the art of war

My duskglass.net strategy approaches the target from two different vantage points. First, I will examine the novel's language and culture using a critical method based in whatever I am thinking about at the time. Then, I will identify other manifestations of Uskglass-like characters in books that are not Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Also, there's a trebuchet (no there isn't).

The Uskglass parts aren't as hard as the other stuff; I think Clarke's character is such a deep-myth relic that other interpretations of it are relatively common. Uskglass has some direct (that Wikipedia image is an abomination) precursors (that Wikipedia image is also an abomination) in traditional British literature, but I'm currently pursuing antecedents in other cultures — early work has indicated possible involvement by Classical mythology, and maybe even some shady Yahweh influences. These parts are not only less than but also much different from the sum of their accumulation, of course. The transmitted object is not the clean, stable lines of some hypothetical story-symbol, but an atmosphere of mystery. Eventually the mystery usurps, and then erases, whatever was intended to be signified in the first place — and then the story itself becomes an expression of unnameable mystery. Nobody cares about that kind of thing but me, probably; I don't mind. I'm not working for tips. Vague antiquities aside, one of my favorite semi-Uskglasses appears in a recent YA novel called Archivist Wasp, in the person of a seductively nameless ghost who severs the novel's protagonist from the narrative of her own existence and initiates her transformation into the World Savior. Look at this:

The ghost was sitting in her only chair, surrounded by mismatched stacks of paper in various degrees of fire-damage, water-damage, unidentifiable staining, mildew, and general dissolution. It appeared to be reading her field notes.
“Get your boots off my table,” she snapped, and did not quite squirm under the look it fixed her with, or under the ensuing silence as it went back to reading.
Force of habit, she found herself studying it. It was all she could do not to pull out her notebook and start sketching it on the spot. Its clothing was basic and dark, something like a uniform but not one she recognized from any ghost she’d seen before. The gun and sword were in its belt. The ghost turned pages with a trained precision, a spring-loaded sort of predatory grace in which no fraction of any movement went wasted. Between its person and its clothing there was no color to it anywhere; it was all pale and dark, with those gray eyes. Its face was sharp, guarded, possessed of an icy and immaculate calm. Its posture was miles better than hers. It hadn’t moved its boots.
Usually Wasp didn’t find silences awkward and felt no need to fill them with pointless chatter, but this, this was unendurable.
“I didn’t know you could read,” she said.

And:

The ghost cut its eyes at her, pure scorn. “I see they were mistaken.”
It dropped a mocking little bow before her and walked out, trailing what remaining bonds of salt and blood she’d not yet broken, which it had snapped at whim.

I really, really, really like Archivist Wasp. I was going to review a series of YA novels last year, which I thought would be both fun and perhaps surprising. I find the Millennialesque reshuffling of gender norms inspiring, so why not their vision of the bildungsroman? Haha, what a gullible fool I am. After attempting to survive about twenty different popular books, chosen for their genre themes from Amazon, I begged off without even really starting. The worst, most conservative, heteronormative, claustrophobic, depressing, old-fashioned writing in the world is currently happening in the realm of YA novels. All the genre's heroines are exceptionally-ordinary self-inserts who are constrictingly adored by boring (and often violent) hunks. It's hunk after hunk after sad-manbaby 1950s beefcake hunk in the Young Adult World, all rendered in a primary-color paint-by-numbers palette that would strike a frustrated mid-century housewife as uninspiring. But Archivist Wasp isn't like that! Is, in fact, exactly not like that. (The ghost's lack of a gendered pronoun is suggestive, is what I'm telling you.) It was one of two YA novels published in the last 30 years by someone not named Ursula K. Le Guin that didn't make me want to kill myself. I highly recommend it, both for the Uskglass mirror-content and for itself. Best DRM-free $10 you'll ever spend. I hope there's a sequel. (That's a joke.) (Most YA novels are half-a-book's worth of content spread out into 34876 commemorative volumes.) (I would indeed be very happy to read Archivist Wasp: The Second, however.)

Well. I've also been doing a lot of reading, for the last couple of years, that pertains (in my imagination, at least) to JS&MN's literary contexts. Probably my most favorite of the contexts are written by Robert Aickman, who until very recently I believed to be a lesbian operating under a pseudonym. Aickman was not a lesbian, it turns out, but rather a very large, fluffy British cat that, in the 1950s and 60s, gained access to, and somehow learned to operate, a typewriter. I've read nearly everything Aickman ever published; I had to import hard copies of The Late Breakfasters (favorite) and The Model (not a favorite), but I read those, too. The Late Breakfasters is much different than the rest of Aickman's work, most of which he self-identified as "strange stories" because of some German mood-word that the late Mark Fisher was also interested in, and which I don't understand at all but will try to deal with later. Breakfasters has some weird-fiction attributes in common with the rest of Aickman's canon, but I believe it's primarily intended to be a social satire (?). Like Animal Farm, maybe (?), but with people. People Farm? Maybe. It's full of political and cultural details I don't get, or even understand how to unpack, but which Aickman presents in a way that makes them seem both ludicrous and performative. So... satire, right? Who knows. I identified hard with the novel's protagonist, Griselda. I consider that my life has mostly been an attenuated escape from the Geoffrey Kynastons of the world, and a simultaneous, resolute flight toward Louise. Although, unlike Griselda, I was never privileged to actually fuck Louise; I've only ever read about her in books. Still, it's maddening to imagine that she exists in the world somewhere, and I can't get to her. I'm going to keep looking. (I do realize.)

Despite the buildup, this excerpt isn't from The Late Breakfasters. I have discovered that it's hard to excerpt the book and have it look suitably meaningful, because the story is so involved with its own conditions and symbols. This is from "Bind Your Hair," a very strange story that appeared in Dark Entries:

The next morning Clarinda had to admit to herself that she was very depressed. As she lay in bed watching wisps of late-autumn fog drift and swirl past her window, she felt that inside the house was a warm and cosy emptiness in which she was about to be lost. She saw herself, her real self, for ever suspended in blackness, howling in the lonely dark, miserable and unheard; while her other, outer self went smiling through an endless purposeless routine of love for and compliance with a family and a community of friends which, however excellent, were exceedingly unlike her, in some way that she did not fully understand.

omg it me

More when I find it.

when i hear songs, they sound like a swan

No Quincunx for you; I didn’t read it. I DIDN’T READ IT, LIKE IN SCHOOL.

Thor took my electricity for two days after my last post, probably because I said he was boring (Thor you are boring) (I’m very sorry, sir, please try to work your hot ass into a better series of films), and so I ended up having to read an actual book. Made of pages. And it wasn’t about English people. I’m still recovering.

Instead of The Quincunx — which in addition to being excellent is also physically heavy — I read Kalpa Imperial again. Like The Quincunx, it is also one of my favorite novels, but it can be picked up with only the one hand. Kalpa Imperial is a collection of stories by a single author (Angélica Gorodischer), writing in the voices of dozens of different storytellers who are compiling the pseudo-oral history of a great, fallen, and imaginary empire; it consists of radiantly original fairytales germinated from myths originating in Spain, Persia, and the United Kingdom, among others. Like most great books, though, it builds from these ordinary materials a house no wind blows over. (An incandescent house? Made of flowers?)

My very favorite of the parts of Kalpa Imperial is a story called "The End of a Dynasty, or, The Natural History of Ferrets." You can get it in its entirety for free here (it's an excerpt by the book's English publisher, not an illegal download). Go read it, I’ll wait.

That was great, wasn’t it? I truly have the best taste in books, I know, I should start a blog. Would you like to watch me connect this story to another of my favorite books, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, using evidence? Of course you would, what am I saying:

You have, I’m sure, noticed the presence of a nameless king at the center of each of these fictions — if you wanted to be picky you might point out that in the case of the Ninth Head of the Hehvrontes Dynasty the monarch is technically an emperor, and an emperor and a king aren’t the same thing, but what are you, the police? — despised and marginalized and chased from his lands and his Right, and also something other than mortal (the Nameless 9th’s "[…]father took as his empress a Southern woman reputed to be not entirely human") (John Uskglass is like 645 years young in the pages of Strange & Norrell) (and hot-looking) (important). Both John Uskglass and Loo’Loö are famous poets, and although we aren’t allowed to see any of Loo’Loö’s poetry or music we know it’s good enough to have gone down in history. His name has been stolen from him and ruined, but he could not be divested of his authority over the hearts of men. Both characters represent the reconciliation of the dark and the light together, embodied in their dispositions and in their fortunes as well as in the pigmentation of their persons — and also in the weather, which provides both Uskglass and Loo with theatrical backdrops for particularly dramatic scenes. Both characters preside over the dismantling (by others, all right) of the crippling patriarchies established without their consent in their forgotten names. Both characters pass from the servants' quarters to the throne — but unfortunately for poor Loo, he goes down toward tragedy instead of ascending in the direction of the historical. They are both my boyfriends.

Perhaps you are not aware, however, of the provenance of "the Raven King" in British folklore? (Or maybe you are, in which case you can skip this paragraph.) Although the origin of the myth is probably long gone — and may never have represented a single folkloric menhir in the first place —  the Raven King was first committed to ink in The Mabinogion, which derives from the prehistoric myths of Wales (?), and is also some of the most ancient folklore in the Western world (??). The modern versions of these stories are contaminated with Christian influence in much the same way that the earliest British Arthurian stories have been ruined by it; everywhere you see a seductress or a villain or a vain, preening coward in the Matter of Britain, you can usually find a pagan hero, a famous Jesus-resistant king, or a goddess behind the curtain. The Children of Llyr have been similarly transfigured by Celtic monks, changed from gold into leaden hagiography. In many versions of their foundation myth they became such devout worshippers of Christ that they hung around a stupid monastery in the form of swans for centuries and then deferred to the spiritual expertise of a priest :[

But the swan siblings probably predate not just the Christian misconstructions, but also the more contemporary fairy tale iteration from which Shakespeare might have worked (Shakespeare didn’t work from that one, sorry) (unless he had a time machine & a library card, which I wouldn’t rule out). The theme is older, perhaps, than even writing. According to the long-forgotten authority of some ancient narrative law or other, the Children of Llyr are always associated strongly with the creatures of the air — Bran itself means "raven," even though the character doesn't seem very raven-like at all; in one of the stories in the Mabinogion, Branwyn, the lady third of the Raven Triumvirate, makes use of a starling to communicate with her brothers; the trickster/magician third of #TeamRaven, Manawydan, is linked occultly with cranes — peculiar, possibly, because "llyr" means "sea," and all three of the Raven Children were sea gods. (I think?) The story, which seems to appear in some form or other in all the cultures of the British Isles, isn’t super-coherent, and swaps mythemes pretty promiscuously with other tales which may or may not be derived from the same source(s). And although the shape of the bird-children changes from story to story, the sense of their tragedy endures — death and pain and loss, dislocation and injustice, wings beating against the vacancy. I’m not sure how starlings, cranes, and ravens turned into swans, either — and then, you know, turned into swans, if you see what I mean. There certainly couldn’t have been three or four old kings called Llyr hanging around in Iron Age Wales whose children transformed into supernatural birds, could there? Maybe it’s just that a crane looks like a swan when you see it through sea mist after you’ve had your head bashed in with a club during a battle over tribal territory? Or perhaps an official Irish storyteller just thought swans were pretty and would suggest a unifying poetic metaphor that the original stories lacked — the Wikipedia entry suggests that Britain Christianized beneath the Children as they flew uncomforted from lake to lake, and then describes how they died immediately upon descending.

Back to the context: The image of the swan is tied immediately to Loo’Loö’s position of exile in the garden where Livna’lams eventually meets his father (more on this later), "[t]he prince and the empress were already in the gardens. Sun or snow or rain or wind or hail, lightning, thunder, whatever the weather, the two of them, the little boy and the woman in white, walked every morning to the central fountain, where eight marble swans opened their wings to the water falling from a basin of alabaster." Loo even looks like a swan: "This one was shorter and slighter, lanky, also very tanned, cleanshaven, with tangled black hair, bright black eyes that looked amused, a wide mouth and a long, delicate neck." Loo’Loö sings, presumably, and plays some sort of guitar or lute-like object. He is better at cards than anyone (cf. "bluffing").

There’s an element in one of the branches of the Mabinogion which indicates that Bran, the Raven King himself, cannot be contained in a house — this is always interpreted by scholars & writers as a description of Bran’s giganticness, but I also think it might mean that Bran was just too enormous/magical/dangerous a presence to submit himself to the domestication of the hearth — and in fact attributes his untimely death to his disregard for this proscription. Although Loo and Renka (Loo’s loyal, reckless, and — coughcough — gigantic companion) are alleged to work in Livna’lams’s palace, neither of them is ever spotted indoors. They appear at the bottom of the garden always, mysterious and secret as fairies.

Lastly, one of the branches of the Mabinogion tells the story of a character called Lleu Llaw Gyffes, an isolated boy-warrior who is rejected by his wicked royal mother, who ultimately rejects the company of women himself, and whose various dialect-inflected names, if stuck all together, probably sound a bit like "Loo’Loö." (Lleu is briefly transformed into an eagle at one point as a means of escaping death, and thus he carries on the family tradition.)

Not for nothing (literally for nothing), but the story of Lleu’s failed love for his faithless flower-wife Blodeuwedd, and the inescapable weight of the myth in the blood, is the main substance of the novel The Owl Service.

I don’t know, either. It could be that when you’ve lost everything to conquerors, down to your own history, and find yourself trapped beneath the suddenly-empty sky, even the escape of death begins to look like the beautiful flight of birds.

I haven’t been able to determine if Gorodischer intentionally called upon the Mabinogion in her own variation on the story of the lost king of heaven, or if there's an Argentinian or a Spanish myth congruent to the British version, or if it just turns out that Fitzgerald was right, at least about the crossing: we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

EDITED 11 NOV 2014:  I attempted to minimize my Gingrichian fondness for modifiers in this post, and I also stamped out an outbreak of #Funny Tags.