Speaking of the Fantastic III. Darrell Schweitzer
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At the same time, The Last Witchfinder is obviously a defense of the Enlightenment. I take Exhibit A seriously—but it’s hard to find Exhibits B, C, D, and E after that. The Marxist totalitarian states are “atheist” or “neo-Enlightenment” in name only. Operationally, they function exactly like theocracies. No doubters allowed.
Q: At one of the funnier moments, the Principia does a critique of the Universal horror films of the 1940s, House of Dracula and so on. What does this do to the drama of the story to have this clearly artificial framework, which makes you stand outside of the story? It constantly reminds us that this is a story.
Morrow: I was certainly taking a risk. I tried to keep these interruptions by the Principia Mathematica to a minimum, so the “color commentary” occurs only once per chapter, and with clearly marked transitions: I use a typographical trick whereby the last sentence of a Principia interlude blends into the first sentence of the next scene in the main story. The preponderance of the scenes belong to a more-or-less realistic drama set in the past. I tried to establish that when Jennet and the other main characters are on stage, we are really in their heads, not the Principia’s head. We’re not getting the book’s subjective account of the action. The events are supposed to be happening before our own eyes.
I did have a lot of trouble selling this book, and one of the agents I approached suggested removing the Principia narrator. He said, “I don’t know if I can make things happen with this book, boosting you to a new level in your career. But if you’d take out the framing device, we would clearly have a flat-out historical novel, and that might go over better with editors.”
Well, I just wasn’t prepared to do that. Sure, I suppose that if that same agent had said, “If you kill the ghostly narrator, I can get Knopf to give you a hundred thousand dollar advance, and they will promote it as a breakthrough in historical fiction,” then, yeah, I might have bitten that apple. But he was merely saying, “Consider taking out that clever postmodern gimmick, but even then I’m not sure that I could sell it.”
Q: It would have changed the tone of the book profoundly. It seems to me that a straight, realistic treatment of this story wouldn’t be as funny. It would be full of pain and loss and rage. It would be all about this woman avenging her beloved aunt who was burned at the stake in an act of gross injustice. But as the book exists, it has an arch tone which steps aside from the material.
Morrow: In retrospect, I see you’re right. I don’t think I consciously added the humor to leaven the horror. But maybe intuitively, as I was writing, I thought, “Well, I’d better make the Principia interludes funny, and that will serve as a corrective to the distressing subject matter.”
But even with the satiric tone, I know the book makes people squirm. I didn’t hold back when describing the ordeal of being tested for the Satanic compact: for example, the way a suspect was pricked with a needle to see if one of her blemishes bled, because if it didn’t bleed, that proved that the protuberance was really a teat for suckling an animal familiar, or else it was a mark indicating that the woman was bonded to Satan. I also dramatize the other main ordeal—the cold-water test—pretty vividly. You tied a rope around the witch’s waist and threw her into a river. If she floated, she was guilty, because water is the medium of baptism. Pure, running water is offended by a Satanist’s flesh and wants to eject it. If the suspect sank and was thus vindicated, the witchfinder would try pulling her out in time, although I am sure there was more than one case of the accused witch drowning while being proved innocent.
One editor who almost bought the book felt that, even with all the funny observations by the Principia, the book was too morbid in tone. But I didn’t want to compromise the torture and testing scenes, because the witch persecutions were really a kind of holocaust, as I said earlier. And yet, for whatever reasons, I still added a lot of satiric distancing. I guess that’s the sort of writer I am.
Q: I think a lot of satire works this way. If you had written the novel absolutely straight, it might have been too shrill. Often the grimmest and blackest and most terrible things have to be treated in a funny manner, even if they build up to tragedy. You can name any number of writers who do this, T. H. White most especially. What I am suggesting is that the distancing is necessary because of the nature of the material. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to make it bearable.
Morrow: Novels that seem shrill, to use your word, preachy, novels that somberly tell the reader how he or she is supposed to be feeling about the material—such books don’t enjoy the same affection in our hearts as the more playful and satiric works. I think of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which is unrelievedly grim, totally without humor. Yes, it did galvanize people to reform some of the practices of the meat-packing houses, but that wasn’t an artistic accomplishment. One critic made a remark to the effect that Sinclair “aimed to touch people’s hearts and ended up hitting them in the stomach.” Readers were repulsed to learn that the meat that ended up on their dinner table very likely contained bits of rat meat.
I’ve started an historical novel that will be in some ways analogous to The Last Witchfinder. I want to dramatize the story of Charles Darwin and the arrival of that universe, today’s universe, in which we perceive ourselves as animals and understand they we’re evidently connected to all the other species on the planet, and they’re connected to each other as well. It won’t be a biographical novel about Darwin, but rather an epic about the exploits of a character who’s living during Darwin’s life and times.
The whole story will elapse between the voyage of the Beagle, which ended in 1834, and Darwin’s publication of his theory in 1859. Many years went by during which Darwin temporized and procrastinated and anguished over going public with his big idea. I have what I think is a pretty neat plot device whereby a clever woman, scheming but sympathetic—I think her name will be Chlöe—she has occasion to recapitulate Darwin’s travels, collecting the very same specimens. Chlöe is hoping to claim a huge cash prize being offered by a Percy Bysshe Shelley cult. They’ll award it to anyone who can prove or disprove the existence of God. Chlöe herself doesn’t care about the God question one way or the other, but she plans to argue the case for atheism because she needs the money. Her nautical adventures will be as mimetic and dramatic as I can make them.
At the same time, I’m once again going to use a postmodern, playful element, whereby an insane bishop locked up in an asylum will be visited by homing pigeons, which are reporting in to him from a second expedition—one that’s out to find Noah’s ark on Mount Ararat in Turkey. The Noah’s ark team also hopes to claim the big prize, by proving God’s existence. It will soon become clear to the reader that, as a function of the bishop’s insanity, the pigeon messages are actually from the future: accounts of evolutionary thinking post-Darwin, such as Mendelian genetics and the deciphering of the DNA molecule. And, of course—because the Bishop is crazy—these messages also contain far more information than you could squeeze onto a piece of paper wrapped around a pigeon’s leg.
Q: This is pretty much what you’ve always done with fantastic elements from the beginning of your career, use them satirically. I observe the paradox that most fantasy is about things we don’t believe in and don’t want to believe in. It is much easier to write a story in which witches or demons are real than one in which they are not. Do you have a sense of this?
Morrow: I think the reason that William Morrow ultimately published The Last Witchfinder as mainstream historical fiction—and I’d have to say that, because of that decision, the book got a lot more critical attention than normal—is that my witches do not have supernatural powers. My demons and devils are purely human inventions. The world of the novel is non-supernatural—anti-supernatural, really, as we’ve been saying—even though at the same time there’s this crazy central conceit of a conscious book.
I guess my fantasy novels are ultimately pretty paradoxical. They use the supernatural to argue against the supernatural. In the case of Only Begotten Daughter I took the Christian argument at face-value. There is a creator God, and this deity has a particular interest in our species and this particular planet. But after taking that claim at face-value, I began exploring the possible psychology of a supernatural being, so that my heroine Julie Katz, who happens to be the daughter of God and the half-sister of