Interfictions 2 (3 page)

Globalization is simply one of a number of forces which are breaking down the tyranny of genre classifications and paving the way for experimentation within popular storytelling. In his book
Everything Bad Is Good For You
, Steven Johnson makes the argument that the most popular forms of entertainment today are popular because they make demands on our attention and cognition. For example, a television show like
Lost
, one of the top ratings successes of the past decade, demonstrates a level of complexity that would have been unimaginable on American television a few decades ago—with its large-scale ensemble casts of characters, its flashes forward and backward in time, its complex sets of puzzles and enigmas, its moral ambiguities and shifting alliances, but also its uncertain and unpredictable relationship to existing television genres. If we knew what the operative genre model was, we might figure out what's really happening on the island, but without such a clear mapping, we remain pleasurably lost. Such dramas thrive in part because they support robust Internet communities where readers gather online to compare notes, debate interpretations, trace references, and otherwise have fun talking with each other. Its interstitial qualities are essential to
Lost's
success, even as they account for why other viewers got frustrated and gave up on the series, convinced that it was never going to add up to anything anyway.

Lost
illustrates another tendency in contemporary popular culture towards what I call transmedia storytelling.
Lost
is not simply a story or even a television series;
Lost
is a world that can support many different characters and many different stories that unfold across multiple media platforms. As these stories move across media platforms,
Lost
also often moves across genres: not unlike early novels, which might be constituted through mock letters, journals, and diaries, these new stories may mock e-mail correspondence, interviews, documents, websites, news magazine stories, advertisements, computer games, puzzles, ciphers, and a range of other materials which help make its world feel more real to the reader. These transmedia works will add a whole new meaning to the concept of interstitial arts.

So, to borrow from Charles Dickens (who borrowed from everyone else in his own time), this is the best of times and the worst of times for the interstitial arts. In such a world, the interstitial thrives and it withers. It finds receptive audiences and harsh critics. It gratifies and grates. It inspires and confuses. Above all, it gives us something to talk about. It opens us up to a world where nothing is what it seems and where little belongs, at least in the narrow sense of the term. We're going
Out There
!

What happens next is in your hands. Read. Enjoy. Debate. Tell your friends. But also create. Write. Appropriate. Remix. Transform. Just leave your cookie cutters and jelly molds at home. We can figure out what shelf this belongs on later.

Ellen Kushner, “Movements in Science Fiction and Fantasy,” in Nebula Awards Showcase 2005, edited by Jack Dann (ROC/PenguinPutnam, March 2005), www.interstitialarts.org/wordpress/?pageid=8

Delia Sherman, “An Introduction to Interstitial Arts: Life on the Border,” www.interstitialarts.org/what/introtoIA.html

Susan Stinson, “Cracks,” www.interstitialarts.org/what/reflection

Stinson.html

Mikhail Bakhtin,
The Dialogic Imagination
(University of Texas, 1982).

Heinz Insu Fenkl, “The Interstitial DMZ,” www.interstitialarts.org/why/theinterstitialdmz1.html

Barth Anderson, “The Prickly, Tricky, Ornery Multiverse of Interstitial Art,” www.interstitialarts.org/what/reflectionAnderson.html

Simon Frith,
Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music
(Harvard University Press, 1998)

Rick Altman,
Film/Genre
(British Film Institute, 1999)

Grant McCracken,
Plenitude 2.0: Culture by Commotion
(Periph: Fluide, 1998)

Catherine Tossenberger, “Potterotics: Harry Potter Fan Fiction on the Internet,” Dissertation, University of Florida, 2007

Alex Doty,
Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon
(Routledge, 2000)

Jason Mittell, “All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling and Procedural Logic,” in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan,
Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives
(MIT Press, 2009)

Linda Williams,
Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible"
(University of California Press, 1999)

Tzvetan Todorov,
The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
(Cornell University Press, 1975)

Renato Rosaldo,
Culture and Truth: The Reworking of Social Analysis
(Beacon Press, 1993)

Charles Vess, “Interstitial Visual Arts: An Impossible Marriage of Materials,” www.interstitialarts.org/what/marriageofmaterials.html

Steven Johnson,
Everything Bad Is Good for You
(Riverhead, 2006)

Kristin Thompson,
Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis
(Princeton University Press, 1988)

John Caughie,
Theories of Authorship: A Reader
(Routledge, 1981)

Peter J. Rabinowitz, “The Turn of the Glass Key: Popular Fiction as Reading Strategy,”
Critical Inquiry
, March 1985

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Jeffrey Ford

Just before I dozed off to sleep last night, I had a vision. I saw, with my eyes closed, a room that was wallpapered with the most amazing scenery of a battle between angels and demons. It was brilliantly colorful and so amazingly detailed. I can still see the deep red of the evil horde, their barbed tails and bat wings—classic Madison Avenue horned demons, but playing for keeps, slaying angels with their tridents. The angels wore billowing white robes and, of course, had feathered wings in contrast to the slick rodent ones of the enemy. Halos, gleaming swords, harps to call the troops to charge, they poured out of the clouds, riding beams of light toward Earth where the demons crawled out of cracks in the ground, smoking volcano craters, and holes in giant trees. The middle part of the wall, from just above knee-height to the top of the rib cage, was taken up by the actual battle. The upper part held scenes in heaven as the troops made ready to descend and the dead and wounded were brought in. The lower part of the wall was the stalactite-riddled caverns of burning hell, showing the incredible numbers of Satan's minions. If you've ever seen the
Where's Waldo
books—it looked like one of those, or at least every inch was as crowded with as many characters, painted in the style and color of Mathias Gr?newald. One thing to keep in mind—I knew this was a war
between
Heaven and Hell, not the war
in
Heaven in which Lucifer and his posse were evicted.

The sight of this wallpaper jazzed me back to consciousness, and I said to Lynn, who was dozing off, herself, “I just saw War Between Heaven and Hell wallpaper.” She was silent for a while, but I knew from her breathing she wasn't asleep. “What do you think of that?” I said. She laughed. “I have to get up early tomorrow,” she said. A few moments later I was describing it to her. When I was done, I said to her, “What do you think that means?” “You've got a screw loose,” she said. “It was so colorful and intricate,” I told her. “Great,” she said, and a few seconds later, she was lightly snoring.

I lay awake for a while and contemplated the War Between Heaven and Hell wallpaper. In my imagination a woman got this wallpaper installed in a room in her house. Eventually she noticed that the scenes changed each day while she was at work. On the days when she had a bad day at the office, Satan's troops had gained the advantage, and the days when things went well for her, Heaven took the lead. Months went by and Heaven really started to kick ass, pushing the demons back into Hell and then invading the smoky underworld in order to finish them off. The last battalion of winged demons had pulled back into the frozen parts at the center of Hell where they'd amassed their infernal artillery and battle beasts, falling into a siege amid the ice mountains. The angels surrounded the last bole of Hell and used long bows and spears.

For the woman to take all of this in each night, she had to get down on the floor and move a desk out of the way to see the spot where the final battle was taking place. Just as it looked like the demons were going to be obliterated, she started to feel badly for them. She felt an uneasiness with the lack of balance represented by the wallpaper's scenario. Since the wallpaper scenes had something to do with what happened to her through the day, she decided to try to turn the tide of the battle by performing acts of evil, things that would reflect badly upon her and ensure she would have a bad day. She put her plan into practice, and the demons began to rally. A call came through on her cell phone, and Satan engaged her as an agent in the War Between Heaven and Hell. That's when I fell asleep.

I woke up this morning from a dream of a kind of monastery in a snowy wood. I think a monastery is a place where monks live, but this place had Catholic priests living in it. Lynn and I came to it after slogging through swamps and through a snow-covered forest. We were totally lost. The place was built from the most marvelous-smelling rosewood, and it seemed to have been carved from enormous blocks of it rather than put together with nails and screws. The trees came right up to the sides of the walls as if the monastery had been there for a very long time and they had grown up next to where it was built. There were a number of larger buildings linked to each other by screened hallways. Some of these buildings were more than one story and were decorated with gargoyles in the shapes of demons and angels.

We were met by a priest out in the yard behind the open gates at sundown. We were weary and hungry. He told us to hurry if we wanted to eat. We followed him through the winding, dark hallways of the place. The shadows were kept at bay only by lit candles. We were led to a small kitchen and given a piece of stale bread and a bowl of onion soup. The priest introduced himself as Father Heems. He was a very downtrodden-looking fellow, his face filled with worry lines and his hands shaking slightly. He told us the place was haunted by the Holy Ghost, and that the spirit was angry. Just the night before we arrived it had strangled the caretaker, whose body he pointed out to us lying next to the stove wrapped in black plastic and tied at the feet and head. “You've got to keep moving. You can't sleep till dawn. If you doze off, the Ghost will strangle you through your dreams. A breeze will pass over you, and you will feel it tightening its fingers around your throat."

We got up from the table and started walking. “That's it,” cried Heems, “keep moving.” Three other priests, two very old ones and a slow heavy one, and Lynn and I, along with Heems, moved through the corridors of the place—up stairs, down stairs, through catacombs, along balconies. When we passed through the dungeon, there was a cell with straw on the floor with about a dozen young children milling about behind the bars. The heavy priest told us that the children were safe from the Ghost at night behind the bars. I asked, “Why don't we go in there too?” And Heems yelled, “Pipe down and keep moving.” Every time I'd begin to feel tired and slow down, I'd hear the wind blow outside and feel a breeze creeping down the hallway.

Somewhere in the middle of the night, Father Heems called out to one of the other old priests, as we made our way along, “Where is Father Shaw?” This almost made me stop in my tracks, because Father Shaw was the head priest at the church I went to as a kid. He was stern to the verge of cruelty and looked like an emaciated Samuel Beckett. We all hated him. Even the parents hated him. When we kids went to the church for any kind of instruction, like before First Communion or for confirmation training, he'd appear and spew rants about how we were a bunch of little sinners and he wished we could feel Christ's pain from the crucifixion. Any time I ever went to confession and that little door in the dark confessional would slam back and I'd see his profile through the grating, I'd nearly crap my pants. The prayers he'd give you to say for even some minor infraction of disobedience would be an onerous weight.

Soon after the mention of Father Shaw, daylight came and we could finally stop walking. In some kind of weird chain of events and reasoning, Heems made me the new caretaker for the time Lynn and I would stay there, which if I had my preference was not going to be very long. First, though, we had to figure out where we were. Once the other priests left us alone for a few minutes, Lynn asked me, “What's with the kids in the dungeon?” “That's not cool,” I said. But then Heems was back with a canvas bag for me with a shoulder strap on it and a long stick with a nail poking out the end. I got the idea that I was meant to police the grounds. So I started around the outside of the building, poking candy wrappers (there were a lot of candy wrappers for some reason). When I made my way around half the building, I came to a little alcove, and lying in the middle of it on the snow was Father Shaw—dead. He was leaking from somewhere onto the snow, and the snow had turned the color of Mountain Dew. His flesh was rotted and yellow. The second I saw him I started breathing through my mouth as to avoid smelling him. I thought to myself, “Do I have to clean this shit up all by myself?” Time skipped here, and I was tying a string around the plastic that covered his legs. I woke up.

While eating breakfast, I realized why Father Shaw had appeared in this dream. I'd mentioned him to Lynn not two days earlier. We were at a wedding in South Jersey, staying in a place called the Seaview in Absecon. It's a really old hotel and golf resort. That's where the wedding reception was being held. Lynn had stayed there once for a conference she was participating in, and she told me that the hallways of the place reminded her of the hotel in
The Shining
.