I’m reading Wilkie Collins’ the Woman in White. Wikipedia classifies the genre as sensational. The term rings a bell, but a faint one, so I’ll find out more about it.
I chose this book because it sounded like a ghost story, and though I’m only a few chapters in, it reminds me of Dracula in the same quiet way that running into a person we know superficially brings to mind the cousin or roommate we know better: the layers of narrative, a night walk and the appearance of a mysterious woman wearing ordinary but completely white clothes, the arrival to a seemingly empty house, eccentric characters who smack of the morally corrupt (a perfectly proportioned dwarf [we know Victorians and their thoughts on deformity and disability], a mannish woman, and a womanish male invalid).
I’m reading it because it’s Halloween, a holiday I like for lots of reasons from children and candy to the acknowledgement of the metaphysical, the embodiment of forbidden impulses, and the fearless and even joyous confrontation with inevitable death and with the drives we can’t or won’t suppress.
I’ve always wanted to write a ghost story of my own, the kind Henry James and F. Marion Crawford wrote, silent, under-the-skin tales that get down deep because they’re based on an assumption that there is a soul and that day-to-day choices feed or dampen that soul. Some, the best of them, read like theology, and I think an otherwise resistant reader can be persuaded to consider God inside a ghost story.
For me, this is vital. So much of my work involves God—sometimes frightening, sometimes petty, sometimes indifferent, sometimes intense and protective, sometimes sexual. I don’t think “faith based” fiction has room for this kind of God. I’m not sure that a lot of other readers do.
Last night, I was having dinner with a friend. She’s in the final stages of her dissertation, which is on the sermons of a tenth-century monk. She was summarizing part of a chapter to me and said that, to her monk’s way of thinking, the male should close the gates of his senses and remove himself from women in order to enter into what she terms a dull Heaven that is devoid of sensory experience and burdened by continuous prayer.
My own thought was that concentrated sensory experience leads to small moments of magnified gratification, like the tension and release of orgasm, but the sustained sensory deprivation and focus of my friend’s monk is the instant prior to or immediately following climax. A body knows the anchor of the senses and does everything it can to find out what else is possible; a soul knows there is more and flounders against the lack of limits.
My fiction is about that struggle, and that eternal state of orgasm is what a lot of my characters strive for or work against. I don’t know how much value someone like my friend can find in my writing. I’m not sure how much of a market there is for this either.
