AFTERWORD

(incl. topics for further research)

"I envy anyone who has yet to enjoy the sexy, eerie and addictive novels
of Jonathan Carroll. They are delicious treats - with devilish tricks inside them."
- Michael Dirda, Washington Post

Discussing the seven novels that Jonathan Carroll has published to date, we had in mind two major objectives. The first was to identify and characterize all the peculiarities that together establish an original, serious, inspiring and entertaining literary world; to mark the rules which govern it and to catalog the themes that its intellectual horizons encompass. It is to accomplishing this task that Part One of the guide was dedicated. The second objective, towards which Part Two and Part Three were designed to work, was to keep track of these rules, themes and motives, as they are modulated, revised and elaborated upon throughout Carroll's novels. This approach was selected for the opportunity it offered to provide as broad a perspective on Carroll's writing as was possible within the confines of a single critical work without sacrificing the clarity of the discourse. It should be noted, too, that although we consistently dealt with these novels primarily as works of art (and not as vehicles for expression of the writer's beliefs), we rarely attempted to assess their artistic/literary value. With the possible exception of The Land of Laughs all the novels were approached "as given." In this respect the guide was conceived as an open discussion rather than a set of critical reviews, thus hopefully retaining some verifiable validity. The descriptive, as opposed to prescriptive, character of this work was intended to lay a solid foundation for further, more penetrating analyses, to finally arrive at a point when a fair evaluation of Carroll's novels' literary merit can be undertaken.

One consequence of such an approach(104) is that in order to keep the volume of this guide within reasonable bounds it was essential to edit the material. To use cinematic terminology: some close-ups were absolutely necessary for the illustration of certain points crucial to the discussion; most of the time however we needed to present the Land of Laughs' different territories in sweeping, panoramic shots. Below is a compact index of themes, concepts and ideas characteristic of the novels in question which the readers may use as a quick reference and the critics as topics for consideration: the viewpoints from which to study Jonathan Carroll's writing. All of the following subjects and notions were at least mentioned in the pages of this guide, some were skimmed over, and a few were discussed in greater detail. There is no significant order for the index, except for the fact that the most general of the issues are listed first. For convenience, the abbreviations of the titles of those novels which deal with particular themes most extensively follow the entries.

• Art as a driving force of humanity; its self-perpetuating, self-contained nature; its impact; the blurring of the boundary between art and reality; the preoccupation with "telling a story"; The figure of an artist (notably as a Creator and a Magician), his role and responsibilities; the obscure element of evil that seems to be inseparable from great artistic achievements (LL, SF, CAS, ODM)

• Father-and-son relationship, usually perceived as a destructive conflict in which the former tries to keep the latter under his overwhelming control; the son's struggle to achieve independence, associated with self-knowledge (LL, SF, AS)

• Magic, taken literally or metaphorically; the way the supernatural events can be transposed into intellectual concepts and the characters' personal experience, emotional states - as implied by the fact that the "magic" reveals itself to each character at his or her "peak" of life (LL, VS, CAS, ODM, AS); More singularly, magic as the knowledge a child is equipped with by the parent in the process of maturation(105) (BM, SF)

• The notion of "unreliable reality": in most cases all magic and all horror of Carroll's world come straight from everyday life (and not from enchanted manuscripts, ancient curses, weedy graveyards, etc., as is usual for typical genre tales). In this respect Carroll's stories resemble those of Stephen King, in which evil finds embodiment in anything from a car and a supermarket to, in the extreme case, an industrial pressing machine. The novel Sleeping in Flame seems to be the only exception from this rule.

• The technique of "unreliable narrator": in all the novels, without exception, the events are reported by the main character, a person obsessed (and oppressed) by a certain aspect of his or her life, often bordering on insanity. The readers may always choose between literal and metaphorical understanding of each story, but even if we wish to take the events for granted, we need to consider the narrator's dubious status. It is only in the case of After Silence that this ambiguity is resolved in the novel's conclusion: regardless of whether we "believe" Max Fischer or not, all notions of supernatural intervention have to be rejected in order to maintain the coherence of the story. In all other cases the surface of the narrative is smooth and impenetrable, allowing for no clear-cut interpretations, and we depend for our knowledge on the accounts supplied by people who, with all their rationality, would themselves probably acknowledge their unreliability as witnesses.

• Two types of female characters, corresponding to their dependence on men vs self-assertiveness: Saxony Gardner and Anna France in The Land of Laughs, Claire Stansfield and Fanny Neville in Outside the Dog Museum, also Lily Aaron in After Silence as independent and "entrapped" at the same time.

• The question of a man's responsibility, guilt and regret; revenge and repentance; the notion of "being given a second chance"; free will vs external control (LL, VS, BM, SF, CAS, AS)

• Fascination bordering on obsession (with art: LL, CAS; with another person: VS, AS); its consequences; insanity

• The symbolism of a HOUSE as a representation of a person's nature; building a house as attaining self-knowledge (LL, ODM, AS)

• The symbolism of FOOD (noted while discussing The Land of Laughs but observable in similar form also in VS, BM, ODM)

• The interrelations between the subsequent novels; their recurring characters, especially that of Venasque, a modern-day shaman, psychotherapist and insightful mentor whose major gift is understanding what a person needs in order to lead a wholesome life; How this device works toward establishing a complete, coherent literary world - parallel to, but not necessarily identical with the "real" one (BM, SF, CAS, ODM, AS)

• Endangering a person's child as the ultimate threat or crime (SF, AS)

• The idea of having a "double" or "being the same person" as somebody else; symbolic affinity between two people; the significance of friendship (VS, SF, CAS, AS)

• Dogs as agents of the supernatural (LL, BM, ODM)

• References to the world of Hollywood movies, whether explicit or implied in the composition of each novel; other intertextual references, the device of pastiche and irony (LL, SF, CAS, AS).

It may now be the right time to return to the question we discussed at length in the Introduction and left open since then: are Jonathan Carroll's novels genre horror? In this author's opinion, contrary even to what Carroll himself says on ths subject, they are not. For all their face value, these novels transcend by far what we are used to associate with horror stories. Probably the answer lies not so much in what Carroll's novels say or how they say it, but in the reason they do so. To categorize a piece of writing as horror means to acknowledge that its final objective as a work of art is to evoke a particular feeling: that of fear. Regardless of whether the novels we have discussed are successful in this respect, the richness and importance of the meanings they communicate seem to imply much broader ambitions. Serious horror? Yes - not because we are asked to believe solemnly whatever ghastly wonders the author's invention puts before our eyes, but because in raising vital moral and intellectual issues it demands a serious approach and attention reserved for higher breed of art. Like in the case of an artful western it is not the body count that ultimately decides of its value, but whether leaving the theater or closing the book we find ourselves knowing or understanding more than we previously did; whether the world - the real one - looks the same to us. If it does not, then art has done its duty and the intellectual stimulus it provided will outlast any emotional impact. Jonathan Carroll's novels appear to be designed to serve just this purpose.

At last, the final word. Discussing Jonathan Carroll's writing on a novel-by-novel basis we identified the logical sequence which they together form. The readers, however, should not be misled by the apparent completeness of this cycle. After Silence, Carroll's latest work, demonstrates that, having exhausted the possibilities which the world of his previous novels evoked (the one we have been referring to as the Land of Laughs), he was able to move on in a new direction, retaining the originality of his style and viewpoint, but at the same time exploring areas new to his writing and perhaps even making it more accessible to the readers who do not feel comfortable dealing with "fantasy" literature. It remains to be seen what Jonathan Carroll has yet to offer and it may take a few more years before his next novel is published, but given what he has achieved so far we need not keep our expectations modest.

Marek Jedlinski

£ódŸ, July - September, 1993