Ray Bradbury

Now that we are well into the 'B's I find it fruitful to have a little pre-blog about Ray Bradbury, since there are a few volumes of his on my shelf and I wouldn't know how to fit my thoughts on the man himself into a blog on either of those. Besides, there are a few novels which deserve mention that are sadly NOT on my shelf, them having been read at a particularly cash-less time in my life. But I digress.

I was introduced to Ray Bradbury when a high school girlfriend of mine suggested that we head down to the local Borders where one of her favorite authors was signing books. Having spent most of my high school years with my nose buried in the medievalesque worlds of Tolkien I had not taken much time to venture into the science-fiction realm and had not yet read any Bradbury. I knew he had written the Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 but it was easy to simply classify him as a sci-fi author and dismiss him. This is a perception which I now fight to mend, but I will talk more on that below.

When we arrived at the Bookstore a modest line had wrapped itself around the side of the building. As it wound its way inside I perused the stacks of books set out for the occasion, deciding that I might as well get a book signed while I was there. The volume I chose was entitled Death is a Lonely Business which I will talk about next week. But some of the volumes that I did NOT choose strangely became some of my most significant experiences of that author.

Photo appears on the back cover of A Graveyard for Lunatics, 1990

Past the table of books was a small card table with a white haired, kindly old man in shorts and sitting in a wheelchair. He signed each book with a swift flick of his wrist which I would later discover to be incredibly consistent (keep posted on this) and a surprisingly firm handshake that made him seem genuinely glad that each fan had at some point enjoyed his writing. I received the same signature, the same smile, and the same handshake and I like to think that Bradbury himself had welcomed me into the fraternity of his readers.

There are a number of books of Bradbury's that I have read and own but there are four in particular which define for me the experience of his writing. In no particular order:

Fahrenheit 451: despite Michael Moore's unwelcome intrusion into the signfication of this title, this novel illustrated something that I myself have come to hold more and more dear as our technological world progresses; the preservation of our cultures works of literary art. Bradbury's high expectation for a literary aesthetic is a perspective I have easily adopted first as a book lover and now as a student of literature (in a lecture delivered at my alma mater, Point Loma Nazarene University, just one year before I started there (unfortunate, I know) Bradbury spoke long on how a writer MUST be capable of reading, enjoying, and carrying with him/her the classic works of literature, a form of preparation that is all-to-often ignored in modern writing programs).

Dandelion Wine: Bradbury grew up in the mid-west and in no other work does he share his sense of mid-american nostalgia quite so poigniantly. I can't remember exactly how he did it, but this homogenous collection of stories easily brings a native Generation Y Californian boy into some golden vision of the boyhood of a mid-american member of the Silent Generation. This book embodied nostalgia without the kitsch; it was youth distilled and fed through a typewriter.

From the Dust Returned: I read this book in a single day and though I am not sure how that effected my experiece, it undoubtedly says something about the author's ability to engage his audience. I suppose the only identifiable comparison we could make to the narrative of this novel would be The Addams Family, but only if the Addams lacked silly humor, took pride in their mysterious genealogy, had a proud genealogy, took their relationships seriously, and lived in fear of being forgotten. I could probably devote a whole blog to simply explaining this book but to be brief: imagine if all of the classic movie monsters cohabitated in a spooky old house yet composed a loving family unit while the changing world outside seemed intent on depriving such creatures of the magic that had made them a poignant part of the human imagination.

The Martian Chronicles: If you have ever watched Star Trek you know that science-fiction, while it uses the backdrop of fantastic new worlds and alien races and astounding technology can tell us much more about what it is to be human. The Chronicles does exactly this. Though usually classified as a good spaceship story Bradbury's vision of another planet and what our race may actually do to it makes a particularly embarassing commentary on our own internalized justification of exploitation. I won't do it here but this book has a lot to say about the modern world that some people may do well to examine.

I have only selected a few books of Bradbury's but I hope it is easy to see that merely classifying him as a sci-fi author really does not do the man credit. I wouldn't begin to plase him in a category since each new story of his that I have read seems to explore a new avenue of human experience that may not be as artistic as Joyce or as prolific as Shakespeare but definitely strikes a quiet but rounded chord in my soul.

Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges

"In the entrance way hangs a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearances..."

My first introduction to Borges was in a collection entitled Labyrinths that I had found in my mother's bookshelf, a remnant from the general ed. English classes that even she admits she does not remember well enough. That particular book has since been lost but I was fortunately able to refamiliarize myself with Borges in a Latin American Lit. class I took as an undergrad (a necessary evil since language requirements prevented me from attending the Medieval lit. class that I had hoped to take. Oh cruel fate!). In that class we had only read the story "The South" but having a chance to look back through Borges stories sparked my memories of two tales that nested very well together called "The Library of Babylon" and "The Garden of Forking Paths."

Reading these stories a second time at a much later date revealed so much more about the author that was not yet available to me intellectually as a high school freshman, though then think I knew that I was missing something under the surface of the narrative.

I think Stephen King (or maybe just his filmmakers) may have clumsily stolen the concept of "The Library of Babylon" for the internalized narrative portions of Dreamcatcher. On a basic level the Library was a tower of six sides that housed bookshelves on its interior and expanded to infinity both above and below. As exciting as this concept sounds to a bibliophile like me where Borges begins to defy our expectations is in descirbing the content of the Library's books. Desribing them here would not do the story justice but suffice it to say that the contents are entirely relative. The concept of this library, ornate and fantastic in my imagination yet infinitely frustrating as well, was a great introduction to the genius of Borges.

"The Garden of Forking Paths" performs a similar function in telling the story of a man expecting to find the eponymous garden yet discovering (though not entirely understanding) that its medium is not soil and seed but pen and paper. I believe this may have been my first introduction to metanarrative. I remember understanding the story for the first time, setting the book down, looking at the wall and feeling somewhat dizzy, then grinning wildly at the startling fact that the book had practically come to life in my hands.

I think it is moments like these that make a lifelong student of literature's pursuits wholy worthwhile. Though that class had introduced us to a number of very fascinating Latin American authors (some of whom I'm sure I will introduce to you soon) in my experience Borges is number 1.
----
Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. Ed. Anthony Kerrigan. New York: Grove Press, 1962.

Deferment

True believers,
Thank you for your patience these last few weeks. In finishing a paper and preparing a lecture this past week I have not been able to carve out the time to write a blog. But never fear, this coming Monday shall find us with good tidings of a great blog which I believe will be about Ray Bradbury. Stay tuned!
-SE

The House with the Clock in its Walls, etc. - John Bellairs

Despite the fact that I am, to my knowledge, completely alone in my experience and appreciation for the children's author John Bellairs his novels have come to occupy a poignant and terrifying position in my literary development.

In my elementary years I had been all but obsessed with the popular book series of the time known as Goosebumps by the pseudo-author R.L. Stine. The series was fun and satisfied the prepubescent need for thrills along with the illusion that reading such stories somehow undermined the parental establishment. But after Monster Blood IV I began to recognize the formula upon which the series was based and their exciting glamor began to fade. It was around this time that I began to notice a certain book being advertised in the Scholastic Book Fair flyer. I had nothing to go on besides the cover but it appeared far more terrifying than anything Stine's imagination could conjur up.

The book was titled The House With the Clock in its Walls and though Bellairs' intended audience was similar to that of Stine the thrills and chills as well as the poignancy of the bildungsroman (protagonist's coming-of-age) made Goosebumps look like bland oatmeal. In retrospect I find it somewhat humorous that my middle school, a conservative protestant organization, was the very institution that handed out the Book Fair flyers. At the time it was the popular response of the overprotective parents of the school's students to make doubly sure that the dastardly Goosebumps series did NOT find its way into the susceptible paws of their little foo-foos, but their sensors failed to catch the presence of this novel, probably due to a lack of awareness. Had they known the content of Bellairs' stories (and had they been more popular, I beeing the only person I know to have read him) a similar stink to that of the Mid-american Christian response to the supposedly demonic content of the Harry Potter series would have been made.

I personally have always maintained that Bellairs' stories were the aesthetic precursors to Rowling's books. The House with the Clock in its Walls tells the story of a young boy named Lewis Barnavelt, orphaned at a young age and sent to live with his uncle Jonathan and his uncle's friend named Mrs. Zimmerman, both of whom turn out to be amiable users of magic. The story that unfolds is undoubtedly familiar: an evil wizard, long since considered dead, has hidden away a secret device that will allow him to return from the grave to wreck havoc upon the living. Bellairs' wizard preceeded Voldemort by nearly thirty years.

It is hard to say exactly what it was that made Bellairs' novel strick so much richer a chord with my sense of the macabre than those of Stine. Both authors had a tendency toward the formulaic plot and fairly standard narrative styles (from what I remember). Perhaps the reason I found The House With the Clock in its Walls so much more effective in portraying an accurate presentation of terror was his use of darkness. In many ways Stine's novels had a tendency to reveal the final trick at his novels' conclusions and even though this often presented itself in some final contrived twist, repetition from novel to novel made the technique lose its effect. Bellairs, on the other hand, was on intimate terms with darkness and the unknown.

In each of his novels a mythology is built around the antagonist, often involving a particular talisman, a spooky location, and some echo of his or her dastardly personality. But this was the extend of the portrayal of those ghosts. Like so many early Christian martyrs the legend that grows out of their death becomes more powerful than their corporeal existence could possibly have been, albiet in a far more sinister and demonic manner. Often the legend would be passed to the main character (ie. Lewis Barnavelt or one of his analogues) through an older, wiser character who left out just enough to get Lewis' imagination running, along with that of the reader. So when a ghostly shadow with red eyes appears in the graveyard it carries with it not only the terror of the moment defined mostly by the hazy and ambiguous atmosphere in which imaginaton may run wild, but the terror that the trajectory in which those imaginings has been pointed. The figure behind the gravestone is not simply the horrific blackness of the unknown; it is still this because its features are obscured, but because the reader has begun to connect the mythology of the dead wizard (for this is often the type of antagonist Bellairs uses) with this new manifestation.

Keenly put; Bellairs knew how to tell stories. My best illustration occured when I was probably in sixth grade. Up until fourth grade I had devoured every R.L. Stine book available in pursuit of the thrill that I know I might regret. Up until that point I had read plenty of 'scary' stories but the inherent campiness of Stine's books would permanently keep the horror bar quite low; nothing he wrote ever kept me up at night. One night, after spending most of the day reading of the exploits of one of Bellairs' protagonists as he wandered the maze of a vast and abandoned mansion alone at night in search of a talisman that would allow him to defeat the ghost of the mansion's undead master, I was attempting to go to sleep. But in that halfway point, the twilight of waking, the darkness that had surrounded the novel's protagonist began to creep over my brain, taking shape but remaining without a definite form. I began to sense what Anthony Monday (the antagonist) must have sensed always just beyond his view in the blackness of unlit staircases and creeping beneath the rugs in dusty corridors. Somewhere out of this darkness a hooded figure reached out with a tentacled hand to pull me into the black madness when I awoke, trembling with adrenaline and completely unable to peel my eyes away from the door of my childhood walk-in closet (which is another issue altogether). That night I kept my reading lamp on and read old issues of MAD Magazine until the sun came up. The experience was terrifying but effectively illustrated the art of trusting your audience's imagination to provide its own version of fear.
----

Bellairs, John. The Best of John Bellairs (includes: The House with a Clock in its Walls; 1973, The Figure in the Shadows; 1975, and The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring; 1976). New York, Dial Books.