Monday, May 15, 2017

The Third Principle—Fate as a Character


New readers of this blog should begin with the first post—"Introducing Miller's Five Principles of Pastiche"—at the bottom here and work their way up.

This Third Principle of my pastiche writing is a bit harder to pin down, both for me to put into words and perhaps for my readers to glean, than the first two. Shall we start at the beginning? I often find that a good strategy.

The principle states: “My stories are intended to illustrate the curious, illusive, exceedingly patient, ironic, and roundabout manner in which Fate can sometimes work.”  My goodness, that’s an ambitious, perhaps pretentious mouthful. Yet, I chose those words for good reasons:

• curious

• illusive

• patient

• ironic

• roundabout

Do any of those descriptor words have any relevance to ordinary dictionary definitions of “fate” such as these:

(1) Something that unavoidably befalls a person  (2) The universal principle or ultimate agency by which the order of things is prescribed; the decreed cause of events (3) That which is inevitably predetermined; destiny.

“Unavoidably,” “ultimate,” “prescribed,” “decreed,” “inevitable,” “predetermined.” None of these dictionary words seem especially harmonious with my own selections of “curious,” “illusive,” “patient,” “ironic,” “roundabout.”

The words I’ve selected have a sense of involvement, participation, deliberateness, changeability, and fluidity about them, as though there was some purposeful agency at work, while the dictionary words, by definition, pun intended, seem set in stone.

Let me share an example from my fiction, and then I will try to make sense of this apparent disconnect. In The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life, Book 2 of the “Holmes Behind the Veil” series, Allan Quatermain is given a task to do by a goddess figure he happens to encounter in the middle of the Ethiopian desert. He listens, determines that everything he has heard is utter nonsense and makes up his mind that the requested task is also nonsense, and true to his obdurate skeptical nature, doesn’t so much decide to ignore said task, but goes about his life forgetting any of the surrounding circumstances had ever happened including the requested task.



And so it stands for a number of years, but there comes a time when events, companionship, timing, etc. line up so that he really has no choice but to remember and relate the story or adventure, of which the nonsensical task is merely a part, to two gentlemen over brandy and a roaring fire. He does so verbally, off the cuff with no sense of permanence or of fulfilling any particular task. However, it so happens that one of his companions enjoys both writing and a good tale and sets down the entire story in detail and eventually sends his manuscript as a souvenir of their delightful evening to the other gentleman, at whose home it is misplaced, languishing for 34 years in a wine cellar, until it is loaned to another party who also loses track of it, and soon that record of Quatermain’s tale is packed away and forgotten in a university library basement for 70 more years. Finally it surfaces at an auspicious time when its contents can be better appreciated, Quatermain’s task becomes generally known, and it starts a chain reaction that changes the world for the better. In other words, Quatermain was given a task to do, and eventually a century and a quarter years later, he fulfills it, indirectly to be sure, but fulfills it nonetheless.

All my descriptor words fit perfectly this scenario, and yet there is no doubt that these events as described are all random, haphazard, unpredictable, and seem to avoid any normal standard criteria for cause and effect. Quartemain was given a task, and despite his every effort, conscious and unconscious, to undermine the task, it eventually bubbles to the surface and affects the whole world.

The successive events (or lack thereof) unfold having very little to do with any conscious human agency. Yet, Fate is, in modern parlance, almost like a computer program running in the background.

Both Books 1 and 3, describe similar mechanisms, turns of fate if you will, a little less so for the former, a little more so for the latter.

I mentioned in Posting # 1 that reading H. Rider Haggard’s The People of the Mist affected me deeply; there was a mysterious something permeating the novel that I found refreshing and illuminating something that I had never encountered before in all my reading (up till then). After reading a half dozen more Haggard novels, I was able to put my finger on that quality. It was that Haggard successfully made Fate as palpable a character in The People of the Mist as any of its “flesh and blood” characters. It seemed to me that that story did not come alive solely due to characterizations or plot developments (admittedly both quite strong) so much as they did to turnings of Fate.

So is it any wonder that I would include “turnings of fate” as important elements of my pastiches. It doesn’t hurt that I totally subscribe to such turnings, not so much as fiction plot devices, but as fundamental to human life on this planet. It’s clear enough that, like Haggard, I have a mystical side, a cosmic view that mandates me to expect the unexpected. Haggard biographer Peter Berresford Ellis touches on some of this: “Haggard’s concern with man’s ambiguous status in the universe, a universe of chance and change, and his probing towards an elucidation of purpose....”



1894 First British Edition
Here is what so enthralled me about The People of the Mist. Two brothers come to find that the estate they called home is to be taken away; Leonard loses his chance to marry Jane Beach due to his declining fortunes.  He and his brother go to Africa to start a new life, where their lot is bitter. They are far from civilization trying to mine gold. As Leonard’s brother lies dying, the last words out of his mouth pertain to trusting the woman who is coming. Quickly a woman comes begging him to go with her to a lost land to help rescue her mistress. Leonard and his dwarf sidekick Otter take up the challenge and there follows 300 pages of wonderful adventure. He rescues the woman, Juanna by name; they marry and return to England. Once back, he learns that Jane Beach, who had spurned him, was able to will his estate back to him before she herself died. It turns out that if he had waited a bit longer following his brother’s death, he would have learned of this by message through the agency of her attorney’s messenger, and his life and fortune would have been totally different. As it stands, he is married to Juanna and they live on an estate that is his by virtue of the good graces of his first love, a fact that Juanna cannot forget. In other words, he had endured a fearful adventure and rescued and married a woman all by virtue of wrongly interpreting the “Delphic oracle”-like last words of his brother, which led him to material success but also to a stoic sorrow and a never-to-be-truly-bridged emptiness between he and his wife.

These moments correspond in some respects to the real events in Haggard’s life. In 1891, six years after he had indisputably attained the position of one of the world's most successful writers, his only son died of measles at the age of 11 when Rider and his wife were in Mexico. One can only imagine Haggard's grief and reactions on every level. Where was the sense there? What was the point of attaining the absolute pinnacle of success only to have all joy extinguished forever? All this only convinced him of the cruel workings of destiny and the underlying futility of life, views that couldn’t help but infuse The People of the Mist, the second book he wrote after the loss of his son and which was, as you recall, my introduction to Haggard. It was the sense that results and conclusions are not always wrapped nicely and tied up with pretty string. This was a new concept for me, and one I learned was a constant in Haggard’s writing.

I use the term "Turnings of Fate” repeatedly in this essay. If Fate turns, that would belie notions of inevitability and predetermination. Fate was the utterly unpredictable yet underlying engine that moved The People of the Mist's plot forward, not so much any ordinary human agency. The same can be said about Haggard’s She: A History and most of the Quatermain novels. I use the word Fate to label events or instances unrelated to the apparent action or motivations or cause and effect that we observe in the novel, yet of absolute consequence to the resolution of the novel in fictional terms and to the book's theme or message in broader philosophical terms.

The first book in the series is already released and is available from all good bookstores including Amazon USA,  Barnes and Noble, and Amazon UK.

NEXT:  The fourth principle overlaps to some degree with all of the above, but holds its own as a separate principle:  “It’s my intent to convey a sense of my conviction that there is in reality an attentive, deliberate consciousness 'behind the veil' and that the key to knowing, or relating to, that consciousness is G.K. Chesterton’s remark: 'There is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss.'”


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