From: Rich Puchalsky Subject: Re: The Bridge: spoil-o-thon Date: Friday, April 27, 2001 8:36 PM Fifth post Metaphormosis: Four (in two posts, 1 of 2) As with all four sections of "Metaphormosis", this chapter starts with a dream. I'm going to go into much greater detail for this one since it introduces recurring characters. That means I'll break the chapter into two posts. In this dream the narrator is a sword-and-sorcery style swordman, and the whole thing is written phonetically, in Scots-accented English, in a very similar style to _Feersum Endjin_. The swordsman tells about how he got a familiar (from a magician that he killed) that the swordsman can't get off his shoulder, even though it annoys him that the familiar keeps talking in highly intellectual English that he can barely understand. The familiar has been teaching the swordsman new words, though, and the swordsman says he's done all right since he got it -- not surprising, since later on in the dream the swordsman will more than once be stuck somewhere, the familiar will tell him what to do to keep going, and the swordsman will do whatever the familiar said as if it was his own idea, without acknowledging that he understood. You quickly get the idea that there is some mind vs body symbolism going on. Both the familiar and the swordman are very good at what they do; both share a casual attitude towards killing people. In one of his first passages, the familiar says that the tower symbolizes retreat, the limitation of contact with the real world. Naturally the next scene has the swordsman fighting his way into a tower inhabited by a queen with magic powers. The familiar mentions that they are high enough for oxygen deprivation; yet another reference to a scene used later in _Feersum Endjin_. (Parenthetically, I wonder if there is some general attraction for sword-and-sorcery heroes among anarchists? Bob Black, a well-known U.S. anarchist, wrote an appreciation of Conan as a sort of anarchist ideal.) They run into a harem room full of mutilated women -- all their limbs have been cut off -- tied down, some crying, clearly sex objects in the worst imaginable sense of that phrase. There are a number of old men there; the familiar questions them and then tells the swordsman to kill them. Later we find that these were actually young priests; the vampiric queen keeps the mutilated women there to excite them, then she "milks" them, a process that ages them quickly. I really haven't yet figured out the point of the dream blaming this version of twisted male sexuality on a dominating woman, but maybe it's part of the narrator's defense mechanism. The final dream scene has the familiar facing the queen; the swordsman has been paralzyed by her magic, but she and the familiar are clearly old enemies and start fighting. The queen has a some kind of grenade-like ball that heats red hot and then explodes, taking the top off the tower, by then the swordsman is long gone, having seized the chance to get away from the familiar. Disappointed that he didn't find any gold, the swordsman rapes the mutilated women on the way out. Orr wakes up and is prompty seized with guilt and self-disgust, because he was the swordsman in the dream, he lusted after the mutilated woman and raped them. Actually, he says that to the barbarian it meant nothing, but he, Orr, wanted the woman, actually created them. "My God, better a lack of all desire than one excited by mutilation, helplessness, and rape." The narrator is at an especially difficult point. It appears that he's actually started dreaming, when he would normally wake up, he returns to the Bridge construct. He's wanted to revive his libido, sure, but now his unconciousness is telling him that it wants something different than he thinks he should want, he really wants is a sadistic power fantasy. But he's far too guilty about it to just indulge himself and tell himself that it's not real anyway. What's the use of being the Demiurge and creator of whatever you like if you're disgusted by what you like? Fascination with power in sexuality is a common theme with Banks. It drives a lot of the emotional action in Player of Games, where Gurgeh grows out of it, in Excession, where Dajiel and Byr-Hofoen have a sexual power struggle, in Use of Weapons, where the main character has sex just to hurt someone else, in Inversions, where the female characters are seemingly written mainly to pander to it. Anyways, Orr gets his next appointment with his therapist, and determines to lie about his dreams. In a classic nightmarish embarassing scene, he keeps telling Dr. Joyce about innocuous dreams that he invented, but Dr. Joyce keeps hearing him tell about the real dreams he had. Joyce asks him if he identified with the man whipping the water in the first dream, and what it meant that the man whipping the waves seemed real, and that the narrator was apparently the unreal person and had no shadow. For the second dream, the doctor asks what the dialect signifies, and whether it was a wet dream. Orr says no. What does the dialect signify? I'd guess that it means that the narrator is really Scottish, but his fantasy image, Orr, is not; he's not comfortable with his ethnicity, probably because of class connotations.