The Shape of My Name

[A.C.]

Hopefully last week's discussion will continue, however, I figured I'd get the discussion of The Shape of My Name by Nino Cipri started.

First, the link to the story, which is available for free at Tor: http://www.tor.com/2015/03/04/the-sha...

And now some thoughts to kick things off...

There's a kind of dual time travel going on in this story. Each time period is anchored by sensory detail - a smell, a taste, the color of the walls, a particular food. It's interesting structurally, and an opportunity to explore the interplay of memory and literal time-travel. As the narrator looks back, he becomes a time-travel conduit for the reader, but does he literally visit every time period he describes within the framework of the story?

In other places online, I've seen the question of the strike-thru text raised (but not answered). Did it add to the narrative, or distract from it, especially with the changes being relatively subtle. Do you read it as the narrator re-writing their history, or other family members constantly changing and rearranging history as they travel through time?

Continuing with the theme of time and history as a palimpsest, the way the narrator's room is a physical manifestation of this idea. Each time he visit layers of paint have been added or stripped away, and there's new furniture in place. It echoes the writing and erasing of the narrator's name in the family history book. I also thought it made a nice metaphor for the perspectives of various characters in the story the familiar made strange and vice versa, and the idea of transformation at the core of the story.

Something I wondered about on this read-through of the story is whether there's any significance to the time period each character chooses to live in. We don't know when Dara was born, but she eventually chooses to live in 2073. The narrator's mother was born in 1977, but chooses to live farther back in the past, before fleeing to the far future. Does she have any choice in the matter or is she pre-destined for these times because it's written in Uncle Dante's book? Do you think part of her resistance to accepting her son is related to the idea of pre-destination versus free will?

What do you think of the fact that we don't learn the narrator's name until the very end of the story? Do you think there's any relation to the idea of knowing something/someone's name giving you power over that thing/person? If so, is it an act of acceptance or defiance when the narrator finally gives his mother his name?

Those are my initial scattered thoughts and questions. I love this story, and I can't wait to hear what others think of it!

[Rebecca]

This is an incredible story--haunting in the way that echoes.

I love this theme of rewriting/iteration, and the way it echoes across different parts of the story. The palimpsest is an apt word to use. I'll talk about the strikethroughs, because even though they are quiet, they are also an echo on the theme.

The one I'm most interested in is: "I’d grown wary of my own body in the last few months, the way at how it was changing:..." (strikethrough on "the way.") To me, they read the same way, so I had to read it a few times to try to wrestle why "at how" was preferable to the narrator. The best I can come up with is that the narrator is not particularly surprised at the fact that his body is changing, but surprised at how it is--for example, the betrayal of breasts and soft curves, rather than the growth of body parts he doesn't have but perhaps hoped to have. The specifics.

Also, as a glaring guidepost to the story, the queer strikethrough, in favor of trans. It seemed clear to me in this instance that "queer" was Dara's word, not the narrator's, who was merely substituting the right word. Yet I continue to find it interesting that even in these few instances, the narrator chooses to leave visible the crossed-out words, those that have outgrown their usefulness. Words are powerful, and you'd expect this narrator to want to completely rewrite his own story. Yet there is a transparency, the transparency of the palimpsest. It seems to say: Here is my story, yet there are other stories beneath mine, that have provided structure for mine. I do not hold onto them, yet they are there, like ghosts.

The narrator is even transparent about his story. He doesn't try to hide (for the most part) his past body, his past social circumstances. He allows the past to provide the structure for his present tale--one cannot exist without the other, however painful.

[Bunny]

Finally got a chance to read this. I'm still processing but I feel like it's a very understated story. Maybe a bit too understated for me. And it takes a lot for me to say that because I tend to like that sort of thing.

[Sarah]

I'm having a crazy week, and I'll be offline entirely next week. Will come back when I can!

[Terry]

A.C. asks:

In other places online, I've seen the question of the strike-thru text raised (but not answered). Did it add to the narrative, or distract from it, especially with the changes being relatively subtle. Do you read it as the narrator re-writing their history, or other family members constantly changing and rearranging history as they travel through time?

I agree with Rebecca that palimpsest is an apt word, but pehaps for a different reason. Overwriting a text is an act of destruction, perhaps even of violence. It brands what went before as obsolete, unwanted, not worth saving.

I think there’s lot of anger under the surface. I’m thinking of Miriam’s jump to June 22, 2321 CE, a time traveler’s suicide, and its repercussions. And I find myself questioning how much Heron’s visit back to her mother, just before his surgery, precipitated that jump.

[Terry]

Time travel has been depicted in many ways, with differing rules. To clarify, I think this is how time travel works in “The Shape of My Name”:

The traveler can travel both forward and back in time, but within a limited range: no earlier than the invention of the time machine, the anachronopede, in 1905, and no later than August 3, 2321, for reasons not known.

Only certain people can travel in time. The machine is keyed to something in an ancestress’ matrilineal DNA, and only her female descendants can use the machine.

Multiple of these people can use the machine at will, and each one’s timeline is affected by her choice; other travelers may or may not know of an individual’s presence as a traveler.

The traveler may already exist in the destination, so that there can be two (or more?) versions of the same person at any point in time.

Alterations of the past affect the future of all time travelers, creating a new shared future. There are no alternate realities or parallel universes created by such alterations.

The time-traveler retains memories of her previous timelines.

Is this correct?

[Outis]

Terry wrote: " I find myself questioning how much Heron’s visit back to her mother, just before his surgery, precipitated that jump."

Time travel to the past breaks objective causality so such questions as what precipitated an event are nonsensical... or rather (since we're talking about fiction) any answer could only be justified as an aesthetic choice.

A.C. wrote: "Does she have any choice in the matter or is she pre-destined for these times because it's written in Uncle Dante's book? Do you think part of her resistance to accepting her son is related to the idea of pre-destination versus free will?"

As I have argued in a different thread, this dichotomy is a theological construction. It has nothing to do with time travel. It's about whether the capacity not to sin is intrinsic to people or selectively granted by God. I don't think reusing theological constructs (especially without realizing what they are for) is a good way to understand anything other than theology.
And I don't think this story is about theology.

Within the framework of this story, I do not see any reason to believe that someone has no choice just because something is written in a book.
One of the reasons why I don't believe that is that this story has led us to believe that choices can affect the past thanks to time travel to the past.
Another is that we have not been led to believe that the characters of this story can be meaningfully said to make choices even when the outcome of their choices is not written in the book. In other words, it seems they're not conscious of what drives them to begin with.

So no, I don't think the mother's issues have any relationship to predestination (except perhaps in the theological sense).
Then again, I do not understand this character. In fact, I understand none of the characters (am I missing something?) but the mother puzzled me the most. That's my biggest problem with this story. In spite of its merits, I can't say I like it.

[A.C.]

Rebecca - I think you may have hit on it exactly with your reading of 'the way' vs. 'how' in the strike-thru text, and on Heron substituting his own word (trans) for Dara's (queer). It is interesting that the words are struck out and not erased, since presumably Heron could do that if he chose. The only thing he erases outright is his name, everything else he builds on, allowing the past to give structure to the present.

Bunny - I'm sorry to hear the story didn't work for you, but I completely understand. I personally like the fact that it's understated. You don't often see a time-travel story quite this quiet or personal. So often it's big stakes - let's kill Hilter, stop the war, undo the past, etc. I like that this one never really addresses the point that no one can travel farther into the future than 2321, and the stakes are almost entirely personal, not world-changing.

Terry - I think your understanding of time-travel in the story is correct. I'm not sure about only female descendants being able to use it, though that does raise an interesting question about natal sex vs. gender in terms of Heron's future ability to travel. The idea of Heron's visit precipitating his mother's jump is an interesting one. It's noteworthy that she doesn't jump to the past to try to change her son's life, so is that the closest she'll get to admitting her acceptance of him? I still wonder about the question of pre-determined fate vs. free will in her choice. Does she believe there's something that compels her to go to the future, thus never properly connecting with her son? I could very well see choice vs. destiny being at the heart of their relationship. Maybe she never felt like she could love him because no matter what, she knew she would have to leave.

[Bunny]

I wouldn't say I hated it, I was just not in love. I think maybe I needed just a little more help understanding why the protagonist did things. Or maybe not, maybe I did understand and I just didn't agree with him. He seems to be very angry with his mother and entirely forgiving of his father, idealizing his father even. And I don't see why. Did his father accept him as trans? If so I missed it. If not, why can he forgive his father for not understanding his gender identity but not forgive his mother? At least she took him to see Dara, so maybe that wasn't perfect, but she tried to help even if she didn't fully understand. So why is she unforgivable?

Why does he seem to think his father's suicide is his mother's fault, but his mother's disappearance is a betrayal? Like, they both left him but his father had no choice while his mother was wrong? It just feels to me like he wont forgive her for being insufficiently self abnegating. Like if she was a good mother she would have stuck around to be emotionally supportive of everybody else regardless of her own needs or confusion, because ... because I don't know why. Because mothers are supposed to live for others?

I'm left feeling either I don't understand him, or I don't like him very much. And maybe that's unfair, maybe he's just a teen boy going through a difficult transition ungracefully. I don't know. Its hard for me to make sense of his responses. It just feels like his mother is being held to a standard that nobody else is expected to meet, and if there's some justification for that I need more help understanding what it is.

Does that make any sense?

[Terry]

Outis writes:

Time travel to the past breaks objective causality so such questions as what precipitated an event are nonsensical... or rather (since we're talking about fiction) any answer could only be justified as an aesthetic choice.

Not just causality is broken; so is the conservation law for mass. If I send an object back in time, from that time forward there are now two objects; the mass of the duplicated object was created out of thin air. However, as you say, it’s a story.

Broken causality in time travel is illustrated by the grandfather paradox: you travel back in time before you’re born and kill your grandfather. But of course if you’ve killed your grandfather, you can’t be born, and thus can’t travel back in time to kill your grandfather…

Leibnitz takes this an extra step by observing that some things are contradicted but others are not. The individuals who can exist together are compossible, and a possible world can only contain compossible things. The world you kill your grandfather in is not possible; the world you don’t, is.

Considering “The Shape of My Name”, I think I can relate to the idea that a lot of family situations are not compossible.

[Outis]

The grandfather paradox is bogus. If you assume time travel, killing your grandfather before you're born poses no particular difficulty. The difficulty only arises if you both assume both time travel and the mainstream account of causality (which is nonsense because they're not compatible).
Non-objective, non-relativistic accounts of causality need not be broken. For instance stories often preserve causality from the point of view of the time traveller. This works fined as long as independent time travellers do not interfere with each other (as they do in this story). That's when you start getting actual paradoxes.

[Terry]

Bunny writes:

I think maybe I needed just a little more help understanding why the protagonist did things. Or maybe not, maybe I did understand and I just didn't agree with him. He seems to be very angry with his mother and entirely forgiving of his father, idealizing his father even. And I don't see why.

Regarding his mother, I think Heron has always felt unwanted:

You went into labor not knowing my name, which I know now is unprecedented among our family: you knew Dad’s name before you laid eyes on him, the time and date of my birth, the hospital where he would drive you when you went into labor. But my name? My sex? Conspicuously absent in Uncle Dante’s gilt-edged book where all these happy details were recorded in advance.

Dad told me later that you thought I’d be a stillbirth. He didn’t know about the record book, about the blank space where a name should go. But he told me that nothing he said while you were pregnant could convince you that I’d come into the world alive. You thought I’d slip out of you strangled and blue, already decaying.

Mariam keeps secrets from Heron (and Tom:)

I crept out of bed, dragging my blanket with me. I slipped out of the door and into the hallway, heading for your and Dad’s bedroom. I stopped when I heard voices coming from the parlor downstairs: I recognized your sharp tones, but there was also a man’s voice, not Dad’s baritone but something closer to a tenor.

The door creaked when I pushed it open, and the voices fell silent. I paused, and then you yanked open the door.
The curlers in your hair had come undone, descending down toward your shoulders. I watched one tumble out of your hair and onto the floor like a stunned beetle. I only caught a glimpse of the man standing in the corner; he had thin, hunched shoulders and dark hair, wet and plastered to his skull. He was wearing one of Dad’s old robes, with the initials monogrammed on the pocket. It was much too big for him.

You snatched me up, not very gently, and carried me up to the bedroom you shared with Dad.

“Tom,” you hissed. You dropped me on the bed before Dad was fully awake, and shook his shoulder. He sat up, blinking at me, and looked to you for an explanation.

“There’s a visitor,” you said, voice strained.
Dad looked at the clock, pulling it closer to him to get a proper look. “Now? Who is it?”

Your jaw was clenched, and so were your hands. “I’m handling it. I just need you to watch—”

You said my name in a way I’d never heard it before, as if each syllable were a hard, steel ball dropping from your lips. It frightened me, and I started to cry. Silently, though, since I didn’t want you to notice me. I didn’t want you to look at me with eyes like that.

And:

In the morning, there was no sign a visitor had been there at all. You and Dad assured me that I must have dreamed the whole thing.

I know now that you were lying, of course. I think I knew it even then.

And the situation between Miriam and Tom is built on another lie as well, the time machine itself:

I know you were lonely, waiting for me to grow up so you could travel again. You were exiled when you married Dad in 1947, in that feverish period just after the war. It must have been so romantic at first: I’ve seen the letters he wrote during the years he courted you. And you’d grown up seeing his name written next to yours, and the date that you’d marry him. When did you start feeling trapped, I wonder? You were caught in a weird net of fate and love and the future and the past. You loved Dad, but your love kept you hostage. You loved me, but you knew that someday, I’d transform myself into someone you didn’t recognize.

Finally, there’s the the relationship between Miriam and Dora, hidden from Tom but not Heron; mother, daughter, and lover to both. It runs in the family, as Uncle Dante says. So a romantic rivalry, of some sort, and for a trans gender boy perhaps even more complicated. Oedipal and Electra can’t be adequate words to describe the psychological stew Heron feels. But we do have a clue:

Dara told me about the two of you, eventually; that you’d been lovers before you met Dad, before you settled down with him in 1947. And that when she started visiting us in 1955, she wasn’t sleeping alone in the guest bedroom.

I’m not sure if I was madder at her or you at the time, though I’ve since forgiven her. Why wouldn’t I? You’ve left both of us, and it’s a big thing, to have that in common.

Dara’s forgiven, but Miriam, notably, is not.

And finally, he blames his mother for his father’s suicide, by reason of her abandoning them.

[Bunny]

Yes all of that. He forgives Dana. He forgives his father. He does not forgive his mother. Why is she held to a different standard? In one way it feels real to the character, because boys often do expect their mothers to exist to serve and sort of resent evidence of them having any kind of identity that is not Mom. Especially boys raised in the 1950's.

[Ben]

The Shape of My Name didn't evoke much emotion in me, even though I thought it should.

The story is a letter Heron writes to his mother sometime in the process of his learning what their relationship is. During their first trip, Heron says, "I hunched my shoulders and covered my privates, though you barely glanced at my naked skin." Again, when he visits his mom on the day from his youth, he writes, "I was lucky that you or Dara had left a blanket in the shelter, so I didn’t have to walk up to the front door naked; my flat, scarred chest at odds with my wide hips, the thatch of pubic hair with no flesh protruding from it."

It's this idea of scars that got me thinking about the crossed out words. Heron might not have been able to let his mom see the body he was uncomfortable in, but he was able to show her scars of a sort, both the old and the new words.

I'm also left wondering what happened on the day Miriam left for good. Heron talks about one day forgiving her and going back, but did that really happen? Did Miriam even go to the future (though the only other possibility I can think of is death)? And if Miriam did go to the future, how did he get the letter to her? He could leave it for her to find, but he could also bring it.

Good story. I'll keep my eye out for more from Nino Cipri.

[Bunny]

With regard to the question of whether only female descendants can time travel, Heron says Uncle Dante traveled to the future
I had to explain to him then—he’d been to the future, and so it didn’t seem so far-fetched, my transition. I simplified it for him, of course: didn’t go into the transdermal...
so it seems all the sexes can travel they just have to be related to Emmeline.

With regard to how or if Heron got the letter to his mother, I don't think he did. You can write a letter to somebody and never send it. It's actually one way to work through anger with the person and he certainly has a lot toward her.

[Terry]

One thing I note about “The Shape of My Name” is that it manages to make time travel restrictive. Using restrictive settings is a classic way to build suspense (the exemplar is Murder on the Orient Express), but you usually think of time travel as expansive. In this case, with a capped range of dates where time travel’s possible, a time machine stuck in a rural Southern Illinois location, and the travel restricted to one family, it throws everyone together in an almost incestuous way.

A.C. asked about names:

What do you think of the fact that we don't learn the narrator's name until the very end of the story? Do you think there's any relation to the idea of knowing something/someone's name giving you power over that thing/person? If so, is it an act of acceptance or defiance when the narrator finally gives his mother his name?

I don’t have an answer for that other than that it’s his name rather than hers, and thus his choice, but I do find the name itself, Heron, interesting. A heron is a creature of both land and water, one foot on land, and one foot in the water, ambiguous. So with the narrator. The title comes from an Andre Lorde poem. In looking for it, I came across a different poem, “a litany for survival”, which begins:

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children's mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours:
For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother's milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.

[Bunny]

That's a really interesting point, Terry about the restrictiveness of the time travel. I think you are on to something there! When I think about it, the traveler really doesnt use the machine to visit any place but his own home in different times, and/or his own family. Or at least that's really all he shows us. I suppose he went to a hospital to get surgery but doesn't tell or show us much of anything about the hospital. Its all very focused in on this one family in this one house.