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The spotlight belongs on Portia Control. For tonight’s final number, she takes the stage wearing the highest hair in recorded history. Her wigs are always an event, but this creation is most enthralling—a leaning tower three units tall, generous scoops of pistachio green. Loyal patrons of the bar brace for disaster, place their bets on whether the stacked wigs will fall. But Portia is no amateur. She works magic with spirit gum and bobby pins. Tonight, she is the fantasy, rhinestoned to death in her thrift store dress. No one can tell her otherwise.
The other queens are notorious outfit repeaters, worshippers of stretch fabric. They trot out their faithful standbys, the crowd-pleasing numbers they know will get wallets out of pockets. They don’t perform. They do laps around the bar, kissing cheeks, collecting dollar bills from drunk bachelorettes. At curtain call, they return to the stage a parade of half-drag. One of them, a newly minted queen whose name Portia has already forgotten, wears a T-shirt advertising the Iron Pit Gym—at curtain call!—and then the show hostess, a queen named Dawn Deveraux, emerges from backstage wearing flip-flops. It’s no wonder Dawn must remind the audience to applaud. On the mic, Dawn is a kindergarten teacher, pleading with her students to form a line. There are drink specials that Dawn needs to repeat—the vodka that nobody can stand is now only two dollars; Boozy Bottoms are half off—but the spotlight ignores Dawn and searches for Portia instead. Twenty minutes have passed since Portia’s last number, the one where she breathlessly lip-synced the side effects from a pharmaceutical commercial, and still the wigs sit heavy on her head, defying the laws of physics. Below the neck Portia wears a new look just for curtain call, a houndstooth overcoat the audience hasn’t seen before and will never see again.
After the curtain closes, the queens stream onto the dancefloor, choking the air with their department store perfumes. Portia cannot understand why these queens are treated as minor deities. Worshippers flock to them with offerings of well liquor and gas station cigarettes. Portia won’t accept such gifts. Her taste is far too particular. She drinks lemon drops out of champagne flutes. For her ceremonial post-show cigarette, she only smokes Fantasias, the luxury brand that comes in bright colors she can coordinate with her lip—cherry red, strawberry-milkshake pink. Any sensible queen knows that the performance doesn’t stop when you leave the stage. There is still an audience watching, even in the alley behind the bar, where Portia smokes next to the graffiti that reads BE GAY DO CRIME.
That’s where the new boy finds her, the new boy operating the spotlight. He has no theatrical experience, nor was he given any formal training, only this suggestion by Dawn an hour before the show began: “It’s a light. You take it, and you move it around.” But the spotlight moved of its own accord. The new boy swears this. The light is simply drawn to Portia.
She rewards the new boy for his flattery with a drag on her cigarette. Shivering in his corduroy jacket, he accepts readily, as if the cigarette might bring him warmth. “I’ve never done lights before,” he says. “Did I do okay?” His jacket has a fur collar, but in no way is it appropriate for winter. Portia feels a sudden motherly stirring. The jacket, she estimates, is at least a size too large for him. In the jacket, he looks like a child playing in Daddy’s closet.
“You were pretty good for a virgin,” Portia says.
A new song starts playing inside the Closet, the bump and grind favorite that comes on every Friday and Saturday when the party reaches its peak. The throb of bass is so heavy it shakes the whole block. “I bet the twinks are going wild in there,” she says. “Sucking down their vodka sodas. What is it about being skinny and hairless that makes you order vodka soda?”
The new boy laughs. “I love your name, by the way,” he says. “So funny. Portia Control! I kept cracking up.”
“Why?” she says. “What’s funny about it?”
“It’s. Ummm.”
“It’s what?” She takes pleasure in watching him squirm. She is having fun with this new boy. They are having fun together, both of them.
“Well,” he says, “uh, you know—”
“I’m kidding,” she says. “I’m messing with you. Yes, I’m a big girl. That’s the joke.”
“It’s hard to tell. If you guys are joking.”
“Guys?”
“Ladies. Gorgeous ladies.”
“That’s better.”
Holiday lights twinkle down where the alley meets College Ave. Christmas is over—New Year’s, too—but the city is in no rush to put away its decorations, and while some people might find this tacky, Portia can appreciate it. What’s so wrong with keeping that festive mood going long enough to see them through the winter?
She realizes she is staring at the new boy’s jaw, the empty threat of his stubble. For how long has she been staring? She can’t remember. She says, “Have you ever thought about doing drag? You have the face for it.”
“Yeah?”
“Cheekbones,” Portia says, “are very important.”
The new boy considers this. He finds a wall to lean against, strikes a pose that says I, an intellectual, am considering cheekbones. To complete the look, he takes a long drag on her cigarette. The smoldering end burns red, burns orange, bright bursts of color in the January gray. “Your name’s Dustin, right?” he says.
“I’m Portia,” she says.
“Yeah, but like, your actual name.”
“I don’t do government names. I hear that enough out in the real world. Don’t make me live in the real world any more than I already have to.”
The new boy takes one last sip of the cigarette. “I’m Miguel,” he says, and passes it back to her, but the greedy little thing has left her nothing but ash.
She invites him over to keep her company while she does her stoning for tomorrow night’s show. It’s a long and lonely process, applying rhinestones to fabric, but just how long she keeps to herself. She does, however, issue the requisite warning about the E6000 fumes upon their arrival at her apartment. She believes those fumes have mind-altering properties. You have to take a break every hour or so, step away from the glue and fill up on fresh air.
At Portia’s apartment, overhead light is forbidden, its cruelty toward drag queens well-documented. Lamplight is kinder, more flattering, and a lamp is yet another object Portia can adorn with fringe and beads. To someone who has never stoned before, her apartment with its low light and scattered syringes probably looks like the den of a heroin addict, but the truth is much sadder—she’s a drag queen who buys secondhand and spangles every garment herself. Portia visits the women’s section at Vintage Wearhouse so often that the cashier who merely cocked his eyebrows at her selections in the beginning has started asking questions. Her answer is always that she’s shopping for her homebound mother, her poor mother who likes to dress up in the mirror because it makes her feel alive.
“And he believes that?” Miguel says.
“People like him will believe anything,” she says, “as long as they don’t have to believe queers exist.”
Anyway, Vintage Wearhouse is a crapshoot. Only sometimes is their selection worth the homophobia. Where Portia most reliably strikes gold is estate sales. None of the other queens at the Closet will shop a dead woman’s wardrobe. They find the practice morbid; they prefer to sew their four-way stretch swimsuits and serve the same look week after week. Portia’s standards are higher. Whenever a big girl croaks, Portia is there to rifle through her closet. That’s how she found the houndstooth coat, the coat. Does Miguel remember it? Of course he remembers it; Portia says so before he has the chance to respond. Even if her haul is not up to par, even if she comes home from a sale with trash, it doesn’t matter. Portia knows how to make trash look good.
Miguel is newly twenty-one, a student at the university enrolled in a full slate of business classes. Majoring in business—that was his dad’s idea, he says, not his. It is the most essential of the strings attached to his dad’s offer to help pay his tuition. His dad works in landscaping. He and a team of four other brown men are shuttled around the Indianapolis suburbs in the back of a pickup truck to plant flowers for white people with money to burn. This has been his father’s workday for nearly twenty years now. Miguel will make something more of himself—thus, business! Miguel will not spend his life down on his knees.
“Your dad is right,” Portia says. “I’ve spent a good chunk of my adult life on my knees, and I regret every minute of it.”
“Ha ha,” Miguel says.
“Does he know?”
“About what?”
“Your appreciation of artisanal meats.”
“I think so. But if I don’t say it out loud, we can go on pretending. And as long as we keep pretending, he’ll keep covering tuition.”
“So this is a long con,” Portia says. “You’re scamming him. Look, as a rule, I respect the hustle, but in this instance, I’m not sure.”
“It’s not a scam.”
“Sounds like one to me.”
“A degree in business can take you anywhere.” Look how precious he is, trying to believe his own line. He gnaws on the skin around his thumbnail, his teeth as square as a woodland creature’s.
“The longer you put off telling him,” Portia says, “the harder it’s going to be. I’ll just say that.”
“Thanks for your input,” Miguel says, “but it’s fine. I’ll be fine, Mom.”
“Not Mom. I’m not that old yet.”
“Tell that to your hairline,” he says quietly, as if already apologizing for it.
Here is a lesson Portia learned years ago—you can get away with being rude and nasty if there’s a twinkle in your eye. Miguel’s eye has no such twinkle.
“Was that okay to say?” he says. “Your hairline really isn’t that crazy.”
“Oh, stop. No backpedaling!” She gives him full permission to read her into the dirt. Nothing is off-limits, save for her government name, which is not to be repeated. “So,” she says, “where were we? My hairline. Go on. Destroy me.”
He needs to know the backstage gossip if he’s going to work with the queens up close. Has he heard about the amateur porn? The oldest queen at the Closet makes amateur porn with her two mustachioed lovers. She is the cabaret singer, the queen with the terrible, caked-on makeup. Miguel nods as in yes, the terrible one, I remember. You can look up the terrible one on PornHub, where she and her Super Mario boyfriends have a decent following. Portia can show him right now if he wants.
“I think I’m good,” he says.
“Oh, it’s hilarious,” Portia says. “I’ll send you a link. Homework for next time.”
The biggest story is Dawn, the show hostess. Dawn is mother to nearly a dozen Deveraux girls, several of whom—this is not to be repeated—have sucked her toes in exchange for bookings. Dawn is going through a divorce and milking it for all it’s worth. The divorce is her excuse for repeating stale material on the mic: I’m a little distracted right now. Maybe you heard? Miguel should avoid friending her on Facebook, where she posts only photos from the latest furry convention or mopey updates about how quiet her house is now. Never mind that Dawn was out on the dance floor every Saturday night slobbering all over some local twink, back when things at home were bliss. These days she hovers near the bar after her shows, collecting pity drinks. Meanwhile, her husband—“A total sweetheart,” Portia says, “he worshipped her, the dumb fuck”—has been banned from entering the Closet ever again. Dawn made sure of it.
Miguel says, “Is that true about Dawn’s toes? You’re for real?”
“Oh yes,” Portia says. “Those little piggies get around.”
“That’s nasty.”
“Foot stuff isn’t nasty. Dawn is nasty. Let’s get that much straight. We don’t kink-shame in this house.”
He asks her what his drag name is. He does not ask what his drag name might be or could be. In Miguel’s mind, it seems, there is a right answer, one that Portia is uniquely qualified to intuit. And perhaps she is. Portia will play the role of drag prophet. She will do her best to communicate with the showgirl in his subconscious.
“Her name is Chiquita,” Portia says. “Like the banana.” For her signature number, Chiquita would do a bit of burlesque in a yellow dress with marabou trimming. The dress would be built to be torn away; it would peel in four different places: neck, shoulder, back, shoulder. Portia points to those places on her body, miming a little striptease.
Miguel objects to this moniker. The name, the whole concept—it all sounds like a crude stereotype to him, the exotic Latina covered in fruit.
“That’s drag, babe,” Portia says. “Stereotypes and stupidity. You have to own it. You take the dumb shit people say to you, and you wear it like armor.” She has been stoning her gown, her armor, for hours now, an effort she can count in calluses. The night has slipped away, and light begins to filter through her velveteen curtains. Still, the garment barely glimmers.
She asks Miguel if he has any advice for her on how to manage her money, and he says, “You’re a drag queen, you don’t have any money,” which stings, but it’s the truth. In the daytime, Portia works at a cellphone store, convincing townies to upgrade to unlimited plans they don’t need. She won’t tell Miguel which store it is; Portia isn’t meant to be seen in the world of strip malls. She makes decent money in the realm of lanyards and slacks, but that income goes to her drag closet. Portia is a costly venture that has not yet yielded profit. Portia is a long-term investment.
“In other words, you’re going to be broke for a while,” Miguel says. Nothing wrong with that. Miguel is, too. For months he had a steady gig working the line at Build-a-Bowl, but just after New Year’s, Miguel showed up five minutes late to a lunch shift, and his manager told him he should go home and reflect on his issues with authority. In his file—this mythical file, often referred to yet never seen—there are multiple strikes against him, complaints describing him as uncooperative and lazy. So claims the day manager. All the managers there are white. Everybody else who works there is white, actually, and none of them have ever been told they have an attitude problem. Only Miguel.
“That place is fucked up,” he says. “A Philly cheesesteak bowl, that is such a fucked-up concept. But the tips are good. The tips are so good, you don’t even know.”
“Tips are great,” Portia says, “but let’s not neglect the shaft.”
“Um, yeah.”
“I was trying to make a joke.”
“I’m describing racism. What about that is funny to you?”
“I believe you were describing a Philly cheesesteak.”
“Fuck off,” he says, but actually, this is her house, so if anything, he should be the one to fuck off. He shifts in his chair like he is signaling his intention to leave. He slides an arm into a jacket sleeve, but slowly, tentatively, a burlesque in reverse. She suspects he’s bluffing. In the event that he isn’t, certainly he has fumbled the opportunity to make an impactful exit.
“Sorry,” Portia says. “I guess the joke didn’t land.”
“I’d like to speak to whoever cleared it for takeoff,” Miguel says.
The next night, they show up to the Closet together an hour before showtime. Portia carries her triple-stack wig on a mannequin head. Miguel, ever the gentleman, lugs Portia’s suitcase, which is no easy feat. The suitcase weighs at least thirty pounds. It is packed with her costumes for the night—a different outfit for each of her numbers, and of course, a last look for curtain call that is stoned within an inch of its life.
Outside the bar, stationed as close to the entrance as is legally possible, is a street evangelist in a crisp white polo, his flesh pink and wet like smoked ham. This man has been accosting the queens for years, condemning them to hell for as long as Portia has been doing drag. A venue will close, a new one will pop up in its place, and Mr. Ham will be there to let them know that they are sluts, they are whores, they are Satan’s foot soldiers in the cosmic war between good and evil. Tonight, as Portia and Miguel roll past, he barks, “Abomination! God sees this perversion and frowns upon you.”
Portia says, “I like to think so,” and blows the man a little kiss.
Miguel scurries along like a frightened rabbit. To him, the man’s words strike like hate, but Portia doesn’t see it that way. For a man to inquire about the state of her soul and not the state of her hole—that’s love, she says. Anyway, hate and love, they’re both expressions of passion, aren’t they? Portia is blessed to have the most passionate fans in the world.
She arrives at the bar in full face. It isn’t like TV, the queens getting ready together backstage, painting their faces at a row of identical vanities. No—there is room enough for only one mirror, and that mirror belongs to Dawn. The position of show hostess comes with certain perks.
Backstage, Dawn is scrolling through Grindr, dragging French fries through ketchup. “Love your new puppy,” she says to Portia. “You’ve trained him well. All that’s missing is the leash.” She taps a ketchupy fry on her fast-food wrapper like she is stubbing out a cigarette. Dawn wears athletic shorts and a tank top so distressed it looks like a pillowcase. Only Dawn’s face is ready for the stage, and even that, Portia thinks, is debatable. Dawn’s makeup is spray-tan orange. She has carrot undertones.
“Thanks,” Portia says. “He’s a rescue.”
“Who rescued who?” Dawn says.
“Me, obviously. I rescued him.”
Dawn puts down her phone, looks to Miguel. “We’re paying you to run lights,” she says. “You know you don’t have to hang around her, right? It’s not your job.” She chomps a fistful of fries, waiting for him to say something.
What he says is: “I need a drink.” He excuses himself, leaving Portia and Dawn alone backstage.
“Portia Control,” Dawn says, “corrupting America’s youth.” She unzips a garment bag to reveal the same lemon-lime swimsuit she wore last Saturday and the Saturday before.
“He’s a sweet kid,” Portia says. “He just needs some guidance.”
“Just fuck him already,” Dawn says, “and be done with it. That’s what this is all about, right?”
Portia’s showstopper tonight is another estate sale gem—a boatneck dress in Scotch tape tartan, hunter green and navy blue. Draped across her shoulders is a burnt orange boa that curls like a telephone cord all the way down to the sticky bar floor. What is the mood tonight out in the crowd? Portia can’t tell if they want what she’s giving. Perhaps she is stiffer than usual now that she knows who wields the spotlight. But why should that matter? She lip-syncs to a mix of rants by unruly drive-through customers, and the tips are meaningful but sparse. Some nights, she tells herself, she cannot grab the Top 40 crowd. Some nights she is only for the enlightened few.
She leaves the stage before her mix is over. Portia is not a showboat; she is not desperate to soak up every last drop of the audience’s adulation. Backstage, congratulatory messages wait for her on her phone. Miguel, who is out operating the spotlight, has sent a series of gushing texts, along with many exclamation points. KILLED IT!!! HOW ARE DAWN’S TOES TASTING BACK THERE?
SALTY, Portia replies.
After the show, she takes him to the bar to do celebratory shots of Fireball. He asks what they are celebrating, and she says, “Do we need an occasion?”
On the dancefloor, they dance close enough that it’s obvious they are there together, but not so close that they could be mistaken for anything more than friends. Portia is not wooing him; that is not happening. Miguel, baby-faced Miguel, has been of legal drinking age for how long? Less than a year, certainly. Meanwhile, Portia has been perfecting her drinking for the last decade. Portia is a nightlife professional. She has no business rooting around in this boy’s cellar or letting this boy root around in hers.
Miguel, bless him, has no rhythm. He closes his eyes when he dances, flinging his arms and doing a sorry step-touch. It’s almost cute, Portia thinks. The bump and grind song, the song, is up next. People scream for it; they love the song so much. The song hasn’t even started yet, not really—that familiar synth bassline is only just creeping into the mix—but people are already pressing their bodies against each other and thrusting dramatically to the beat they know is coming.
“I gotta take a piss,” Miguel says.
“How very macho,” Portia says.
“Did you want to come with?”
“You’re a big boy. I think you can manage.”
“Are we going to make out tonight?”
She considers his lips, cracked and peeling, crying out for a coat of ChapStick. “No,” she says, “I don’t think so.”
“Oh, right. Because I’m just your fucking dog.”
“That was a joke.”
“Yeah, and it’s sooo funny.”
“It is,” she says. “It can be if you’ll laugh about it. Drink some water.”
“Okay, Mom.”
He leaves, and she is alone in the pink club light, surrounded by theatre majors doing the choreography from a pop star’s Vegas residency. Then he fights his way back through the arms and elbows, returning to their spot not with water but with drinks.
“Thank you,” she says, and gives him a pat on the head. “Good dog.”
“What?”
His drink of choice is some ungodly mix of peppermint schnapps and white chocolate, the sort of drink only a rookie goes for, a drink where the burn is disguised by sweetness.
Louder now, so he can hear her over the music: “All I said was thank you.”
“You’re lying.”
She says, “I’m lightening the mood.”
“You’re not, though. You literally are not.”
Portia can’t see his face. The blurry disco lighting at the Closet gets blurrier the more you drink, yet less flattering. Everything looks smudged. “Don’t be so sensitive,” she says. “You’re making it into something way too serious. We’re just cutting up. We’re having a good time.”
As is tradition at the Closet, the DJ starts playing “Last Dance” by Donna Summer to let patrons know the bar will soon be closing. Over their heads, the disco ball stops turning, but the crowd continues dancing as if the night will not end.
“You are such bullshit,” Miguel says.
“It doesn’t matter,” Portia says.
“What doesn’t?”
“What you think.”
The lights come up. The spell is broken. She can see him clearly now—how sweaty he is, how small.
He says, “The audacity to come out here tonight with this crunchy wig. That took guts.”
“You don’t know anything about anything,” she says.
“I know your shit is fucked up.”
“You run lights. You’re nothing.”
“Right,” he says, “I’m nothing.”
“You are. We all know this business school nonsense is a joke. Come summertime, you’ll be riding around in the back of a truck with dear old dad.”
“Bitch.”
“I am,” she says. “A musty old bitch. You didn’t know?”
“Oh, everybody knows, Dustin. It’s actually kind of sad. You come out and do your little skit, and the whole bar takes a cigarette break. A bathroom break. No one wants to look at you.”
“You’re drunk.”
“I’m buzzed.”
“You need to eat something.”
“I could keep going.”
The bar staff turn chairs over, recite their mantra to the patrons still lingering on the dancefloor: “Love you, but go the fuck home.” There is something shameful about seeing this space so brightly lit, Portia thinks. In the dark, the dancefloor bursts with possibility, then the light comes on and exposes everything for exactly what it is.
Portia offers Miguel a ride home, which he declines. “I’ll walk,” he says, “I love walking,” and then he trips over an object that only he can see.
“Why don’t you let me take care of you tonight,” Portia says. This is more announcement than question.
They drive through Rally’s on the way back to her apartment—it’s the only restaurant still open at this time of night. Miguel protests; somebody told Miguel once that they found a fly in their burger here. “It’s four in the morning,” Portia says. “Lower your standards.” They order off the value menu, value cheeseburgers and value tenders and value fries, whatever sounds good. Does Miguel want the cinnamon apple pie? Portia will buy him the cinnamon apple pie. “I don’t want the cinnamon apple pie,” Miguel says. “Jesus.”
“Cancel the pie,” Portia tells the illuminated menu.
He makes a show of not speaking to her. An admirable effort, a fine performance, but isn’t that his hand in the Rally’s bag, searching for fries? Back at the apartment, she fluffs him a pillow, drapes him in the softest blanket she can find, and still he commits to the bit, horizontal on her futon.
Other priorities spring to mind, priorities that are not Miguel. Water, for one—she goes to fetch water, and perhaps an aspirin. It is imperative that Portia stays awake long enough to sober up. If she falls asleep now, she’ll pay for it in the morning. She can’t bounce back like Miguel can. For her, the carriage will be a pumpkin again soon enough.
The faucet runs. She makes herself keep drinking despite the sour taste on her tongue. On her phone, she finds a text from Dawn: 2 BOTTOMS DON’T MAKE A TOP…
Portia types her reply: LOVE FINDS A WAY. Then, because it’s Dawn: LOSE THIS NUMBER.
The next morning, it’s afternoon. Miguel is gone, the blanket folded into a perfect little square.
She isn’t interested in staging a reality TV reunion episode about it. They don’t need to rehash last night’s stale drama, do they? She goes out to Vintage Wearhouse to find something his size. Lucky her, she ends up finding a gown with serious potential, and on top of that, a ridiculous fuck-off hat straight out of My Fair Lady. Who, she wonders, would give these treasures away to a thrift store like they’re nothing? The hat looks like an elaborate birthday cake. The gown is studded with blue raindrops. Portia brings her discoveries up to the checkout counter, and the cashier says, “Your mom’s lost a lot of weight, huh?”
“These aren’t for my mom,” Portia says. “These are for my gay lover.”
“I knew you were some kind of fag,” he says.
“Incredible detective work,” she says, “truly. Now ring up my items, please. I’m a fag on the go.”
Miguel would rather not see her. He makes that clear. She calls him, and he says, “So now you’re calling me?”
“Yes, I’m calling you,” she says.
“I’ll pay you back for the food.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“What do you want from me, then?”
“Nothing,” she says. “I don’t want anything. I found something in the back of my closet. A gown.”
“I’m happy for you.”
“It doesn’t fit me,” she says, “not anymore, but I think it would fit you perfectly. Can I convince you to come try it on?”
He wants to know what the occasion is. There is no occasion. The gown is the occasion.
The story of last night is that he wants nothing to do with Portia, yet here he is at her kitchen table, his face so close to hers she can feel his breath hot on her cheek. It’s bad luck to try on drag without lashes and lipstick, Portia says. 301s and a cherry lip—those are nonnegotiable.
Miguel is not shy. He undresses when she asks him to undress. She watches his clothes collect on her living room carpet—the corduroy jacket with the fur collar; the unreasonably baggy jeans that make it look like he has no ass whatsoever. Now that he has stripped down to his tiny red briefs, she can finally confirm an ass is there. A pair of legs is connected to it.
“Yeah, I have chicken legs,” Miguel says. “Don’t make fun of them.”
“I wouldn’t dare,” Portia says.
“Literally all you do is roast people.”
“Only the people I like.”
“Is that how it works?”
He steps into the raindrop gown, and she zips him, her thumb tracing a delicate line up his back.
The hat is a little much on him, though that does not surprise her. A hat like that—frills and netting and polka dots—you have to wear with intention. But the gown. He needs hips, that much is a given, but already, he is a confection. Of this she is certain. “Walk around a little,” she says. “See how you like it.” Miguel is a terror, clomping around in her heels. He is a tornado, ripping his path through her kitchen. But look—he shimmers any way the light hits him. The gown she bought is covered in stones, hundreds of them. In the gown he is so bright and so brilliant, Portia can only have a glimpse of him before she has to look away.
***
Rumpus original art by Ian MacAllen
In a 1975 essay called “The Child and the Shadow,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote:
In many fantasy tales of the 19th and 20th centuries the tension between good and evil, light and dark, is drawn absolutely clearly, as a battle, the good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other, cops and robbers, Christians and heathens, heroes and villains. In such fantasies I believe the author has tried to force reason to lead him where reason cannot go, and has abandoned the faithful and frightening guide he should have followed, the shadow. These are false fantasies, rationalized fantasies. They are not the real thing. Let me, by way of exhibiting the real thing, which is always much more interesting than the fake one, discuss The Lord of the Rings for a minute.
It’s a sweet little pivot that Le Guin executes in that paragraph’s last sentence, because many of her readers would have assumed that her critique included Tolkien – but no. She admits that “his good people tend to be entirely good, though with endearing frailties, while his Orcs and other villains are altogether nasty. But,” she continues, “all this is a judgment by daylight ethics, by conventional standards of virtue and vice. When you look at the story as a psychic journey, you see something quite different, and very strange.” Daylight ethics is insufficient to account for the greatness of The Lord of the Rings: it may in certain respects be “a simple story,” but “it is not simplistic. It is the kind of story that can be told only by one who has turned and faced his shadow and looked into the dark.” And:
That it is told in the language of fantasy is not an accident, or because Tolkien was an escapist, or because he was writing for children. It is a fantasy because fantasy is the natural, the appropriate, language for the recounting of the spiritual journey and the struggle of good and evil in the soul.
Which is why when she herself had a story like that to tell, she turned to fantasy.
In most respects, Earthsea is a radically different world than Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, but that perhaps makes the correspondences all the more worth noting. As I was rereading The Farthest Shore recently it struck me how faithfully the journey of Ged and Arren to the Dry Land echoes the journey of Frodo and Sam to Mordor – down to the point that Ged’s helper Arren has to carry him for a brief period, in much the same way that Frodo is carried by Sam (though after the decisive moment rather than before).
That said, Le Guin has created a world in which the protagonist has a different kind of helper than Frodo does. The relationship between Frodo and Sam is that of master and servant – as Sam’s deferential language continually reminds us – but the young man who accompanies Ged to the Dry Land is not a servant at all. He is a prince, soon to be a king, and had been shocked to learn just after meeting Ged that this Archmage, this titan among wizards, had been in his childhood a goatherd on a distand dirty island. But he is much younger and less experienced than Ged, and Ged is, after all, a mage, which Arren is not. So matters of status are very much in question here. Ged takes upon himself the burden of teaching Arren, assumes an authority over him in certain respects, an authority that Arren sometimes accepts and sometimes resents. Their relationship is much more complex than that of Frodo and Sam; it is constantly in negotiation.
What is Le Guin doing with this acknowledgement of and then swerving from the Tolkienian model? Well, I think this is very closely related to her fascination with Daoism, and illuminates certain contrasts between Confucianism and Taoism – especially as regards the purpose of education. Among other things, Confucianism is a way of breeding rulers. It emphasizes righteousness (yi 義) as a key virtue – but especially for rulers. (See this overview by Mark Csikszentmihalyi.) The practice of yi is essential to legitimizing and consolidating political authority – and this is why the famous Imperial Examination, used to identify candidates for civil service, was so deeply grounded in the neo-Confucian classics.
By contrast, Daoism does not make governors but rather sages, and the Daoist sage has no interest in ruling. If the key virtue of the Confucian ruler is righteousness, the key virtue of the Daoist sage is inaction: wuwei. And this is the virtue that Ged, knowing who Arren will become, tries to teach him. That is, Ged believes that even for a king righteousness sometimes may be inadequate. He says to Arren,
“It is much easier for men to act than to refrain from acting. We will continue to do good and to do evil. … But if there were a king over us all again and he sought counsel of a mage, as in the days of old, and I were that mage, I would say to him: My lord, do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.”
Ged is preparing Arren not for kingship as it is typically understood – the “daylight ethics” of Confucianism would be adequate for that – but rather the the possibility of a “psychic journey,” a spiritual challenge.
When in the Dry Land they meet the undead mage who goes by the name of Cob, they are encountering one whose path to power, and to great evil, had years earlier been opened for him by Ged. That opening was quite inadvertent, to be sure: Ged wished to act righteously in disciplining Cob, who had dabbled in necromancy, but his actions – driven in part, he admits, by his pride, his desire to demonstrate his greater power – had precisely the opposite effect than he had intended. Cob became more, not less, obsessed with necromancy and the conquest of death. (He is in some ways the proto-Voldemort, a would-be Death Eater.) Ged acted thus because he thought it “righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so”; but it was not what he had to do, and it could have been done in some other way, some less humiliating and degrading way. The problem with action, as Daoism teaches and as Ged tries to teach Arren, is that it always, always, has unexpected consequences, often profoundly unwelcome ones.
To their final confrontation with Cob Arren brings an instrument appropriate to a ruler and a warrior: a sword. Again and again he strikes Cob, severing his spinal cord, splitting his skull … but Cob simply reassembles himself. “There is no good in killing a dead man.” Ged, by contrast, brings but “one word” that stills Arren and Cob alike. (We do not hear the one word is, but Ged says that it is “the word that will not be spoken until time’s end.”)
And then what Ged must do – must do, and cannot do in any other way – is to pour out all his own magical power, leaving nothing inside, not to inflict a wound but to close one; not to sever but to knit together. Cob had made a gap in the cosmos through which Death entered the world of the living; and that could be healed not by a Confucian king but by a Daoist sage.
But something a little, or a lot, more than a Daoist sage: here, I think, the guiding shape of Tolkien’s story takes Le Guin a step beyond what Daoism can envisage. Like Frodo, Ged undertakes a kenosis, a self-emptying; except that what Frodo cannot do without the intervention of his Shadow, Ged completes. “It is done,” he says. It is finished. And when Arren takes up his crown, he knows that he owes it to Ged; the same knowledge leads Aragorn to kneel before Frodo.
Near the novel’s end, the Doorkeeper of Roke says of Ged, “He is done with doing. He goes home.” And still later Ged will wonder why he outlived his magic. Which raises the question: What happens after “it is finished”? There, I think, our three stories diverge.
Le Guin, from her Afterword to The Farthest Shore: “It would be lovely if writing a story was like getting into a little boat that drifted off and took me to the promised land, or climbing on a dragon’s back and flying off to Selidor. But it’s only as a reader that I can do that. As a writer, to take full responsibility without claiming total control requires a lot of work, a lot of groping and testing, flexibility, caution, watchfulness. I have no chart to follow, so I have to be constantly alert. The boat needs steering. There have to be long conversations with the dragon I ride. But however watchful and aware I am, I know I can never be fully aware of the currents that carry the boat, of where the winds beneath the dragon’s wings are blowing.”
Unless you’re a fantasy fan, you likely haven’t heard of Brandon Sanderson — which is odd, because the man has written more words and sold more books than just about any living genre author not named King or Rowling. Even so, you’ll enjoy this curveball of a profile, in which Wired‘s Jason Kehe tries to distinguish between the man and his wor(l)ds.
This story has an ending, I promise, and I’m sprinting toward it, as if to a vacation. Like the best of Sanderson’s endings, my ending should surprise you. Because, you see, Sanderson actually did say one thing to me, one miraculous thing, that stuck, that I remember, these five months later, with perfect clarity. Just seven words, but true ones. You’re not ready for them just yet. You need more story first. For now, there is only Sanderson, both wordful and wordless, the best-selling writer no writer writes about because writers only know how to talk about words. Sanderson’s readers—loving, legion—care about something else.
Join Sarah Jones and Zoe Hu for a discussion on stay-at-home girlfriends and feminism.
Continuing the recent reflections on fantasy, it me:
Like many other fantasy writers, [Hope] Mirrlees is interested in what happens if the power of Fairyland cannot be wholly excluded from our well-buffered society. In this case, we see what happens when magic begins to creep back into well-ordered and well-buffered lives. To figure this as essentially a drug war — an inevitably unsuccessful attempt to prevent the smuggling of what one character in the story significantly calls the “commodity” of fairy fruit — is a wonderful conceit and developed with delightful panache, tracing an elegantly oscillating line between the economic and the metaphysical. When one character tells a senator that he should be more aware of the high levels of consumption of fairy fruit among the poor, I find myself murmuring, Fairy fruit is the opiate of the masses.
Adam Roberts (yes, again):
My problem is not that [Miles Cameron’s Against All Gods] gets this or that specific historical detail or mood wrong; it’s that it doesn’t really engage with ‘history’ at all, despite pretending to do so. Its characters’ sensibilities are modern, its gods agents in the imagined world much as its mortals are — the gods are more powerful, though ‘power’ is rendered here only in terms of the ability to overbear, with violence or words — all potestas, nothing of auctoritas. There’s nothing in these gods of the numinous, the transcendent, nothing of the strange, the awe-inspiring, tarrying or resplendent. This is not a dimension that Cameron reproduces in his imagined Bronze Age; although for ‘actual’ Bronze Age human beings, in their porosity of subjectivity, it was a crucial and wondrous and terrifying aspect of existence. The characters go about their various plot-driven actions, and the storylines are punctuated by interludes of purely somatic intensity (the violence, the fighting, the sex) that do nothing to estrange, to capture or embody the wonder and strangeness of the past as such.
Great post by Adam. I would just add that precisely the same problem afflicts most SF, which cosplays an imagined future as fantasy cosplays an imagined past (or past-like secondary world). As someone who has toyed with the idea of writing both fantasy and SF, I have always believed that this is the greatest challenge: How to avoid writing characters who are people exactly like me, only placed in a different natural, cultural, and technological environment? But people who are situated in radically different environments develop in wholly different ways: each Lebenswelt generates its own distinctive range of cultural and personal possibilities. Trying to imagine my way from (a) the possibilities, the options of mind and action, available to me in my Lebenswelt to (b) what someone formed in a radically different environment might experience … well, that’s astonishingly difficult. (Indeed, I have felt this challenge so strongly that I’ve never completed anything in either genre. The problem defeats me.)
One writer who has attempted to think through these problems, though primarily in one novel and with one character, is C. S. Lewis. (He attempts a similar act of historical imagination in Till We Have Faces but without the explicit contrast to our own world.) The novel is That Hideous Strength and the character is Merlinus Ambrosius, who is awakened from 1500 years of sleep into mid-twentieth-century England and is puzzled by everything he sees. For instance:
“Sir,” said Merlin in answer to the question which the Director had just asked him. “I give you great thanks. I cannot indeed understand the way you live and your house is strange to me. You give me a bath such as the Emperor himself might envy, but no one attends me to it; a bed softer than sleep itself, but when I rise from it I find I must put on my own clothes with my own hands as if I were a peasant. I lie in a room with windows of pure crystal so that you can see the sky as clearly when they are shut as when they are open, and there is not wind enough within the room to blow out an unguarded taper; but I lie in it alone with no more honor than a prisoner in a dungeon. Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun. In all the house there are warmth and softness and silence that might put a man in mind of paradise terrestrial; but no hangings, no beautified pavements, no musicians, no perfumes, no high seats, not a gleam of gold, not a hawk, not a hound. You seem to me to live neither like a rich man nor a poor one: neither like a lord nor a hermit.”
The novel I think is flawed, but this is quite brilliant, and I wish the world of fiction had more like it. One reason there isn’t: Merlinus is to his modern interlocutors a thoroughly appalling character, who quite readily suggests that a woman who has not behaved in the way he thinks right should be beheaded, and then is befuddled by the response this opinion receives. (“The Pendragon tells me … that you accuse me for a fierce and cruel man. It is a charge I never heard before. A third part of my substance I gave to widows and poor men. I never sought the death of any but felons and heathen Saxons.”) And to create a character so alien to our readerly sensibilities is a risky thing for a storyteller to do; perhaps Lewis was wise to do this only with a minor character.
After all — and here the imperatives of historical imagination may run contrary to the imperatives of good storytelling, readers do typically want to … well, we have different words for it: people used to say that they like to identify with characters, but now they’re more likely to say that they find characters relatable (or not). This is an impulse that I don’t wish to discourage: as Edward Mendelson says in his excellent book The Things That Matter, “A reader who identifies with the characters in a novel is not reacting in a naïve way that ought to be outgrown or transcended, but is performing one of the central acts of literary understanding.” But, I fear, the more seriously a writer takes this reaction the more constrained that writer will be in historical imagination.
But the thing that struck me is the way Gandalf comes back invulnerable. The last we see of Gandalf the Grey he is complaining that he is tired (‘what an evil fortune! And I am already weary’ [348]). Now he has almost limitless energy — when the four of them ride all day and all night across Rohan, Gandalf permits them only ‘a few hours rest’…. Not only does he not need sleep, he cannot be harmed by weapons: ‘Indeed, my friends,’ he tells his companions: ‘none of you have any weapon that could hurt me’ [516]. This carries with it the suggestion that all Gandalf’s subsequent battlefield galivanting with Glamdring is a kind of play-acting: for he can no more be slain than could Milton’s Satan.
Adam is rarely wrong, as I’m sure he will confirm, but I think he’s wrong here. There’s a big difference between “none of you have any weapon that could hurt me” and “no weapon of any kind can hurt me.” Later he is openly uncertain whether he is a match for the Lord of the Nazgul — why couldn’t that encounter at least potentially end in his death again? I suspect that Adam thinks (confirm this for me, friend) that Gandalf could himself be transformed into a wraith, but if that’s what he’s in danger of, I suspect that Tolkien would have him say so.
But that’s just a suspicion — I’m not sure what could befall Gandalf. I just don’t believe we can say that he is “invulnerable” in any sense of that word I know.
(By the way, in the movie of RotK, when Gandalf finally does confront that antagonist, Peter Jackson makes one of his very worst mistakes by having the Boss Wraith instantly destroy Gandalf’s staff, thus demonstrating absolute dominance over the wizard. It’s impossible to imagine that Gandalf, who has returned from death to fulfill his role as the Enemy of Sauron, could be utterly helpless before one of Sauron’s servants. Jackson then compounds the error by having the Wraith distracted from Gandalf by events on the battlefield: he immediately flies away rather than pausing for the four seconds it would clearly take him to destroy the staffless wizard whom he knows to be the leader of the rebels against the Dark Lord. It’s such a dumb scene.)
I’m ignoring the main topics of Adam’s post, but I cherish that as my right. One further thing though: At the end Adam discusses Eomer’s complete ignorance of the existence of Lothlorien, though it’s almost on his borders. I wonder if this is meant to be an illustration in small of a more general phenomenon: the separation of the various peoples of Middle Earth, their withdrawal into “gated communities” with a consequent xenophobia. The leaders of Gondor are largely ignorant, and when not ignorant suspicious, of natural allies like the people of Rivendell; the boundaries of Lothlorien are closely guarded; the people of Bree rarely see travelers from the Shire; the dwarves of the Lonely Mountain don’t even know what has become of their kinsman Balin — and don’t seem especially interested, though they are curious. (How far is it from the Lonely Mountain to Moria? Maybe 600 miles? A goodly distance, but people in these books make such journeys fairly regularly.) We are often reminded that what’s called the Last Alliance of Men and Elves occurred thousands of years before the events of this book. The whole world seems to be afflicted by a mistrust of everyone except those who are definitively One’s Own People. There can be good reasons for mistrust, mind you, but not all of these folks act on good reasons.
In his brilliant book J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Tom Shippey spends a good deal of time trying to account for the depth and intensity of the hatred of Tolkien among the literati. Many of his points are worthy, but I am especially drawn to something he writes near the end of the book, which he is comparing Tolkien to James Joyce — and there are indeed some interesting points of comparison, for instance in the generic forms their great ambitions take and their fascination with language. But of course there are huge differences as well, and Shippey focuses on one of the most important when he notes their radically different attitudes towards the classical tradition.
Shippey points out that much Modernist writing depends heavily on literary allusion, and especially allusion to the literary inheritance of Greece and Rome. Ulysses is the obvious example here, followed closely by Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Joyce refers occasionally to Irish myth and legend, and Eliot quotes the Upanishads, but those references are not central; if you really want to get to the heart of those texts, you must know Odysseus and Tiresias. (Shakespeare too.) Even Yeats, for all of his invocations of Irish legend, expects his readers to know about Leda and the swan and to grasp the significance of the death of Agamemnon. The essential works of the classical tradition are the lingua franca for the most ambitious and demanding writers in English-language Modernism. (As they were for Milton, who effectively defines ambition for so many writers that follow him.)
Tolkien doesn’t care about any of this.
He alludes frequently to works of what he regarded as his own tradition, the ‘Shire tradition’ of native English poetry…. Tolkien’s heroes and his major debts came from the native and Northern tradition which Milton never knew and Eliot ignored: Beowulf, Sir Gawain, Sigurd, the Eddic gods — a tradition seen by most modernists as literally barbarous (the possession of people who speak incomprehensible languages).
In brief, “Tolkien was as educated as [the literati] were, but in a different school.”
Educated in a different school. And the key point here — Shippey hints at this, but is not quite as explicit as he might have been — is that Tolkien never expects his readers to know any of what he knows. To fully appreciate Ulysses you need to know the Odyssey, but the reader of The Hobbit need not be aware of Snorri Sturluson’s “Tally of the Dwarves” in his Skaldskaparmál:
Nár, Nainn, Nipingr, Dainn,
Bifur, Báfur, Bömbur, Nóri,
Órinn, Onarr, inn, Miöð̠vitnir,
Vigr og Gandálfr, Vindálfr, Þorinn,
Fili, Kili, Fundinn, Váli …
Indeed, perhaps it is better if we don’t know, at least not until after we’ve read and enjoyed the story. Similarly, it is certainly interesting to note that the exchange between Gandalf & Co. and Háma, the Doorward of Théoden, in The Two Towers is nearly identical to an early scene in Beowulf — but Tolkien doesn’t expect you to know that and your appreciation of the scene isn’t diminished if you don’t.
The great Modernist writers have a tendency to flatter their learned readers and disdain the others; they are in many respects principially elitist. (As has often been noted, Leopold Bloom is Joyce’s hero but he couldn’t have read Joyce’s book about him.) There’s none of this in Tolkien; the astonishing range of allusions to medieval writing in The Lord of the Rings is certainly meant to provide a kind of felt (not directly perceived) coherence to the reader — Shippey is great on this — but its primary purpose is to satisfy Tolkien’s own imaginative needs. There was, I think, something creatively liberating about having been educated in a school — Germanic and Anglo-Saxon philology — that virtually none of his readers ever attended.
Phantastes is all about doubling: reflections in mirrors, a cave of making juxtaposed to a grotto of destruction, a loving womanly beech-tree versus a malicious Maiden of the Ash, a bedroom in an ordinary Victorian home and the twin of that bedroom in Fairy Castle. All of these doublings are most fully embodied in the contrast between our world — where the waters reflect but the sky does not — and Fairy Land — where just the opposite is true.
On the day after his 21st birthday, a man named Anodos enters Fairy Land, undergoes many adventures and trials, and returns to his home twenty-one days later — though the period feels to him like twenty-one years, that is, the equivalent of the time he had previously spent in our world. (The one life mirrors the other.) His parents both being dead, he has now, at reaching his majority, become the head of his household:
My mind soon grew calm; and I began the duties of my new position, somewhat instructed, I hoped, by the adventures that had befallen me in Fairy Land. Could I translate the experience of my travels there, into common life? This was the question. Or must I live it all over again, and learn it all over again, in the other forms that belong to the world of men, whose experience yet runs parallel to that of Fairy Land? These questions I cannot answer yet. But I fear.
These concerns about the effects of such doubling (such “parallel” experiences) are, it seems clear, George MacDonald’s own concerns about the writing of fantasy. In his essay “The Fantastic Imagination” MacDonald confesses quite directly a complication in the writing of what we would now call fantasy but when he called (as he himself said, for lack of a better term) fairy tale:
MacDonald knows that this will not be pleasant news to the didactically inclined. But the didactically inclined are free to work in (and to read) genres other than the fairy tale.
If a writer’s aim be logical conviction, he must spare no logical pains, not merely to be understood, but to escape being misunderstood; where his object is to move by suggestion, to cause to imagine, then let him assail the soul of his reader as the wind assails an aeolian harp. If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it. Let fairytale of mine go for a firefly that now flashes, now is dark, but may flash again. Caught in a hand which does not love its kind, it will turn to an insignificant ugly thing, that can neither flash nor fly.
A work of fantasy, then — in addition to being a firefly, and a wind —, may be described as a mirror, but as with the Mirror of Galadriel, what one sees in it is largely determined by who one is. (And anyway, if G. C. Lichtenberg was right, that’s true of all books without exception: “A book is like a mirror,” he said; “If a jackass looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”)
But if this mirror will provide any kind of reflection at all in what Lord Dunsany liked to call “the fields we know,” what’s necessary, MacDonald believes, is a kind of consistency in the imagined world one offers to the reader.
Man may, if he pleases, invent a little world of his own, with its own laws; for there is that in him which delights in calling up new forms — which is the nearest, perhaps, he can come to creation. […] His world once invented, the highest law that comes next into play is, that there shall be harmony between the laws by which the new world has begun to exist; and in the process of his creation, the inventor must hold by those laws. The moment he forgets one of them, he makes the story, by its own postulates, incredible. To be able to live a moment in an imagined world, we must see the laws of its existence obeyed. Those broken, we fall out of it.
This is obviously an adumbration of Tolkien’s more famous concept of “secondary worlds” — but it is clear (see my previous post on mythopoeic promiscuity) that when MacDonald talks about the “laws” of an imagined world he cannot possibly mean the kind of consistency in world-building that Tolkien so prized, and so lamented the absence of in Lewis’s fiction.
I think the laws that MacDonald refers to are mystical and spiritual, and unconnected altogether to the material furniture of the fictional environment. But I need to think about that further — and about the specific ways that MacDonald’s crazy-quilt fictional world just might possess a consistency that allows it to serve as a useful mirror of our own.
With the recent kerfuffles over the forthcoming One D&D and Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro's designs on revoking the original Open Gaming License, Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts could use a little chillaxing entertainment and comic relief. Will that be found in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, the star-studded motion picture? — Read the rest
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