In Defense of Evil Witches

The first impression of the witches in Diana Wynne Jones’ Aunt Maria was that of familiarity. These aren’t the flimsy monsters of folklore, or the persecuted healers at the barbeques of antiquity, they are ordinary people from a small town, old people to be sure, but by all accounts still people. The story is embellished with supernatural touches but the real machine underneath is driven by the endemic struggle of the sexes. It would be tempting to characterize Jones’ depictions of witches as playing to easy stereotypes surrounding strong women in authority roles, but there are more layers to Jones portrayal then she lets on at first.

Galloping in to the minefield of gender politics Jones first illustrates the complex familial dynamics that keep Mig, Chris and their saintly mother in Maria’s grasp. She beautify articulates the delicate dance of politeness in amongst their cold war of passive aggression. The real forces at play here are the tooth and claw struggle of social superiority by animals only somewhat constrained by the rules of civilized society. Women have never ascended to power easily. At every foothold they are faced with the insecure rhinoceros of patriarchy. But Maria fights against these odds; perhaps the poisonous stereotypes and constant threat of exploitation darkened her last shreds of humanity. Perhaps she could have been the archetype of the powerful, benevolent witch, a spiritual healer and wise leader in her community. Instead she emerges from the battleground like a mystical granny Thatcher, a twisted female despot whose worldview has turned in on itself.

There is nothing magical about the villain Jones constructs for her story; underneath the trappings of genre fiction beats the heart of an ordinary, everyday megalomaniac. As it turns out there is nothing particularly villainous about her villains either. Maria has deceived herself just as thoroughly as she has her followers. How do you punish someone who according to her own delusional worldview has never done anything wrong? In the end Maria’s manipulations are more of an indication of her own tragic solipsism then an indication that she wants to cause harm to others.  After all what else is there to do in Cranbury?

Angela Carter and the Power of the New Weird

The concept of weird as we know it today has it’s roots in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In Macbeth the Weird Sisters, also known as the Three Witches, controlled the destiny of the protagonists through the powers of fate. These great powers were of mystical, otherworldly origins, hence the idea of weird as unnatural, strange or not of everyday experience. In the modern usage weird is often used as a kind of pejorative, employed to quarantine those outliers who operate independent from the status quo. Many artists have re-appropriated this term, elevating it to a loose sub-genre of works in the so-called “New Weird”. These artists exalt the ambiguous experiences separated from the everyday to dig into the least comfortable realties of human nature. These works are often characterized by an unexpected point of view and contain surrealist motifs as a means to delve into the workings of the subconscious mind.           

Angela Carter explores weirdness extensively in her novel Nights at the Circus.  In Nights at the Circus journalist Jack Walser becomes obsessed with the truth behind the life of Sophie Fevvers an orphan girl turned circus performer who has allegedly sprouted a set of giant wings from her back. Carter plays with our preconceived notions around the characters in the story. As we are swept into Fevver’s elaborate narrative, the weird aspects of the so-called “Freaks” are rendered as mundane with the details of their everyday life and down-to-earth personalities. However their experiences amongst the supposedly ordinary populous stand out in stark relief for their strangeness and cruelty.

The setting in Nights at the Circus is the true source of the stories strangeness. The circus setting appears in various incarnations; firstly through Jack’s point of view in London, then through a more fluid narration as we follow the circus across Russia. Through Fevver’s narrative we learn of the brothel where she was raised. In the brothel Fevver’s wings did not alarm the other women, rather they saw Fevvers as a beacon of hope, a physical symbol of their moral separation from the rest of the world as a result of their profession. The last place Fevver’s describes to Jack is her stay in Madame Schreck’s house of horrors. Schreck’s house is by far the most exaggeratedly cruel and shocking example of how people are treated when they are made to be the mysterious other by exploitative forces. Throughout Carter’s story we are faced with this dichotomy of the freak or the whore versus the normal, freaks and whores in this case being interchangeable stand-ins for the moral other in society.

What makes Nights at the Circus and similar works in the “New Weird” so intriguing is not necessarily what they say but what they deliberately occlude. Jack casts his shadows of doubt over Fevver’s story from the very first sentence. Although Jack is eventually swayed by Fevver’s tale the audience is left largely in doubt. The narration from her point of view is never completely stable, in contrast to Jack’s journalistic grounding in objective fact, Fevver’s narration makes constant jumps, and the audience never feels completely satisfied with her explanations. The use of mundane elements lull the reader into a sense of security then the surreal aspects of the work take hold and the reader is plunged into a parallel world that is uncannily like their own. Ambiguity is a vital ingredient to weird. There is always a sneaking suspicion that something is ‘just a little bit off’. The subjectivity inherent in the “New Weird” forces the audience to engage with the work on their own terms, as a reflection of their own perception of reality.

No Names and Doers in A Wild Sheep Chase

When taken a face value A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami has nothing to do with traditional western assumptions of storytelling, much less those of the often formulaic Horror genre. The universe presented throughout the story seems to coil in on itself, spinning an ever-tighter cocoon of absurdities. As such it’s easy to loose oneself in Murakami’s flourishes and tangents and lose focus on the larger picture. When taken in from a distance that twisted cocoon actually takes on a clear point of view that both replicates and repudiates elements of western storytelling and comments on post-war Japanese culture. 

To say that the unnamed protagonist of A Wild Sheep Chase is a reluctant hero, would be to reconfigure the definition of ‘hero’ and stretch ‘reluctant’ to its breaking point. There is no easy term for the protagonist, he is not an anti-hero, he is not exactly an everyman, nor is he exactly an outsider, he works in advertising. He just is. He is really more of a force, a kind of Zen monk of mediocrity, a physical manifestation of post-modern boredom and vague existential unease.

If A Wild Sheep Chase has a call to action the protagonist takes the afternoon off and misses it, then takes a limo ride to casually accept it, then makes some follow up phone calls to his quest-giver to make small talk and finagle the details. There are some of the trappings of a classic detective story however lunch breaks, neurotic chain-smoking or ‘intercourse’ often overshadow them. What this all adds up to is the author’s exaltation the mundane.

Mild Spoilers Ahead

The horror genre elements are introduced when Murakami pits the ‘No Names’ against ‘The Doers’ in society. ‘The Doers’ (i.e. The Boss, or the unnamed Ainu youth) manipulate the ‘No Names’ and the supernatural spirit manipulates ‘The Doers’ in tern. The scourge infecting Murakami’s universe is not the all-purpose, moralistic ‘Evil’ so prevalent in western horror, it is the embodiment of rugged individualism. When the Doer has fulfilled their singular purpose at any cost, the sprit leaves them and they cease to be extraordinary. Without fail these former titans die as broken husks. In effect society scrambles to pick up the pieces. The disastrous consequences after the passing of the spirit seems to be a poignant metaphor for post-war, economic-boom (circa 1980s) Japan. Murakami is cautioning with narrative form against the western cult of the extraordinary or in a broader context, the threat of modernization.