Chapter Two:
THE PARANOIA OF FATHERHOOD

"Magic and the mundane don't mix!"
- Jonathan Carroll

(Sleeping in Flame)

When a discussion of five novels falls into three separate chapters, one book has to be singled out. We are going to devote this entire chapter to Sleeping in Flame: after The Land of Laughs Carroll's most innovative and, in this critic's opinion, by far the best work. Nevertheless, the selection of this novel for an analysis in a separate chapter is founded on more than just personal taste. Sleeping in Flame appears as a logical "bridge" between Carroll's earlier and later works, it provides a thematic link for all of his novels after The Land of Laughs. If the seven novels Carroll has written so far were to be approached as a single composition, a concerto of sorts, then Sleeping in Flame would be its central movement, echoing the introductory motifs and foreshadowing the finale. In fact, this sequence of novels seems to develop around a coherent structure that is impossible to overlook and that perhaps is not at all coincidental. Speaking extensively of The Land of Laughs we noticed that it predefined the specific world of Jonathan Carroll's novels which would be extended later on (by "filling the blanks", as it were), and that it contained, in embryonic form, all the themes and problems which would preoccupy the characters in the novels to come. In the previous chapter we showed how Voice of our Shadow and Bones of the Moon draw upon The Land of Laughs to elaborate on topics of love, guilt and obsession. These will be returning as background motives in later novels, but will not constitute their main concern, replaced by other themes that resound in the Land of Laughs. Here is how Sleeping in Flame fits into this structure:

• It follows up the two previous novels on the themes of responsibility and possessive love,
• It anticipates the next two novels', A Child Across the Sky and Outside the Dog Museum, preoccupation with the nature of art, its grandeur and its pitfalls, as well as the role, the liabilities and the limitations of an artist (as a figure endowed with semi-divine powers),
• It focuses on yet another theme introduced in The Land of Laughs: the "tug of war" between a ravenous, powerful father and his son, who tries to elude the parent's excessive, stifling control over his life. Incidentally, this is the major theme found in Carroll's last novel to date, After Silence.

All this does not yet exhaust the uniqueness of Sleeping in Flame. Other factors worth mentioning that cause it to stand out among Carroll's other works are:

• It is the last novel that vaguely resembles horror writing (although genre horror will become the topic for extensive considerations in A Child Across the Sky); beginning with Sleeping in Flame there will be no Rondua-like monsters any more,
• As a part of the "cycle" we mentioned while speaking about Bones of the Moon, it introduces the character of Venasque: a modern-day shaman and agent of the divine - and a common acquaintance of the major characters of this and later volumes,
• Of all Carroll's novels, it is most closely affiliated with what may be considered "typically American" writing - as a literary representation of the traditional theme of "search for identity",
• It is the most distinctly postmodern of all Carroll's works, in the way it is based upon - and reworks, twists - a "canonical" literary work: in this case, one of the Grimm Brothers' fairy tales, the Rumpelstiltskin.

The best way to introduce Sleeping in Flame is just by recollecting the Grimms' tale: a story of a poor miller's daughter who, unable to spin straw into gold for a greedy king (which he has been led to believe she is capable of), seeks the assistance of an (evil?) midget. The midget uses his magic to help her, but every time he does he demands a reward: first the girl's ring, then her necklace and when she has no more material possessions to give up, he coerces her to promise that when she has become the queen she will surrender to him her first child. Much later, when the queen gives birth to a baby boy, the midget appears on the scene again to collect his dues. Seeing how desperate the mother is, he gives her a chance to save the child: in a typical fairy-tale fashion all she has to do is guess the midget's name. (Remember the mythology associated with the names of persons and objects, according to which whoever knows someone's real name wields unlimited power over his or her life: much of fantasy literature is based on this concept. 65) After three days of futile efforts, the queen finally learns of the dwarf's name - Rumpelstiltskin - and so she can keep her child while the midget, anguished that his mystery has been found out, commits a suicide in a strangely ferocious way.

Sleeping in Flame is framed upon this tale, but tells the story from the point of view of the queen's child - the narrator, Walker Easterling.(66) In Carroll's version the midget is a powerful magician and an impotent man, deeply in love with the beautiful poor girl. Realizing that she will not reciprocate his love - in her greed she wants to become the queen as much as the king wishes to have a wife who can spin straw into gold - he takes her son (a "part" of her) for himself, and brings him up lovingly, teaching him all of the magic he knows. When the boy grows up, however, he chooses to have a life of his own and shuns his foster father's magic as he begins to feel the sexual desire.(67) This is exactly what the midget wants to shield him from: after all it was carnal love that brought him all the torment in the first place. Having tried and failed to convince his son that "magic and the mundane don't mix"(68), afraid of losing his only love, his son, the midget kills him and brings him back to another life as a small child again, in hope that "next time" the boy will not make the same mistake. Still, the man's destiny - or nature, or desire - takes the upper hand every time, and, as the midget repeats the process over and over again, the boy passes through thirty one incarnations and, never remembering his previous lives, he follows the same human path to his father's rage.

When Walker Easterling, about thirty years' old, divorced actor-turned-screenwriter based in Vienna, is introduced by a friend to Maris York - a stunningly beautiful ex-model and an artist who designs fantastic cities using LEGO sets and a state-of-the-art computer - falling in love with her he doesn't at all suspect what demonic twists of fate and magic brought him to this point of his life. The only reason why he may feel a little different from most other people is that he never knew his mother and father: raised by foster parents who gave him his name, he cannot know his real identity. Walker's first marriage was a disappointment, which was why his magician father did not intervene then - but now that Maris appears to be Walker's perfect partner in love, the midget (who has watched his unsuspecting son throughout the years and hates to see him repeat the same "mistake" over again) steps in and threatens to take the life of his wife and the child she is pregnant with unless Walker agrees to leave her and chooses his father's magic over the earthly existence. Easterling however wants no part of the midget's powers and in the course of the novel struggles to discover his lost identity, to ascertain himself, thus eluding his father's monstrous, possessive love. This is a threefold quest. Part of it depends on Walker's "getting to know" himself, remembering his former lives (a Wehrmaht soldier in Nazi-occupied France, a writer and a sadistic killer in czarist Russia, a potato seller's son in a plague-ridden Vienna, etc) in which process he is aided by Venasque ("It's a man. A shaman. He teaches people to fly" - SF, p.98)(69) whose role is perhaps best described as teaching Walker to "read his own map." Apart from discovering his own roots, Walker traces the origin of the Grimm Brothers' tale Rumpelstiltskin. He learns that they paid various local people for telling the folk stories that had been passed on through generations, and that writing them down they modified them, adding suitable morals, adapting the tales for the upper classes' delicate tastes. The Rumpelstiltskin itself was told to the Grimms by the two Wild sisters, who based their story on an actual event they had heard of. The magician midget was actually "a man named Retzner who lived near Kassel. A poor man who once, after having done some work for a farmer's wife, wasn't paid for it. To get even he stole her child." (SF, p.269) The sisters spun a beautiful and sad story of love, greed and magic, but it was the Brothers Grimm who added the happy ending to the tale, in which the queen, portrayed as a virtuous woman pursued by the midget, wins her child's safety by guessing the evil creature's name. In the Wild sisters' version the dwarf's name wasn't Rumpelstiltskin and he did take the son away from the selfish queen who despised him for the love he had for her - which is how the unending cycle of Walker's lives began.

The Wild sisters are essential to Easterling's quest for more than one reason. Not only do they reveal the "real" Rumpelstiltskin story to him, but (which constitutes the third ingredient necessary for his self-discovery) it is from them that he learns of his father's real name: Breath. This, combined with the newly-attained knowledge of his own past (acquired partly thanks to Maris' loving insight, when Walker recognizes one of the cities she created as the one he originally lived in with his father) allows him to conquer the midget's magic powers and break the deadly cycle. However, it is not Easterling himself who puts an end to the midget's life: using the magic his father endowed him with, he brings the Wild sisters back to life and asks them to "continue" their story so that it would end the way he wishes. Because it was the sisters who originally told the tale, thus bringing Breath to life in the first place, it is now up to them to destroy him, simply by inventing another ending to their own story.(70) As this happens, Walker is freed from his father's scheme and left to lead a life of his own, without the unwanted burden of magic, whether black or white.

This could be a rare happy (or at least satisfying) ending to a Jonathan Carroll novel. However, as Walker Easterling himself admits in its very first sentence, "regret is one of the few guaranteed certainties." (SF, p.1) Thus he will eventually come to regret even his victory, when other inhabitants of the fairy-tale land, somehow stirred by the commotion he aroused in their domain, return to haunt him (in the last page of the novel, leaving only a disturbing premonition of more evil to come) and promise to threaten the life of the Easterlings' son.

Such an unexpected conclusion seems somewhat "artificial" at first, it is not easily justified within the novel's plot and we may begin to suspect the author of sacrificing the smoothness and logic of the story in order to (unnecessarily) shock the readers, as if to leave a lasting impact. On closer inspection however, this ending serves to add a whole other dimension to the novel, and not quite artificially either, as we realize it has been hinted upon throughout. On the most apparent level Sleeping in Flame seems to be concerned, as we have already said - with the struggle between a father who wishes to keep his son under control in the world he created for him, and the son who desires to follow his own way of life.(71) In this light Sleeping in Flame is a novel of self-discovery and a literary representation of an idea that in order to take one's life in one's own hands, one needs to look in the past to learn where he or she is "coming from." But the novel becomes "deeper" and more ambiguous as it postulates a higher level of control over every person's life - that which we might call destiny and which it is not within any human being's power to change: not even the Wild sisters', not even Marshall France's. Devoid of his magic now, Walker Easterling is painfully reminded of this ultimate scheme which is going to work its inscrutable ways against all his wishes and efforts. As a more concrete implication we may notice that there is a cycle in the novel larger than that of Walker's life. By interfering in the other-worldly matters, he inadvertently did to his son what his midget father had once done to him: laid out his future - and a dangerous one at that, a future in which his son will have to salvage himself from the wrath of whatever shadows Easterling awoke, just as it took Walker much of his life to wrench himself free from the deadly grip of his father's plan.

There remains to be mentioned one important aspect of Sleeping in Flame: it is a novel about love. For the purposes of the plot it was important to set Breath's voracious, dangerous love for his son(72) against the perfect relationship between Walker and Maris: all-encompassing, full of adoration and understanding, almost impossibly idealized. But there are other kinds of loving relationships there, too - especially that which is called friendship, which in Jonathan Carroll's books is treated synonymously with love. Caring friendship is not new to these novels: remember the absolute, giving friendship between Joseph Lennox and the Tates (before things started to go the wrong way) in Voice of our Shadow, and that between Bones of the Moon's Cullen James and the movie director Weber Gregston. In Sleeping in Flame it is Walker's best friend, Nicholas Sylvian (himself a moviemaker too) who introduces him to Maris York knowing that Easterling will fall in love with her and so in effect "offering" her to Walker. Such exceptional friendship will become the framework for A Child Across the Sky, when Weber Gregston will follow the path of his roommate, colleague and friend Phil Strayhorn almost literally down to hell in his attempt to finish the film which Strayhorn, having died by his own hand, left incomplete. Generally, Carroll's characters usually make the best possible friends: tender, always ready to help, tirelessly inventive in looking for ways to confirm and acknowledge the feeling through the gifts they give, surprises they make and stories they tell each other. Even the lures and dangers of sex do not threaten their ties: Weber Gregston spends his life desiring the beautiful Cullen James who remains at all times faithful to her husband, and yet the two manage to develop and sustain a caring, lifelong friendship, having crossed the line beyond which a kiss and saying 'I love you' are not understood the wrong way. If we are beginning to feel that, for all their beauty, these friendships are unrealistically wonderful, too easy and sweet, it may seem like a good idea to think of how the other, sexual, kind of love is portrayed in many Hollywood movies: most of the time it is just that: unrealistically wonderful, too easy and too sweet. We can probably assume that among people's most common dreams are the dreams of power and sex. Realizing this, Hollywood enacts these unfulfilled fantasies in dazzling scenery and with breathtaking grandeur. Similarly - and can it be held against them? - Jonathan Carroll's novels enact other kinds of dreams, fulfilled or not: the dreams of perfect friendship.(73)