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| My final four Christmas amaryllis blooms, on Mardi Gras, foreshadowing Easter lilies.... |
[Some readers may find traumatic the references to abortion, incest and rape in the discussion of the Anne Rice book The Witching Hour, The Game of Thrones and other literature referenced.]
Anne Rice is a Witch
I totally accidentally happened to read Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour during Carnival season, fortuitously finishing before Lent.
At least originally I’d thought it was accidental. I’d read Rice’s vampire books back when they were new and I was a young bride. We were a hip couple, before there were hipsters of course, and we partied with the most interesting people, including friends who were sometimes maintaining underground identities.
In current times, I’ve been observing with interest the phenomenon of diverse Instagram witches. So when browsing for books, I happened upon The Witching Hour and snapped it up. It was written in 1993, after I’d given up parties and steamy reads for parenting and children’s books and sleep. I thought I’d remembered the Lasher books coming out, but only in passing.
My first thought was that I couldn’t write about this reading, because surely Anne Rice is canceled now. That was back in the day and she, we, meant no harm, but–generations of New Orleans witches with appurtenant “mulattos” and small-b black help, when the language has since changed? And, you know, I thought incest was considered verboten in publishing and advertising. And: a main character sure seems to have a great and awesome grief for the aborted, (while acknowledging that of course the legal right in the pregnant person to decide is the only defensible legal, political position). So what do you think, canceled?
Well I’m relieved I guess to find, not canceled. Also I see that it wasn’t at all an accident that I was able to scoop up the Witching Hour. (I bet you already figured that out, how it happened, what algorithms, put the title before me…)
It seems there is a new streaming series coming out, or already out, called The Mayfair Witches, based on Rice’s series of books starting with The Witching Hour.
So, not canceled. We can talk about it.
Oh and that’s right, incest, rape, are OK to witness since Game of Thrones! Truth, I didn’t actually see GOT, (my grown son didn’t want his mother to see it, too pornographic!), but I did read A Song of Fire and Ice, so I know the story, mostly excellent reading btw. (My old dad is currently enjoying listening to a superb audio rendition.)
Though incest repels readers and frightens publishers, it is a classic literary theme. [I am sorry to be so academic about it, for anyone who has suffered the actual trauma.] Committing the act in ignorance is chronicled between King Arthur with a sorceress sister, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and I think even the Tolkien origin stories involve a brother and sister if I recall, in Children of Hurin? And remember Twin Peaks? And as we know from GOT and from history, royal bloodlines sometimes intentionally try to consolidate or concentrate power by inbreeding.
But Anne Rice. The author is a witch.
There’s a scene where she maddeningly bewitches the innocent reader. She writes a scene where a man, by fraud and trickery and sorcery, is helplessly drawn into sexual relations with his daughter.
(Don’t worry, I don’t believe this is a spoiler of any of your suspense if you will read or view. I haven’t named which ancestors in the long line are involved, truthfully I don’t independently remember without checking, it’s a weighty and repeating family history. But only in this one scene do you have to watch it happen.)
Rice’s passage is such a perfect example of twinning the reader’s experience with the story unfolding as experienced by the characters. The author manipulates the reader, the reader who would reject the act in disgust and horror, and is manipulated in the precise way the sorceress-or-demon, (whichever bears responsibility), manipulates the man into performing the acts. Rice writes an erotic scene, veiling identity, with multiple women serving as the succubi to arouse, and the reader is sucked in too so that even with some foreshadowed anticipation of the impending repellent act, the reader is aroused to read it and even forced to feel stimulated by it. Just so the male character, knowing now what he is about, continues the evil acts repeatedly and forcefully, as he continues as a prisoner in the chamber.
A reader might feel violated, like the character who can’t help herself from enjoying a demon incubus’s uninvited sexual trespass (I’m sorry, she herself isn’t sure whether to call it rape until later).
That power of the author witch is awe-inspiring and scary.
The spell-casting episode relates to a significant theme of the book: the continuing debate over fate and free will. Characters are doomed by their destinies, or do they have choice?
Or is fate merely a probability, resulting from genes and environment, something the rare and most singular people, saints, can overcome with action.
Saints, she points out–but also, the few singularly evil, who can corrupt the fate of the world.
So perhaps, while we may prefer free will, being bound on destiny’s tracks is safer than apocalyptic derailment by the free will exercised by a monster.
I find the debate interesting, perhaps even dated? because of the suggestion by current science that human actions are predetermined. Discussion and citations for another time …
I do know I was launched and compelled by author witchcraft into consuming and enjoying this story; just as I was manipulated by commerce and media to purchase the book, (when I thought it was serendipity or my independent little find!), because there is a streaming series coming out.
Christmas to Mardi Gras
The Carnival season begins with the Christmas season’s Twelfth Night and continues until Mardi Gras and the beginning of Lent with Ash Wednesday. Both Christmas and Mardi Gras frame The Witching Hour. The protagonist Michael retains childhood memories of the supernatural figure Lasher in the church at Christmas, and memories and dreams of the flambeau and the ritualistic drums for the final orgiastic Comus celebration on Mardi Gras. After multiple recorded (and repeating) histories of the Mayfair family through time, Michael’s story builds from a Halloween wedding to the terrible climax on Christmas Eve at midnight, the Witching Hour. Then the falling action includes a separation, waiting and perhaps healing time, after revisiting Mardi Gras.
It’s perfect for a series, the Mayfair witches go way back and can go on forever, there will be endless seasons. Questions remain unanswered at the conclusion of The Witching Hour.
For one, the issue of maintenance, restoration and renovation of the New Orleans House, caused conflict throughout the story. Was restoration of the house finally for the good, or the opposite, or was it merely a distraction?
I doubt I’ll be reading more of the series, only as I tend to be a series sampler.
I was glad to have read the story for Mardi Gras by happenstance,(!) and to complete it by Ash Wednesday. I looked long at the Christmas amaryllis blooms withering with the end of the Christmas season and the Carnival season and felt glad to be done with the long festival season.
Ascetic Aesthetic
Which brings me to the washing up.
I have been organizing stuff since the Christmas season, out of necessity for various boring reasons. As a result I can’t find anything. I did want the peace of a clean house, really! and I still want peace, the simplicity of empty space, and order.
But it seems to require constant fussing. Maybe cleaning up is the distraction, instead of the trash. Maybe dirt is the desert away from civilization for a penitential hermit.
I want to turn in. Perhaps write some letters, or just write. Because of all the putting-away, I had to search out the charging cord, the stationery. Now there’s stuff all over the table again, but that is the price for some stillness right now. I will, by Easter, turn to spring cleaning. But right now I choose to be Mary over Martha.
At least that’s what I tell my family, that this is a holy mess.
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| Engraving print titled "Thought Plagued by Spirit of Distraction". Don't know how it became skewed, woowoo |