You all know what dramatic irony is, right?
Now this is the point in the script where I pause for a brief moment, say something like, "No? Well that's funny because . . ." and then pause again for a beat before dropping some kind of humorous comment that's meant to break the ice and steer us right into the column itself. People love it, I'm sure, judging by my lack of feedback. Because I always assume that if nobody says anything, I must be doing something right. And by "something right" I mean "hilariously popular". But this is what happens when you assume. This is also what happens when you try to start in a different fashion to break with the formula but instead get bogged down in the complicated morass of your own ego.
So. That said, let's start again.
I love dramatic irony. I like the sounds of the words even since I first heard them sometime in high school, no doubt in English class and probably having something to do with Shakespeare. Something about Romeo not knowing that Juliet isn't really dead and the whole time he's going on about how life isn't worth living now that she's a corpse you're trying not to shout at the page, "You idiot! Just wait five more minutes and she'll be fine" because that will just seem weird. But he does himself in anyway and she wakes up a minute later and events follow their logical course, leading you to remember that it's not called "Romeo and Juliet: Smiles and Hugs" but "Romeo and Juliet: A Tragedy". That's how it's always been defined for me, as you knowing something that the character doesn't know. Wait. Let me refine that. It's me knowing something that the character doesn't know as it relates to the plot. Dramatic irony is not that I know calculus or that I can name all the members of REM and Romeo can't. That's not the point. The point, and I may be reading too much into the theory behind it, is that it can further a greater emotional connection with the story, by actively involving the reader in the story, giving him or her "secret" knowledge, cloaked to the point where the characters don't even know it. By knowing that, you're not a bystander anymore, you've got one foot into the land of fiction, you have no choice but to sit there and wonder what these things mean, that these fake people don't know about. You sit there and ponder and try to see how it all fits in and what the reactions might be when they find out. You're drawn in, a catalyst to your own capture, despite everything you spin the web around yourself and make sure that it sticks. The story is no longer just a block of the unreal, you have a connection with it, in the same way when you read a newspaper article about someone you once knew. You feel part of it, without being in it.
In another sense, it's nice to know something that someone else doesn't. We feel superior, although lording that over people who don't exist probably is a sign that you're not quite connected with reality. Just suggesting. No offense or anything. A lot of times in stories facts are held from us, we're subjected to twists, to things that we don't see coming, the characters have all the cards but don't reveal them to us right away. So for once we get a glimpse into something that they won't find out right away, and it's nice. Well, it's good and bad. It creates a different kind of tension, waiting for the payoff, but this time it's all self generated. You can try to blame the story but all it's done is handed you the tools, what you do with them is entirely up to you.
Of course, this leads into the question, does everyone experience the same dramatic irony from the same story? Was does that mean? Ooh, I sense we're going somewhere esoteric. Everyone buckle your safety belts. What I'm trying to say is, we've defined dramatic irony as knowing something the character doesn't . . . but is that something a bit of knowledge that is just handed to us via some kind of info dump, the narrator basically coming out and telling us something that the characters won't find out for some time. Or does it count when you figure something out ahead of the characters? You realize who the killer is or what caused the lights to go out or that the girl who everyone thinks is his sister is really his brother. Or that the calls are really coming from inside the house! Heh. I love that line. But you weren't told that specifically, you've guessed it. So does it still count? After all, you feel like you know something they don't. But maybe you're wrong. And won't you feel silly then? Who's got the irony then, eh, chuckles? So maybe I'm defining it too broadly again and will probably invalidate a lot of what I'm about to talk about. Perhaps no one will care either way because I'm just so darn entertaining.
Or perhaps I'm just reading too much into things, as usual. I think the inscription on my tombstone is going to read "Will you just get on with it already?" when all is said and done.
I keep promising myself, and by extension the readers out there, that I won't spend the first page or two of the column just rambling about whatever vaguely relevant nonsense pops into my head. And I break that promise every single time. There's something to be said for rampant consistency. It would help actually if I at some point mentioned the story I'm supposed to be talking about, although I'm sure you can guess it by that long introduction up there. Can't you? I thought it was clear. I wonder if anyone ever reads this and goes, "I bet he's going to talk about my story" before I actually bother to relay what I'm going to talk about. I wonder how many of those people are disappointed. Not as many as you might expect, perhaps. I'm afraid one time I'm going to do an entire column and finish it and sit back and realize that I never actually talked about any kind of story. Just a big ol' monument erected to my boundless ego. If it falls, you'll all be crushed.
All right, enough of that. Laura Kelly, come on down. We're going to go through her story "The Horrible Mile" this time out. We'll try to stay on point this time, I'll probably get back into the dramatic irony thing a little later although it's rather tangential but I like having something else to talk about other than, "Well in this paragraph the sentence here could use a little sprucing up." From the story, it's clear that she knows what she's doing, she has the basics down at least and thus doesn't need me going through every other word with a fine toothed comb. If she wanted me to write the story for her she could have just mailed me a letter and written me a check and called it a day. However, I would have turned this story into a bloated mess.
People who aren't writers (and even some who are) tend to come under the impression that writing a short story is the easiest form of writing there is because "you don't do have to do as much." The reality of course is that writing a good short story is just as hard if not harder than writing a novel. All the stuff that we stretch out over five hundred pages you basically have to cram into ten (or less, if you're good) not only telling a complete story but giving the reader enough information that they actually give a darn about the story. So you really have to hit the ground running, which as we've seen so far, isn't exactly my strong point. Thus I have a great admiration for people who can pull it off. I try to blame my inability on my boundless ambition, but that's probably not true. You have to be able to do several things at once in the course of the narrative, or risk stretching an idea that can really only sustain ten pages into some overblown fifty page epic, with the only result being that it looks absurdly padded.
That's why Ms Kelly goes about it the right way here. In my bombastic fashion I probably would have started the story off with some melodramatic scene of big fat Ty being mocked by his classmates and then showing his years of working out in order to get his weight down to something reasonable. But that's the wrong way to start and here is the right way to start, throwing us into the middle of the action. Ty's already in the race, he's reflecting on the things that have brought him here, and along the way filling us in on what's going on. The trick is to keep it simple, of course. Ty was fat and he's not fat anymore, or at least he's not obese. He wants to run a race, to prove to all the people who said he was a fat lard-ass that he's not that kind of man-beast anymore. He's motivation by that most simplest of desires, revenge, the desire to get up in front of his former classmates and say, "Yeah, you thought you knew me, but this is how I really am and I proved you all wrong?" And who can blame him? How many of us have wanted to do the same thing, seen ourselves stamped with a label that we think is unfair and have spent our entire lives trying to outrun it, trying to change it and by changing it, change peoples' minds about you. Which is easier said than done. Of course, it's another issue altogether why people who you will probably never see again matter so much to you. Do they still think about him? Probably not. Sometimes I wonder what happened to the people I never see, but I'm alone in that if only because I'm relentlessly curious. You occupy the same building with some people for five years or so, you grow up with them but at the end you all go your separate ways and that's it. They find new people to replace the ones that they don't see anymore, people that they can choose to be around and aren't thrown together with by some quirk of age and geography. You're merely a darkened facet, an annoying sliver that was plucked out and tossed aside a long time ago. Which is fine, when you accept that sort of thing. But there are some people, like Ty here, who become obsessed with not just their own image, but the image of how other people see him. He doesn't want to go down in eternity as "that fat guy", so he tries to change it. And he does, to some extent, and that should be enough. We should do these things for ourselves, so that we can look in the mirror and go, "I did a good thing. I didn't think I could do it, and I did." It rarely works out that way though, because we're vain creatures, thriving on what others think of us.
I got all that from the first few paragraphs or so. In a short story you have to say a lot with a little, since your space is limited. So the words you use, the phrases you choose are essential and I think she does as good job here, setting the scene without giving us too many details and moving into the action without wasting any time. The premise is simple. Ty was fat and now he's not and he wants to run this race so he give all the people who made fun of him the big middle-finger. This doesn't require a twenty page prologue but in the hands of some writers it might. The fact that Laura realizes this and choose to do it this way I think speaks to a grasp of the economy of writing. It could take up a lot of space, but it doesn't have to. Here's the evidence, if you would.
This is classified as a horror story, according to where I found it on the site and I'm not really sure if the author herself submitted it as that type of story or the people who sort the stories out for the site put it there because they decided it was that kind of story. And the first time I read through it I really didn't see where the horror was. Our former fat man tries to run a race, overreaches himself and drops dead during the course of the race. The end. That's not really scary because we all see this coming. The hints are already there in the beginning portions of the story, as he reflects on his mad quest. He states he's never really run a marathon in a while, only smaller races, and because of work he's been out of practice for a while. I never run races and there's a good chance, as healthy as I am, that if I tried to run a marathon I'd probably die too. There's only so much the human body can take. So it's not really horror so much as suspense, waiting to see if Ty will come to his senses before his body and medical history finally do him in. And of course he doesn't because he's a stupid person who thought he could do something that was beyond him. That's not scary, not frightening in the conventional sense. People die all the time, for silly reasons. And Ty did bring it upon himself, nobody forced him to, he made no deal with evil spirits, nobody knifed him in the back while he was running, he went out and ran and died. The end. If human stubbornness frightens you (and it does to me, sometimes) then maybe you might feel a tremor of fear, briefly.
But you know what, it's really just a quirk of genre selection. We don't really judge stories here based on how well they hold up to their genre conventions, we judge them by whether they're good stories or not. If someone slips a copy of The Naked and the Dead into someone's review pile for Harlequin Romance Monthly, is it the fault of the book that it's a crappy romance, judged by the standards of the genre. No. Sure, it's a sucky romance but that's not the point. That's not what we're here for. Or at least not what I'm here for. If I wanted stories to be by the numbers, then there's a whole wall of that stuff at the bookstore if I feel so inclined, written by professionals who will make the clichés go down easily.
There are, however, different kinds of horror. Going back to English class again (and you thought this stuff would stop being important after graduation), we know that there's at least two kinds that I can remember . . . internal and external. It's not always the crazy man with an axe who gives us the biggest fright. Ty, what have you done? We see here a man obsessed, a man warped by desires to the point that it eclipses all rational judgment. He wants to be thin, and he's nearer to that goal than he's ever been. But that's not enough. And the things he wants he really can't have but he's going to try, not for noble reasons, but for selfish and petty reasons. Reasons that he'll pursue past all point of sanity, when your body is telling you to stop but you don't care anymore, you're not listening because it doesn't matter, only the need matters, only the sick impulses that are keeping you going mean anything to you. Ty runs and Ty dies and we see it coming the entire time, even if he doesn't. He's blind, struck blind by the taunts of classmates five years dead, comments that probably nobody even remembers. But he remembers and he's determined to do something about it. And he does, in frightening, elaborate fashion. No, he doesn't put on a mask and stab all the people who made fun of him back in the day, snarling "How do you like me now?" to every person right before he stabs the dagger down. He doesn't need to, he thrusts it all inward and proceeds to embark on a complicated form of suicide. Because this is the only way it can end. A form of mutilation without scars, no different from the girl sitting in a darkened room, wondering why she can't cry even as she carves another mark into her arm, watching blood well up in perfectly straight lines. Ty could have cut all the fat off of his body and cooked it and invited his unknowing friends over and served it to them . . . and it wouldn't be as unsettling as the lengths a man will go to prove a point that nobody cares about anymore. That's the internal horror, the things you convince yourself of when it's dark out and you're alone and you have nothing to stop you but your thoughts. He pushes himself into a shape that he can't conform to and although we're only seeing the end result, we can envision all the mad steps that led here, and to see the final outcome of this odd race, as he goes down smiling, oblivious to the very end . . . it feels wrong. You want to stop him, but it's already too late. The gun has fired and he's already off and out of our reach.
It's not just Ty here who serves up the horror though, it's society itself, the third source that we never blame. Or maybe not society so much as the environment, the kind of life he grew up under, with all the external pressures that it entailed. They drove him to this, and when I say "they" I mean all the people who called him fat, who made up clever but cruel names for him, out of teasing, out of a sense of outright sadism, to make themselves feel better than him, to watch him brought low for no other reason than his waistline was a bit too large. We know these people. We are these people, in some fashion, how many of us can honestly say we've never muttered something under our breath when some overweight person squeezes past us, when we see someone grossly large wearing clothes too small for them, when they sit in front of us at movie theaters, when they see next to us on airplanes, when we see them and wonder, "How could you do that to yourself? How could you let it get that bad?" Never realizing that it's never an easy decision, that we never wake up in the morning and go "Today I'm going to embark on a journey to fatness", it's a series of little steps, tiny failures that lead you right down the slope, the kind of hesitant path that makes you stare at the ground the entire time, so that when you finally do look up, everything is different. You're different. Ty was different and those people felt superior to him and tried to make him feel every second of that. And in the one sense it did a good thing, it forced him to lose the weight, to become a healthier person. But on the other hand it brings him to the point that we find him at in the beginning of the story, determined to do whatever it takes to make the people he'll probably never see again perceive him differently. He probably wasn't perfect when he was heavy, but he was probably reasonably well-adjusted. Now we see him railing at ghosts and engaging in what can only be described as elaborate self-torture. This is what he's reduced to, what he sees as the only way out. And the people who did this to him, who allowed him to do it to himself, probably never realized the extent of their cruelty, what it would eventually lead to. Or maybe they did and they just don't care. And this is what happens, when nobody cares. The scariest thing of all. They did it, and they never saw anything wrong with it. Because he's fat and it's okay. Who taught them that? Their parents? And who taught them that? Society? You can feel a little bit sorry for Ty here, as far as he's responsible for his own actions, you can almost believe that he was driven to this point the same way that bison were driven off cliffs in the old days. With a line of torches and a lot of shouting guiding you down the only path you can see, driving you crazy the whole way down so that when you finally reach an option, you make the leap, not because you want to, but because it's the best choice you see and it's the only thing you can do. That's scary to me, to get to that point and not know what else to do. To do it and feel like you've done the right thing. That's where the horror lies, that everyone around him gave him the gun and the knife and said, go ahead, use them, it's okay. And they smiled, because it was all in good fun. Because nobody realized and nobody cared. That's what happens, when you don't give a damn. When you tell someone, "the cliff is that way" not thinking about what they'll do if they take your advice. So wrapped in yourself that you don't even hear the diminishing screams, or the sickening crunch at the end. When they're at the bottom of the hole you don't even see the blood.
Whew. Now that we've worked that theme to death, let's move onto something else. Laura builds the oddness at a nice pace, contrasting it with Ty's extreme overconfidence, showing us a little bit of weirdness here, another fragment there, gradually building the atmosphere until you really can't ignore it and it's clear that something is amiss. She captures the monotonous motion of running fairly well, giving us a sense of the weariness involved in running lots of miles and the random thoughts that pop into your head when you really don't have anything else to think about. The prose reflects that determination, the sense of putting your head down and continuing to run, even when your body doesn't want to, even when you're really just coasting on inertia and any second you expect either to just stop or reach the finish line and you don't really care which one comes first.
One thing in the story that I'm not sure on, and this may be where a As Others See It section would come in handy for this column, is whether she tips her hand too early with the "I'm surrounded by the dead" motif that crops up late in the story and ultimately brings us to the end. The first mention of it, and maybe earlier mentions are so subtle that my keen eyes didn't notice them, is when Ty sees his Uncle Joe, who we're told right away is dead. Right away the alarm bells went off in my head and I saw where we were going with this, really the only way that this could end. When the second girl, also dead, showed up, that just confirmed it and by that point it was just a matter of waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak. So I don't know if it would have been a better idea to hold off on the "he's dead!" reveal at least until a couple of other dead people had shown up. Maybe just when he sees Uncle Jim, have him note that, hey it does look like Uncle Jim but have him think, "But it can't possibly be" without really saying why it can't be him. And then as you go along, gradually reveal that he's seeing dead people until the point that the reader realizes the reason that he's seeing dead people is quite simple . . . he's not cast in a sequel, he's one of the brain-eaters himself. Like I said, I really don't know if that really affects anyone's reading of the story, or if changes like that would alter the mood any . . . that's not really my call. I highly doubt I'm so astute that I just picked up on it right away . . . but I guess it's one of those things the author has to decide. Try it the other way and see what happens, I guess.
This of course is where the dramatic irony comes in (I told you it'd be back) because it becomes very clear to us that Ty is dying or already dead and we're just waiting for the story to explicitly tell us that so we can go home. And I like how this is set up, that we're seeing more and more of the dead people, like Ty himself is jogging down that great tunnel of light that we all must go to. And it becomes obvious to us that he's dead, so what we get here is a juxtaposition of "what we know" versus "what he knows" and as it turns out it's really two entirely different things. We all know that he's running into the hereafter and in a sense it almost makes the story a type of dark comedy, because we see him straining harder and harder and he thinks it's going to get him the adulation that he craves . . . while we know all it's going to get him is an early grave. Each person that we see that's dead only cements it, until you want to yell at the page for him to stop running, because doesn't he see, can't he see the signs, he's running into death (if Laura was a lot less clever, she could have made that her title . . . it does sound like something Roger Corman would have had a ball with, though). But we don't do that, of course, because he's not real. And frankly, it's just weird, to yell at your computer. He thinks he's won the race and maybe he has, but we know it's just the opposite of the race he wanted to win. He's ahead of us, but not in the way he thinks he is and there's no going back to the starting line and trying again. And by knowing what we know, it feels odd, like having been told that the guy in the next room only has six months to live and finding out that he doesn't even know that yet. Shifting the burden. How are we supposed to feel, now that we know? Glad, because he's dying and he'll soon be dead? It's irony twisted, we can't sit back smugly and think, "Well now I have all it figured it", it's thrown back in our faces with a silent taunt, the implied, "Now what are you going to do about it?" But we can't do anything about it. It's already written, we can just follow it through to the end. To his end. The knowledge engages us, instead of keeping it a surprise, like she could have done, Laura pulls the curtain away early and by doing that keeps us reading. Because maybe we're wrong, maybe the story is lying to us. Maybe that's not what's going to happen. But sometimes a duck is a duck and sometimes when a person stretches himself too far, he snaps, and collapses and that's the end of it. The story is pushed up against us, uncomfortably close and you either have to blink and look away, or stare right into it and accept what you know is coming.
Laura could have ended this in a much more brutal fashion than she did. I half expected to see all the dead people that Ty knew materialize in the fashion of their death, Uncle Jim, emaciated and wasted, ravaged by cancer. Vicki, with rope burns around her neck, or blood still leaking from slit wrists, or from the neat hole she drilled into her own head. The old lady, her skin turned translucent, dragging behind her a dialysis machine that you can't see. The author doesn't go this route, which is probably a good idea and would have dragged what so far had been a very even tempered story into someplace very dark, definitely into the realm of horror. But some things we don't need to see and instead death is treated as more of a gentle thing, Ty is greeted by the people who went before him. He's given the adulation he desires, but from the dead, only from the dead. The only people who talk about him among the living don't even know who he is. We don't hear the voices of friends mourning his loss. Perhaps they never came. Maybe they were never real. He drops dead in a crowd full of people and nobody cares. The final horror, the thought that we cease to exist beyond death, that everything we ever were means nothing, all the memories we tried to generate nothing more than dust, barely worth the mental effort to summon them up. It occurs to me that I keep trying to drag this story into somewhere horrific, an existential zone that I don't think she wanted to go in. Which probably says a lot about how I think, or at least how I approach these things. The impact of the ending of this story depends more on the contrast between what Ty knows and what we know. He thinks he's succeeded but all he's succeeded in doing is breaking the barrier and crossing over to the other side. And while it's not a surprise, part of you still hopes for a last second save, that this tragic tale instead becomes a cautionary one, a warning against obsession. Ty's cluelessness is what saves the story from becoming too over the top, he ends the story the same as he began, not really knowing what's going on. Laura gets bonus points for not finishing on a melodramatic note, having Ty drop to his knees in whatever realm of the dead he's in, screaming "NOOOOOO!" while shaking his fist at the grey skies. Or by having the specters of the dead attack him, tearing his ectoplasmic body to pieces for some slight that we're not aware of, some kind of weird karma coming back to haunt him. Instead it wraps up in an almost kindly fashion, despite the best efforts of the subject matter to drag it somewhere very dark. This is not a story you read while playing your Joy Division albums, it's almost . . . nice, in a way. Which, frankly, is a change of pace.
Is it horror? Who cares? I think we've already established that's not for you or me or anyone to judge. If the author thinks it is, well that's good enough for me, but like I said I don't critique stories based on what they're supposed to be, but how they are. And this is a worthy tale, it says what it has to say and gets out, giving you the necessary information so that the story makes sense, without belaboring anything. It sets up the premise, moves things along and then bows out before its overstayed its welcome. Like a good pop song, it may not change your life and it may not resonate in your head two weeks after you've read it, but while it's on, it's rather good. Time spent reading it is certainly not wasted time (unlike these last few pages here) and I certainly hope you read it before reading this (especially since I gave away just about every nuance of the plot . . . why are you here first?) because it's definitely worth a look. I'd be curious to see what else she's done or will do, if she continues in this style or has other stories that are drastically different. You certainly can't make any sweeping statement about someone from one story and I'm not about to, although that does seem like typical behavior for me. It's not bad, it's good and that's all I have to say.
See, I'm not always longwinded. As he looks at the previous eight single spaced pages. Ah, nevermind. Pay no attention to me.
Happy holidays, all. Give each other stuff. Act like you mean it. If you do it long enough, you may find that you do.
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12.17.05
"One good minute could last me a whole year . . ." - Superchunk, "The First Part"
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