THE TRAITOR
MICHAEL CISCO
Cheeky Frawg Books
Tallahassee, Florida
Copyright © 2007 Michael Cisco.
Introduction © 2012 by Jeffrey Ford.
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Cover art copyright © 2013 by Jeremy Zerfoss.
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Introduction
Jeffrey Ford
In preparing this introduction I did some reading up on what others have had to say about The Traitor since its publication by Prime Books in 2007. As always, with any book, some of it is incredibly insightful and some is incredibly dumb. We’ll get to the incredibly insightful later, but let’s start with the incredibly dumb. My reason for beginning here is that I think there are perceptions of Cisco’s fiction afoot in the world that betray the quality of the work and cast it in a false light, hence denying wary readers of some of the great works of fantastic fiction in the new century.
I’ve seen it said of The Traitor that it is unremittingly dark, difficult, and has “virtually” no plot. Let’s not name names if we don’t have to, but I will say that the person who made the claim of the novel being “difficult” was Cisco, himself (the traitor). All three of these observations couldn’t be further from the truth. Granted, the book is an original, unique, and Cisco is a very idiosyncratic writer, but there is nothing to fear or to be put off by as a reader of his work.
To say The Traitor has virtually no plot is ridiculous. There’s more plot in this book than you can shake a stick at. Something is always happening, there is always movement, when things happen there are implications for what will happen later, there are new characters introduced throughout and their presence affects the outcome of the protagonist’s (Nophtha’s) story. There’s drama, action, intrigue, suspense. The book is a short one, and although it includes Nophtha’s musings as well as what he does and what happens to him, things move quickly the way they do in fairy tales and myths—leaping to the important junctures instead of attempting to build the kind of verisimilitude a “realistic” novel might have.
The story begins with the outcast child, Nophtha, and describes his estrangement from the community and his family. He is then taken in by his uncle, Uncle Heckler, and the apostates, and brought to a realization of his abilities as a spirit eater. He is conscripted by the Alaks, the foreign force occupying his town and the surrounding area, to be a spy. He becomes aware of the spirit burner, Wite, and joins a hunting party to bring Wite to “justice.” All of what I’ve mentioned here takes place within the first 40 pages of the book. No plot? Please.
I realize it is true that certain readers have a hard time identifying a plot for which they can not readily see the scaffolding or hear the creaking of its clockwork. But Cisco isn’t a bricklayer and the book is not architectonic in the sense of right angles and rationale. The plot of The Traitor grows organically, without forethought, from itself—like a dream or better yet, a nightmare. But what form of story is more convincing or compelling than a dream? There are few traditionally plotted books that one can wake from their effects breathing heavily, perspiring, crying out. A dream has this power over us. I’m betting that even Cisco wasn’t aware what would follow from one part of the story to the next as he was writing it, but was equally surprised as the reader will be with the developments of Nophtha’s journey. Cisco is a writer of discovery, and one of the most exciting aspects of reading this novel is that you can palpably feel the sense of discovery as the story unfurls. Imagination isn’t constricted or tortured here to get the character from point A to B, but it is allowed to grow unfettered. The focus of The Traitor is the journey, the experience, and not so much the outcome (more on this later).
As for The Traitor or any of Cisco’s fiction being unremittingly dark—more foolishness. Yes, spirits are eaten, spirits are burned, bodies are blown apart, our hero hides out in cemeteries, but underlying all the darkness there is a definite sense of humor and fun about what the author is doing. To miss the humor in Cisco is to miss Cisco. Even though the plight of the characters is dark and the reader feels the dire nature of things, the general absurdity of what happens is at the same time unnervingly funny. I don’t mean out loud, laugh-a-minute funny like the jokes in a TV sitcom, but humorous in the way that Poe’s stories are or the stories of Borges. One of Cisco’s avowed masters in his education as a writer of fiction is the author, Thomas Ligotti. Ligotti as well as Poe and Borges, also employs this kind of subtle, sometimes dark, bleak, humor in his fiction. As he has been quoted—“To my mind, a well-developed sense of humor is the surest indication of a person’s humanity, no matter how black and bitter that humor may be.”
The manner in which Cisco convey’s Nophtha’s story is the confessional form. When you begin the novel, you will find the character in a jail cell, writing out what has become of him. This is not the confessional form of St. Augustine, though. It is instead a more modern version of it, in which the possibility of the unreliable narrator is at play (see Poe’s “The Black Cat”) and where the autobiographer is, in their pursuit of relaying their plight unaware of how ridiculous they are at times (see Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From Underground”). It’s not that the character isn’t being earnest, but that he is unaware of his own self-delusion which is evident to the reader. This can result in some hysterical passages.
Earlier, I also mentioned that The Traitor can be “fun.” And it is. The evident power of imagination in the novel is outright delightful. For instance, take the character Wite (I don’t want to give away too much, but I think I can offer this without spoiling things). Wite, the spirit burner, gains incredible physical and psychic powers from his ability to ingest souls for his own purposes, and so you have a figure in the story who is very much like a super hero or super villain from a comic book. The way Cisco describes and weaves this character’s abilities into the story is remarkable. It never interferes with the flow and reality of the world of The Traitor, and as a reader you both believe and are amazed by it. In addition, there are great action sequences, especially in the course of the manhunt for Wite, and much of Nophtha’s philosophical musing, which is delivered in lines that hem and haw in their meaning and eventually betray their initial intent, dazzle like the performance of a tightrope walker at the circus. The book is dark, but Cisco, with his “well developed sense of humor” is having a blast and invites the reader to as well.
We now come to the last of the foolish charges I’ve seen leveled at The Traitor, that it is “difficult.” In an interview about the novel conducted when it first came out, Cisco discusses the influence on his writing of the works of Thomas Bernhard. Bernhard uses a technique of repetition in his writing, repeating certain phrases more than once each time he uses them. For instance, every time Nophtha mentions his uncle, he writes, “my uncle, uncle Heckler.” Cisco says this technique could be difficult for the reader. My question is, “Why?” Repetition is, on the contrary, through its incantatory effect, something that is well known to draw people in
. Otherwise, why is it used so often in ritual, in religious sermons, in political speeches? The way it is used in The Traitor is not really very obtrusive, and it lends insight into the character of the confessor when one considers what aspects of the story are repeated.
The place where I feel that the novel could possibly be difficult for certain readers is when they are finished with it and are pondering the journey of Nophtha’s experience. There are interesting and well-written interpretations of the book. I’m thinking of one I read by the author, Nick Mamatas, who sees the book as a kind of contemporary political allegory. There are others as well that interpret the book as a psychological allegory or an allegory about the creative act itself. All of these arguments are well made and interesting, but they all view the work as an allegory. In truth, The Traitor presents the illusion that it is an allegory, but ultimately that idea is betrayed by the fact that Cisco through Nophtha never offers a definitive lesson or meaning. Traditional allegory means to instruct, but there is no instruction here. Instead, the novel has an empty place inside of it, like the spirit eater, Nophtha, which draws each reader’s interpretation, considering his or her interests and state of mind, the way the spirit eater draws the spirits of the dead. The reader’s idiosyncratic interpretation is absolutely part of the book. The novel will not work without it. Cisco has said as much. The only time this novel will be difficult is for those readers who fear that their own imaginations will betray them.
Chapter One
I rise from my pallet like a sleepwalker and cross the cell to the table, where I am writing this. I lay there all night in a trance, my eyes open, my body completely stiff, as if I were dead already and not dying; the effort to move is all but too much for me, in fact, it is too much for me, and I cause myself irreparable harm moving about. I am no doubt shortening my life at this moment as I write. When one blows on an ember it flares and thereby perishes all that much faster. I don’t pretend to be “flaring,” but something in me demands that I leave at least these few traces behind, as testimony, not to myself, but to why I came.
It’s cold. There’s no light, or very little light. Being who I am I may see in the dark. I have shriveled to a skeleton, not for being in here, but for the bug in my lung that I brought in with me. A few days ago, I have no idea how long it’s been, I felt it spread to the other lung. I was lying on my pallet and I felt a sudden click in my chest as the bug punctured through to the other lung, and now it’s in both. From that moment on I started coughing more and more until now I cough more than twice as much as I did before, and I am certain I will never leave this cell, that is, not entirely. It is because things have become so urgent in this way that I have turned to writing. Once things have become hopeless, it becomes possible to write.
I’ve just done some coughing. Each cough scatters against the walls and echoes back at me seeming even louder than when I coughed it. I have blood on my hand where I held it up to my mouth, and I can taste blood. My blood has never had what could be called a strong flavor. As I cough my lung’s blood into my mouth and onto my hand, my coughs cascade through the room and are swallowed up, one by one, by the spirits. I’m sure they dote on each of my coughs, bearing as they do the increments of my death. When I die, when I am finished dying, when I’ve exhausted dying or dying has exhausted me, they will swallow me up in the same way, the same way they swallow my coughs, but also the same way I used to swallow them—the way I would swallow them all up now if I had the strength.
I will write down now who I am and some of my story, not so that you who read this, if there is anyone there, may understand me, since, in any case, you can’t understand me; there is no way my story could make you understand me. I’m writing my story to prove that I understand it, and I can’t help repeating it over and over to myself simply because that is all there is left of me. I favor it more for the useless details that remind me of how I used to be, not that I miss anything. Now I am nothing at all like I was, although I believe I am now what I had originally intended to be.
I write this first so I may arrive at my testament through these memories, as I arrived at where I am now through these times I’m remembering. If I don’t write beautifully, it’s because I’m trying to be honest, and because the taste of blood in my mouth reminds me how little time remains for me, how little time there is to polish words.
I must begin with my uncle, my uncle Heckler, who had far more influence on me than my parents or brothers and sisters. My family was very large; I was lost in the middle. No one in my family liked my uncle Heckler, in fact, my mother and even my father, whose brother he was, detested him, but, since he was the only one of my relatives with any money, they had to put up with him. He looked nothing like my father, and was older. I remember he had a goblin’s face, especially then, when every feature was absurdly elastic. He would grin, and it looked as if his mouth were going to stretch across the room. He grinned at everyone. He was also very nearsighted, and grinned at things as well. I realized he greeted everything he hated with that grin. There was also something womanish about his face, something that my father found especially disgusting. He looked exactly like his own father, while my uncle Heckler looked much more like their mother, who had abandoned the family. The last straw, or what would have been the last straw had my family not needed my uncle Heckler’s money, was that my uncle Heckler had, at a young age—but not so young an age that he could have impulsiveness as his excuse—joined the apostates. This made him an object of hatred both for my family and for the whole town, and placed him among a tiny religious minority within its walls. My uncle Heckler had to live apart in the town center, and I remember that, whenever he came to visit, he had to spend about twenty minutes outside our door, battering the dust from his shoes with his shapeless, loathsome old hat, before my mother would let him in.
My uncle Heckler took to me right away. He was always charming to my sisters, but even I could see that his heart wasn’t in it. He grinned at them. My brothers didn’t merit any attention as far as he was concerned. But I, for whatever reason, appealed to him, and my parents were glad to have someone to watch me. I was never large as a child, although I grew up bigger than the rest of them, and my brothers, even my younger brothers, liked to drub me. My uncle Heckler noticed me because I kept to myself, and because my parents didn’t like me. My father beat me constantly, several times a week, but there was no getting used to it. He would stand in front of me, holding me by the collar of my shirt, and slap my face, first striking my left cheek with his open palm and then, reversing the direction of his hand, striking my right cheek with the back of his hand—as a result, my left cheek would sting more and more sharply while my right cheek would ache and throb, turning numb, and often my nose would bleed. Almost all my first teeth were knocked out of my head this way, when they loosened, they would fly out of my mouth as my father beat me. Occasionally I would lose my footing and tumble to the floor, and this would irritate him, and he would drag me to my feet with one hand and beat me all the more severely. I could always tell when he was about to beat me, because his face would go white, and his features would turn blank, and my mother would leave the room and lie down. I would stand there with my face uplifted, seeing only his implacable face, and soon I would lose all sense of my surroundings, until I was only my face, being struck with the regularity of a pendulum, at which point things to my view would become dark and colorless, until he released me.
When my uncle Heckler saw how much more frequently I was beaten than my brothers, he must have felt an affinity for me. He and I had both been, even from the very beginning, completely rejected by the world, and deprived of the world in every way. Having joined the apostates, my uncle Heckler was despised by the whole town, there wasn’t a single person in the whole town who treated him honestly, he was swindled constantly, he was knocked aside in the street, he was harassed by young children, rocks and slops would come his way, and sometimes drunken men would shout at his house and the houses of the fe
w other apostates in town. But the apostates enjoyed, if that is the word, official protection, and that set a strict limit on the amount of misery my so-called country men were able to impose on them. My uncle Heckler’s affinity for me had been lost on me completely, until one day, by that time he must have seen what sort of person I was turning into, when his sudden arrival at the house saved me a thrashing. I recall he had come to talk to my father about money, and my father was positively seething with hatred for my uncle Heckler. I had wanted to leave altogether, for fear that my father would take this out on me, but my uncle Heckler, having concluded his business with my father, asked if he might take me out for a walk. My father, who was by that time completely overwhelmed with impatience, and, I’m sure, prepared to approve of anything that would rid him of my uncle Heckler more quickly, agreed. My uncle Heckler did not say anything much to me as we walked about, and we didn’t walk more than a few dozen yards up the street. My uncle Heckler then stood and waited, and I, completely confused, waited with him. Eventually, my father left our house, as he did every evening, to play cards with his friends. Then my uncle Heckler brought me directly back to my door and sent me inside without a word. My uncle Heckler sent me back inside once my father was safely away. He would do this for me a number of times.
I was very fond of girls when I was a boy, and I chased them around the neighborhood, and they chased me. I was forever falling in love or fancying myself in love with one or another of them. This story is so disgusting I simply can’t tell it quickly enough, nor could I tell it any worse. When I was a little older I fell in love with a girl who was a year or two ahead of me. She would have nothing to do with me. I already knew not to approach her—from that time on, I have never approached a woman myself. I thought about this girl every waking moment and it nearly killed me. I was starving myself, completely unable to eat, and I found it increasingly difficult to catch my breath. Then on one occasion I saw her with another boy of about her own age if not older still, and while he wasn’t a brother of mine, he was precisely their type, indistinguishable from them, so that he might as well have been one of them, and of course the first moment they thought they were alone they turned to each other and began kissing. They had no idea anyone was watching. I stared at them. I recall this moment clearly; I was in excruciat ing pain, I felt myself dying, that is, I felt death, watching them; and as I watched and suffered with no clear sense of time, I felt also a desire or sense emerging out of this deadly feeling and, to put it badly, hovering over it, and I was seized by this feeling, this growing overpowering feeling, which seemed liable to overcome my pain, but which seemed just as liable to marry with the pain I was feeling, which grew forever, and amounted to a piercing longing to know how it felt to be him, how it felt to be her; I was drawn completely out of myself toward them by my desire to feel what they were feeling. How did that feel?—this demand hammered at me, and drove me right out of my mind, I would say; as I watched them I felt as if I were drilling my gaze into them and turning them to stone, but I also knew that they were alive, and I imagined I could palpably experience the life that was in them both, and the particular flavor of that life in that instant as the two of them met in those bestial kisses. How did that feel? How did that feel? After a while, it was only a nice little while for them, they left, and I remained where I was—I had been standing still watching them almost on the tips of my toes, taking a pounding of another type—I was disappearing, I thought, I let myself fall on my side, as if I were rather idly throwing my body into a corner, and, if I remember this right, I rolled onto my back, and I saw my uncle Heckler watching me intently from a few yards away. I read in the expression on his expressive face that he had seen everything, but moreover I knew that he had understood perfectly everything he had seen, and this was such a wild and foreign relief to me that I was able to close my eyes, and forgo making any effort. I allowed myself to be carried.
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