Letting in the light · 2:41am Jun 6th, 2015
I'd like to put the spotlight on Patchwork Poltergeist's "A Diamond and a Tether." It's a moving story, deftly written and adroitly told, but be advised it's sad. Oh, no one dies; there's no illness or injury or abuse, and in fact everyone ends up safely home. But it's still very sad, and that's doing sad the hard way. Respect.
What really caught my eye, though, was how Poltergeist handles the problem of metaphor. Because as somebody said (maybe Tolkien, maybe a grad student), every magical tale is implicitly metaphorical. Yet how do you clue the reader in? You can make the metaphor explicit in a concluding moral, a device with a respectable history in talking-animal stories. The show adapts this for every episode in the form of a missive at the end, addressed to a reigning Presence, which summarizes the theme of all that has gone before (when you do this in a poem it's called an envoi).
Poltergeist again chooses the hard way, working it into the events of the story. Knowing that it's always risky to say "this is what the author means!" (and trying at the same time to avoid spoilers), I think it's right there in Chapter Three, "A Diamond is Forever." Look at the social media Lucy Burdock flips through on her cellphone while...well, that would be telling. Notice the things she sees, what those things mean. What the story seems to be saying in these images is when you treat relationships and their consequences like fashion accessories you beget a bound and crippled generation.
And I remember thinking as I read it that what Poltergeist was doing here was like the medieval practice of illumination.
In old European manuscripts the first letter of a particularly significant passage was often enlarged and highly colored. It was sometimes decorated with all sorts of figures and ornaments and when most important, it was embellished with gold leaf . The intent was to honor the text, which was usually canonical, but there was another purpose as well: it drew the eye to a place in the text that required particular care and attention. This was especially effective when reading by firelight, as the gold caught the light and glowed like fire itself--hence the term "illumination" (the technique was also called "letting in the light"). I've seen an illuminated manuscript by candlelight and the effect is breathtaking, miraculous: it seems as if the paper itself is adorned with gleaming coals that burn, but do not consume. By the by, the effect is precisely reproduced in the animated movie The Tale of Despereaux, which you should watch, first for its own sake, but also for the myriad shout-outs to Medieval and Renaissance art sprinkled all through it (see how many you can find!)
So, too, in Patchwork Poltergeist's text: the little squares of brightly-colored text and images, glowing as if supernal, draw our attention to the metaphor, the moral, the envoi that she addresses to that Presence which is her reader. Who gives such largesse as he or she may.
And here is mine. Well done, and thank you.
The idea of expressing theme through plot has special interest for me, so I'll go take a peek.