Speculative Short Fiction Deserves Love discussion
Individual Stories
>
I Can See Right Through You
date
newest »
newest »
Mod
I will say that when the story first came out I ran to McSweeney's to read it, and completely bounced off. WHen I read it again in the collection, I had a completely different experience of it. This is my own occasional bounce-off-long-things-online issue, but I say it to encourage anyone else to consider a second read if the first doesn't take.
Popping in to say hi--I have the story open in another tab and will be back after I've read it!
To be honest, this is not my favorite Kelly Link story; I like “The Summer People” best, and I recall “Light” from Tin House. And I think “I Can See Right Through You” will be a difficult story to pin down, for several reasons.AC writes: One of my favorite things about Kelly Link's stories is the way they skirt the line between fantasy and reality.
In other story discussions we’ve talked about magic realism, which is often used to describe Link’s work. But the you could also call it surreal, absurdist, even Borges-like; her fiction has been called all of those. In story which starts off When the sex tape happened and things went south with Fawn, the demon lover did what he always did.you might well wonder where the realism starts, and since the protagonist’s an over-the-hill actor best known for playing a vampire, we’re dealing with Hollywood realism, which is fairly absurd to start with. Add a reality show about ghost hunters set in a nudist colony, and 'veer' seems to be an inadequate word.
But Link writes about this in a dead-serious, matter of fact way, and the contrast between her writing and her subject matter is striking.
AC goes on to say:
She's also a master at layering her stories so, much like Kij Johnson's '26 Monkeys', I find myself discovering something new every time I re-read them. 'I Can See Right Through You' is one of those stories for me. It combines humor, darkness, desperation, love, and a whole mess of other things. It can be read as a commentary on Hollywood, reality vs. fiction, aging, identity, relationships, and more. Almost every line can be questioned for a deeper meaning, or it can stand on its own, and still make for a wholly satisfying story.
And therein lies the rub. The real question with this story is ‘how should I read it?’ Her prose is so… well, convoluted is the word that comes to mind- that it’s hard to know how to make sense of it.
Gene Wolf, in reviewing her collection for Locus, makes the point this way: You can never really read a Link story for the second time, much like you can’t step in the same river twice. It’s the same point Sarah made when she talked about how the story gave such a different impression the second time around.
Looking at the Goodreads reviews for Get In Trouble, I’m taken by how across-the-board they are: one stars, five star, and everything in between.
One of the things that really stands out for me about this story is that we are basically seeing the entire thing from the point of view of Will, and yet there are abundant clues everywhere that Will is, for a number of different reasons, kind of clueless. So, are there a lot of mysteries here, or is it just that Will is failing to see what's going on because he's a: not real bright, b: stoned and or hung over a lot of the time, c: very upset, d: in denial, e: monumentally self centered, f: afraid.It reminds me a little bit of the Tiptree classic The Women Men Don't See. There's that same feeling that this would be an entirely different story seen through another character's point of view.
I also really enjoy the title, because I feel like its a key to a lot of things. Fawn tells Will she can see right through him in the sense that he's not fooling anybody except himself with his lies. In the sense of, I see the real you no matter how much you try to hide it. But I think Will is actually afraid people are looking through him in the other sense, the sense that nobody really sees him at all. If people can see through you, then you are invisible, right? He feels like he is disappearing. Which is why he runs to Maggie whenever things go wrong in his life, because she's the only person he feels really sees him.
I think she does see him, but not in the sense that he assumes. He thinks she "sees him" because she remembers the younger self that he wishes he still was. But I think she sees the actual Will and still cares about him, albeit in a sort of weary, oh god here we go again kind of a way. And that is what he is actually craving. The whole story is filled with tensions about the seen and the unseen.
One little note about the question about what happened in the bungalow that Meggie and Will can't talk about now, I think what happened is exactly what Will says happened, they had sex with an underage girl who committed suicide not long afterward.
A lot of great thoughts on the work so far! Terry, I initially would have agreed with you that it's not my favorite Link story (and it still isn't my absolute favorite), but I find myself enjoying it more each time I experience. I first heard Kelly Link read an excerpt at World Fantasy, then read it twice online. It was different every time.
Bunny, you say: One little note about the question about what happened in the bungalow that Meggie and Will can't talk about now, I think what happened is exactly what Will says happened, they had sex with an underage girl who committed suicide not long afterward.
The only thing that makes me question that literal reading is Meggie saying she's told the story, but she's never heard Will tell it before. So much of the story seems to be about the way each character experiences the world/reality. It just made me wonder if there was anything else going on there.
The way I read it, after they found out about the suicide both Meggie and Will started to have nightmares and feel like there was something hanging over them and coming for them and getting between them. Will thought those feelings were all metaphors for guilt about the way they treated the girl and fear that it would get out and ruin their careers. He seems to have thought that if they could work the feelings out in therapy then they could continue their relationship and their lives as usual.Meggie clearly did not agree because she split up with him and left town and stopped making movies for awhile. So she changed her life in reaction to what happened and he didn't. Whether she thought the feeling between them in the bungalow was a ghost, or a warning from some other force, or a sign to make changes... whatever she thought, she definitely took it more seriously than he did and responded to it in ways he did not.
AC asks:What really happened to Meggie and the demon lover in the bungalow that they are unable to talk about now? Do their versions of the story match up? How reliable are they as narrators?
As Bunny says, we’re seeing this from Will’s point of view.
But he’s not identified as Will Gald until very late in the piece. From the opening sentence, he’s the demon lover, his way of referring to himself, which is an interesting self-image:
The first time you bite a girl’s neck, Meggie’s neck, you’re a twenty-five-year-old actor playing a vampire who hasn’t gotten a day older in three hundred years. Now you’re a forty-nine-year-old actor playing the same ageless vampire. It’s getting to be a little ridiculous, isn’t it? But if the demon lover isn’t the demon lover, then who is he? Who are you?
But this framing is also a symptom of disassociate disorders, so Will’s ‘normal’ state of awareness and self-identity may be questionable.
Looked at as pathology, much of Link’s opaque prose makes sense, as the running interior monologue of a man who’s used to looking at himself from a remove and as playing a part. This explains the changes of verb tense and person. Consider the opening two paragraphs.
When the sex tape happened and things went south with Fawn, the demon lover did what he always did. He went to cry on Meggie’s shoulder. Girls like Fawn came and went, but Meggie would always be there. Him and Meggie. It was the talisman you kept in your pocket. The one you couldn’t lose.
Two monsters can kiss in a movie. One old friend can go to see another old friend and be sure of his welcome: so here is the demon lover in a rental car. An hour into the drive, he opens the window, tosses out his cell phone. There is no one he wants to talk to except for Meggie.
Later, Link spells it out:
The demon lover feels his own lip lifting. They are both wearing masks. They look out of them at each other. This was what you knew when you were an actor. The face, the whole body, the way you moved in it, just a guise. You put it on, you put it off again. What was underneath belonged to you, just you, as long as you kept it hidden.
Then there are the many scene breaks and small flashbacks, usually in narrative summary. These are the ruminations of a man spending much of his life in the past. As Link says,
It’s hard for the demon lover to grow old.
Looked at like this, “I Can See Right Through You” starts to look more like a conventional plotted story, albeit with a long setup, and which breaks most of the ‘rules’ of ‘good’ fiction. It doesn't really get under way until Will shows up at Lake Apopka in the rain and encounters the nude film crew.
Which brings us back to AC’s question: How reliable are they as narrators? In Will’s case, the answer is both ‘not much’ and ‘very’. The question becomes, what’s traumatized him so? How hidden is that? I think it’s the same question AC asks: What really happened to Meggie and the demon lover in the bungalow that they are unable to talk about now?
Bunny comments:
One little note about the question about what happened in the bungalow that Meggie and Will can't talk about now, I think what happened is exactly what Will says happened, they had sex with an underage girl who committed suicide not long afterward.
I agree, but Link also stresses that the memory of the girl haunts them:
And at some point the girl is between them and everyone is having a good time, they’re having fun, and then the girl says to them, Bite me.
The girl remains between them to this day.
“Because every time we’re together, she’s here with us,” Meggie says. “Didn’t you know that? She’s here now. Don’t you feel her?”
"It wasn't the house that was haunted."
Or perhaps it haunts Will, and he then haunts Meggie, tracks her down, returns to her, makes her feel his disease.
i don't think we need to search for something more terrible than what actually happened. It's buried in a lot of minimizing language and subject changing with details held back and then dropped in out of sequence - all of which makes it hard to put the story together - but what actually happened is quite sufficient to be a lasting trauma that would haunt someone. Plus all of the ducking and weaving in the way he tells it. that in itself suggests that he's trying to hide from and deny that it matters. Which is not something you do about a trivial experience.There's that section where he talks about how becoming famous is a catastrophe…
Here it is:Everyone watches you. Even when they’re pretending not to. Even when they aren’t watching you, you think they are. And you know what? You’re right. Eyes will find you. Becoming famous, this kind of fame: it’s luck indistinguishable from catastrophe. You’d be dumb not to recognize it. What you’ve become.
That kind of famous means bizarre disturbing things are going to happen to you, people are going to become obsessed with you and try to hurt you or hurt themselves or demand that you rescue them from their own demons when you don't know how. The incident in Venice Beach is the main one he talks about, but I doubt it was the only one. He makes some throwaway comments about, people are going to approach you at the bank, they are going to ask you to bite their daughter. I mean how disturbing is that? How weird to live a life where that kind of thing happens often? Just because you are famous, people are going to think you can fix their pain and you can't. So what do you do about that?
You could do what Meggie did, all those years ago. Disappear. Travel the world. Hunt down the meaning of life. Go find Meggie.
But Will decided to try to ride it out, roll with being famous and make the sequels, and sleep with the golden girls that he can't tell apart, and at least in the period covered by this story, it isn't really working. Its kind of funny though, that what he does when things go wrong is run to Meggie, like he thinks Meggie can fix it for him. The line "go find Meggie" reads both ways, do what she did and go find yourself, or just go find her and see if she has answers. Its ironic because in a way he uses her as a talisman the same way his fans use him as a talisman.
That line "give me Meggie but not yet," a play on the St. Augustine quote, "give me chastity but not yet," that's an interesting one too. Meggie is his fallback plan. But what does Meggie think about being his fallback plan?
Mod
There's the actual ghost-hunting business with the nudists. There's Ray, who nobody else remembers being there.
There's the incident that haunts Will and Meggie.
There's the story with the ouija board.
There's the demon lover, the role that haunts Will and which he's spent his whole life living, and which he still plays even though he's past it - which he finally acknowledges at the end.
Etc.
Sorry I'm a bit late to the party.I found this one a bit confusing, as I often do with Kelly Link's stories. I found myself more concerned with decoding the symbolism than actually following the story, and I only got so far with that.
As far as I can understand it, Will and Meggie have both had their lives defined by one iconic erotic image. Will is always going to be known as the demon lover he played in that one film. As they age, they still want to find counterparts who were equivalent to each other at that point in time. They seem to be emotionally tied to each other by what they've shared, but at the same time that means they can see each others' self-delusion far more clearly than they can see their own. They can see through each other, and perhaps each needs the other to explain themselves.
Pretty much what Terry and Bunny said.
What I can't make sense of are the other supernatural events, such as the dead seagulls, the mysterious Ray and the disappearing Juliet. They're obviously there very deliberately, so they're part of a narrative. Can anyone else work out what that narrative is?
We get introduced to the Will (though not by name) as the demon lover right away, so when we read about the ouija session and Meggie being contacted by someone who'll love her forever--just wait!--we're (well, I'm) primed to see Will as that person. Certainly he does. But she has a succession of always-young lovers, so is she still looking for that ouija promise? In a typical story like this one, the answer is no, because the story is really about aging and disappointment and masks and trust and loss. But Meggie disappearing the way she does makes me wonder. There feels, for me, like there's maybe just a bit too *much* in the story, too much to process. Like, the tragedy of the fifteen-year-old girl, and the sense of being (or actually being) haunted by her. But is that really what drove Meggie and Will apart?
The nudists and the ghost-hunting show in general--and maybe the ouija scene, too--are maybe all just smoke and mirrors. Maybe it's all just like those baby skunks, straining to produce a scent but unable to . . . except for that one skunk. Except for Maggie's disappearance.
I like what Sarah said about multiple layers of haunting, both literal and figurative. I think Link is ringing changes on what it means to be haunted and also on what it means to be seen. Or not seen. In a sense is a haunting something appearing where you don't expect it, and then a disappearance the opposite, something not where you expect to find it? Appearance and disappearance.
DJ writes:What I can't make sense of are the other supernatural events, such as the dead seagulls, the mysterious Ray and the disappearing Juliet. They're obviously there very deliberately, so they're part of a narrative. Can anyone else work out what that narrative is?
This is, after all, a ghost story, and what's a ghost story without supernatural elements?
I think one of the things Link does is to keep us a little off balance, not sure what's 'real' and what's not, so that ultimately, like Will, we're left standing on unsettled ground. As Francisca put ut, it's smoke and mirrors.
I think it’s fair to say that you have to work a bit to read a story like “I Can See Right Through You”. You have to tease the narrative apart.At the start, AC asked,
Either specific to 'I Can See Right Through You' or in general, how do you feel about that kind of opened-ended mystery in a story? Does Link provide too little information, or too much? What details in particular help you (or hinder you) from filling in the gaps in the story?
Here’s the thing: once you have what you think is the narrative, you can go back and re-read and start to see how each little bit of narrative, each scene or piece of foreshortened prose, supports (or not, as with the bits DJ mentioned) your view of the narrative.
What you find- or rather, what I found, because this story is guaranteed to be different for each reader- is that Link’s added tons of little clues- about the mystery of what happened back in the bungalow, about how twisted glamour- in both the Hollywood and supernatural sense of the word- have left Will and Meggie, about whatever meaning you think you’ve extracted from the story. It’s like a pointillist painting- each dab, taken alone, is just a dot; the pattern emerges when you connect the dots.
Thank you for the fantastic discussion, everyone! I'll need to re-read the story again with all these thoughts in mind. I suspect when I do, I'll get something completely different out of the story than I did on each of the first three reads.
Mod
Agreed, thanks AC. I was following the discussion even if I didn't find much to contribute.
Thanks AC for leading the discussion and the introduction to a story I had not read before!
I really, really need to catch up on these stories. I've had so little time lately. But that's an issue we all have, so I have no excuses. Hopefully this weekend I can start!
To start things off, here's the link for the free version of the story at McSweeny's: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/i-can...
And now, my rambling thoughts to get the discussion started...
One of my favorite things about Kelly Link's stories is the way they skirt the line between fantasy and reality. She's a master at presenting situations that plausibly belong in our world, just slightly skewed. She's also a master at layering her stories so, much like Kij Johnson's '26 Monkeys', I find myself discovering something new every time I re-read them. 'I Can See Right Through You' is one of those stories for me. It combines humor, darkness, desperation, love, and a whole mess of other things. It can be read as a commentary on Hollywood, reality vs. fiction, aging, identity, relationships, and more. Almost every line can be questioned for a deeper meaning, or it can stand on its own, and still make for a wholly satisfying story.
Personally, I like the fact that so many of Link's works are opened ended. She never answers the question of what is meant literally and what is meant figuratively in her texts. Similarly, she leaves enough gaps in her stories for readers to fill in their own narratives. There are several of these holes in 'I Can See Right Through You', for example:
What really happened to Meggie and the demon lover in the bungalow that they are unable to talk about now? Do their versions of the story match up? How reliable are they as narrators?
What happened to the entire camp of nudists who disappeared?
What exactly is the role of the Ouija board and its message to Meggie when she was young? Is it connected to the demon lover saying, "It wasn't the house that was haunted." Is he including himself, or only Meggie? Who or what (if anything) has always been waiting for her? What about the other girl using the Ouija board with her lost sweater?
What is the significance of the incident with the dead seagulls in Meggie's ghost hunting show, Who's There?
Are any of these things connected?
What happened to Meggie?
Is Ray real?
Is anyone besides the demon lover real?
Either specific to 'I Can See Right Through You' or in general, how do you feel about that kind of opened-ended mystery in a story? Does Link provide too little information, or too much? What details in particular help you (or hinder you) from filling in the gaps in the story?
Aside from these mysteries, another thing I love about this story is the demon lover and Meggie's relationship. They only made one movie together, but they're tied together from that moment on. What do you make of the fact that the demon lover is never given a name (other than the demon lover) until he meets up with Meggie? Is it about the way he sees himself - constantly playing a role vs. being real - or the way she sees him? Do you think they ever loved each other, or have they both always been searching for something that doesn't exist? The idea of re-enacting the past, of acting out one's life is a strong theme in this story. What is Meggie re-enacting vs. what the demon lover is re-enacting? Do their realities match up? What is true, and what isn't? Does it matter in the end?
Related to their relationship, there's a recurring theme of identity, and self-perception vs. outside perception that I find fascinating in this story. It's even reflected in the way Link uses 'you/the demon lover/he' interchangeably. Sometimes she seems to be addressing the audience and drawing their attention to something about the demon lover, and sometimes she seems to be putting the reader in the role of the demon lover. Does that work for you as a reader? Does it change your experience of the story?
Even the structure of the story itself is fascinating to me. A line early in the story reads: "Film can be put together in any order. Scenes shot in any sequence. Take as many takes as you like. Continuity is independent of linear time. Sometimes you aren’t even in the scene together." To me, this encapsulates the way Link built the story. Why do you think Link chose to structure the story this way? Could you physically cut this story up, rearrange it, and get a different meaning, or would it always stay the same?
Like I said above, I obviously have a lot of thoughts/feelings about this story. I can't wait to hear what everyone else thinks!