26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss by Kij Johnson

[Bunny]

My turn to lead a discussion begins tomorrow but I thought I'd get the thread up tonight.

Here is a link to the story on Kij Johnson's website
http://www.kijjohnson.com/26_monkeys.htm

For those who enjoy audio, here is a link to a podcast of the story
http://escapepod.org/2009/04/18/ep195...

This story was first published in Asimov's in 2008 and was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula. It won the World Fantasy Award in 2009. It has long been a favorite of mine.

[Francesca]

I loved this story--so glad we're going to discuss it. I'm going to reread it before adding a more substantive comment.

[Sarah]

This is one of my favorite stories ever.

[Bunny]

For me this is a very profound story about grief and loss and gradual healing, expressed almost entirely through misdirection. The author chooses to express the protagonist's pain very obliquely. For me this actually makes the story more powerful although of course YMMV. I'd like to look at some of the techniques used and explore how this oblique approach works and why it is powerful. If you agree that it is. Or why it is not if you do not agree that it is.

One example of a technique of misdirection would be the list making. There are a lot of lists in this story. How do the lists work in this story, what purposes do they serve? What other techniques are used to tell the story slantwise, and how do they work (or not work).

[Bunny]

The idea of "telling it slant" has its root in a poem by Emily Dickenson

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

[Francesca]

I just reread it, and it made me tear up all over again. Its touch is so light, even though the things it's talking about are so profound. So light and so kind.

And yeah, it's telling it slant--I think Emily Dickinson is right: it's a necessary thing. The truth must dazzle gradually, or every man be blind.

[Francesca]

One thing I remember from when I first read it was the things the monkeys came back with, and how immensely happy I was at the end, when Aimee and Geof's place is one of the places the monkeys are visiting during the time when they're vanished. The thought that the monkeys are visiting all the people whom they've rescued is really, really comforting.

[Francesca]

Bunny wrote: "For me this is a very profound story about grief and loss and gradual healing, expressed almost entirely through misdirection. The author chooses to express the protagonist's pain very obliquely. ..."

I think a thing not referred to directly *always* has more power, because what's unstated grows in the minds of the readers.

[Bunny]

Thank you so much for participating Francesca. I like what you said about the light touch and the underlying kindness. I think that may be what makes this a beloved story for me, it looks at very hard things but with a kindness.

I also love that the story is ostensibly about a magic act because there's that theme of misdirection again. But in this case the magic is real, and the magician is not in control of it. The monkeys literally run the show.

Does anyone else have that saying in their family? In my family when the kids and the dogs and the pizza delivery were all happening at a particularly hectic level someone would laughingly call out with great faux drama, "help, help, the monkeys are running the show!"

[A.C.]

I've always been a fan of stories that exist between the lines that actually appear on the page. When done well, list stories can be a very effective way of pulling this off. I wonder if part of that may be due to the fact that lists literally break the traditional structure of a narrative. They pull lines apart and force the reader to slow down and consider each individual item. Why did the author include this particular piece of information and not another? Why is it important? Or, what isn't listed that could have gone here instead? What is hiding, or what it the reader's attention being drawn away from, or toward? Rather than telling, or even showing, the author leads the reader to come to their own conclusions about the heart of the story.

26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss, is one of those stories I find something new in each time I read it. I think that's precisely because, as Bunny and Francesca pointed out, the story is told obliquely, and with a light touch. It can be enjoyed on the surface, but the more you look at it, the more layers unfold and the deeper it gets.

[Terry]

Bunny wrote:

For me this is a very profound story about grief and loss and gradual healing, expressed almost entirely through misdirection.

A good story depends on some surprises. I think the misdirection in “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” is that most of the tale’s concerned with Aimee trying to figure out how the monkeys perform their vanishing act, but the story's not about that at all. Johnson has us asking the wrong question until near the end of the tale. It’s a magician’s trick- nothing up my sleeve, or in this case, bathtub.

What’s it really about? More than halfway into the story, in numbered scene 15, we learn more about Aimee:

These are some ways Aimee's life might have come apart:


She might have broken her ankle a few years ago, and gotten a bone infection that left her on crutches for ten months, and in pain for longer.
Her husband might have fallen in love with his admin and left her.
She might have been fired from her job in the same week she found out her sister had colon cancer.
She might have gone insane for a time and made a series of questionable choices that left her alone in a furnished apartment in a city she picked out of the atlas.
Nothing is certain. You can lose everything. Eventually, even at your luckiest, you will die and then you will lose it all. When you are a certain age or when you have lost certain things and people, Aimee's crippling grief will make a terrible poisoned dark sense.

It’s evident that these events, rather than ‘might have’, actually all actually happened to Aimee. She’s a mess. At that point a congruence between Aimee’s path to healing and the mystery of what happens in the bathtub begins to emerge, beginning with her understanding of how the world works:

14. What Aimee likes about this life:
It doesn't mean anything.

And then, in 15:

Nothing is certain.

[Sarah]

As AC said, I also find something new in this story every time I read it. When I bought Kij's collection, it took me ages to read because I kept rereading this story instead of trying the others (many of which I also loved.)
I don't reread many works, and I think it's that obliqueness that you all are referring to that helps. Stories that are all surface? I read it, I contemplate it, I move on. But this one has a whole reef living underneath, and every time I go down I catch glimpses of species I've never seen before.

[Francesca]

I think the monkeys are a great portrait of wordless support. They make room for Aimee in the tub, even though she can't magic away the way they do--but they let her try. They create home and comfort around her. Being monkeys, they don't offer advice or tell her what to do. And although Aimee thinks of this existence as sort of ersatz, in fact it's a healing cocoon. As Geof the "meaningless boyfriend" says, "everyone has a home, even if they don't believe in it."

Her change in perspective seems to come after Zeb dies, but I think actually it's when Geof first takes her to eat away from the carnival--thereby moving their relationship from the liminal, cocoon location into the outer world.

[Terry]

Francesca posted:
As Geof the "meaningless boyfriend" says, "everyone has a home, even if they don't believe in it."

The way Aimee came to the monkeys and leaves them says something about this:

There was a monkey act at the Utah State Fair. She felt a sudden and totally out-of-character urge to see it, and afterward, with no idea why, she walked up to the owner and said, "I have to buy this."

And towards the end:

Six weeks later, a man walks up to Aimee as she and Geof kiss after a show. He's short, pale, balding. He has the shell-shocked look of a man eaten hollow from the inside. She knows the look.

"I need to buy this," he says.

Aimee nods. "I know you do."

She sells it to him for a dollar.

I'm minded of that quote about home- that when you have to go there, they have to take you.

[Terry]

Sarah had commented on the multi-layered nature of this story, and I agree. I hadn’t read it before the discussion, but every time I look at it I see something different.

Back when we read “Meet the President”, there was a discussion on the never-ending literary fiction/speculative fiction debate. It seems this story could fit that debate. Its’ not science fiction. It’s not even really fantasy. Perhaps it’s a bit of that magical realism we talked about. But I think it’s also a fable; the monkeys, certainly Zeb, are talking to us.

When I first read it, I treated it as science fiction, trying to understand the vanishing act, and got caught up in the misdirection. I remember thinking of Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, and jaunting.

We’ll all face the Abyss eventually, and the story has a lot to say about it. Part of Aimee’s trauma is the loss of her sister, and she knows she’s going to loose Zeb, and she can’t cope with it. But the story carefully reduces death to just another performance, by the use of ritual.

Everyone is backstage. Aimee is finishing her makeup, and Geof is double-checking everything. The monkeys are sitting neatly in a circle in the dressing room, as if trying to keep their bright vests and skirts from creasing. Zeb sits in the middle, beside Pango in her little green sequined outfit. They grunt a bit, then lean back. One after the other, the rest of the monkeys crawl forward and shake his hand, and then hers. She nods, like a small queen at a flower show.

[Terry]

An odd thing happened a bit ago, working on the last post; "Arlington" came up on my stream. Odd in that the lyrics and mood match this story well, I think.

[Sarah]

Y'know, I have trouble talking about this story because I love it so much.

[Terry]

To me, the interesting thing is not whether or not I like a story, but why I like or dislike it. Usually, an effective approach is to start with technique. This story is so unconventional in style that even that doesn't work well (although, as in several of the stories we've discussed, point of view would be a starting place.)

It's a great story, and I'm grateful for this group for introducing me to writers I've should pay more attention to.

[Francesca]

I know what you mean, Sarah! And I know what you mean, too, Terry, but sometimes if something's good enough, it can be hard to analyze that why.

Also, Terry, by "Arlington," do you mean the song sung by the Wailin' Jennys, because it really does have some lyrics that go with the story--but it's not a very well-known song.

[Bunny]

Thank you so much to everyone who has contributed to the discussion so far! I know we are approaching the end of the discussion week, but I'm hoping to keep going just a little longer as I actually have some free time today! So exciting.

I've read everyone's comments with great interest. I share that feeling that Sarah and Francesca talked about of not quite wanting to analyze a story if you really love it. Almost like I'm afraid to poke it because I might let the magic out! Of course I usually manage to get over the impulse and poke it anyway :-)

Terry points out that the passage beginning "She might have broken her ankle ..." is a list of things all of which probably happened to Aimee. She probably did break her ankle, and develop a bone infection, and get dumped by her husband, and lose her job and her sister, and her home. But in a way the specifics of what happened seem to me like the specifics of the different kinds of monkeys in the bathtub.

Specifics help, they give the mind something to hold on to, they provide traction. When I'm lost I make lists, I get specific, I do something with my hands, because details help me to focus and function when I'm shocked. How many siamangs and vervets, and whether it was a bone infection, and that the capuchin is named Pango and that her husband fell in love with someone else, those details anchor the story, and the reader, and Aimee in the real. Which is important when a person is floundering.

But the underlying truth, the reason for the floundering is not in the details. Its that the monkeys vanish, not what kind of monkeys they happen to be. The underlying truth of her pain and fear is not the specifics of why her life went poof around her but the thing that keeps repeating throughout the story "nothing is certain."

One day your life can just blow up around you and be utterly changed and you didn't cause it and you can't stop it, and you aren't going to know if its coming because the universe is a chaotic place where monkeys disappear from bathtubs and we don't know why. We can make lists and tell stories and research types of monkeys and find a good vet and fold our laundry and make sandwiches but we are still going to get confronted (sometimes more than once) with the inescapable fact that we aren't in control. And then have to somehow come to terms with that.

[Terry]

"Arlington" was indeed by the Wailin' Jennys. I don't know the provenance.

[Francesca]

Thank *you* Bunny, for choosing this story! (It's nice to have one that's so luminous and uplifting now and then).

And Terry, high fives on the Wailin' Jennys. Great singers. (And I'm thinking maybe that one's original with them? I know they sing traditional songs, but I think they make songs up as well.)