Ray Bradbury's Sincerity

There are stories you remember because of a brilliant character, or an unusual setting, or the twist at the end. I remember Ray Bradbury's story 'The Next in Line' from The October Country because of a single, brilliantly placed word.
                  As it happens I'd probably remember 'The Next in Line' anyway - it has the unusual setting, the great characters, the twist at the end - but this was the story that showed me how language can transform great writing into magic.
                  Ray Bradbury died less than a month ago, and as ever when a great character dies there were plenty of obituaries, quotes, etc. Great people should be remembered after they're gone, but it feels slightly morbid writing about someone because they've died. It's almost like saying 'Look at me, I knew about him too, I read his stuff, I thought he was great.' Maybe it's the age of Facebook and Twitter, and maybe there's nothing wrong with it (I admit I found out that Ray Bradbury was dead on Twitter, and had 'remembered' him on my Facebook account less than an hour later). Either way, in this instance maybe morbidity is appropriate. 'The Next in Line' is a morbid story.
                  We start in a poor Mexican town in the 50s, with a young married couple, Joseph and Marie, on holiday from the States. Marie finds the town macabre, especially after witnessing its custom of displaying the bodies, mummified, in an underground catacomb if the relatives cannot afford to pay a 'graveyard tax'. She becomes so upset that she wants to leave the town immediately, but due to a broken down car the couple are forced to remain an extra night.
                  Aside from the magic word, the brilliance of this piece is in the pace. At the end of the story we learn that Marie is dead. At first this is jarring - there seemed no indication of imminent death on first read. But rereading, it becomes obvious. Bradbury tricks us with the pace, and the character of Marie.
Throughout the story there are many long sections, all of them intimately involving Marie, which have very few full stops, so that the sentences seem to go on forever in a most frantic manner. Amidst these sections, repetition enforces the pace. When Joseph and Marie are in the catacomb, with Joseph giving nicknames to the corpses, such as 'Mr. Grimace and Mr. Gape,' Marie is barely listening, counting the bodies in horror. Then, when she imagines the bodies are screaming, Bradbury writes, 'Click went the camera, and Joseph rolled the film. Click went the camera, and Joseph rolled the film.'
                  These hard, repeated sentences in amidst Marie’s turmoil really emphasise the ghoulish nature of the scene, and show how alienated Joseph is from his wife.
                  At several points throughout the story, Marie says out loud that she is ill, but because of her character, because she just wants to leave the town, we do not take this at face value. It is not until we reread that we can see, Marie’s actions are not the actions of a healthy person. The fast pace mirrors her body breaking down, and at several points she listens to her heart beating, noticing that it sounds louder than normal.
                  And then comes the language. This is a story subtly about a body falling apart, and clearly about a failing relationship. In the penultimate section, Joseph is in the hotel bathroom cleaning his teeth. Marie calls to him from bed, begging him that if she dies in the town, he won't let her be buried there. He refuses to make what he calls a 'ridiculous' promise. And then Bradbury does this (starting with dialogue from Joe):

'                  And besides, if you died, you'd look very pretty in the catacomb standing between Mr. Grimace and Mr. Gape with a sprig of morning-glory in your hair.' And he laughed sincerely.

                  The dialogue tells us plenty about this relationship, but it is the final sentence, and in particular that final word, which grip the reader and tell us everything we need to know about how far apart these people are, and how blind Joseph is to his wife's plight.
In the final scene, Joseph is driving away from the town, finally. He glances beside him and from his eyes the reader sees the black band around his wrist, and the empty passenger seat. Marie has died, and she is not leaving Mexico.
                  One of Ray Bradbury's greatest qualities as a human being, and as a teacher (figuratively speaking - he didn't agree with Creative Writing courses!) is his sincerity. He knew he was very, very good, and didn't feel the need to pretend otherwise. He couldn't read War and Peace or Proust or James Joyce, and again he didn't feel the need to pretend otherwise. He spoke truthfully, unashamedly, and this turned what could have been arrogance into humour. He was hilarious. He was a teller of haunting and beautiful anecdotes, and it's no wonder he wrote the way he did. Here's his interview in the Paris Review - you'll see what I mean:
Paris Review Interview: Ray Bradbury

The Ambiguous Orphanage

Ambiguity in fiction, or art in general, is a difficult thing to master. Take it too far and the audience is left confused, in a bad way. Is he a ghost or not? Was the guy at the beginning her father or her great-great-great-great-eighty-second-cousin-two-thousand-times-removed who's time traveled from the past to warn her about genetically modified wombats? If the audience is asking these questions there's a good chance they're dissatisfied, left without an answer. However, if the writer/filmmaker provides enough evidence for each explanation - he is both a ghost and not a ghost, both a father and a time-traveling great-great-great-great-eighty-second-cousin-two-thousand-times-removed - it can be a source of great pleasure for the reader/viewer.
                  The trick is in the intent. I wrote a story a while ago in which I wanted three possible readings.

1. The narrator is a ghost.
2. The narrator comes from the imagination of another character.
3. The narrator is real.

                  If I hadn't intended these three readings, a reader's response would likely be '...I don't get it... Is he real or not?' As it is, I don't think I've fully achieved my intended result yet - no one has read it and wondered about all three possibilities. But neither has anyone been confused. People generally say something like 'I like it... he could be dead, or imaginary.' Not, 'is he dead, or is he imaginary?' Because the ambiguity is not a result of careless or clumsy writing - is, in fact, purposeful - it works.

                  The finest example I've seen of this recently is in the horror movie, The Orphanage, directed by J. A. Bayona. (Spoilers ahead!) 

                  The basic plot of The Orphanage is: Woman moves into a now closed-down orphanage she lived in briefly as a girl, along with her husband and their adopted son. They plan to open it up for children with special needs. The adopted son, who is HIV-positive, has a vivid imagination - he sees and befriends invisible children in the house. The son goes missing and his mother spends the rest of the film trying to find him, when everyone else has given up, growing more and more desperate. I won't reveal the ending.

                  The horror of this movie - and it is terrifying on a first viewing - is not due to gore (there is only a small amount). Neither is it really to do with the threat of violence. It comes through in the way the suspense is built, so slowly it becomes unbearable. It comes in the conflict between being unable to tear your eyes away from the screen because you know something will happen at any moment, and wanting with every stretching second to turn on the lights and play some happy music. And then you come to the end of the film and the horror becomes about emotion - the emotion of a mother who's lost her child and will go to any lengths to find him, the emotion of a husband trying to bring his wife to a better place but being pushed away for not believing in ghosts or mediums.

                  And then the ambiguity comes in. Is the mother right, or is the father? You build an argument for superstition, and then before you finish it a rational explanation presents itself in your mind. Even the most difficult events to question have reasonable answers. In one scene a medium is invited to the house. She goes into a trance and has a terrifying encounter with some dead children. Microphones are placed throughout the house, with corresponding monitors to show feedback. And there is feedback, lots of it. According to the medium, this is the children screaming. But if you know anything about this equipment you know that random feedback is a frequent occurrence, and the noise it produces can sound an awful lot like a distorted human voice. There is an explanation for everything. But the viewer doesn't say 'is it supposed to be real or not?' The viewer sits and discusses it for days with anyone else who's seen it, saying 'that was amazing... it was all real... but none of it was real.' The ambiguity makes it the film you remember.

Storytelling Narrator v. Free Indirect Style in Fantasy

Maybe it's because I'm reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest at the same time that I'm trying to plan a fantasy(esque) novel, but it suddenly seems that very little fantasy truly embraces free indirect style.

                  Infinite Jest is a master class on the device of getting into the head and speech and thought-patterns of a character you're writing about in the third person (not to mention a master class in getting into the head and speech and thought-patterns of a character you're writing about in first person). It could also, arguably, taking place in the 'not-so-distant future', be classed in the science fiction category. In fact, Wikipedia classifies it as 'Hysterical realism, Satire, Tragicomedy, Postmodern, Science Fiction'. But Infinite Jest is a million things, whereas traditional fantasy tends to follow a much more limited path.

                  I have tried writing fantasy before, and always a worry starts to niggle and grow until I have to stop. If I'm writing something set in a different world, why would the characters, even if humanoid, interact like we do, eat like we do, walk/talk/fight like we do. Why would they speak English? There's nothing more jarring, for me, when reading a fantasy novel, to see a character (or even an omniscient narrator) say something like 'silent as the grave.' Would characters from another world really use phrases that we ourselves use? In my mind it's like Wittgenstein's notion that, should a lion suddenly discover the entire vocabulary of the human language, we still wouldn't understand it, so alien is its nature and social situation compared to ours.

                  All this is not to diminish Fantasy which tells a story using human words and expressions - it's still one of my favourite genres. It's just that when I try to do it, it grates on me until I give up.

                  Taking this up a level, the 'fantasy' I'm planning at the moment is set on a world entirely alien to our own - the native creatures are not humanoid, they have no concept of spoken language, they could not imagine what it would be to be human. The 'world' has no oceans or deserts or plains or trees or rivers or even minerals. And yet I need language to write about it - even more I need the English language to write about it. So how do I get around this? Do I embrace the omniscient, storytelling narrator, who can describe the world to the reader in language they can immediately grasp, or do I limit the narration to as true a form of free indirect style as is possible - create a new dialect, new idioms, limit my vocabulary to a certain number of words, as Niall Griffiths  limited his vocabulary to around 700 different words whilst writing Runt. Aside from this, is it even possible to create a race completely devoid of human connotations which a human reader could nevertheless empathise with.

                  The contradiction of using language to describe a language-less 'species' would have its advantages - language is a brilliant thing, and to give it free range to describe something completely novel would be liberating. It would just feel inauthentic. Could a blend of the two work - a jump between omniscience and free indirect? Any ideas, anyone? Maybe I can write this as 'experimentally' as possible, and write a more traditional fantasy story alongside it as a sort of catharsis. Or maybe I should just stop planning and start writing?