Interfictions (2 page)

Bridge of Birds
spawned two sequels, but then Hughart quietly disappeared from the Fantasy radar, having worn out the quality that made his mythic China a novelty in that genre. Hughart's is a case of initial success as a result of forceful classification into a genre, but the eventual outcome is negative.

One might say that what I've described is merely the sad reality of the publishing business. But Hughart's case shows the problems of initial perception and the eventual effects of forceful classification based on a publisher's (mis)perception of a text. Playing devil's advocate, one might argue that Hughart had his chance with readers, that he simply represents a cases of a text that lost its potential readership to other texts more competitive in the marketplace. But both readers and publishers know the importance of initial reviews, packaging, and classification. What if
Bridge of Birds
were to be re-released into a different classification, with careful attention to sending the book to appropriate reviewers? Would it suddenly find large numbers of new readers who had not appreciated it in its first release?

Hughart's situation exemplifies how things are complicated in the DMZ of the Interstitial. Interstitial works are self-negating. That is, if they become successful to the degree that they engender imitations or tributes to themselves, or if they spark a movement which results in like-minded works, then they are no longer truly interstitial, having spawned their own genre, subgenre, or even form. The DMZ they initially inhabit becomes its own nation, so to speak.

What I am trying to illustrate is the oddly ironic quality of interstitial art. Once it manifests itself, regardless of the conditions of its creation, the interstitial work has the potential to create a retroactive historical trajectory. Further, if this historical trajectory is prominent enough, the work that sparked its discovery (or creation) then may become a representative—though not necessarily the first—work in a newly-identified genre or subgenre whose parameters the work has helped illuminate.

An example might be the form of the Revisionary Fairytale, which has become a clear subgenre by now. Although its current form is best represented by the works collected in the six volumes edited by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow as well as books like Emma Donoghue's
Kissing the Witch
, there are numerous recent works that make use of the same trope, some by established writers like Robert Coover, who enjoy a highbrow credibility for their Postmodern writing. Once this subgenre exists and is identifiable by various consistent characteristics, it is possible to begin tracing the history of the form. We might begin with a work with strong elements of Revisionary Fairytale like the film that made Reese Witherspoon famous—
Freeway
(1996)—and then look for other works that perform similar transformations on the Little Red Riding Hood story and arrive at Angela Carter's collection,
The Bloody Chamber
(1979). Carter is recognized now as one of the originators of the contemporary Revisionist Fairytale, but while doing some random reading, one might run across an even earlier text, Djuna Barnes' perplexing novel,
Nightwood
(1937), which uses tropes very similar to Carter's, and may, in fact, be a formative influence on her work. But by this time we will have noticed the Red Riding Hood motif in perfume commercials, music videos (by Tori Amos and Sarah Evans), and other recent films (Pieter van Hees's short,
Black XXX-Mas
: a.k.a.
Little Red in the Hood
).

IV. Illuminating the Interstitial

What the Interstitial does, actually, is transform the reader's experience of reading. Formerly invisible historical trajectories become visible to the reader. The interstitial work, in combination with the reader's particular perception of it, manifests itself in that particular way because the reader's “reality” has changed. We have figures of speech for this kind of transformation at a profound level—"I have seen the light,” for example—but the transformation caused by the Interstitial is far more subtle. Perhaps instead of something as extreme as “The scales have fallen from my eyes,” one might characterize this change as “A scale has fallen from my eye.” In any case, the reader has learned to see in a different light, and that change causes a reinterpretation of the reader's experience of the past—in general—though perhaps this begins with a re-examination and reinterpretation of other texts the reader has experienced.

An interstitial work provides a wider range of possibilities for the reader's engagement and transformation. It is more faceted than a typical literary work, though it also operates under its own internal logic. At Readercon, on a panel discussing Metafantasy, I used the term “bilocation” (borrowed from the practice of Remote Viewing) to describe the reader's state of mind when reading works like John Crowley's
Little, Big
, which are Fantasy but also aware of the fact that they are Fantasy and make the reader aware of that awareness. Readers can lose themselves in the world of the novel, but simultaneously maintain an awareness of the act of reading. This “bilocation” (more precisely, a “multilocality") of the reader's awareness produces a form of engagement characteristic of metafiction and altered states of consciousness. Many readers find this state of mind so uncomfortable that they reject works of this nature (often rationalizing their rejection by focusing on some perceived flaw). Interstitial works also induce a sort of multilocality in the reader's consciousness, but at a different threshold of perception. The reader may not be aware of this phenomenon, and therefore stays with the work, achieving the effect of multilocality over repeated engagements over time. This multilocality then extends to the reader's perception and memory of other works. (And once again, this is not to suggest that interstitial works cannot be metafictions.)

Once one engages with the underlying logic of the Revisionary Fairytale, for example, one can see its structural qualities in other works in various orders of magnitude. What Carter and Barnes do with the story of Little Red Riding Hood is to take an extant structure and then transform its elements or its structural dynamics, thereby creating a work with clear knowledge of its subtext but with a distinctly different rhetoric. This is what the Romans did with Greek myths when they renamed the Greek gods and goddesses and appropriated them into their own religious practices. This is also what the Romans did by attaching their mythic history
The Aenead
to the Greek epic
The Iliad
. This is what the writers of the Gospels did when they took the story of Jesus and worked it into a classic Hero tale that parallels the stories of Krishna, Mithras, Apollonius, Buddha, and even Julius Caesar.

But before such historical trajectories become apparent, the works that reveal them are interstitial—sometimes only for a short while, yet sometimes for several centuries—and by being unclassifiable, they present readers with a uniquely new literary consciousness.

In transforming the perceptions of the reader, interstitial works make the reader (or listener, or viewer) more perceptive and more attentive; in doing so, they make the reader's world larger, more interesting, more meaningful, and perhaps even more comprehensible. The reader, who has been seeing black-and-white, suddenly begins not only to see color, but to learn how to see other colors.

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Of course the house is haunted. If a door is closed on the first floor, another on the second floor will squeal open out of contrariness. If wine is spilled on the living room carpet and scrubbed at furiously and quickly so that a stain does not set, another stain, possibly darker, will appear somewhere else in the house. A favorite room in which malevolence quietly happens is the bathroom. Many speculate as to why this room draws so much attention. One might think that in a bathroom things would be more carefree, in a room where the most private of acts are committed, that any damned inhabitants could let down their hair or allow a tired sigh to pass through their doomed lips.

Perhaps this is exactly what they are doing in the bathroom, and we have misunderstood them. They turn on the shower and write names in the steam gathered on the mirror (never their own names, of course). They tip perfume bottles over, squeeze the last of the toothpaste out of its tube, they leave curls of red hair in the sink. And no one who lives in the house—no one living, that is—has red hair, or even auburn. What's worse is when they leave the toilet seat up. They'll flush the toilet over and over, entranced by the sound of the water being sucked out. This is what these restless inhabitants are endlessly committing: private acts.

Always there has been a family subject to the house's torture. For sixty-five years it was the Addlesons. Before that it was owned by the Oliver family. No one in town can remember who lived in the house before the Olivers, not even our oldest residents. We have stories, of course, recountings of the family who built—House, but their name has been lost to history. If anyone is curious, of course there is the library with town records ready to be opened. No one has opened those records in over fifty years, though. Oral history, gossip, is best for this sort of situation.

Rose Addleson believed the house was trying to communicate something. She told her husband women know houses better than men, and this is one thing Rose said that we agree with. There is, after all, what is called “Women's Intuition.” What exactly the house was saying eluded Rose, though, as it eludes the rest of us. Where Rose wanted to figure out its motivations, the rest of us would rather have seen it burn to cinders.

"All these years?” Jonas told her. It was not Rose Addleson who grew up in the house after all, who experienced the years of closeness to these events, these fits that her husband had suffered since childhood. “If it's trying to communicate,” he said, “it has a sad idea of conversation."

Rose and Jonas have no children. Well, to be precise, no living children. Once there had been a beautiful little girl, with cheeks that blushed a red to match her mother's, but she did not take to this world. She died when she was only a year old. On a cold winter's night she stopped breathing, when the house was frosted with ice. It wasn't until the next morning that they found her, already off and soaring to the afterlife. “A hole in her heart,” the doctor said, pinching his forefinger and thumb together. “A tiny hole.” They had never known it was there.

After their first few months of marriage, Rose and Jonas had become a bit reclusive. Out of shame? Out of guilt? Fear? Delusion? No one is able to supply a satisfactory reason for their self-imposed isolation. After all, we don't live in that house. If walls could talk, though, and some believe the walls of—House do talk, perhaps we'd understand that Jonas and Rose Addleson have good reason not to go out or talk to neighbors. Why, even Rose's mother Mary Kay Billings didn't hear from her daughter but when she called on the phone herself, or showed up on the front porch of—House, which was something she rarely did. “That house gives me the creeps,” she told us. “All those stories, I believe them. Why Rose ever wanted to marry into that family is beyond me."

Mary Kay has told us this in her own home, in her own kitchen. She sat on a chair by the telephone, and we sat across the table from her. She said, “Just you see,” and dialed her daughter's number. A few rings later and they were talking. “Yes, well, I understand, Rose. Yes, you're busy, of course. Well, I wanted to ask how you and Jonas are getting along. Good. Mm-hmm. Good. All right, then. I'll talk to you later. Bye now."

She put the phone down on the cradle and smirked. “As predicted,” she told us. “Rose has no time to talk. ‘The house, Mother, I'm so busy. Can you call back later?' Of course I'll call back later, but it'll be the same conversation, let me tell you. I know my daughter, and Rose can't be pried away from that house."

We all feel a bit sad for Mary Kay Billings. She did not gain a son through marriage, but lost a daughter. This is not the way it's supposed to happen. Marriage should bring people together. We all believe this to be true.

She has heard voices since she was a little girl. Rose Addleson, formerly Rose Billings, was always a dear girl in our hearts, but touched with something otherworldly. If her mother doesn't understand her daughter's gravitation to—House, the rest of us see it all too clear. Our Rose was the first child to speak in tongues at church. Once, Jesus spoke through her. The voice that came through her mouth never named itself, but it did sound an awful lot like Jesus. It was definitely a male voice, and he kept saying how much he loved us and how we needed to love each other better. It was Jesus all over, and from our own sweet Rose.

We do not understand why, at the age of twelve, she stopped attending services.

But Rose also heard voices other than the Lord's. Several of us have overheard her speaking to nothing, or nothing any of us could see. She's hung her head, chin tucked into breastbone, at the grocery store, near the ketchup and mustard and pickles, murmuring, “Yes. Of course. Yes, I understand. Please don't be angry."

Rose heard the voices in—House, too. This is why she married Jonas: The house called for her to come to it.

It was winter when it happened. Rose was eighteen then, just half a year out of high school. She worked in Hettie's Flower Shop. She could arrange flowers better than anyone in town. We all always requested Rose to make our bouquets instead of Hettie, but Hettie never minded. She owned the place, after all.

On her way home from work one evening, Rose's car stalled a half mile from—House. She walked there to get out of the cold, and to call her mother. At the front door she rapped the lion-headed knocker three times. Then the door opened and wind rushed past her like a sigh. She smelled dust and medicine and old people. Something musty and sweet and earthy. Jonas stood in front of her, a frown on his sad young face. He was already an orphan at the age of thirty. “Yes?” he asked in a tone of voice that implied that he couldn't possibly be interested in any reason why our Rose was appearing before him. “Can I help you?"