was Plato who wrote that man stares eternally at a cave wall, with his back to reality. What we see, what we call reality, is only shadows cast on that wall, fire-lit shadows from the actual reality behind us. The shadows dance and nod and flit, some much sharper than others, as some books and plays and poems are sharper, closer to the bone. And sometimes these authors’ made-up lies about the same experience seem to cancel each other out—as shadows must if we view them from different angles.
Romanticism. Naturalism. Realism. Epic heroism. Escapism. All our literature has, until now, been cast from a flickering fire—the imperfect glow of one artist’s mind, one artist’s fragmented perceptions of those archetypal experiences that make up human reality within the brain. The results have been fitfully brilliant, fitfully dim. Even Shakespeare is conceded to have shadowy, murky patches, though the very gloom may cast the comforting shades of ambiguity around his harsher truths and thus render them the more acceptable. But if a way could be found to build that fire higher, to build it to a steady brilliant heat that casts ever more steady and brilliant shadows, eventually those shadows will merge and overlap until they stand as sharply etched as the original, a virtual copy of the reality, unmistakable and complete. What has done so, of course, is the technology of the composing-audience, that bringing together of many minds to cast light from all angles on an experience, until the fragmented shadows from each overlap and are again whole, and all the racial and archetypal responses are cast cleanly on that cave wall, in their one universal form.
How many such forms exist buried in the human mind? We don’t yet know, but if the virtual congruence of Greta and Floor of Heaven is any indication, the number may be more sharply limited than we formerly thought.
Or wished.
What this posits about the definitive pinnacles of art is . . .
“Fragmented shadows’ is lousy,” I said, too loudly. “What?” Garber said.
“ ‘Fragmented shadows.’ On the fourth page. It’s a lousy image. You can’t fragment a shadow. It’s a mixed metaphor. Or something.”
“I’ll tell him you said so.”
I knelt on the floor next to his chair and put my arms around him. “We’ve got lots of time, though, Garber. It’s not as though G-M Press will be obsolete tomorrow. Finding these archetypal works, or whatever, will take time. Years.”
“Yes.”
“And anyway, now that I think about it, Jameson’s talking about the masterpieces, the heights of experience. All this probably won’t even apply to us at all! We’ll just keep on as we always have, turning out entertainment for children!”
“Yes.”
“We won’t really be that affected at all. Kids will always need variety, even if it’s ‘fragmented.’ They don’t care. It’s not as though G-M ever expected to produce a masterpiece, for chrissake.”
Garber didn’t answer.
“But maybe we just will, anyway!” I said, and heard my own desperate brightness, and tried not to wonder what Garber’s private dreams as a publisher had been. “And, in any case, there’s lots of time!”
He looked at me steadily. The jolly elf was gone, the scatterbrained enthusiast was gone, the casual fatalist was gone. He was the Garber who had come to see me in the sanitarium, the Garber who’d taken me to boarding school on the train, the Garber who’d stripped me of all my old destructive defenses, and so also stripped himself.
“I don’t have lots of time, Mary.”
I didn’t say anything to that. There wasn’t anything to say.
The shoulder of his jumpsuit felt rough against my cheek. I kept my arms around him, and we watched the pickets walking below in the rain. A bus went by, and three prohibitively expensive taxis, and a pair of kids who probably should have been in school. They wore yellow rainsuits and walked through every puddle, splashing and stamping. From what I could see at this distance, they never looked at the pickets at all. But from this distance, I couldn’t see much.
Garber stood up, shook his head vigorously from side to side, and grinned.
“So what’s this about more deathless prose from the pen of Ida Tidwell?”
I got to my feet. “You won’t believe it, Garber; you just won’t believe it. It’s for this incredibly sappy proposal—”
I managed to remove the manuscripts of both Greta and Floor of Heaven from the desk without actually looking at either of them. Then those of us who were not scaling the definitive pinnacles of art went back to work.
“Well, I hope you’re satisfied,” Susan said, before I had closed the apartment door. “I just hope you’re satisfied.”
“And it’s nice to see you, too,” I said wearily.
“Mother—”
“Look, do you think I could at least get my coat off before you start in, Susan? At least?”
She folded her arms and waited, boulder silence under downy brows. Her shoulders were trembling. The sofa overflowed with crumbled paper, her recorder, cassettes, books, and tissues. I hung up my coat very slowly.
“All right, Susan. What is it?”
“Mr. Blake is back. He’s back, and he saw my D that substitute gave me on my oral history project, and he said I could do it over to raise my grade. Only my grade won’t raise, because I know it won’t be any different this time; I still don’t know enough stuff to do it right, and I’ll end up with two D’s, and it’ll junk my whole quarter’s grade! I hope you’re satisfied!”
She scowled horribly, and I saw the insane effort not to cry in front of me, the enemy. Had grades mattered so much to me, at ten? Had the handsome Mr. Blakes? No, of course not; both had been lost in bigger nightmares. But Susan was not me.
“You don’t care. You just don’t care,” she said. “Lya’s mother told her heaps. Cassettes and cassettes worth!”
Not me, and not in my version of pain. But she was in pain, however trivial it might look to me. What is art for? Garber had asked, and I had thought I’d known the answer: to transform and justify pain. If we can. But not all of us can. What if the alchemy is missing?
“Mr. Blake looked at me like he was so surprised, and so disappointed in me. And he asked me what happened because I never get D’s, and I started to cry . . .”
What is art for? To order human experience, to reach toward some ultimate expression of what we are. And if that ultimate expression has already been reached?
“. . . all the other kids looking at me bawling, and Mr. Blake just standing . . .”
So it’s been reached. What then? Or, rather, what before—long before, when pain was the daily expectation, and language too crude for the transformation to beauty. The base of Jameson’s pinnacle, before the long climb to the dizzying top. When shadows on cave walls was not a metaphor, but the real thing, flickering with hidden menace all night long. All the way back.
“. . . so embarrassed I wanted to die, and you just treat me like a child anyway, and—”
All the way back.
“Susan, honey—no, I know you don’t like to be called ‘honey’—Susan, then—Susan, come here. Sit down. No, there on the sofa—sit next to me. Listen. I know you’re not a child anymore, even if you . . . I know it. You’re old enough to . . . I know. I’ll help you with your history project. Sit down.”
Susan glared at me, eyes mutinous through a sheen of tears, but she sat.
“Wait right here, Susan. I have to get something, something I want you to see, want you to read. I have to get—”
I remembered the key flushed down the toilet. What I would have to get was a crowbar. Pry open the desk drawer, or see if I could break the lock—but that part could wait, after all. The written manuscript could come later, had always come later. Susan would have to read it, yes, it would make it easier for her to understand if she read it, easier to see where I had changed things, reaching for . . . but later.
All the way back.
I drew a deep breath.
“Listen, Susan. I’m going to tell you something that happened to me, when I was your age. It’s part of our family. It happened. Listen.
“Let me tell you a story . . .”
CASEY’S EMPIRE
Nancy Kress’s First F&SF contribution is a first-rate story about a young man who leaves the security of academe to become, of all things, an SF writer. Mrs. Kress teaches in the English Department of the State University of New York and has had stories in Omni, Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine and Universe 11. Her first novel, PRINCE OF MORNING BELLS, will soon be published by Pocket Books.
This is the story of Jerry Casey, who lost a galactic empire. Oho, you sneer to yourself—one of those. You know, of course, from your vast reading, what a trivial and hackneyed idea a galactic empire is—even now. You know, of course, from your vast reading, about the convoluted, melodramatic machinations by which a hero loses an empire, and what that feels like. Go suck an egg; you wouldn’t know a galactic empire if you tripped over it, which Casey did. Tripped over it and lost it. You think you know how that feels? You don’t know. Unless it has happened to you, you don’t know. You can’t ever know.
He was born in the 1950’s in Montana, but he didn’t let it bother him. To his child’s eyes, the big, lonely, empty plains were within the sound of the sea, within a hard day’s climb of the Himalayas, within touch of the hibiscus-smelling rain forest. He walked on desert sands or ancient glaciers or the bottom of the Mariana Trench. At night the wide sky was impossibly full of stars, and he named them all and walked on their spangle-colored planets. Part of it, of course, was his reading, which he did so constantly that he failed the fifth grade. But not all of it. There was something else, something extra, something his own. His parents were puzzled but tolerant. They bought a new car every three years, new drapes every five, and saved up for yearly vacations in Las Vegas. Older people—he was a late, only child. Kind, decent, stupid people. Casey loved them.
His high school years were no more hellish than anyone else’s; his college years were an anonymous marathon of beer blasts, rock concerts, and overdue term papers; his decision to enter graduate school was complicated by his advisor’s doubt that any graduate school would enter him. But enrollment was falling, programs were being cut if too few live bodies registered for thesis seminar, and Casey found himself a teaching fellow in a small undistinguished college that was part of a large undistinguished state university system in the Northeast. He also found himself scorned. Politely, judiciously, even indulgently—he was in the Humanities, and indulgence was encouraged—but scorned is scorned.
“What’s your area?” asked Paul Rizzo, the stocky, bearded teaching fellow with whom Casey shared an office. Rizzo was wearing a plaid flannel shirt, jeans, and Frye boots. All the male teaching fellows, Casey had noticed, wore plaid flannel shirts, jeans, and Frye boots. So did some of the females. Casey wore a sports jacket.
“Area?”
“For your thesis.”
“I’m doing the option—the creative-writing thesis. A novel.”
“A novel?”
“Yeah, you know,” Casey said, “a fiction narrative over 40,000 words. You’ve heard of them.”
Rizzo’s eyes narrowed. “Have you started this, uh, novel?”
“Yes.”
Rizzo seemed surprised. He stopped in the middle of changing his plaid flannel shirt for a football jersey, arms suspended in midair. Twice a week he scrimmaged to keep in shape, playing on a team limited to grad students and captained by a third-year fellow in the biology department who had his own grant from the federal government.
“What’s it about?”
Casey smiled. “In twenty-five words or less?”
“All right, then, what’s it like? Who would you say your writing was closest to, if you had to name an influence, a mentor? Barth? Hemingway? Dickens? Faulkner?”
Casey took a deep breath. “Burroughs.”
“Naked Lunch?”
“No, not William.”
“Then who—”
“Edgar.”
“Edgar Burroughs? You write . . .”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
Rizzo finished sliding into his football jersey and picked up his helmet, rubbing a finger over a jagged nick. Then he smiled. Politely, judiciously.
“Well, chacun a sa gout, right?”
“Son gout,” Casey said.
“My thesis is on Keats. The psycho-sexual relation of the “Hyperion” fragment of his later work. You probably don’t like Keats, though?”
“Why not?”
“If you write that . . . do you like Keats?”
Casey picked up Rizzo’s football shoe and fingered the cleats. He tried each one in turn, pressing lightly with the end of his index finger. They were all dull. Rizzo waited. Indulgently.
“Well, I’ll tell you, Paul. I really think Keats is some kind of poet. Not too commercial, you know, but a strong sensory receiver, quick on the end line. Some kind of poet. But, overall I guess I have to go with Edgar Guest. Enjambment-wise, that is.”
Rizzo turned maroon. Casey smiled. Politely, judiciously, indulgently.
“Who you got for frosh comp?”
“Some flake in a striped sports jacket. Young. He talked about semicolons.”
“Must be the new guy. Casey.”
Casey, the new guy, ducked behind the gray bulk of the candy-and-pastries vending machine. The styrofoam cup he was carrying sloshed coffee onto his striped sports jacket. The student on the other side of the vendor kicked it.
“Took my quarter again!”
“Here, have half my Babe Ruth.”
“Eff-ing machine. Any frat files on his assignments?”
“Not yet. He’s new.”
“Just my luck.”
“It’ll be all right. The new ones don’t like to flunk anybody. Just go to class. The new ones take attendance.”
“He wants us to write a paper for Friday.”
“Get Sue to do it. She’s an English major.”
“Yeah. Jesus—semicolons!”
“Yeah.”
He got used to teaching freshmen. He made truce with Rizzo. What he couldn’t get used to or make truce with, what led him to discover why a university was a bad place to write, was the faculty.
His thesis advisor was a Dreiser man. If you are a Dreiser man, Casey learned, if you champion Dreiser and the American realists for 25 years (including six articles in PMLA), if you dissect and evaluate and explore Dreiser, you can be Dreiser. You know what he wrote in the margins of his books, how he wore his hair and who cut it. You have his/your position in belles-lettres to defend, and you fight for it ferociously. When a prestigious Eastern university has a sudden unfortunate death among its existing faculty and so needs to acquire another American realist, you throw your hat into the academic ring and play politics with dead candidates. You win, and jolly well you should. Dreiser is a definite A. And then so, of course, are you.
Casey walked. He walked on village streets at noon, over snowy athletic fields before dawn, in night woods where one clumsy step could break his unwary neck. While he walked, he agonized. He agonized because he was not Tolstoy or Shakespeare or even Maugham. He agonized because he was honest enough to know that he never would be Tolstoy or Shakespeare or Maugham, complimented himself on being “at least” that honest with himself, and agonized that his selfcompliments showed a lack of artistic passion. When he wasn’t walking and agonizing, he wrote. It was all H—. When he wasn’t writing, he read Dreiser. It was a definite A.
But I had my advisor’s approval for the thesis before I began!” Casey said. He tried to sound indignant rather than desperate, and knew he failed. “Both Dr. Jensen and Dr. Schorer signed the approval form!”