August 16, 2004
MORDREN GRANGE
"She stepped down from the hackney, into a vapour of snowflakes and extermination..."
So begins my latest story, Mordren Grange, just out in Minnesota Review. It's a postmodern Gothic, in which the author of a Victorian pastiche comments on his work even as he's composing it:
"I will set it in a Victorian manor house. This is a trope so filtered and distilled through modern entertainment that it feels archetypal, seems to spring from the collective unconscious. I will utilize the usual cues: fogs, butlers, parlour maids, arcane constructions, narrative props as alien to your waking life as they are embedded in the genome of popular culture."She stepped down from the hackney, into a vapour of snowflakes and extermination...
"This, a reference to the ill-gotten nature of the Mordren fortune, the particulars of which I may only hint at, ambiguity - though hardly characteristic of Victorian literature - being a particularly contemporary malady."The Victorian gothic is a myth, a fabricated past, a harsh world which nevertheless seems innocent in the gas-lit haze of nostalgia. It's a decadent, late-phase fantasy that appeals because it portrays a society that for all its rigidity and shortcomings seems predictable and well-ordered in a way that modern life is not. It has the faux-atavistic appeal of Tolkien. The well-dressed 19th Century characters seem noble, in that they are by definition innocent of the unimaginable crimes of the 20th Century; they inhabit a steamy, well-tended conservatory where the serpent of relativity still waits among the palm fronds to lisp E=mc².
In case you just popped in from Atrios or Maureen Dowd, and are baffled by the well-written prose, this story is narrated in an arch, self-conscious manner in which the style itself a character. It's a technique that can smother a novel but works well in short pieces. Masters of the craft are Annie Proulx, Angela Carter, Rikki Ducornet, Cormac McCarthy, & Gabriel Garcia Marquez. You can read more of Mordren Grange here, or you can buy the Minnesota Review - a great, chewy journal edited by Jeff Williams, full of art & ideas - here.
Speaking of Garcia Marquez, my story Angel Moreno will be out this month in Caribbean Writer. It's a pop satire about the Elián Gonzalez fiasco,in which the Supreme Leader selects a Cuban delinquent to make an Elián-style trip to Cuba, with surreal results. It's also the first story published in a university journal to feature a cameo by Garcia Marquez as Castro's lapdog. I'm sure that will garner me just oodles of invites to chic Manhattan cocktail parties where lugubrious literati like Sontag & Doctorow make plangent repartee comparing America to Weimar Germany, that sort of thing. Can't wait! You can read a sneak preview here.
Posted by Jeff at August 16, 2004 09:31 PM