{"id":1914,"date":"2010-01-16T15:08:17","date_gmt":"2010-01-16T23:08:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=1914"},"modified":"2010-01-16T15:10:21","modified_gmt":"2010-01-16T23:10:21","slug":"the-orpheus-and-eurydice-pattern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/16\/the-orpheus-and-eurydice-pattern\/","title":{"rendered":"The “Orpheus and Eurydice” Pattern"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m revising my novel Jim and the Flims <\/em>this month, getting ready for a final push to the end. I haven\u2019t taken any new pictures since last week, so I\u2019ll just recycle some images from 2009.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In my novel, Jim is in the afterworld (called Flimsy), and he may or may not bring his dead wife Val back to life on Earth. It\u2019s a take on the Orpheus and Eurydice <\/em>legend, but I\u2019m considering a happy ending, although I keep wondering if a \u201chappily ever after\u201d\u009d ending is best.<\/p>\n

I gather that, in romance novels, the HEA ending (as they call it) is more or less mandatory. As the romance novel writer Janet Dean says on the writing-advice website Seekerville: Escape from Unpubbed Island<\/a>: \u201cWhat I love about romance novels is the guarantee of a happy ending. That\u2019s why I read and write them.\u201d\u009d But should I be following writing advice from such a source?<\/p>\n

[Speaking of \u201cunpubbed island,\u201d\u009d I keep thinking about the stories of how the Inuit supposedly dispose of aged family members who become a burden. Eventually the same fate overtakes older writers. The editors put you on an ice floe with a hunk of blubber. \u201cWe\u2019ll be in touch.\u201d\u009d]<\/p>\n


\n[Two alien flims: a jiva and a yuel<\/a>, left to right.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Back to my plot. What if my character Jim doesn\u2019t <\/em>in fact get his wife, Val, back at the end of the Jim and the Flims<\/em>?<\/p>\n

At a deep level, Jim and the Flims <\/em>is about a man coming to terms with his grief over his wife\u2019s death. So it might be a cop-out for Jim to get Val back. Maybe it\u2019s enough if he travels through the whole process, and at the end he\u2019s rounded off a grief cycle. Nobody ever comes back from the dead. You can\u2019t ever go back to the happy person you used to be.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019d guess that the grief process is the transreal theme of the Orpheus and Eurydice <\/em>myth in the first place. Here\u2019s a link to Vergil\u2019s version in the Georgics<\/em><\/a>, and here\u2019s a link to the story in Ovid\u2019s Metamorphoses<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Eurydice is bitten by a poisonous snake soon after her marriage to Orpheus. Orpheus goes down to the underworld and plays his lyre and garners some sympathy. He\u2019s like, \u201cIt was unjust, it was too soon.\u201d\u009d Pluto, the god of the underworld, gives him Eurydice and tells him to lead her out of the underworld, but not to look back. And, when Orpheus is almost out of the cave entrance, he looks back at his beloved, perhaps worried that she wasn\u2019t following, and now she breathes the world, \u201cFarewell,\u201d\u009d and fades like smoke in the air. He never sees her again, and the keepers of the underworld won\u2019t let him come back and try again.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Vergil says Orpheus was soon torn to shreds at a wild Bacchanal, and that his severed head floated down the river to the underworld, the head still calling out for Eurydice. Ovid says that Orpheus \u201cwas the first of the Thracian people to transfer his love to young boys, and enjoy their brief springtime, and early flowering, this side of manhood.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

In other words, our bereaved poet\/singer turns alkie or gay! Gotta love it.<\/p>\n

So what about Jim and the Flims<\/em>? As a half-measure, I\u2019d been entertaining the notion that Jim does in fact get Val back to Earth at the end\u2014but then she frikkin\u2019 divorces <\/em>him! I was thinking of that as a post-modern twist.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Or maybe it\u2019s heavier if Jim somehow can\u2019t get Val to come back at all. It\u2019s not so much that she wants to come and that he mistakenly he looks at her\u2014like in the Orpheus an Eurydice <\/em>myth. I think it\u2019s rather that Val wants to go through the zero and start again. I\u2019d need to prefigure this kind of predilection on Val\u2019s part, or show her growing into this mind-set during her stay in Flimsy.<\/p>\n

All this said, I might be outsmarting myself if I don\u2019t just do the comfortable, reader-friendly thing and let Jim bring Val back. HEA! What I can <\/em>do is make this a little hard for him. Like, Val initially doesn\u2019t want to come, and maybe he has to talk her into it. Perhaps the scary ghost of Amenhotep\u2019s mummy shows up near Flimsy\u2019s core and, like, scares Val into Jim\u2019s arms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m revising my novel Jim and the Flims this month, getting ready for a final push to the end. I haven\u2019t taken any new pictures since last week, so I\u2019ll just recycle some images from 2009. In my novel, Jim is in the afterworld (called Flimsy), and he may or may not bring his dead […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1914"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1919,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1914\/revisions\/1919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}