"Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan-Part Four

I speculated the other day on the possible motivations of writers who use brandnames and product placement in their fiction. I'm not sure that I have an answer to the question of why they do it, but I have another possible explanation. Commercial products, commercial services, and brandnames are obviously on their minds. Actually, I think that what these writers do is unconscious, and so it's not so much on their minds as in them. They have been so steeped in commercialism and consumerism all of their lives that it probably comes naturally for them to throw around these labels and names. This is their natural vocabulary and their natural habit.

My alternate explanation for product placement and the use of brandnames is that these writers and so many like them are signaling their virtue. This isn't a moral or intellectual kind of virtue signaling. They are actually signaling their commercial virtue. It's a display of a kind of street cred. They're basically showing that they're hip and cool and with it. They know what the good stuff is, they know where and how to buy it, and they want you to know that they know. They have the means and the apps, the subscriptions and the accounts, the access and the cash to get it all. To them, I guess, this is a kind of skill, a display of taste, an indication of their superior status, or a status at least equal to yours. They're with it. They're keeping up. They're putting themselves on display. At its base, this kind of thing probably comes from pressures to conform. People who do it want to fit in and be accepted. They want to sit at the cool table, even though they will never be able to sit at the cool table because that was in high school and we're not in high school any more.

Anyone trying to be cool should know that cool isn't trying. Cool is.

Here's Langston Hughes' poem "Motto," first collected in book form in 1951:

Motto
By Langston Hughes

I play it cool
And dig all jive
That's the reason
I stay alive.

My motto,
As I live and learn,
            is:
Dig And Be Dug
In Return.

-----

That's cool.

* * *

"Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan is not a pleasant story. The author, I think, claims not to write horror stories, but this is one. The horror has to do with the narrator himself and what he has inside him. He carries that horror around with him. He exposes others to it. And in one way or another, they are destroyed by it. Or apparently they are destroyed, maybe murdered, but still ruined and their souls wiped away by exposure to his abysses and voids. If you read this story only at its surface--as if you were floating on the surface of a lake sprinkled with the reflections of stars--you would believe that the abyss is external to the narrator. But if you peer into its darkest depths, you might see that the abyss is inside him. I have a feeling that the author knows abysses like these. I think we have to acknowledge that there is some autobiographical content here. So is he Edgar Allan Poe, exploring very human and very dark depths? Or is he acting as his own psychologist, examining his own torments, exploring his own abysses through his art?

So a third question for today: did the author of this story put himself into it (the way he inserted various commercial products in its pages)? And if he did, is he represented only in the narrator? Or is the boy at the end also a representation of himself? In the story, the narrator says that a thing need not be just one thing. It can actually be more than one. I take that as an artist's statement. Maybe the murderer and the murdered--the exploiter and the exploited, the recruiter and the recruited, the groomer and the groomed--are both the same person, separated only by time. (Remember that the psychiatrist asks if the thing in the lake has followed him through time, from his childhood to now.) What was done to him, he will do to others, another inversion of a biblical idea.

In reading the stories of Poe, I'm not convinced that he was like or sympathized with his darkest and most depraved characters. He may have understood the darker side of life and the dark depths of the human soul, but it's clear that we are not to think of the narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart" or Montresor in "The Cask of Amontillado" as a hero, or someone admirable, or someone whom we might aspire to be like. In other words, we're not supposed to take his side or to be on his side. I'm not sure the same kind of thing is true in the fantasy fiction of our time.

I have been reading stories by Thomas Ligotti. The first in the collection I have next to me is called "The Frolic." Mr. Kiernan's story reminds me of "The Frolic," which I think can be included in the category of cosmic horror. In "The Frolic," the situation is reversed, though, for we get things from the point of a view of a psychologist who is treating a serial killer whose names are legion but is called John Doe. The psychologist describes Doe as:

"[. . .] a comparatively lazy demi-demon from a Neverland where dizzy chaos is the norm, a state of affairs on which he gluttonously thrives. Which is as good a description as any of the metaphysical economy of a psychotic's universe."

Note the word chaos, which, as we have seen, is a synonym of abyss or void. Here is some of what Doe writes in his final note to his psychologist:

[. . . ] for in the black-foaming gutters and back alleys of paradise, in the dank windowless gloom of some intergalactic cellar, in the hollow pearly whorls found in sewerlike seas in starless cities of insanity, and in their slums . . .

(The italics are in the original.)

Here also is the imagery of cosmic horror, including mention of the sea, a word for which abyss and void might be synonyms.

I think it fair to say that the author of "The Frolic" is mentally ill. I don't take any pleasure in saying that. I don't say it gratuitously. I say it to make a point, which is that authors of today may very well write, specifically and with purpose, about the things that most torment them. One reason they might do this is as a kind of self-treatment. They are acting as their own therapists. Another might be more significant and it is that authors may attempt to bring these things, through their art, into the real world, thereby making of them a kind of affirmation of what they have inside themselves. For as long as they are inside, they are formless, chaotic, even abyssal. But if an author can speak them through word into creation, then they can be made real and ordered, after some fashion. But just because something exists in the real world doesn't mean that it's good and right and true. Material is not necessarily good, even if you're a materialist. In addition, what you might make true for yourself through your creation is not necessarily true about the universe, nor for all of us, nor for any one of us. It might still be your own private horror. I have a feeling, though, that readers of a certain type go looking for dark, negative, violent, nihilistic, atheistic, materialistic, death-dealing fiction because they believe it affirms their view of the world and all of its people, including themselves, as a terrible place. It doesn't though. There is no affirmation. The universe is not like that. All of that exists only in your head, in your heart, in the gutters and gloom, in the cellars and sewers inside you, in the God-shaped hollows you have carved out of yourself and that you keep open inside like a niche made for Nothing.

* * *

So there appear to be parallels between, first, the narrator and the box, and second, the author and his fiction. The narrator says, Open the box to see what's inside me. The author says, Open the book to see what's inside me. The hope (or despair) in each case is that the viewer or reader will be drawn into the narrator's/author's worldview--into the abyss of himself and his beliefs--and thereby converted, thereby ruined. Note that "Night Fishing" is told in the first person.

* * *

Although the words box and book are similar, they are apparently unrelated. It's interesting that both refer to the names of trees, box to boxwood and book to beech.

* * *

A hollow is a void, the numeral zero, a rim around a hole, the hole being the point and the operative part. It's no wonder, I guess, that so much of the depravity, insanity, and departures from normality of our time--that so much of atheism, materialism, nihilism, gnosticism, leftism, progressivism, and so on--that so much psychopathology and narcissism and delusional thinking--is about sex, for it's all about trying to fill a hole, to grow something self-punishers and self-sufferers hope to be good and positive inside their own voids. But you can't create yourself, you can't give birth to yourself, and you can't christen yourself. You have to get over yourself and be what you are, what you were created to be, which is a God-made human being, in your essence entirely unalterable.

To be concluded . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley