Week 8: The Prison of Rationality (Reading: Lady in the water & Anansi Boys)

This week I watched Lady in the Water and read Anansi Boys. I felt like I was unfamiliar with the genres of both. I was continually surprised by story elements that didn’t fit my paradigm of what should be in a film/ book. However, after spending some time thinking about it, I’ve realized they both had cultural foundations that I’m unfamiliar with. These cultural elements compelled their narratives. Based on this I now question if that has more to do with the differences in what I believe happens in my idea of a standard story and these narratives.

Anansi Boys was the first Neil Gaiman book I’ve ever read. Many aspects of it were interesting however I found the tone of the book almost too upbeat. Another issue I had with it was the constant location hopping. Maybe I had a larger issue with this as I’ve flown between Florida and England several times so each time Charles flew between the two I was just imagining the boredom of the hours and hours on each flight.

This was the first novel that I’ve read for the literature course where I continually noticed literary devices. Descriptions were littered with metaphors and similes along with a variety of other devices. For the most part, I really enjoyed this. It made descriptions feel rich as well as adventurous which matched nicely with how the story was told.

The supernatural elements of the story were really contrasted by the intense focus on the mundane of the protagonist’s life. I thought it was interesting that the author chose to describe in much detail Fat Charlie going to work and what went on there. In a way, this also reflected the protagonist himself. He had the day off but he chose to go to work. This action really defines the character. His actions seem unusual but they’re motivated by his boredom with his life. He is uneasy just existing so he wants to go to work to be productive.

In the story, many times things seemed to be almost physical. They were there but people didn’t quite perceive them or saw them be different from what they were. Charles’ girlfriend mistook Spider for Fat Charlie until it was reviled to her what was going on. This seems ludicrous in a logical way, but it fits perfectly with the fantastical elements of the story.

One of my favorite aspects of the book was the importance put on story and music. How the gods interacted with the idea of possessing story was interesting to me. I’m quite familiar with many myths from Greek mythology and some of the Roman myth, so it was nice to see different types of gods from a different culture.

 (Spoiler Alert)

At the end of the story, I really expected Spider and Fat Charlie to be merged back into one person. I didn’t know how I felt about both going on and Spider ending up with Rosie who he practically stole from Charles. From my point of view, this felt wrong or unnatural like things hadn’t been returned to the way they should be. In most stories I’ve previously read/ consumed, when someone is split into two people they are out of balance. This balance must be returned to how it should be, generally in order for the protagonist or the side of the protagonist to succeed. The fact that one of the characters is all of the “good” of Charles and the other is all of the “bad” makes it seem like they can’t function properly without becoming one again.

When I first started reading the book, I tried to rationalize a lot of what happened. I brushed it off and reasoned out a normal reason for what occurred. Part of this had to do with the fact that I’m unfamiliar with Anansi. I had no idea this story would have so much about spiders in it when I started – if I had realized I probably would have avoided the story altogether.

An example of my rationalizing was when Charles’ mother recovered from cancer. I assumed that his father had just lifted her spirits and that she felt better but wasn’t really. I was almost mad at the father. I never even began to think that he had supernaturally healed her. I tried to create what I believed to be a logical explanation for anything that seemed odd. I tried to take the magic out of it. I really realized that I had done this while we were in class watching Neil Gaiman give a talk. He said that Americans are prone to removing the magic from stories, even in how we tell old tales to children.

I also think that my want of things to have an element of logic to them affected my experience with watching Lady in the Water. I wanted the characters to react logically to the mythical events that were proving to be real. I didn’t feel like it had that. Most characters jumped on board with helping a water lady return to her water home without much resistance or hesitation. My issue with this was that it didn’t make sense to me.

After some thought, I’ve begun to wonder if that limits how I think about stories. Lady in the Water is a film. All of it is fiction, none of it is real. Why should it need to seem real? And who dictates what is and isn’t considered real? I think there’s at least some room for subjectivity on that.

Both of the stories that I read this week will affect how I look at writing for my own screenplays and whatever other stories I write in the future. Even if I didn’t like elements of these tales, I still learned so much from each. I’m glad that I read them and allowed them to challenge my preexisting ideas of what should and shouldn’t be in a story.