Straub, Peter - Poe's Children by Straub Peter

Author:Straub, Peter [Straub, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385528467
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday
Published: 2008-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

The experimental technique. Every story, even a true one, wants to be told in only one single way by its writer, yes? So, really, there’s no such thing as experimentalism in its trial-and-error sense. A story is not an experiment, an experiment is an experiment. True. The “experimental” writer, then, is simply following the story’s commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story is the story. See? Sometimes this is very hard to accept, and sometimes too easy. On the one hand, there’s the writer who can’t face his fate: that the telling of a story has nothing at all to do with him; on the other hand, there’s the one who faces it too well: that the telling of the story has nothing at all to do with him. Either way, literary experimentalism is simply the writer’s imagination, or lack of it, and feeling, or absence of same, thrashing their chains around in the escape-proof dungeon of the words of the story. One writer is trying to get the whole breathing world into the two dimensions of his airless cell, while the other is adding layers of bricks to keep that world the hell out. But despite the most sincere efforts of each prisoner, the sentence remains the same: to stay exactly where they are, which is where the story is. It’s a condition not unlike the world itself, except it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t help either, but who cares?

The question we now must ask is: is Nathan’s the kind of horror story that demands treatment outside the conventional realistic or Gothic techniques? Well, it may be, depending on whom this story occurred to. Since it occurred to me (and not too many days ago), and since I’ve pretty much given up on it, I guess there’s no harm in giving this narrative screw another turn, even if it’s in the wrong direction. Here’s the way mad Dr. Riggers would experiment, blasphemously, with his man-made Nathanstein. The secret of life, my ugly Igors, is time…time…time.

The experimental version of this story could actually be told as two stories happening “simultaneously,” each narrated in alternating sections which take place in parallel chronologies. One section begins with the death of Nathan and moves backward in time, while its counterpart story begins with the death of the original owner of the magic pants and moves forward. Needless to say, the facts in the case of Nathan must be juggled around so as to be comprehensible from the beginning, that is to say from the end. (Don’t risk confusing your worthy readers.) The stories converge at the crossroads of the final section where the destinies of their characters also converge, this being the clothes store where Nathan purchases the fateful trousers. On his way into the store he bumps into a woman who is preoccupied with counting a handful of cash, this being the woman who has just returned the trousers.

“Excuse me,” says Nathan.

“Look where you’re going,” says the woman at the same instant.

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