Books for Blankets

"I am sitting... looking out across the the backyard full of blue evening snow, everything is slick and crusty with ice, and it is very still. It's one of those winter evenings when the coldness of every single thing seems to slow down time... Tonight I feel that my love for you has more density in this world than I do, myself: as though it could linger on after me..." ~The Time Traveler's Wife

The schools let out early that day in preparation for a storm that came a lot later than we anticipated. 

I looked out the window often throughout the morning and into the afternoon, in-between customers and during them, looking out into the dead world for the snow that we had been promised was coming. 

The buses canceled in waiting. 

It was only on my way home from work that tiny flakes started to fall onto the windshield of my car; only after I fell asleep in my bed was the world transformed, as it usually is. 

You cannot watch the change. It always comes suddenly, softly, while you are sleeping. It's like magic. Even if you are awake, it creeps in so silently, like someone slipping into bed late at night when their spouse is already dreaming.

 

 

I awoke in the evening inside a blue darkness. Outside my gently weeping windows the world had been dressed white.

I read in my bed for hours after, tucked into a soft blanket, my fingers curled around the large pages of my book, listening to the silence. 

I never thought this book, with its meadows and its picnics and sunny childhood days, would be a winter book. But now, reading it for the second time, I realized that it was. It is full of winter, full of festivities and New Years parties. It is full of snow banks, and cold naked nights, and stagnant winter days, and soft and still ones too. It is packed with cold pavements, and tragedies that happen on Christmas, and wedding days during snow storms. 

It is full of soft silent nights in which its characters curl up in bed with a book, or with the warm body of someone they love. 

It was the perfect book to keep you warm in bed on a night like this one.

 

 

The spell still hasn't broken. But the book was over by the time I made my way into the night to behold the winter's magic. The only disturbance in the snow was a cat's soft footprints and the showers of a tree laden white,  leaving trails of its own as it shed bits of its new coat. 

 

I crawled into bed after, with my mittens and boots drying downstairs and my book put aside on my nightstand without a slip to mark its place in time.  

 

It is strange how a narrative is remembered when it is over; not in thought-out paragraphs or ordered pages, but existing in one's head in fragments and duality, in coupled moments and disordered dialogue, misplaced moments stuck in sections of a nonsensical timeline. It is as if it has happened all at once, a stream of consequence nestled into a soft white night spent in reading, and nothing else.

 

 

Spending Time in My Printed Book

I have spent the last few months inside the first few chapters of my book.

Part One, which I wrote so long ago, in another province, in a house now far gone, in a time and a life so unlike this one, is a thing of my past. 

I have spent these last few weeks revisiting it, sifting through its words, righting its tilted paragraphs, rummaging through its pages like sheets of music that need organizing. 

First, they were untouchable, black on a white glowing page, easy to erase and alter, to mend and mistakenly correct. All I had to do was press the keys. 

Then, a few weeks ago, they became concrete. 

With the help of my family, Part One, written one summer when high school was done but my new life had not yet begun, was printed now for the second time. But with it came something new; something more hefty and more full of change; something written by a writer so unlike the one who spent more time deleting than she did writing; a writer who somehow learned to write so effortlessly, she almost believed she was doing something wrong. 

 

Thus, Part Two was printed for the first time. The book in both parts was bound by twine and many helpers, as we sliced and organized and punched holes. It had to be bound in three parts, due to its length. 

Furthermore, something both small and great happened: the book was printed with a name. For the first time since I first started writing it, this book that was mine had a title wholly apart from its former one ("my book", a unfitting title altogether, since it will not always be mine.) I always knew it would need a name in order to go out into the world. But I never thought it would come so easily.  

 

But this copy in its incompleteness, in its messiness, with its notes and scribbles and its curled edges, will always be mine. So, as I toil with it, as I get frustrated with it, as I hop across its shortcuts and try to find new ways to write about things that to me are by now old and familiar, I learn that what I love most about this printed being is to hold it, to feel how much it weighs, and remember what it was like to fill out these pages when they were digital and blank. I knew it as the printer coughed it out, and I picked up the pages, and all I could say was "I wrote all of this!"

But, not only did I write it all, I worked for it all; I fought with it all; I got fed up with it; I hurt for it; I lost sleep for it. I wrote every word.

 

Now I get to think about it; I get to fix every fragment and cut up every run on. I get to ponder each word and select some new ones. I get to cut and paste and alter. 

 

So, as I edit Part One for what I hope will be the last time in a while, I resist the urge to rush to the end, to the new stuff yet unread, wholly unedited, but full of tension, and mystery, and murder, and so much more. I resist the urge to call it good enough, and I ponder with my pencil these now printed words. I cross things out. I jot things down. I think about unfinished paragraphs when my mind can wander during long work days.

I tell myself that I do not know when I will be returning here next, to these chapters written before the beginning had yet begun. 

I do know this though: when I return, I will be a better writer than I am now; when I return, I will have written chapters I still know nothing about; I will be one step closer to the last one, what ever numeric title it may bare. I know that it is out there, somewhere on the paper white horizon. 

I know also that the next time I read these chapters I will look up from this book, this book that is mine only for a time, and the life around me will be different too. 

It is strange how thoughts like these affect me: making me both eager to get to the end, and desire to linger here a little while longer.

The Tail of Despereaux (And Why He Had to Lose It)

A Look at the Heroic Critters in Literature, Who (more often than not) Lose Their Tails

 

Ever since I wrote my post Why Mr. Fox Had to Lose His Tail a few months ago, another heroic critter has been coming in and out of mind. 

It occurred to me shortly after I shared the post here that Fantastic Mr. Fox wasn't the only fictional critter I knew of who had lost his tail. Despereaux, the heroic mouse in Kate Dicamillo's The Tale of Despereaux also loses his tail most gruesomely when Miggory Sow chops it off with a cleaver, so sparing his life by a hair, and yet, taking his tail nonetheless. 

 

Reepicheep in C.S. Lewis's Prince Caspian also loses his tail in a battle against the Telmarines.

 

I thought that surely there must be a mutual string here in these stories. I might not have noticed it otherwise were it not for the trail left by a violently lost tail.

 

Throughout the weeks that followed my first touch on this topic in June, I thought from time to time about Despereaux, wondering occasionally if I could figure out what this symbolism meant, if anything.

Yet I was uncertain whether there was enough in this differential between the loss of tail. It was evident to me that these two stories (Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Tale of Despereaux) did not otherwise have much in common; one being rather grotesque, while the other, though somewhat violent at times, reads much like fairy tale. 

Then, less than a week after I started to ponder Despereaux and his poor cleaved tail, a little chipmunk began to help himself to the food in my bird feeder just outside my living room window. 

Ironically, the little bandit had lost his tail. 

I decided then that it was time to revisit The Tale of Despereuax in an attempt to unravel this mystery. This post is the result of what I have discovered in my lengthy investigation.

We learn from the mouse Reepicheep that the loss of a tail is a heavy burden to bear for any small critter; and so, naturally, Reepicheep was not forgotten in my thoughts as I considered this conundrum. 

In C.S. Lewis's Prince Caspian, Reepicheep also loses his tail. Thereafter his mice followers decide to chop off their own tails, saying that it would be better to go without it than to bear the shame of wearing an honour denied to their chief.

 

Fortunatetly, the world Reepicheep lives in is one of healing and redemption, and by the power of Aslan his tail is quickly restored and thus no more tails are chopped off.  

Because of this, I will not be talking much about the wonder that is Reepicheep the mouse and his blessed tail, only say that the reaction of his people shows that the loss of a tail is not to be taken too lightly.

Indeed, I myself would  have been unsettled by such a sight as a group of mice slicing off their own tails with the sharp end of a blade. Surely, Narnia would have to be a more savage place than I remember if that is how the story had gone and we were left to look at the bloodied rumps of these pure creatures. 

 

 

 

As I mentioned in my last post regarding this subject, I find Mr. Fox's own bloodied stump of a tail unsettling, for it represents to me the severity of death in an animal's world and just how near it lives to an animal's rump. A slip down a hole may not be enough to give Death the slip. But if, like Mr. Fox, the critter is lucky, it may miss them by a tail's length. 

 

Despereaux himself is spared from the meat cleaver, and, like Mr. Fox, he must live with this reminder for the rest of his life. Death nearly got him then. But it was not luck that spared him. Fantastic Mr. Fox is a lucky creature, this we cannot deny, for every tight spot he ever gets into he evades with a combination of luck and his own personal cunning. 

Despereaux is not cunning, and indeed, he is often unlucky. 

So, what spared him then?

In the weeks that followed, Despereaux popped often into my mind trailed by this simple question. But the more I thought about these tailless creatures and the argument I had made for Mr. Fox's stump the less it seemed to apply to Despereaux. While it is true that he lives in an often harsh world, death does not dwell nearly so close in Despereaux's castle. Indeed, with an air of destiny, Despereaux evades death the moment he is born, for none of the other mice in his litter survive. He is born along with dead brothers and dead sisters, and though his father claims that he cannot possibly live, the narrator immediately assures us that he does, for this is, after all, his story. 

Thus, Despereaux survives, defying death with his birth alone. One might say it was his destiny that pulled him through. 

 

There is no destiny for Mr. Fox. Indeed, the word is not once uttered. One must remember that the events of the story itself are brought about by the consequences of Mr. Fox's own actions. They are the direct result of his animalistic instincts, to thieve, to eat, to snap chicken necks and crunch on bird bones. 

 

Despereaux, however, is never good at following his mouse instincts. Anyone assigned the task of teaching Despereaux the ways of being a mouse quickly gives up, and so Despereaux is left alone, free to spend his time as he wishes. 

Mostly, Despereaux wishes to daydream.

This simple activity in itself may not seem like a big deal, until one considers that Despereaux is doing things that are beyond even the Fantastic Mr. Fox. After all, despite his fantasticality, Mr. Fox's desires remain largly animalistic. He desires to eat good food, to protect his mate and his offspring, to have good game, and to be tricksy. 

Any fox we might otherwise observe will surely share in these desires: to hunt, to live, to expand the size of his den and further his own line.

 

Despereaux though, as we already discussed, is not just any mouse. He desires to transcend his own mousehood. He has little desire for food. When his sister tells him to eat the crispy pages of a book, Despereaux is perplexed. He would rather read it. While his siblings hunt for crumbs, Despereaux watches the light and he listens to the far off sound of music.

The music, we are told, is enough to make him forget the few mouse instincts he possesses, and so, Despereaux is led by his fate away from his siblings and right to the foot of the human king. 

 

We can all imagine what would happen to Mr. Fox had he forgotten his foxness so: he'd have been shot. His fur would likely have been turned into a hat, and his tail would have prematurely acted as a trophy. 

Despereaux's world is kinder. Indeed, I will tell you that the story ends with Despereaux sharing a table with the King and his daughter, an altogether whimsical image that can only be the stuff of fairytales.

 

Thus, the differential between the two worlds becomes once again evident. The world Dicamillo creates in this narrative is altogether lighter and more dreamy than that of any Roald Dahl book I've ever read, for in this world the gap between humanity and animality can be crossed with compassion and a willingness to change. 

These things are not available to the heroic creatures I mentioned in my last post. For Mr. Fox, for Hazel and Fiver, and for Peter Rabbit there is no crossing this gorge, for death stands in that valley. It is a law not to be breached; a disparity left agape with the curcuial disability of a limited language and an ultimate failure to see the life and possibility in the other. Be it the shortcoming of the beast or the man, these worlds are split apart, and in life they cannot be united. 

 

 

When I said that death does not live close in Despereaux's castle, I meant that death is by no means his next door neighbor. Even so, we find out very quickly exactly where death lives: in its most threatening form it lives in the dungeon, down a long winding staircase and many floors beneath Despereaux's own little feet. Yet, before we even know why, we are told that Despereaux is destined to go there. 

Indeed, the narrator herself tells us that it is fate that sends him there. With the sound of drumming and the smell of celery breath, bound to by a red thread, Despereaux is sent forth to meet death again. 

No mouse, we are told, has ever come back from the dungeons.

 

Despereaux does come back. He goes down the dark winding stair down which mice are sent to die, and he comes back up them again. 

In fact, he does so quite easily. He does not even do so himself. He is carried up on a tray, borne up by a girl named Miggery Sow, who, as I've already told you, will be the one to chop off his tail.

 

It is notable that the first thing Despereaux does when he comes to in the dungeon is to reach for his tail. Throughout the story so far, he has reached for tails often, sometimes his own, sometimes those of others, such as those of his older siblings. But there, with no other tail to cling to, Despereaux searches for his own and is frightened by how long it takes him to find it in the pitch black darkness. 

There in the black, with death circling around him, nearing him with sound of rat claws and long rat tails slithering, his own tail is the only comfort he can cling to.

 

It is also there that Despereaux utters the phrase "I need to live... I can't die," into the ear of the one who will save him.

It is also notable that Despereaux loses his tail the moment he leaves the dungeons. Just as he is recalled to the light and the life that it holds, Despereaux is greeted by a blinding flash as the cleaver comes down. 

So, Despereaux loses his tail. What do you think saved him?

If you want the techincal answer, Migger Sow did. She saved him when she saw more than just a filthy mouse, and so, as cook shouted the implacable words "kill him even if he's already dead", Miggory Sow missed him by a hair, and so Despereaux scurried away; he scurried like an actual professional mouse, the story tells us; for in this moment he is, after all, just an animal who has lost his tail and is running for his life. 

If you want the fairy tale answer, Despereaux's destiny saved him too. For Despereaux, we are told, is destined to save the princess, and thus, to eat soup at the table of the King.

 

That leaves us with one final question. Why did Despereaux have to lose his tail?

 

We are told by the people of Reepicheep that to wear a tail is an honour. 

Honour is a word often uttered by Despereaux throughout the course of his story. It is spoken by him to the princess when he first gives his heart to her. ("I honor you," he whispered with his paw on his heart.)

It is whispered by him in the face of danger and death when the princess is nowhere near, for it makes him feel braver to think of honouring her. 

 

So, one might say, Despereaux does honour her. He loses his tail for her, and so he honours her in the greatest way a little mouse can. Maybe even more.

 

I have, however, come to think that it is not quite that simple. After all, what does Despereaux's and Reepicheep's honour have to do with Mr. Fox's consequential world? The only mutual thread between the bullet, the cleaver, and the heat of battle is that they all have death in them. Yet, none of these critters ultimately dies within their story.

If we are to accept that the losing of a tail is a symbol for death, then we can be certain that these critters have all faced it.

So, why did they have to lose their tails at all?

Probably because only animals have tails; and because Despereaux, in order to transcend his animalness, had to lose a little. In order to unite animality with humanity, he had to give something up. 

 

As for Mr. Fox, he will never cross the breach between animality and humanity in this life. These two worlds cannot be united while they are living. 

Despereaux himself dies by all accounts but actuality: he is sent to the pit of no return, and comes back caked in blood and flour, looking altogether like a ghost. 

 

His story ends with a heavenly image as the author asks us to imagine a mouse and a rat at the table of a king, eating soup and being joyous. It is indeed the stuff of fairy tales. But by the light of this image, I see a heavenly twinge. 

 

 

 

In Despereaux's world death looks like a dark dungeon. Fortunately, it does not look so in mine. To me it looks a bit like the image Dicamillo leaves us with: of animal and humankind eating together at a table. To me, there is light even on the other side of death.

So, as I draw this mystery to a close at last, Reepicheep comes once again into my mind. I am not, however, thinking about his tail. 

I am thinking that Reepicheep is the only critter among all those I've mentioned that doesn't die, who will never die; not by the cleaver, or by the hunter, not in battle, not even by time.

I am thinking about Reepicheep in his little boat, sailing over the sweet waves into Aslan's country, there to depart from death forever. 

I cannot think of another place in literature where man and animal can live and dwell so well together, walk together, fight together, even die together, and then spend eternity together after all else is done.

 

"The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea."  (Isiah 11:6-9)

Little Uncle Runs Home to Make Coffee

Let Pippi and her friends go trudging through rain storms and sleep in shacks and under pines, Little Uncle thought to himself. 

 

He was going to run back home where there was sugar cubs and pancakes. He was going to spend the next few days grazing in their front lawn and awaiting Pippi Longstocking's return on the front porch. And maybe, if he could manage it, he would have the coffee ready for them when they returned from their exertion. 

 

After all, running away from home was for the young. He wanted nothing more than to stay home where all was good and the food was tasty.

 

 I knew from the start that this was a field in which an Astrid Lindgren character needed to graze. And who could be a better individual for such a field than Little Uncle: trusted horse of Pippi Longstocking. 

 

In the episode in which Pippi and her friends run away from their respective homes, Little Uncle also runs off when a rainstorm sends him into a fright. 

 

I always loved the casualness with which Pippi responds to Anika and Tommy's worry, claiming that he was simply running home to make coffee so that they would have something warm to drink upon their return. 

 

Little Uncle is nothing if not a thoughtful horse.

 

I am glad he has joined my collection of animals going for a walk. 

The Wordless Writer's Worthless Hours

A writer walks across a field and suddenly a flash of lightening strikes them: I want to write is the only thing that remains in their mind after the shock fades. 

Their spine tingles a little with the electric snap, and their neck feels stiff. No one else around them seems to feel it. No one else seems to notice that they have come to an abrupt halt midfield. But there it is, clear as day, astounding as the clear sky above: I want to write. 

 

They leave the field, not caring which it is; soccer, football, or wheat. They leave the field, and they drive home. 

The shock seems to be the only thing that matters. They can feel it flowing through their veins, pulsating in the back of their skull. Word, words, words, they course through the awakened writer; their brain, their hands, their heart. 

Every word the world is wrapped in is suddenly at their disposal. 

 

Word. Words. Words. They flicker on their laptop's screen; writing, then erasing.

After a while their hands no longer shake. After a while their eyes become tired. Their spine aches from sitting hunched in the kitchen chair. Soon their hands start to tremble; the writer probably hasn't eaten since noon. 

They eat a quick amount of nothing. It doesn't matter what goes in their body, unless its books to fill their mind or vocabulary snacks to sink their teeth into. They browse dictionaries or an online thesaurus, glowing on their face like a fridge, searching it for something to fill themselves with.

 

Their eyes look back at the page. There is nothing on it for them to read.

The darker it gets, the brighter their screen seems to glow; words fizzle and flounder, unattainably there in the bright white page. They burn like on the sun's scorching surface. The writer blots them out as they try to grasp at the vapor before the words sizzle away and all that's left is water marks, like their dusty laptop screen.

Probably the writer will not write anything that matters that night. Their brain is tired and clumsy, and their heart is on repeat. (I want to write, it says. I know, the writer whispers.) 

 

After hours of typing and trying, they grab their laptop, and they drive back to the field. 

There, in the cold, in the same spot where the need to write struck them, the writer sits under the stars and lets their laptop glow on their face. 

The people are gone. It is only the writer and the stars now, the writer and the stars and a gaping desire within them to write something down. 

But, after hours of trying, the writer realizes that there is nothing to say. So, they close their screen just to open it again. The light of their laptop pulsates in their tired eyes, pouring its white vacancy into them. 

They realize that they are no longer looking at the screen. It is more like it is looking at them, trying to figure them out, trying to decide why they stay so long when they have nothing to say. 

 

The glow fills the writer through their pupils, like the morning sun on white sheets; it fills the writer up and smooths them out, softening all their crinkles, every wrinkle, every fold. 

 

The white page peers at them. 

 

I want to write, the writer says. 

 

Only after the screen closes its eyes and goes to sleep does the writer at last go to bed, thinking as they fall asleep about how much they'd rather be writing, and how much they might say.

The desire to write doesn't always come with the words. But the yearning makes it ache sometimes. It drains out your hours and your sleep; it makes you forget to eat sometimes. The writer spends these worthless hours writing worthless things. Words, words, words sometimes lead to pages. But there is only one thing of value on the laptops tattooed face on nights like these: Words, paragraphs, pages, filled with every word the world is wrapped in; all new ways to say with the attainable alphabet how much the writer wants to write.

 

So, as the sleepy writer slumbers, the heat fades from the tired laptop, and the books on the shelves whisper in their sleep, like distant owls in the night. The cat snores softly. 

The desire doesn't sleep, though. It is the first thing on their mind when they awake. 

I myself have spent endless hours in that field, searching for the words like a lost wifi connection and looking out for lightning, hoping that the flash will strike, and I'll be able to write at last. 

Stuck Editing in an Imaginary Fishbowl

I was reminded of the scene in Big Fish in which Edward Bloom is engulfed by a rain storm. Within seconds of the storms beginning, his entire car is immersed as a lake gushes from the sky, equipped also with fishes and the ethereal woman who we've learned is also a fish. What follows is a scene of tranquility. In the ghostly underwater world, Edward sits in his car like in a fishbowl and watches the strange fish blow bubbles around him. 

I, however, was not in my car, and it took at least the whole night for my house to be engulfed to the brim. The rain had been driven onto my window all night. Eventually though, it sounded less like raindrops and more like a waterfall. I could hear the tree crashing against the side of the house as the tempest thrashed away with it.

I spent most of that night editing, usually forgetting the gloriously nasty weather outside. I had a candle by the window, and from time to time, I pressed my face to the glass. I could see almost nothing outside. It was dark, and my reflection peered at me in the black. I did not see any fishes.

Believe what you will, but moments after this picture was taken, a trickle of water leaked through the frame of the window and put the candle out. 

 

I admit, I am never quite sure where the time goes when I'm writing, and after a night spent imagining things, it is always strange to come back to the real world. By the time I return to my surroundings, it is usually pitch black outside, and there being no street lights where I live, there is nothing out there to see by. 

 

All I had was the sound of the outside world to spur my imagination. I could hear the rainstorm pounding on the rooftop; I could hear it running down my windows; I could hear the waterfall outside our door gushing wildly; water; water; water. It didn't seem to stop nor lessen. 

 

As I tried to fall asleep, I listened to the trickle leaking through the top of the window, and I imagined what might be going on outside. Then sleep came, and with it silence. And still the water trickled. 

I slept there, in that tranquil lake.

 

 

I was saddened when there was no lake around my house in the morning, and so, I had no choice but to go in to work. The ditches and dykes I passed on my way were flooded, but beyond that, I had no proof of my strange night. 

 

I suppose fiction can only be incorporated into one's life to some extent. I'd imagine myself into Edward Bloom's fishbowl any day, if I had the choice. There is less to do there, and so much more time to write.

Dracula: The Diaries that Were Never Meant to be Read

(or) The Writing Puppeteer and the Surrogate Confessor

 

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula were written almost a lifetime apart. Yet the two novels are undeniably the most highly read books of horror ever to be written. 

 

This, to me, is no mystery.

 

Indeed, when one thinks of other renowned writers of horror, such as Edgar Allan Poe or H.P. Lovecraft, one usually thinks first of the author who penned them, not the names of their stories. It is not so for Shelley's Frankenstein and Stoker's Dracula. They are remembered mainly for their monsters, for the titles of their monstrous works, for the horrors that they penned within. 

Frankenstein's monster (widely and ironically called merely "Frankenstein") is a sapient creature created from dissevered human parts. Dracula, the most well known vampire ever written about, is an apparition of terror who feasts and sucks on other human beings. 

 

I trust I did not have to tell you that. You already knew who they were. Everyone does, after all. But it is good to be reminded just how ghastly these creatures with whom we are so well acquainted are.

 

While there is no denying that the grotesque and debase way human life is sucked, smothered, split, and severed in these works is utterly unsettling, there is another more horrifying detail. 

It is easy to be sickened by Victor Frankenstein's cowardice and self victimization. Even more so is it natural to detest and dread Dracula who diminishes naive young maidens to ghostliness and drives people into madness and terror. 

But, to do all this while also making the reader feel uneasy, not just with the plot itself, but with themselves, that is a narrative feat to be admired, even to be feared. 

Indeed, it is no coincidence that the two most engrossing tales of horror ever to be written adopt the same narrative style. These works are not tales, they are private confessions; they are the dreadful diaries of those who have gone to dark and dismal places and seen the diabolical; and, what's more, they were never meant to be read. 

 

 

This is, of course, not to say that the authors did not mean for us to read them. But the author is not the real teller of these stories, not in the fictional sense of the word. They are the executioner, the puppet master, and they have their ink stained hands inside another's mouth. 

 

Stoker is the singular master of numerous private diaries, confidential letters, and secret interviews. From Jonathan Harker, Madam Mina, Lucy Westerna, Doctor Seward and more, in Dracula, Stoker puppeteers these soul's private musing and secret confessions. He plays these puppets so perfectly, searing and tearing at them with his pen till the ink dots his pages, till the reader themselves can pretend in full that there is no author at all, just horrid utterances written by cursed characters who know not that their words are being read by a stranger.  

Shelley likewise has her own skill as a puppeteer, speaking in not one, but two mouths at the same time in a story told within another. In Frankenstein, Captain Walton concedes the account told to him by Victor Frankenstein on a near desecrated ship, trapped inside a frozen sea. 

One might say Walton had little choice but to listen to Victor Frankenstein's horrible account. He had no where else to go. He is locked by cold and ice just as he is by his human conviction, stuck in the clutches of curiosity and foremost, by a moral contract to listen to this distraught stranger's confession. 

Yet, the reader, having all the places to go in the world, finds themselves trapped in the same fate. From the stories first pages we are led on by the deplorable thread, the demoralizing idea that the teller has no one else to turn to. As we read the reiteration of Frankenstein's words through the mark of Walton's pen, we are implored to listen by the same means he is. We keep reading because we are curious; because our mind has been meddled with; for the narrator has claimed that there is horrible confession on its way, just ahead, on any one of these pages, and deep down, we would like to hear it to sate our secret curiosity. 

Thus, the reader is entreated to listen for the sake of the teller's soul in both tales. In Dracula as well as Frankenstein, we are not sure if the teller will make it out alive, and thus the horrible thought lurks always in the back of our mind that no one else will ever know that they are dead, or what it was that killed them.

 

 

 

 It becomes easy to see why the names of the author's, though remembered, become somehow detached from their works. The authors are admired once the book is finished, recognized when their names are spoken or their works are discussed. Yet, while the book is being read, the author becomes altogether irrelevant, displaced for the sake of terror and dismay. It is, after all, so much more terrible and thrilling to become enthralled and engrossed with the confession. 

Let us not ask the writer what their intentions are. Let us fear the monster instead. Let us forget that their is a writer pulling strings and attempting to shock. Let us be at their mercy. 

 

Of course, if we are to continue with this fictional pretense for the sake of good horror, it is also important to note that the confessor will never know that someone has read their words. It is a strange and unsettling thing to read the diaries of those now dead.

The tale of Victor Frankenstein, if we are to consider it further, is one confession inside of another. For as already stated, Victor Frankenstein tells his story to one more soul before he dies. It is captain Robert Walton, his first confessor, who writes down every word uttered by Victor Frankenstein on that cold barren sea.

I will not recount here the horrible things confessed by Frankenstein, only say that it is little wonder the tale haunts Walton so much so that he cannot but write it down, thus sharing the harrowing burden with the page and the reader's inquisitive eyes. 

Though naturally these words were never meant for us. Walton writes to his sister Margaret. It is to her that he confesses.

"What can I say that will enable you to understand the depth of my sorrow?" he asks. "All that I should express would be inadequate and feeble."

Yet there is no guarantee that Walton's words are ever read. No known response is ever received from Margaret, not a word is ever uttered by this surrogate confessor. Furthermore, the reader can never know if Walton ever reaches land and finds another soul to share in his burden. 

It may very well be that Victor's secret dies on that desolate sea, in which case the reader is the only one that knows.

Thus, Walton's story ends with the form of Frankenstein's monster disappearing across the ice into the distant darkness.

 

Famously, the story of Dracula starts with the diaries of Jonathan Harker in the weeks he spends at the castle of Count Dracula. It was in those weeks that his diary proved to be a source of solace; a soothing to his sanity in satanic places. He never imagined how vital this comfort would turn out to be. Indeed, he sometimes shudders to imagine that his words might be read by another.

Thus, when Jonathan confesses that he hesitates to note down the terrible things he saw because he fears that his love Mina might one day read it, what reader does not pause, if only for an instant, and wonder who gave them the right to read these private words.

It is a strange sort of sensation that feels faintly of discomfort, even disgust. 

 

It is true that a great many diaries are shared throughout the course of the narrative. It often seems that for the characters words do not suffice. In the rare occasion that horrors are repeated aloud they usually cause great distress. 

The reading and sharing of private writings throughout acts as a symbol of good faith, and what's more, as a more perfect truth. The accounts as they are thus laid out on the pages of their diaries are unaltered by doubt or misconceptions caused by reflections or reason. They are the raw reports of the senses and what came over them, sometimes written mere moments after the events transpire.

But there is another reason that the characters rely so on their diaries. It is a truth that every writer knows. It is simply this: a soul is easier shared on the page than in conversation. As Mina herself says, to write is both a listening and a whispering to oneself, and so, the soul is not disguised by such trifles as one's voice or actions. It is unaltered by the reactions of those they are speaking to. 

This is not to say that the characters are immune to the discomforts caused by such intrusions. Madam Mina, who becomes the guardian of their diaries as well as her own, says after reading one such account:

"I have been more touched than I can say by your grief...It told me, in its very tones, the anguish of your heart. It was like a soul crying out to almighty God. No one else must ever hear them spoken ever again!... none other need now hear your heart beat as I did."

Van Helsing upon requesting permission to read the diary of one recently deceased shares a similar statement, though his speaks even more directly into the reader's own ear. 

 

Upon assuring that he does not desire to read the papers for curiosities sake, he says, 

 

"I have them (the papers) all here. I took them... so that no strange hand might touch them – no strange eyes look through her words and into her soul."

 

If there is one thing to be taken from this it is that the reader is by all accounts a stranger, and that they have looked long and hard into all of their souls.

When Jonathan and Mina finally marry, Jonathan entrusts his diary to her, his wife, bidding her only that if she were to read it never to let him know it. 

 

Mina, of course, does not in that moment realize the gravity of her decision. She binds the book in ribbon and wax, a ribbon which she wore around her untouched neck, and she seals the wax with her wedding ring, recognizing it as a symbol of the trust they have for one another. 

 

The reader makes no such vows. Their eyes breach every secret, every concealment unashamedly. Thus, they become the invisible confessor that no one asks for.

Whether they are the one who breaks the seal or whether Mina does this herself depends on how you read the story. Maybe it is best to imagine that the story is already over and Dracula is just an old dusty diary and a stack of letters laced together with a blue ribbon once worn around a lady's neck. 

 

Surely, it is easier than watching it all transpire in silence. It is easier than intercepting every letter and stealing every diary in the dead of night just to keep up with the story. 

Certainly, it is easier than being the one to break the seal.

So the work of horror is put down and the astounded reader wonders at the puppeteer's skill, to write such a harrowing and haunted tale through the mouth of another, a mouth sewn by their own cunning hands. 

It is no longer clear who is the puppet: is it the characters? Or has the writer caught the reader in their strings? 

Stoker's Shadows

 "Though we were in shelter, we could hear the rising wind, for it moaned and whistled through the rocks, and the branches crashed together... It grew colder and colder still."

(Dracula, Bram Stoker)

It was a cold, blustery day; the cold was of the wet, bitter kind; the kind that seems to grasp your very bones. Not even the heat indoors could fight it away. You could feel it seeping through the glass of every window. 

 

 

The outside world looked dreary, blurred by the wetness and the damp, and the rain's slim slippery fingers tapped on my window eerily, sometimes almost desperately.

 

By the time the afternoon rolled in the day had changed its mind tenfold, turning itself from rain to snow, and back to rain again. By then the clouds above were as thin as a dying person's skin, and the light it let loose was pale and meagre. 

 

The day was almost spent.

As I read by the window, the shadows crept out from between the pages of my book, out of the core of its very spine. Even as I held it open, transfixed by its horror, still, the shadows lingered. I expanded its leaves, extending its spine and wrenching it wide. Still, the shadows deepened.

 

 

 

 

 Dracula was made to be read on days like this: when all through the afternoon the light weens to grey; when the imminent dark of November is only hours away, and even the crook of a spine is a dark and shadowy place.