(urth) Short Story 4: The Dead Man

[Marc Aramini]

--- On Sun, 3/25/12, Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com> wrote:


From: Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com>


 


Just a few things. The Brahmin is described in the beginning as *outside* the house and emaciated from fasting. It's a huge contrast to the bloated bodies *inside* the magar's den waiting to be eaten. That comes back to the relationship with "maya" he's playing with, I think. Also, when he's describing how he can see when he wakes up, he mentions that he can "examine the edges [of his vision], where the ghosts of the newly dead and the more material demons flutter away from man's view." Materiality here is associated with the demons, with the magar, with eating and putrefaction, etc. Even sex is mixed up with that in the way he eyes the other woman's dead but still nicely curvy (from necrotic gasses? shudder) body. And he has that moment where he feels that he's in the magar's den *and* lying in bed at home beside his wife -- he says he feels this "without contradiction," and it further emphasizes that here, it's not just "bad spirits" that are
 un-divine, but everything "worldly." Even the ghost "limps" in that between world, so he's affected by "physical" injuries even though he's immaterial. And all of the strength and health that the peasant has only serves to let him scream loudly before he dies.



So I'm not so sure that there's much judgment here for being a good or bad man in life.  To me it seems more like Wolfe is playing with the notion of maya as illusion full on: everything about life, from happy supportive marriage to the magar "demon" is equally low and illusory. The passivity in death (a death in the water and the submission to drowning...where have we seen that before?) is something that the narrator quips could be cultural, but it's actually the right thing for this guy to do in that "gnostic" system. It's his not having fully let go that leads to the Brahman having to intervene and cast a spell (or whatever) to free him. The Brahman even suggests that anything he says (or thinks) must be wrong ("It is seldom good to hear what they [ghosts] say."), and the "Name, dissolution, and release" are good things.


So maybe the magar has returned because they are too much "in the world"? After all, the grandmother laments that people are going to die, rather than accepting illusion like the Brahman. There's also that weird comment that the peasant and his friends, "ignorant of the comparative religion of the schools, would have killed the magar if they could." So it sounds like killing the magar isn't the right response to his return. The Brahman is trying to "propitiate" him at the beginning, which is more like acceptance than driving him away.


There is the comment about the jungle having been cut down for lumber 50 years ago and now growing back. That might be something different.




 

Very nice comments, I was hoping someone else would weigh in on the idea of "right/wrong" response to the Magar and materialistic reality - sexual swelling through necrotic gases is an awesome image.  This story is a perfect example of why I think spiritual possibilities always have to be considered in Wolfe to make accurate interpretations.
 
I guess I will press forward - I think that even though two of the stories in "Young Wolfe" were not published until 1992 in that volume, they seem like very early works, so we will talk about them before going to the Tor anthologies. The Dead Man, Mountains Like Mice, and The Green Wall Said are definitely the highlights - Mountains like Mice is far and away the longest, so I should be able to finish up my scans of Young Wolfe tonight, get those out, and start posting some of those comments. 

Then it looks like Trip, Trap - the story from which Damon Knight grew Wolfe from a bean. That story will probably slow us down a little, but that's all right.
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