Navigating The Intent of a Fickle Author (Guest Blogger Jesse Bullington)

[Now that we've reached the end of the week I want to profusely thank Tom for putting me up here, Jeff VanderMeer for introducing us, and everyone for reading, it's been a great week! On to the finish line...]

I veer wildly from taking myself too seriously to not taking myself seriously enough. This has always been the case, the same kid who cried about not being able to put on two (2) consecutive puppet shows at the third grade talent show laughing hysterically when he was asked to justify this or that bit of Serious Business bad behavior. How else do I explain this aborted paragraph that almost opened the admittedly mock-serious preface to The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart?

“Our history is written in blood and ash, the pages of our books are skin, the stylus a splinter of bone, the inkwell a skull. Three millennia past—by some accounts, four by others—one of the first works of fiction made the evolutionary leap from oral to written, and so it has persisted. That work, titled He Who Saw the Deep or, more popularly, The Epic of Gilgamesh, despite the thousands of years separating its authors from the modern age, wrote what we write today. They wrote of violence, for we abhor brutality yet wallow in it, they wrote of men and monsters, for we are so often both, and they wrote of immortality, for we are mortal creatures. I will not claim that all stories of all ages concern these matters, but it is undeniable that such tales are to be found in every land and every era, some purported to be history, others acknowledged as myth.”

Oh my goodness. Part of me thinks this is brilliant, my finest hour, and laments that cowardice prevented me from including it. After all, the veneer of faux-academic writing that I used to coat my preface would allow those who recognized the genius manifest in the above words to appreciate them while still insulating me from any philistines who might find the observation, or at least the expression of it, as purple as Cormac McCarthy wearing a lavender sweater while channeling the shade of Clark Ashton Smith.

My deep and abiding love for those two authors and so-called purple prose aside, part of me thinks that the excised excerpt is, in addition to being purple, also pretentious to the point of being laughable, which was sort of the point until I started taking it seriously. Another part of me still wonders if I didn’t unconsciously plagiarize some of it from some forgotten text I read in high school. In any event, if I can’t decide if I’m being serious or not, or figure out just how seriously I’m taking myself, how can I expect readers who have never met me to navigate my intent?

The answer, which is one I abide by regardless of what mood I’m in, is that I can no more expect my readers to intuit what I was going for than they can expect me to personally explain every ambiguity they might encounter in their reading. The solution is to not worry about it. I was the annoying guy who didn’t see how we could ignore Poe’s relationship with his cousin Virginia when discussing “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and yet here I am seemingly arguing for an abandonment of authorial intent when reading a text. I’m fairly consistent in my hypocrisy, at least.

Here’s the rub: sometimes when I was working on The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart I was consciously thinking about the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and sometimes I was berating myself for putting on airs. Sometimes I focused only on writing a story that would have thrilled me as a teenager, only to chide myself for not treating my craft with more severity. Sometimes I was convinced that the statements I was making were sharp, timely, and more nuanced than I thought myself capable of producing, and other times I wondered if one more reference to human waste would push it over the line. Sometimes said lowbrow references were intended only for a laugh, and sometimes the express purpose was to invoke Don Quixote or the works of Rabelais.

Nowhere is this dichotomy between silly and serious more apparent than in the Brothers Grossbart themselves. They are completely over-the-top and farcical at first glance, but upon reflection they are anything but—can we reasonably claim that contemporary individuals who have the same level of fanaticism are less ridiculous simply because their theologies are more common in the modern era? There I go again. The point is, with Hegel and Manfried I’ve gone for realism over romance, and the reality is that men who go about looting tombs and battling the so-called Infidel are usually no cleaner of morals than they are of fingernails, and if their outlook seems silly or exaggerated it could be because we haven’t walked a league in their turnshoes. Humor and horror have long been confederates, and with The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart I’m attempting to bring that relationship to the forefront, to wed the serious with the silly without compromising either.

If, when discussing the novel, I take a serious tone it’s because that’s what’s on my mind at the time, and the same goes for when I ham it up. The truth is I make things up for a living and don’t always know exactly why at the time, which might make all of this sound a little hypocritical. That said, I don’t know if I could trust someone who wasn’t at least a little hypocritical, and sincerely hope that other readers feel the same.