(urth) Short Story 4: The Dead Man

[David Stockhoff]

I can only add to this that the depth of research needed for this little 
OMG-I'm-the-ghost ghost story is remarkable. It's not /entirely 
/convincing, because of the little Orientalist "footnotes," but the 
sheer legwork to get us into the peasant's mind---banter of women, 
jungle species succession, the croc's chimney, if true (I can't confirm 
it)---is commendable.

Incidentally, the croc is known as the "mugger" crocodile and does lie 
in wait for prey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mugger_crocodile). 
However, the manner in which it actually killed the peasant sounds more 
like the "death roll" described for the saltwater croc 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltwater_crocodile). One would need to 
delve deeper than Wikipedia to  sort it out further, but the conflation 
works, if conflation it is.

On 3/26/2012 2:16 AM, Craig Brewer wrote:
> Nicely done on this one. And you're absolutely right about the prose. 
> 14 years makes quite a difference!
>
> 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.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com>
> *To:* urth at lists.urth.net
> *Sent:* Sunday, March 25, 2012 1:05 PM
> *Subject:* (urth) Short Story 4: The Dead Man
>
> The Dead Man
>
> This was first published in 1965 in Sir!, and while thematically it is 
> similar to the 1951 work of Wolfe, especially "The Grave Secret", the 
> prose is far more precise and articulate.  Gene's progress, of all the 
> truly great writers, seems more "made" that born.
>
> SUMMARY:  Taking place in a Hindi river setting, for the first time in 
> generations the river seems unsafe.  The main character's 
> sister-in-law has been taken by a Magar (crocodile, but Urdu/Hindi for 
> "water monster") 9 days previously.  His wife has been bitten on the 
> foot by a jackal and it has reacted badly when she tried to distract 
> it away from her young son, so her husband, called the peasant, must 
> perform the womanly task of getting water from the river since his own 
> mother is too old.
>
> He rises early, but there is an old Brahman already on the step 
> sitting outside his door, who has cast Marigold wreaths into the river 
> to placate the Magar and other river spirits.  The man retrieves the 
> first jug and returns to his hut where his wife moans and stirs before 
> he goes back with his second, chipped jug for more water.  He grows 
> careless, and his foot slips.  As a result, the Magar snatches him by 
> the leg and he passively accepts his fate.  He awakens in the lair of 
> the crocodile, next to a blackbuck and a woman whose body seems 
> familiar.  He escapes through the "chimney" of the lair and makes his 
> way back to his family (the limp is implied from the injury to his leg 
> during the croc attack).  He stands before his house and looks first 
> and last at his wife.
>
> The Brahman is seated inside his house and says, "Do not address it.  
> It is seldom good to hear what they will say" before casting saffron 
> powder from a brass bowl into the air to bring the dead peasant release.
>
> COMMENTARY:  Once again we have a dead man unaware of his condition.  
> However, we must address the moment when he returns to awareness after 
> the attack.  "When next he came to know our world -- maya, that which 
> is not God -- it was a small circle of pale blue far above his eyes."  
> In hinduism, Maya is like an illusion.  Along with matter and activity 
> it creates a trifecta through which man "exists", but he experiences 
> matter and activity through Maya.  Thus dualism is taken to an extreme 
> degree -- the real world as an illusion, that which is separate from 
> the reality of the divine.  Maya is also somehow linked to the act or 
> actors involved in the creation of the physical world.
>
> The Brahmin is someone who has come to experience knowledge of the 
> self, BUT it is a bit suspicious that he is sitting there waiting 
> outside the man's door when he leaves, then is not present the first 
> time the man returns ... but the wife moans and stirs in her bed.  
> Since the description is of a very old man I will not posit that the 
> Brahmin had a vested interest in the wife.
>
> However, the peasant's half-brother's wife, which is probably the 
> corpse rotting in the den of the crocodile, also evokes the feeling "A 
> drugged and whirling concourse of surmises rushed through his mind, 
> until simultaneously an without consciousness of contradiction he felt 
> that he lay in the palace of a scaled river-spirit and asleep beside 
> his wife."
> The crocodile has teeth that are ill suited to eating the man, so it 
> has to wait for food to get appropriately soft and rotten to consume 
> it, in its little cooking den with a chimney to prevent the noxious 
> rotting gasses to poison the den.  The man escapes through this.
>
> POSSIBLE AMBIGUITIES: Is the Magar there for judgment?  Why has the 
> river been safe for so long?  Was the man having an affair with his 
> half-brother's wife -- is that why they both shared the river-spirit's 
> attention?  Was the Brahmin innocent or complicit, being there before 
> the man left and then present at his final return to dissolve his 
> consciousness, but not there upon his first return, when he heard the 
> moan of his wife?  Also, is the woman that he recognizes his sister in 
> law?  It would seem to be, but has she rotted enough for 9 days? It 
> does not seem to be another fresh victim that he "knows".
>
> ALLUSIONS:  Besides Weird Tales, we have Kipling and The Jungle Book 
> here!  The crocodile is called by Magar just as Baloo is a bear.  
> Hindi religious systems seem to be treated seriously, especially that 
> separation of real world as illusion from the actual reality of the 
> divine -- the Dead Man has unknowingly fallen between those two.
>
> RELIGIOUS CONNOTATION:  We should look at The Brahman as someone who 
> is aware of his own spiritual state and maya as that which is separate 
> from God; interesting concepts, because the main character, like many 
> of Wolfe's, is able to accept his fate but not understand it (so he is 
> not very "Brahman").
>
> Also, there is a subtle difference between Brahmin and Brahman, and 
> Wolfe usually employs the "a" spelling.
>
> FUTURE ECHOES:  As Gerry said of "The Grave Secret", it seems clear 
> that "The Other Dead Man" will be related to this, and I would also 
> liken it to the stories where indigenous myths are given power and 
> treated seriously (even the Latro books would fall into this category 
> -- Egyptian gods in Egypt, Greek gods in Greece, etc).  The idea of 
> Maya as an illusory real world seems to permeate Gene's work, though I 
> would normally ascribe it to "Gnosticism".
>
> Also, we have ANOTHER leg injury, and besides a possibly broken 
> vertibral column, the most obvious source of discomfort to the peasant 
> when he "awakens".  This wound was given at the time of translation 
> between life and death, or between maya and that which is beyond illusion.
>
> The next one will be "Mountains like Mice" - I need a day or two to 
> get that one prepared.
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